In turn, she bids God leave her and she bites the wrist of the hand, sending an immense jet of blood across the stage.
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.
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: 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.
"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).
When Jet of Blood was written in 1925, it was included with Artaud's other writings Paul les Oiseaux and Le Vitre d’Amour in a folder labeled Trois Contes.
Despite this apparent omission, Artaud included the play in his second book L’Ombilic de Limbes, published by the Nouvelle Revue Francaise.
The 1926 publicity blurb for Artaud's Theatre Alfred Jarry listed the premiere of Jet of Blood in their season.
Ruby Cohn's translation of Jet of Blood was the inspiration for Worship, the concluding scene of the stage play Gospel.
The production was directed by Etienne Pierre Duguay and took place at Manhattan's Albertine, a project of the Cultural Services of the French Embassy.