I’ve never liked the idea of figures ‘ahead of their time’; all artists are products of their environment, one way or another. But even among his friends – at the literary salons of Mallarmé, Rachilde and her husband, Vallette – the consensus was that the art of Alfred Jarry represented something so obscure and incomprehensible that few would ever understand it. As his biographer Alastair Brotchie points out, it was decades after Jarry’s death in 1907, at just 34 years of age, and years past the heyday of the Modernist movements he influenced, that his work was reappraised.
An anarchic playwright, novelist, satirist, artist and critic, Jarry is known principally for two inventions: pataphysics, Jarry’s ‘science of imaginary solutions’ (more on that later) and Père Ubu, the gluttonous, flatulent despot with whom he became virtually synonymous.
Alfred Jarry, poster for Ubu Roi, 1896
His precocious originality brought him, at 17, to Paris and and the heart of Symbolism, befriending writers such as Apollinaire and Remy de Gourmont and his colleagues at the Mercure de France. With Gourmont he founded in 1894 L’Ymagier, a short-lived review that gathered medieval woodcuts, contemporary prints by Nabis artists and avant-garde essays: it shows Jarry’s interest in popular visual forms and his taste for mixing high and low iconography, foreshadowing the visual eclecticism that would cling to Ubu’s afterlife. He borrowed printmaking tools from Gauguin and praised Rousseau’s early paintings when few others would; he treated popular almanacs and Épinal prints not as trivia but as raw material. His literary career was equally peripatetic: he published verse, essays on theatre, and short prose works that earned him admirers but little pay, while cultivating an eccentric personal style that blurred the line between his life and his art. Accounts describe him cycling furiously through Paris, armed with a snub-nose ‘bulldog’ revolver; he spoke in the blustery, staccato idiom of his own character Ubu.
Most of all, Jarry liked monsters: examples, as he described them, of ‘dissonance unresolved’, which became a central part of his life. To his friends he was pale, lean, polite, if mischievous; to others, he was the very ignominious incarnation of King Ubu.
Like Wilde, he lives on in apocrypha and anecdote. His apartment was apparently decorated with skeletons and taxidermies of his pet owls, and, according to Apollinaire, he had an alarming penchant for gherkins. His capacity for shamelessness and to flout custom, his disregard for the vicissitudes of life and his heroic self-sufficiency – retreating, when his health failed him, on his racing skiff to a shack on the river Seine where he fed himself by fishing – brought him closer to a modern-day Diogenes, who rebranded his exile from his homeland as liberation from worldly ties. As Brotchie notes, even in fin-de-siècle Paris, where extrovert characters were not in short supply, Jarry stuck out like a sore thumb: ‘the hard-drinking athlete, totally negligent of his appearance, did not much resemble the contemporary literary trope of the limp-wristed Decadent poet.’
Alfred Jarry, Père Ubu, woodcut, 1896
Most famous of these anecdotes remains the premiere of Ubu Roi; no Jarry article is complete without a retelling. On the evening of December 10, 1896, in the renowned Théâtre de l’Œuvre, a small venue already associated with Symbolist experiment, an already tense audience stirs. The hulking figure of Père Ubu, played by celebrated actor Firmin Gémier, waddles onto stage wielding a toilet brush sceptre in one hand and propping up his papier-maché belly with the other. He growls the first word, “Merdrrrrre!” – ‘Shiiiiit’, with a superfluous ‘r’ – and the house erupts. Fights broke out. The performance was delayed for fifteen minutes before staggering back to life, though little attention was then paid to the plot – a loose parody of Macbeth, in which Père Ubu, seizes the throne of Poland, plotting murders, exacting taxes, farting, dismembering his wife and screaming nonsense.
Alfred Jarry, César-antechrist, woodcut, 1895
This was not an uninitiated crowd, Alastair Brotchie points out, comprising bohemian theatre-goers eager for novelty alongside a junket of partisan journalists. A public dress rehearsal the day before had warned audience members of what to expect, when it was not so much the opening dialogue as the play’s eccentric stagecraft that had earned it its jeers and boos. Jarry envisaged Ubu as essentially a human marionette play, with actors playing both puppets and props, anticipating the cardboard costumes of Dada performance. His audience had been subjected to a nightmarish evening of Theatre of the Absurd, more than half a century before the genre’s invention: ‘Jarry was determined to revolutionize so many different aspects of French theatrical practice at once that he inadvertently ran ahead of his audience by several decades. They found themselves at best baffled, at worst revolted.’
Jarry himself had planted supporters in the crowd, demanding a scandal. ‘The performance must not be allowed to reach its conclusion,’ he told them: ‘the theatre must explode.’ It was an extraordinary act of self-immolation, sacrificing his own play on altar of revolution and earning from W.B. Yeats, seated in the audience, its most famous review: ‘After Stephane Mallarmé, after Paul Verlaine, after Gustave Moreau, after Puvis de Chavannes, after our own verse, after all our subtle colour and nervous rhythm, after the faint mixed tints of Conder, what more is possible? After us the Savage God.’
portrait of Alfred Jarry (1873-1907) towards the end of his life in his house on the river Seine
Ubu’s picaresque DNA was not hard to decipher: Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel, the Neapolitan Pulcinella, in form and bloviate pomposity Charles Philipon and Honoré Daumier’s conception of Louis- Philippe I as an idiotic pear all went into the mix. But his origins were more homespun. Félix-Frédéric Hébert was a physics teacher cursed with the disastrous combination of incompetence, corpulence, and great sensitivity to his own shortcomings. His educational career was woeful: within a decade he had been moved to six different schools; reports from his principals describe him variously as ‘extremely slow’, ‘ill-prepared’ and ‘unable to impose his authority’, his results as ‘feeble’, his practical classes ‘marred by repeated accidents.’ He sought respite as a school inspector, only to be summarily fired when the incumbent local administrator, with whom he was in favour, lost his seat to a Republican. Returning reluctantly to the very first lycée he had taught at in Rennes, his pupils included Jarry and his friends, the brothers Henri and Charles Morin, who instantly pounced on his weaknesses. Together they dubbed him ‘Père Hébé’ and concocted the farcical skit Les Polonais from which Ubu Roi was cribbed. Père Ubu is both an exaggeration in the extreme of Hébert and his ineffectual tyranny, and – in a wickedly pataphysical sense, perhaps – an authoritarian fantasy of the power he failed to wield in the classroom.
The play itself ran for just these two performances before it was pulled, but the damage had been done. Jarry, barely into his twenties, had created a monster who would outlive him by more than a century. He attempted to capitalise on the legend now forming around his character with Ubu almanacs, published by the great patron Ambroise Vollard and illustrated by Bonnard. Vollard, whom Jarry came to know well, was partly responsible for the visual afterlife of Ubu, purchasing the rights to the character after Jarry’s death in 1907, officially of tuberculous meningitis; absinthe and ether no doubt played their part too. It was Vollard who ingeniously paired his own reimagination of Jarry’s Ubu-as-colonial-officer, inspired by the setting of Vollard’s native Île de la Réunion, with Georges Rouault as illustrator, shortly after having purchased the entire contents of Rouault’s output to date. Their collaboration – Réincarnations du Père Ubu, a livre d’artiste featuring etchings and wood engravings – would not arrive until 1932. Jarry’s dummy stagecraft likely chimed with Rouault, then fascinated with puppetry; his profile portraits resemble shadow-puppets in reverse, illuminated amidst dense etched hatchings liked stained glass wrapped in iron tracery.
Alfred Jarry, Les quatre hérauts porte-torches et Monsieur Ubu, print
Ubu’s cultural presence grew and expanded as quickly as Jarry’s own precarious career had ended. Hans Arp read Ubu Roi aloud at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, Dada’s birthplace, while Ubu became an archetype of Surrealist iconography: Dora Maar’s unsettling portrait of a foetal armadillo, transforming its clumsy anatomy into something altogether more sinister, is perhaps the most original of them all. Ubu’s mix of absurdity and monstrosity made him irresistible to illustrators and animators, and in the 1970s he was revived in the idiom of punk rock’s manifesto of misrule.
The brevity of Jarry’s life did not prevent him from writing prolifically, however, and much survives beyond the Ubu trilogy: essays, poetry, satires and several novels. Among them, the most important was Gestes et opinions du docteur Faustroll, pataphysicien (‘Exploits and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, Pataphysician’), composed and compiled throughout the 1890s but published posthumously in 1911. In its pages Jarry laid out the idea that would become his other lasting invention: pataphysics.
William Kentridge & Jane Taylor, Ubu and the Truth Commission, 1997
This nonsense philosophy, Jarry wrote, extended ‘as far beyond metaphysics as metaphysics is beyond physics.’ In Faustroll, Jarry stages a voyage through a series of islands, each a parody of philosophical or artistic systems. The pataphysician, as guide, takes seriously not what is general or universal but what is singular, exceptional, paradoxical. Jarry had studied with the philosopher Henri Bergson and was steeped in Nietzsche; both shaped his fascination with time, perception, and the collapse of stable values. In pataphysics he founded a science of examination that, contrarily, critiqued the limits of induction and valued original ideas over effective or provable ones.
André Breton, who claimed Jarry as a precursor, saw in pataphysics the possibility of treating every accident or digression as an event with meaning, and so it has its place in the roots of Surrealist automatism. Later still, Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze found in Jarry a precursor to phenomenology and poststructuralism.
Clockwise from top left: Georges Rouault, Pére Ubu Songster; Rock Crystal; The Good Voter; The Scheming Politician, etchings with aquatint, 1928
What then is pataphysics? For Gavin Bryars, Satrap of the Collège de ‘Pataphysique, something closer to Zen Buddhism than any formal doctrine of thought. ‘When the college of pataphysics started in 1948, it was emphatically not an Alfred Jarry Society’ he tells me. ‘They did not study Jarry, but, if you like, the implication of his work. It’s not developed in Ubu, but one can see in him an example of a sort of rather bizarre pataphysical life taken, pataphysically, to its extremes: disregarding all norms of acceptable, societal behaviour.’ In pataphysics, Gavin stresses, there is a form of logic – ‘a peculiar one, though completely rational. Beginning with an oblique premise, followed step by step, leads us to absurd consequences.’ When Groucho Marx (part of the Collège, alongside Duchamp, Raymond Queneau, Ionesco and others) quipped ‘I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member’, he was deploying pataphysical logic.
Georges Rouault, Réincarnations du Père Ubu, etchings, 1928-32
‘There is a whimsy to it, and an odd kind of humour,’ Gavin continues – ‘and of course a pataphysician would never be dogmatic. Uselessness, incoherence, is at the heart of it, and yet it can throw up ways of thinking that are very useful indeed. Making one decision, then following the implications as far down the line as one can go, highlights issues in rigid thinking – the failure of the thing is a lesson. But it can also set up a tradition of its own, in opposition to what is already out there, and a potential for completely different reality had certain choices been made differently.’ He gives, as an example, the work of Luc Étienne, who tied himself in knots developing, writing and performing a ‘metric form of music, dividing the octave into 10, not 12. There’s no rational sense in that – the octave divides by 12 because of acoustic facts – but he did it, all to play music that had no acoustic coherence whatsoever.’
Is pataphysics a creative heuristic then? For Bryars, it represents a way of thinking and seeing that is latent in reality, if only you can find the pataphysical perspective: ‘Take Jarry’s description of the postage system. You have little holy icons, faces of significant personages, and you kiss the back of their heads before laying them on a piece of paper which you send out into the air, and mysteriously it reappears somewhere else. Now that’s not how the post works at all, but it is a kind of metaphorical and rather beautiful way of looking at it.’
Dora Maar, Père Ubu, gelatin silver print,1936
Pataphysics could also pull back the curtain on the more disturbing arbitrariness of manmade systems. William Kentridge, working in apartheid South Africa, revived Ubu as an obese administrator in Ubu and the Truth Commission, written with the playwright Jane Taylor and incorporating not just Jarry-esque puppetry but animated drawings too. The play took its name from the enquiry established in 1995 after the transfer of power from the outgoing Nationalists to the incoming African National Congress in South Africa. Before a jury headed by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, victims were encouraged to come forward and recount the crimes they and their loved ones had been subjected to, while perpetrators were invited to give evidence of their own abuses. This traumatic performance of exoneration, for Kentridge, seemed intrinsically pataphysical, a real life Theatre of the Absurd: ‘A full confession would bring amnesty and immunity from prosecution or civil procedures for the crimes committed. Therein lies the central irony of the Commission. As people give more and more evidence of the things they have done, they get closer and closer to amnesty, and it becomes more and more intolerable that these people should be given it.’
Joan Miró, Chez le Rois de Pologne, lithograph (without black), 1966
Which brings us back to the amorphous and infinitely exportable Ubu. If pataphysics proved slippery and elusive to define, Ubu suffers from the opposite problem, becoming an over-prescribed diagnosis in a world that seems to have no end of political Ubu-types. Joan Miró seized on the allegory in his intense hatred for Franco’s regime, illustrating various new editions of Ubu Roi in his inimitable style. Carnivalesque figures and shapes refuse to settle, returning Ubu to his origins in schoolboy doodles where Miró shows us how quickly laughter can curdle to menace.
But Jarry’s Ubu was an everyman. He shared none of the dogmatism, the intense Nationalism that characterised Franco, Mussolini, Hitler, though his purgation of all officials – even those who pander to his excesses – anticipated Stalin’s and Mao’s ‘house-cleaning’ habits and Putin’s state-sanctioned assassinations. But in the aftermath of his debut, Jarry made a point of demonstrating Ubu’s total lack of loyalty and depth, other than his endlessly voracious greed, his ability to volte-face at any minute. For Jarry, Ubu was supposed to embody the very worst and petty aspects of every one of us, bundled into a ridiculous sack of inflated vice. I’m convinced that Tim Burton’s Oogie Boogie, villain of the stop-motion macabre The Nightmare before Christmas, his body a burlap sack held together with string, is drawn from Jarry. In the final showdown of the film, the thread that holds him together snags on his spiral roulette contraption and unravels, revealing not a singular figure inside but a wriggling infestation of bugs and worms.
That mutability explains why critics still reach for Ubu when describing any number of contemporary leaders. The comparison has been made with Ceauşescu, Idi Amin, Mugabe, Duterte. But his true heirs are surely our current day populist Ubus, who swear no fealty to anything but themselves – our Trumps, Johnsons, Bolsonaros. Ubu is appetite personified. He endures because the world keeps offering him stages on which to reappear.
