Just Playing Mad: Revolutionary Irrationalism in Three Dramatic Objects by Claude Gauvreau

With particular attention paid to three plays by Claude Gauvreau, my study will address the aesthetics of madness as it arose in one substantial node of Canadian avant-gardism – the French-Canadian Automatist movement. The Automatists shared the European Surrealist’s strong spirit of unbridled, irrational psychological utopianism, but believed they had surpassed the Surrealists in rejecting representationalism in art (including dream representation). This paper demonstrates how and why the work of one Automatist artist struggled to enact and unleash an irrational art on an unsuspecting Québécois public