Jet of Blood - Themes and Interpretation

Themes and Interpretation

Artaud presents a fantastic temporal spectrum of creation and destruction speeded up and slowed down, like a phonograph record. Associating gluttony and lust, sex and violence, even innocence and swinishness, The Spurt of Blood attacks the senses with bizarre sights and sounds as it reaches toward our subconscious impulses and fears. (Cardullo and Knoff 2001, 377)

Some conventional interpretations of this unconventional text address the following themes:

• Cruelty (as described in Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty)
• The creation of the world and its desecration by people, especially women
• Mocking of contemporary attitudes while objectifying inner life
• The inversion of innocence, love, and security to depravity, lust, and fear
• Juxtaposition of virtuous archetypes with their degenerate actions (e.g. the Knight and the Priest)
• Blasphemy and human transgressions against God
• The wrath of nature
• The dangerous fascination of women
• “Le mal du ciel” or “heaven-sickness” (Cohn, 317)

Images of destruction are recurring in Jet de Sang, with Artaud starting the audience out with a simple, well-ordered world and repeatedly destroying it, using natural disasters, plagues, and storms to throw typical bourgeois characters into chaos and disarray. It is argued that the ruin left in the wake of this destruction is not the ultimate goal. “Despite its violent overturning of cosmic order… Artaud’s literary transgressions are always matched by cries for reunion with a oneness that has been lost,” (Jannarone, 42).

Since the original title of Jet of Blood was Jet de Sang ou la Boule de Verre, it is argued that Artaud may have written Jet of Blood in part as a parody of a one-act play by one of his contemporaries, a surrealist named Armand Salacrou. La Boule de Verre has many apparent correlations with Jet de Sang. In both plays the four main characters are the Young Man, the Young Girl, a Knight, and a Nurse. In La Boule de Verre, as in Le Jet de Sang, the young couple exchanges declarations of love, then the couples disappear. The Knight and Nurse reveal they are the Young Girl’s parents as well in La Boule de Verre, and the Knight picks up candy wrappers instead of wrapped cheese. There are other associations between the characters in both plays, including the anachronism of the Knight, dependence of the Nurse (Wetnurse), fidelity of the Young Girl, and the idealism of the Young Man (Cohn, 315).