Alfred Jarry and the essence of the absurd

To parody one’s own high school physics teacher and make theatre history in five years and four plays capable of dismantling every possible convention and model, whilst remaining, after more than a century, as relevant as few others. To inspire Apollinaire, the Futurists and the Surrealists, and to found an eternal discipline that seeps into the fabric of metaphysics, uprooting and overturning its principles. This was Alfred Jarry, whose birth is celebrated every 8 September – a true New Year’s Day for all the children of the giant father of the theatre of the absurd and the 20th-century avant-garde, the supreme creator of this four-fold Ubu (king, cuckold, chained and on the hill) and an illustrious exponent of Western humour, which has in Rabelais its most thunderous patriarch.

And with Jarry came Pataphysics, ‘a science we invented because there was a general need for it’, a science concerned with the particular rather than the universal and with exceptions rather than rules, a science of epiphenomena since ‘universal consensus is in itself a miraculous and incomprehensible prejudice’. Jarry allowed himself the luxury of recounting in great detail the genesis of this “science of sciences” – for which he would also invent a treatise – and he did so in his most radical and unthinkable, and therefore extraordinary, work: Gesta e opinioni del dottor Faustroll, pataphysical, giving meaning – over a hundred years ahead of its time – to the use of a verb that is now extremely popular, namely ‘trolling’, which means precisely to mock, provoke or sabotage through sarcasm, thereby rendering a context or an interlocutor ridiculous. Jarry fused “troll” with Faust to indicate the dual nature of the character he created: boundless aspirations, yet more nonsense than substance. The book recounts the exploits of the doctor, born in Circassia at the age of sixty-three and already sporting a moustache, ‘a man more than it is decent to be’, who in 1898, after adorning himself with emeralds and topazes and draping a cord of the Grande-Gidouille round his neck, an order he himself had invented, set off to travel the world, starting from the island of Sterco in search of the rules governing exceptions, accompanied by a baboon with its buttocks transplanted onto its cheeks and a bailiff from the civil court of the Seine department named Panmuphle, aboard a vessel called the Asse, capable of ploughing through sea, sky and land.

Gilles Deleuze, Jean Baudrillard, Raymond Queneau, Italo Calvino. But also Max Ernst, Man Ray, Eugène Ionesco, Vincenzo Accame, Mario Persico, Umberto Eco, Fernando Arrabal, Enrico Baj (Transcendent Satrap and Analogical Emperor in the world of Milanese pataphysics) and Ugo Nespolo (proto-Provveditore of the Institute of Pataphysics in Turin): these are just a few of the many who have taken an interest in and engaged with pataphysics. The science of imaginary solutions has spanned the decades; it is alive and well and can boast a cultural influence that few can match. Boris Vian was one of its most celebrated enthusiasts. The British psychedelic band Soft Machine wrote a song entitled ‘A Pataphysical Introduction’. Centres and institutes have been established over the years all over the world – for an overview, consult the dizzying map on the patakosmos.com website, an online project for the dissemination of science and art created by the painter Giovanni Ricciardi, who also founded the ‘Autoclave di Estrazioni patafisiche’ in 2008, recognised by the College of Pataphysics. From 1999 to 2006, a magazine on graphic arts and pataphysical culture called KRAKATOA was published.

The book that established Pataphysics through the exploits of the necromancer-puppet Faustroll was published in 1911, four years after Jarry’s death. He had an explosive mind and a hard life, although he did not seem to attach much importance to the matter, playful and mischievous as he was and would remain until his very last moment. He died at the age of thirty-four from tuberculous meningitis without ever having paid for his bicycle, a victim of alcohol, malnutrition and poverty, having lived for a while with his sister, for a while in a shack in Laval, and for a while in a squalid studio flat in Paris where one had to sit down because the ceiling was too low: yet he laughed at that too; he laughed at everything and at himself – legend has it that, as his last wish, at his deathbed, he asked for a toothpick.

The play Ubu re was first staged one evening 130 years ago at the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre (a lithographic poster signed by Jarry himself) and, needless to say, caused an absolute furore. ‘Merdre’ was the very first word uttered by the prodigious, ferocious, infamous scoundrel – the first battle cry through which the audience was introduced to the cumbersome, hideous and marvellous crocodile-like, pot-bellied puppet. This expression, born of the fusion of the words ‘mother’ and ‘shit’, was only the beginning, the prelude to an endless and unpredictable torrent—for the unsuspecting audience—of a savage carnival, made up of crude ambiguities, furious double entendres, visceral neologisms, sacrilegious snorts, incomprehensible assertions, logical flatulence, obscene metaphors, zoological inventions (the memorable ‘rastrone’, an animal invented by Jarry as a child) and blatant, exquisite nonsense. Jules Renard was scandalised (with all due respect to Renard: what a disappointment) and Colette wept because she had been unable to get into the theatre. The evening was, in fact, an absolute fiasco, but the play caused a stir and sparked a storm of criticism, insults, outcries and scathing reviews. Jarry pressed on and responded first with a somewhat indignant article in the *Revue blanche*, in which he said: ‘It is no surprise that the audience was stunned at the sight of its own ignoble double’. He then put it behind him, set to work and completed the quartet with Ubu the Cuckold, Ubu in Chains and Ubu on the Hill.

To this day, Ubu remains the character for which Jarry is best known worldwide, conceived in the attics of his adolescence alongside some secondary school friends in Rennes. They were not even fifteen years old and enjoyed writing and performing farces to mock their teachers. Among them was a certain Felix Hébert, a comical and ridiculous man, a dreadful teacher: Father Heb, Ebée, Ebone, Ebance and Ebouille are the names of some of these caricatured precursors that would enable Jarry, within a few years, to fashion the marvellous synthesis that is Father Ubu. There are also numerous cartoons and illustrations of him – Jarry was just as keen on drawing as he was on writing. Then one day the students’ little theatre expanded, and in 1889 Jarry’s home became ‘The Theatre of Finance’, a workshop founded to stage and refine these ‘ur-Ubus’. ‘You are free to see in Monsieur Ubu,’ declared Jarry as he introduced the play to the audience, ‘whatever multiple allusions you wish, or simply a puppet – the caricature that a young student has made of one of his professors, who, to him, embodied all the grotesqueness that could ever exist in the world’.

Ubu re is this: a manual of destruction, a parody that has got out of hand, a Rabelaisian hyperbole gone off the rails, a diabolical inclined plane down which logic and meaning drain away and flow off, precisely in the Heraclitean sense of the expression – one cannot step into the same river twice, just as one can never ascribe the same meaning to the same thing, which, in Jarry, explodes into itself, into its opposite and into a thousand opposites of opposites, celebrating – through its unpredictable and comically hostile nature – the impossibility of being subject to a definition, a metaphysical freeze, an idea or a supreme form. Ubu’s world is, pataphysically, the ‘other’ of every world, possible and impossible: Ubu is a boorish, shapeless being who debunks language by using one of his own, who needs nothing else and rewrites the world according to his own laws – the laws of the belly, of linguistic and moral arbitrariness, of caprice. Ubu represents a constant threat to any attempt to explain him; he is the freest form ever to exist in the theatre and beyond, the most boisterous, brazen and elusive invention, a student-style machine gun, a machine that fires nails, fire and judgements and shreds the very logic that sustains him. Ubu is an unsustainable figure, ambiguous and derisive to the point of spitting in the face of the world and the audience, without hesitation and without rules. In Ubu, a sort of universal levelling force reigns and governs: intelligence is worth no more than stupidity, and stupidity moves the world and all things. The reversal is real, radical. And above all, wildly amoral. How much gratitude do we owe to a man like Alfred Jarry?

Recently, Pierluigi Battista reminded us, right here in these pages, of the striking resemblance between this Captain of the Dragoons and King of Aragon and Donald Trump, based on certain aspects of his character – arrogance, obtuse greed, foolish lust, a taste for arbitrariness, bottomless pockets, pointless cruelty and cowardice. An undeniable resemblance, indeed, one as unsettling as any reversal (usually it is the puppet that draws inspiration from reality; here one gets the feeling that reality has taken possession of the puppet). But King Ubu manages to go even further, because he undermines any possibility of being understood or recounted: King Ubu is a perpetually burning firework; he is the definitive ignition of Meaning amidst the flames of the most derisive contempt; he is no longer even theatre or a theatrical mask, but an ever-living and disruptive outcome, produced by a mind in the favour (one does not know whether any longer) of God or the Devil. It is a mind unafraid of itself—an occurrence that, in human history, can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Jarry was never afraid of vulgarity either, and he rendered it meaningful, flamboyant, lyrical. By the age of twenty he had already written countless farces bearing titles very much in the style of Alfred Jarry, such as "L’ombrello-clistere del dottor Thanaton" or "L’apertura della pesca". In Jarry, what is vulgar becomes essential, and this is the miracle of having created a world and a language that adhere perfectly to one another. Even Ubu’s appearance is part of this: his enormous belly, pear-shaped head, pig-like eyes, crocodile-like snout, the hook with which he seizes the nobles, shakes them and slaughters them, and then the physics stick, the finance stick and the shit pump, with which Ubu threatens his victims with painful evacuation. His entourage consists of the ‘palotini’ (palot in French means ‘fool’), stupid and zealous thugs, crude imps who pander to his overwhelming idiocy and boundless violence by operating the brainwashing machine whilst singing: “Hurrah! Horns up your arse! Long live Father Ubu!” who is a ferocious despot, cruel and a coward, a master at always putting someone else forward, only to be the first to snatch the credit from them. ‘If you are still alive and still treading the snow of Lithuania, you owe it to the magnanimous virtue of the Master of Finance, who has toiled, slaved away and shouted himself hoarse reciting Our Fathers for your salvation, and who has wielded the spiritual sword of prayer with courage equal to the skill with which you have wielded the temporal one!’, he tells his men, battered and in a sorry state. Shortly afterwards, when it comes to finishing off a bear to eat it, upon being invited to take on the task himself, Ubu says to one of his soldiers: “No! Perhaps it isn’t dead yet. Whereas you, who are already half-eaten and bitten all over, are perfectly suited to this task!” King Ubu is an enormity in every respect: in his vileness, in his violence, in his relish for slaughter and persecution, in his cowardice, in his unbridled greed – a brilliant feat of bravado, an enormity born of the swaggering mind of a childish and tragic genius, both hilarious and utterly terrifying.

As Alfredo Giuliani wrote in the preface to the Adelphi edition of the four Ubu plays, “Ubu’s comic-tragic infamy casts a metaphysical, apocalyptic suspicion: who is this libertarian tyrant, who never questions himself, who makes no distinction between intelligence and stupidity, between catastrophe and survival, between freedom and slavery? He is a carnivalesque being who insults our identity, a blasphemous puppet that a perverted Gnosis presents to us so that we may laugh at the world’.

Ubu is a universal language, an eternal warning. A great laugh that does not seek to bury us, but to keep digging our grave.