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Alfred Jarry (1873-1907) |
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French writer known mainly as the creator of Ubu Roi, first produced by Aurélien Lugné-Poë in Paris in 1896. Alfred Jarry was a forerunner of the Theatre of Absurd (see Beckett, Ionesco, Pirandello, Genet and others), writing his works in a Surrealistic style, and inventing a pseudoscience or "science of imaginary solutions" which he called 'pataphysique. It is a concept that eludes definition. Jarry once stated: "Laughter is born out of the discovery of the contradictory." Jarry's other works include stories, novels, and poems. "Anywhere other than in the department of the impossible, which scientists do not admit, as they have no chair in it, energies can only develop if they are specialized – and even then not indefinitely. A wrestler is neither a stallion nor a thinker; the universal Hercules never had and never will exist, and as for benefits of alcoholism: bulls drink only water!" (The Supermale: A Modern Novel by Alfred Jarry, translated from the French by Barbara Wright, Jonathan Cape, 1968, p. 35) Alfred Jarry was born in Laval, Mayenne, into a well-to-do
farmer and craftsman family. He was the second child of Anselme Jarry,
a cloth merchant, and his wife Caroline, née Quernest. Jarry was
educated in the schools of Saint-Brieuc and Rennes. At the age of 18 he
moved to Paris to live on a small family inheritance, and pursue his
studies at the Lycée Henri IV. In collaboration with his classmates at
the Lycée of Rennes, he had written Ubu roi
to ridicule a
pompous and fat mathematics teacher, Monsieur Hébert; by the students
he was mocked as Père Heb, Éb, Ébouille, Ébé, P.H. an so on. Originally
Père Heb was the star of plays presented with marionettes. After settling in Paris Jarry continued to polish the Ubu saga and also wrote two sequels, Ubu Enchaîné (1900), which was acted for the first time at the Paris Exposition of 1937, and Ubu Cocu (1944), in which Pére Ubu flushes his conscience down the toilet. Scatalogical humor always appealed to Jarry, who dismissed the conventional use of language. When Ubu roi was first presented on December 10, 1896 at the Théâtre de l'Oeuvre, the coarseness of the language and anarchistic tones were too much for the audience, which rose in outrage after the first word, which was "Merdre!" The play shocked even W.B. Yeats, who attended its opening night. One reviewer said: "Despite the late hour I have just taken a shower. A necessary precaution after leaving that kind of show." (The Subversive Poetics of Alfred Jarry: Ubusing Culture in the Almanachs du Pére Ubu by Marieke Dubbelboer, Legenda, 2012, p. 4) The title character, cowardly Père Ubu is egged on by his wife to murder the royal family. He becomes the king of Poland and establishes a reign of terror. (PEASANTS. Mercy, Lord Ubu, have pity on us. We are poor, simple people. PA UBU. I couldn't care less.) Eventually he is defeated by the Tsar and forced into exile to France with Mother Ubu. The events take place in a world gone insane, a world out of joint, tempo is rapid, and principal characters move through the story on a mission to destroy existing moral and aesthetic values. In addition to satirizing bourgeois values, Jarry sneers at traditional drama, among others Shakespeare's Macbeth in scene in which Mère and Père Ubu plot to assassinate the King of Poland. After five months of military service in 1895, Jarry was
discharged for medical reasons. He then began to frequent literary
salons and devoted himself to writing. Jarry's first book was Les
Minutes de Sable Mémorial (1894), a collection of prose and
verse. It was followed by César-Antéchrist (1895), widely
regarded as an unperformable play. L'amour
absolu (1899) was a novel, more obscure
than anything he had produced. H.G.
Wells's novel The Time Machine inspired Jarry to write the
speculative essay 'How to Construct a Time Machine' (1900). Le Surmâle (1902, The
Supermale), Jarry's last novel, was an erotic fantasy, which revolved
around the question, can love become purely mechanical. For the
protagonist, André Marcueil, the answer is positive. In the beginning of the book, Jarry writes: "The act of love
is of no importance, since it can
be performed indefinitely. All eyes were turned on the perpetrator of this absurdity."
(Ibid., p. 7) André is a superman who wins a bicycle race
against a six-man team, he has sex 82 times with a women, and
experiences the final climax with the "Machine-a-inspirer-l'amour"
or desiring machine. He dies in the grip of this piece of erotic
technology. A number of citations and allusions, including St. Thomas's
quotation of the Koran, are integrated in the events of the book. "Yet it is high time we perceive the remarkably clear line that connects the impish figure of Alfred Jarry in 1896, calmly saying merde (shit) to bourgeois culture, with Albert Camus, the impassioned humanist who wanted to bring all the black sheep back into the fold." (The History of Surrealism by Maurice Nadeau, Penguin Books, 1978, p. 11) After his fortune was soon spent, and Jarry lapsed into a chaotic, Bohemian life. However, he lived and died a virgin, and although he hated christianity, he felt compelled to seek God on his deathbed. A nihilist, he declared like a character from his own plays: "We won't have destroyed anything unless we destroy the ruins too". (From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life: 1500 to the Present by Jacques Barzun, HarperCollins, 2000, p. 619) Though physically tiny, his presence in the avantgarde circle of Paris was dominating. Jarry had taste for absinthe, he lived in a bizarre apartment
where each store had been cut horizontally in half to make double the
original number of floors. André Gide put Jarry into an episode of his
novel The Counterfeiters:
"Everything about
Jarry, who was got up to look like the traditional circus clown,
smacked of affectation—his way of talking in particular; several
of the Argonauts
did their utmost to imitate it, snapping out their syllabes, inventing
old words, and oddly mangling others; but it was only Jarry who could
succeed in producing that toneless voice of his—a voice without warmth
or intonation, or accent or emphasis." (Ibid., Alfred A. Knopf, 1927, pp. 275-276) Until his death at the age of thirty-four, Jarry was a familiar figure stalking the streets of Paris with his green umbrella, symbol in King Ubu of middle-class power, and wearing the cyclist's garb and carrying two pistols. According to an anecdote, once he was asked for a light in the street and discharged a pistol shot (un feu). From Ubu he also adopted the gestures of his creation, spoke in high falsetto like Ubu, and always employed the royal "we." Henri Rousseau, a minor inspector in the toll service and the first of the so-called naive painters, painted Jarry's portrait which was hung in the Salon des Indépendants. With his healt ruined by poverty, tuberculosis, and alcohol, Jarry died at the Hôpital de la Charité, Paris, on November 1, 1907. He was buried in the Bagneux cemetery. A volume of Jarry's essays came out in 1911 but it was not until the 1920s, when the value of his work was widely recognized. Jarry's writings had a profound influence on the surrealist and Dada movements. With Picasso, whom he once gave a Browning automatic, he shared interest in masks. His absurd humor appealed to André Breton (1896-1966) and Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968), who stated that the Dada spirit was the non-conformist spirit of every century that has existed since man is man. Jarry's influence on modern science fiction is seen is J.G. Ballard's The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy as a Downhill Motor Race (1967), which echoes Jarry's themes from his essay Commentair pour servir à la construction pratique de la machine à explorer le temps. 'Pataphysics
– the initial apostrophe was deliberate –
mixed science, science fiction, technology and art. Jarry defined it as
"the science of imaginary solutions, which symbolically attributes the
properties of objects, described by their virtuality, to their
limeaments." (Selected Works of Alfred Jarry, edited by Roger Shattuck and Simon Watson Taylor, Grove Press, 1965, p. 193) The "science" was later taken up and developed by other
French novelists such as Boris Vian, George Perec and Raymond Queneau.
At the first performance of Ubu Roi, Jarry referred to the "double
aspect" philosophy of Gustav Theodor Fechner, who argued in his book Elemente der Psychophysik (1860) that there is a mathematically demonstrable relationship between physical and psychical events. Paul McCartney paid homage to Jarry's branch of metaphysics in his Beatles song Maxwell's Silver Hammer from 1969, and in 'Hi, Hi, Hi' (1972) by McCartney and Linda McCartney. This double A-side single, written for Wings, was banned by the BBC. With Barry Miles, a bookseller, he had talked about the pataphysical society and the Chair of Applied Alcoholism, and wrote in the song: "Joan was quizzical / Studied pataphysical science in the home / Late nights all alone with a testtube". In 1995 McCartney made for the American network Westwood One a radio series called Oobu Joobu, which was inspired by Jarry's character Père Ubu. For further reading: Les théâtres d'Alfred Jarry: l'invention de la scène 'pataphysique by Yanna Kor (2022); Spatiality and Subjecthood in Mallarmé, Apollinaire, Maeterlinck, and Jarry: Between Page and Stage by Leo Shtutin (2019); 'Pataphysics: A Useless Guide by Andrew Hugill (2012); Alfred Jarry: A Pataphysical Life by Alastair Brotchie (2011); Alfred Jarry: An Imagination In Revolt by Jill Fell (2005); Pataphysician's Library: An Exploration of Alfred Jarry's `Livres pairs' by Ben Fisher (2001); Alfred Jarry: A Critical and Biographical Study by Keith Beaumont (1985); Alfred Jarry by Linda Klieger Stillman (1983); Alfred Jarry, Nihilism and the Theater of the Absurd by M.M. LaBelle (1980); Columbia Dictionary of Modern Europen Literature, ed. by Jean-Albert Bédé and William B. Edgerton (1980); Alfred Jarry by N. Arnaud (1976); Les Langages de Jarry by M. Arrivé (1972); The Banquet Years by R. Shattuck (1958); D'Ubu roi au douanier Rosseau by C. Chasse (1947); Les Pas perdus by A.Breton (1924); Sous le masque d'Alfred Jarry? Les sources d'Ubu roi by C.Chasse (1921) Selected works:
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