Jarry, Alfred

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JARRY, ALFRED

JARRY, ALFRED (1873–1907), French playwright, journalist, and poet.

Alfred Jarry was born on 8 September 1873 in Laval and died on 1 November 1907 in Paris. His childhood was spent in the countryside with his mother and his sister, Charlotte; his father, a tradesman, was an absent figure. Jarry was a highly able pupil who wrote poems and plays from the time he was twelve years old (preserved under the title Ontogenie). In 1889, at the lycée in Rennes, he encountered M. Hébert, a physics teacher whom Jarry and his classmates found ridiculous and satirized in plays and poems. This provided Jarry with the inspiration for his play Ubu roi.

Having settled in Paris, Jarry did not gain entry to the École Normale Supérieure, but in 1894 he joined the group associated with the journal Mercure de France, whose founder, Alfred Vallette, and his wife, Rachilde, became Jarry's closest friends. With Rémy de Gourmont (1858–1915), he published L'ymagier, an art journal dedicated to modern and ancient engravings, such as prints from Épinal, in northeastern France, and woodcuts by Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528). He traveled to Pont-Aven to meet Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) and Charles Filiger (1863–1928), about whom he wrote articles, and in Paris he associated with Henri Rousseau (1844–1910), who painted his portrait.

Jarry published a collection of poetry (Les minutes de sable mémorial, 1894), followed by a symbolist drama (César-Antéchrist, 1895), which brought him to the attention of the public and in particular of Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–1898). He was a close friend of Paul Valéry (1871–1945) for a time. His major achievement came in 1896, with the performance of his play Ubu roi at the Théâtre de l'Oeuvre; deliberately crude and primitive, this farce was shocking in a venue dedicated to the Norwegian poet and dramatist Henrik Johan Ibsen (1828–1906) and the Belgian poet, dramatist, and essayist Maurice Maeterlinck (1862–1949), not least because Jarry invented a stage set that broke with the established conventions. The huge scandal of the opening (10 December 1896) brought him fame; from then on he constantly played the character Père Ubu in his daily life, adopting the tone and figures of speech of the cowardly and grotesque buffoon—so much so that the character became a monster that devoured his personality. Jarry nevertheless produced some learned and subtle works, including Les jours et les nuits (1897; Days and nights), an extraordinary sequence of escapes into dreams,

memories, or drugs, and L'amour absolu (1899; Absolute love), a still deeper exploration of early childhood that was relived through hypnotism. From 1898, Jarry adopted a bohemian life, living on the banks of the Seine, where his greatest pleasures were fishing, canoeing, and cycling, as well as drinking, which assumed an increasingly important role.

From 1901 to 1903, for the Revue blanche, founded by the Natanson brothers (Thadée, Alexandre, and Alfred), Jarry wrote some brilliant columns, which he called "speculations," in which he developed the absurdist idea of pataphysics—a snippet of news, a show, or a minuscule anecdote would pave the way for simultaneously dizzying and logical conclusions. Pataphysics (a term that came from Ubu roi) was the "science of imaginary solutions," the "science of exceptions." An absurdist concept that attempts to examine what lies beyond metaphyics, pataphysics parodies modern science. Jarry also wrote two novels: Messaline (1901; Messalina), a set of variations on themes from antiquity; and Le surmâle (1902; The supermale), "a modern novel," which addresses the fascination with science and "celibate machines" that take humankind beyond its natural forces both in the realm of sexuality and in sporting records.

When publication of the Revue blanche ceased in April 1903, Jarry lost his main source of income and began to live in increasingly impoverished conditions. The theater continued to be a source of work: with the composer Claude Terrasse he worked on many operetta libretti and a major opéra bouffe project, based on François Rabelais's Pantagruel (1532), that reached a few thousand pages but never saw the light of day.

His final years were dominated by poverty. His friends were generous in their help, but his health was deteriorating; Jarry began to spend more and more time in Laval with his sister. He managed to publish three plays—Ubu sur la butte (1901), a new version of Ubu roi for puppets; Par la taille (1906), a protofuturist operetta; and Le moutardier du pape (1907). He mainly worked on two large projects: a collection of his columns entitled La chandelle verte and a novel, La dragonne, that remained unfinished despite all his efforts—the astounding extant fragments are simultaneously a genealogical reverie, a treaty on strategy, a descent into hell, and a journey in time (Jarry was an assiduous reader of H. G. Wells).

Jarry emerged from the postsymbolist crisis by inventing modern myths such as Ubu roi and Le surmâle. These figures brought Jarry the friendly curiosity of Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918) and Emilio Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876–1944), both of whom published his work in their early journals. Through them, Jarry became a tutelary figure of the avant-garde, admired by the dadaists and the surrealists, particularly the poet André Breton (1896–1966) and the artist Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968).

See alsoAvant-Garde; Fin de Siècle; France.