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'Pschitt!'
or 'Shittr!' (depending on which translation you read) is the first word of
French dramatist, novelist, and poet Alfred Jarry's best-known work, the play
Ubu Roi.
Ubu Roi
can be read as a parody of classical and Shakespearean tragedy which
involves, among other things, a plot to kill the King of Poland and a lot of
toilet humour. But the play's subject could just as easily be its own
language of ludicrous exclamations and insults ('By my green candle!',
'pox-riddled spout') and delight in disregarding theatrical conventions.
There are ridiculously frequent entrances and exits and Ubu remarks after a
lengthy soliloquy 'Hmm! what a pretty speech, a pity no one was listening.
Right, back to business!' In the words of one of Jarry's leading critics and
enthusiasts, Roger Shattuck, 'Life is, of course, absurd, and it is ludicrous
to take it seriously. Only the comic is serious.' Jarry (1873-1907) is often
identified as a precursor of Surrealism, Dada, and the Theatre of the Absurd.
Richard Kostelanetz's Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes (1993) argues that
there is a 'divide within avant-garde consciousness [...] separating those
who treasure Jarry from those who worship Artaud.' The Oulipo Compendium finds Jarry worthy of
note for his invention of 'Pataphysics and his rescuing of the notion of the clinamen from classical
obscurity. Jarry described 'Pataphysics at various times as a science of
exceptions; an embracing of paradoxes; and a philosophy of imaginary
exceptions, bizarre equivalences, and imperturbability. The comparison with
Artaud perhaps underlines that Jarry did not make a mythic, ritualistic
practice out of his own psychopathology--although many contemporaries report
that he increasingly blurred the distinction between himself and his most
famous creation.
At the same time, Jarry's writings on the theatre do reveal genuine insight
into the necessity of innovation and the phenomenon of what we would now call
generational shifts or perhaps even period codes. Writing in the late 1890s,
Jarry heralded the birth of 'an ABSTRACT theatre, and at last we can enjoy
something which may be as eternally tragic as Ben Jonson, Marlowe, [or] Shakespeare'.
This new theatre expressed the 'new feelings' of modern life and could only
be fully realised, Jarry argued, with masks, one-note vocalisation, different
accents or speaking styles for each character, stylised gestures and notional
or anti-realistic sets and props such as scene-setting placards and cardboard
horses. In 'Questions de thetre', Jarry called Ubu Roi an 'exaggerating
mirror' which revealed what his friend Catulle Mends called 'eternal human
imbecility'. At the same time, he recognised that his own generation would
one day
become
solemn, fat, and Ubu-like and shall publish extremely
classical
books which will probably lead to our becoming mayors
of small
towns where, when we become academicians, the
blockheads
constituting the local intelligentsia will present us with
Svres vases,
while they present their moustaches on velvet cushions
to our
children. And another lot of young people will appear, and
consider us
to be completely out of date, and they will write
ballads to
express their loathing of us, and that is just the way things
should always
be.
Innovation, then, is cyclical and perhaps as closely connected with youth
protest as with avant garde 'art as life praxis'. Unsurprising to learn, in
this context, that Pre Ubu was based on a hated physics teacher from Jarry's
schooldays at the lycee in Rennes, a M. Hebert who--Barbara Wright's
introduction to her 1951 translation tells us--was 'physically grotesque,
flabby and piglike, lacked all dignity and authority' and was known as le
Pre be. And, of course, the imbecilic is the other side of the horrible as
a range of characters from Tweedledum and Tweedledee through Swelter the cook
in Titus Groan
to some of The League of Gentlemen's grotesques remind us.
Jarry's writings on the theatre show that he was always looking forward and
Jill Fell's excellent new biography reveals that he always located himself at
the leading edge of whatever he was doing and whatever scene he was involved
in. Drawing on a huge range of sources, including memoirs and reminiscences
by artistic and literary contemporaries and biographical notes by Jarry's
elder sister Charlotte, Fell gives us a detailed picture of Jarry's
upbringing and family life, his education and military service, his daily
life, and his literary career. Jarry might seem like a minor figure now, a
cafe society writer associated with one succs du scandale, but Fell's book
reveals the huge range of his activities. These include involvement with the
art world surrounding Gauguin and the Pont-Aven painters; work as a woodcut
artist associated with the revival of the form; innovative book and magazine
design; influential art and literary reviewing; and journalistic articles
taking a defamiliarising view of new aspects of modern life that sound
remarkably like Barthes's essays in Mythologies. These articles even
dabbled in futurology and imagined moving pavements and cordless phones. Fell
also gives lively accounts of Jarry's important friendships with, for
example, the painter Henri Rousseau, the novelist Rachilde, and the composer
Claude Terrasse. And Jarry does seem to have known everyone of note including
Apollinaire, Beardsley, Remy de Gourmont, Mallarme, Marinetti, and the exiled
Oscar Wilde as well as a host of minor, largely forgotten, writers such as
Marcel Schwob and douard Dujardin. Fell makes good use of the surviving
portraits and photographs of Jarry and paints a slightly surprising picture
of him as a keen cyclist and fisherman.
As one would expect from a 'critical life', Fell gives clear summaries and
thoughtful assessments of all the major works including Ubu Roi, Les Jours et les
Nuits,
Gestes et Opinions du Docteur Faustroll (which introduced 'pataphysics to the
world), Messaline (an erotic tale of ancient Rome), and Le surmle. Le surmle (The Supermale) is
set in the near future (1920) and can be broadly described as a work of
science fiction. Jarry constructs a kind of double narrative: in the first, a
five-man cycle team, powered by Perpetual Motion Food, take part in a
Ten-Thousand-Mile-Race against an express train; and the second involves an
attempt to prove and better a story in both Pliny and Theophrastus that, with
the aid of a secret herb, an Indian had been able to orgasm more than seventy
times in succession. The supermale of the title, Andre Marceuil, appears as a
secret racer who keeps pace with the five-man team and the train; and as a
masked sexual athlete. Track down Barbara Wright's excellent translation, issued
as a lovely little Cape paperback in the 1970s, and marvel at Jarry's
descriptive zest and depraved wit.
Returning from Mallarme's funeral in September 1898--which Jarry also
attended--Rodin remarked 'Combien de temps faudra-t-il nature pour refaire
un cerveau pareil?' ('How much time will nature need to create such a brain
again?') His words might be an equally apt epitaph for Jarry. Jill Fell's
book is an excellent introduction to the life and work of a writer whose
alter ego Docteur Faustroll calculated the surface of God to be '~ -- 0 -- a +
a + 0 = ~' and therefore the tangent point of zero and infinity. Jarry
revival, anyone?
David
Kennedy, 2010
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