the body of the Young Girl, which hits the ground and is “flat as a pancake.” The Nurse's chest has become completely flat as well. The Knight enters demanding more cheese and the Nurse responds by lifting her dress. The Young Man says, “Don’t hurt Mommy” as though he is suspended in the air like a marionette. The Knight covers his face as scorpions crawl out from the Nurse's vagina. Depending on the translation, the scorpions swarm onto either the Nurse's or the Knight's genitalia, which swells up and bursts or splits, becoming glassy/transparent and shining like the sun. The Young Man and the Whore run away. The Young Girl wakes up dazed and says the final line of the play, “The Virgin! Ah, so that’s what he was looking for.” The final stage direction is simply, “Curtain.” 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 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 “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