SOURCE: Knapp, Bettina L. “Jarry's The Supermale: The Sex Machine, the Food Machine and the Bicycle Race: Is it a Question of Adaptation?” Nineteenth-Century French Studies 18, nos. 3-4 (spring-summer 1990): 492-507.

[In the following essay, Knapp provides a close reading of Jarry's The Supermale, with particular focus on the frequent elision of mechanization, competition, and fornication. The author analyzes Jarry's use of caricature and humor, and places Jarry's concerns about mechanization and masculinity in the context of turn-of-the-century anxieties.]

Alfred Jarry's farcical and fantastic novel The Supermale (1900) focuses upon a sex machine, a food machine, and bicycles that outdo a speeding train. Satiric in intent, the novel uses these as metaphoric devices to further energize Jarry's already super-virile and priapic protagonist. “To survive,” the author noted, “man must become stronger than the machine, as happened when he gained dominion over wild beasts … It is simply a question of adapting to the environment.”¹

Jarry's protagonist, André Marcueil, the Supermale, detached, unfeeling, and identityless, may in certain regards be viewed as the prototypal man of the future. Power-hungry, driven to perform outstanding acts, attempting to surpass all others in whatever domain he sets his mind to conquering, Jarry's dehumanized Supermale is victimized by the very machines he seeks to outdo in velocity and dexterity. To become overly dependent upon machines, as is Marcueil's case, is dangerous. It may lead to a condition of hubris, and, as C. G. Jung has stated, it may divest an individual of his or her independence:

This proud picture of human grandeur is unfortunately an illusion and is counter-balanced by a reality that is very different. In reality man is the slave and victim of the machines that have conquered space and time for him; he is intimidated and endangered by the might of the military technology which is supposed to safeguard his physical existence; his spiritual and moral freedom, though guaranteed within limits in one half of his world, is threatened with chaotic disorientation, and in the other half is abolished altogether. Finally, to add comedy to tragedy, this lord of the elements, this universal arbiter, hugs to his bosom notions which stamp his dignity as worthless and turn his autonomy into an absurdity.²

Although fun and frolic run rampant in The Supermale, so, too, do deeply erotic currents. One could, indeed, look upon much of the truculence and verve implicit in The Supermale as a twentieth-century reenactment of the Greek comus, a joyful procession dramatized by the Megarians and Dorians in honor of Dionysus. These fun-filled celebrations, in which an effigy of the phallus was carried about in merriment and veneration, were expressions of the ecstasy experienced by the participants during their seasonal fertility rites. Like the Greek comus, the central image in The Supermale is the phallus and everything associated with it. Unlike the phallus of the Dionysian festival, however, the phallus of Jarry's protagonist elicits neither rapture nor delight, nor even hope, as experienced so potently by the ancient celebrants. On the contrary, the modern novel terminates with the destruction of a human being, bringing in an element of sadism that was not part of the comus.

Jarry's humor does not evoke belly laughter. It is sardonic, ridiculing, and destructive, closely akin to those spasmodic reactions Baudelaire labeled “laughter” and which he defined as a “perpetual explosion of his [the author's] anger and suffering.”³ The phallus enables Jarry to distill his strange mechanical concoctions with blendings of sexual—perversions, such as sado-masochism, voyeurism, narcissism, homosexuality, priapism, nymphomania—the use of masks, and sundry other rituals designed to enliven the events.

Exaggeration, used as a literary device by Jarry, increases the ugliness of his creatures, devoid of any redeeming feature. It also magnifies the humor, irony, and absurdity of certain situations and characters depicted in The Supermale, thus mirroring to a great extent the notions concerning comedy set down by Cicero. “The province of the ridiculous lies within limits of ugliness and certain deformity; for the expressions are alone, or especially ridiculous which disclose and represent some ugliness in a not unseemly fashion.”⁴

Although prurient images and events are narrated in The Supermale, this novel is not pornographic. There are no minute descriptions of sexual acts, nor does Jarry delve into the nonexistent emotional reactions or yearnings of his protagonists. His pen is caustic, leveling blows and counter-blows against an ugly society, exhibiting no deep feelings for individuals or their private emotional aberrations. Distanciation is Jarry's technique: a plethora of insensitive personalities, unable to relate to anyone, including themselves, perform their antics with marionette like alacrity and verve. The absurdity of their buffoon like acts elicits cerebral and morbid reactions, and macabre grins reminiscent of the rictus worn by the gargoyles of Notre Dame.

Jarry stops at nothing when depicting his views. Whether his humor is raw or sardonic or overflows with instinctuality, it all serves his goal of devaluating what he finds distasteful in the personal and collective world: the dangers of psychological and spiritual imprisonment for both the individual and society as a whole, as a result of overdependence on the machine.

Jarry (1873-1907) was born at Laval, to a traveling salesman father and a romantic, emotionally unstable mother. With his penetrating and incisive mind, possessed of extreme curiosity, ardent, sarcastic, temperamental, and quixotic, Jarry was considered by his schoolmasters to be an excellent student. After passing both of his baccalaureate examinations he went to Paris in 1891, ostensibly to prepare for entrance to the Ecole Normale.

Once in Paris, however, he immersed himself in the artistic and literary worlds, and changed his mind about his future career. He felt an affinity with the symbolists—Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Mallarmé—who searched for and discovered a whole new realm beyond the world of appearances: an unlimited world where things material and immaterial were alive and breathing; where matter and spirit, the mobile and the immobile, the rational and the irrational, were fused into one.

Rachilde and her husband, Alfred Vallette, the directors of the magazine, the Mercure de France, took an immediate interest in the “strange” lad who “appeared in their offices, more frequently than not, attired in a bizarre bicyclist's outfit. “He attracted their attention with his outlandish antics, and the verve with which he narrated his colorful tales about “walking streets” and people who entered their apartments from the top rather than from the ground floors. Rachilde described Jarry as looking like a “wild animal.” His face was pale, almost mask-like, his nose short, his mouth incisive, his eyes black and “singularly phosphorescent … at once starry and luminous, like those of night birds.” The avant-garde poet, writer, and art critic Guillaume Apollinaire, stunned by Jarry's brio and the manner in which he recited his verses, the metallic ring of their rhymes and the mood created by their varied rhythmic patterns and images, considered him the “personification of a river.”⁵

Although Jarry radiated charm and kindliness, characteristics that endeared him to his large circle of friends, he was an anarchist, an impenitent, and a humorist à la Rabelais. From him came neither romantic sweetnesses nor beautiful plastic images, but mordant, satiric, cruel ironies, invective, puns, neologisms, jokes, and riddles. Jarry's Haldernablou (1894), a narcissistic work pointing up his sexual inversion, relates in part, the love Duke Haldern harbors for his page Ablou. More significant, perhaps, than almost all of Jarry's writings—including his César Anté-Christ (1895), Absolute Love (1899), Messaline (1901), The Female Pope (1908), and his many other works—was his play King Ubu (1896), for it rocked and shocked Parisian audiences, and the theater the world over has not been the same since.

Jarry had succeeded in liberating himself from society, in living an uninhibited existence whatever the consequences might be. His dream world had become his reality. In order to make this state possible and to maintain it, he fed on alcohol and ether, spent money before he earned it. His poverty, his unwillingness to eat, his overconsumption of what he considered to be “holy water” (alcohol) and a “sacred herb” (herbe sainte, meaning absinth) led to his physical disintegration and disease. From 1903 on, he wrote with extreme difficulty. His friends tried, unsuccessfully, to draw him away from his erratic existence, his unhealthy haunts, and his nocturnal ventures. Jarry grew steadily sicker. Late in October 1907, after having made an appointment with his friend Dr. Saltas, he failed to show up. Such a lacuna was not like Jarry. Dr. Saltas grew worried. He shared his concern with Alfred Vallette. Both men went to Jarry's small room on 7 rue Cassette. They found him half-unconscious, dirty, his legs already paralyzed. They took him to the hospital. His last wish, which was granted him, was as “strange” as had been his life: he asked for a toothpick. The wish seems a little less strange if one realizes that Jarry did not believe in death as a finale. In a letter to Madame Rachilde, written on May 28, 1906, several years after the publication of The Supermale, he declared that though the brain decomposes after a person's demise, it still functions, it still dreams, “and its dreams are our Paradise.” In any case, it is recorded that Jarry died on November 1, 1907, at the age of thirty four of tubercular meningitis.

Viewed by many scholars as one of Jarry's most important works, The Supermale is far ahead of its time, a forerunner in many ways of the ideas proclaimed by the Futurists and the Cubists. In Filippo Marinetti's Futurist Manifesto (1909) he suggested that the art to which the machine age gave birth was based on “violence, energy, and boldness.” Futurist painters, such as Umberto Boccioni, fascinated by this fresh approach to life brought on by the machine, remarked: “Everything moves, everything runs, everything turns swiftly.”⁶ Fernand Léger, inspired by the Cubists, depicted modern urban life in his canvases with all of its harsh flashing electric lights, its sounds of traffic, its machine-like movements of individuals and crowds. For him, the machine stood mighty, and inspiring, like God.

The action in The Supermale, purported to take place in 1920, is high-speed, high-tech, high-keyed. Mechanically oriented, it introduces all types of devices and instruments into the story: electric lights and push buttons on doors and in rooms, dynamometers, water denaturation processes, flying machines (planes), cars in the form of military shells, fecundating and sex machines, and more.

Even as a novel, The Supermale is machine-like: devoid of psychological analyses, feelings, and climaxes. Like the fixed or moving parts which make up the framework of the machine, what is of import in The Supermale are the facts of the story that is related. The protagonists, robot-like in essence, perform acts and participate in collective situations as if they had been programmed to do so by some invisible transmitter and energy charge emanating from a standardized menu or course that had been set up. Like disparate objects brought together for some kind of experiment, these parts of beings, or split-offs, breathe, live, function, and die never knowing themselves plain. In so doing, however, they provoke and elicit reactions from surrounding objects and beings—even from the reader. Never does a flesh-and-blood person make his or her appearance; never do we see into a real person's face. Masked and disguised, the persona holds sway in The Supermale: the outside, the hard glistening, smooth or corroded metallic entity.

Jarry's protagonist, a Nietzschean Ubermensch type when it comes to his male prowess is reminiscent in some ways of other sexually active men, namely, Don Juan and Casanova. Like Jarry's protagonist, they, too, were confused as to their sexual identities; their aggressivity and sadistic approach toward womankind followed a pattern of behavior revealing their unconscious distaste for them. To be an absolute male, in Marcueil's eyes, is to be able to accomplish “the act” more completely, more thoroughly, and more often—eighty-two times in the space of twenty-four hours—than anyone else on earth. Such an outlook has transformed him, in the eyes of the Scientists, into a human machine. Only when this sex machine finally meets his match, with the “Machine to Inspire Love” invented by an engineer, chemist, and doctor, are readers made privy to the most fantastic of Futurist, Cubist, Dadaist, Surrealist, and Absurdist situations.

THE BICYCLE RACE AND THE PERPETUAL MOTION FOOD MACHINE

Jarry's disturbing humor is based to a great extent on caricature. This technique, which succeeds in inflating certain patterns of behavior, results in disproportion in the novel's framework, altering its dimension and focus, so that the protagonists and the events depicted are taken out of the world of reality and placed in one of artifice. According to Bergson, caricature, which reveals an aspect of an author's psyche, is a device marked with “insensibility” and “ulterior motive.” It enables Jarry to express in veiled terms his paradoxical feelings of inferiority/superiority. The caricaturist, Bergson contends, like the puppeteer, can force his creatures to express the most outlandish or excoriating emotions under the guise of folly. “The art of the caricaturist lies in his ability to seize that frequently imperceptible movement, and to make it visible for all to see by inflating it.”⁷ Jarry performs just such a feat in The Supermale.

No one would guess from external appearance that the thirty-one-year-old André Marcueil—small, puny, pale, skeleton-like, his relatively long hair curled with a curling iron, and wearing a pince-nez—a Supermale: an exceptional individual with unlimited energy able to perform the sexual act so many times without experiencing the least bit of fatigue. Like eating or sleeping, “love,” he maintains, “is an act without any importance, since it can be accomplished indefinitely” (21). Jarry's hero has reduced the sexual act to a mechanical one devoid of feeling and inspiring no need for relatedness on the part of the participants.

Marcueil suffers from an idée fixe: to survive, he must outdo anyone and everyone. His first claim to fame occurs during a bicycle race. Like many a competitive sport, bicycle racing fires Marcueil's energy, arouses his spirits, and fills him with élan. At high speeds his body feels electrified, as if injected by some outerworldy current which gives him a sense of power, exhilaration, and fulfillment.

That bicycle racing should fascinate Marcueil is not surprising. Although not mentioned in English literature until 1769, and not heard of in France until 1799, it took on fad-like proportions by the 1880s, and 1890s. Indeed, the Tour de France, enlisting the best cyclists of the time to compete over a broad-course of more than 2,500 miles, was organized in 1903.

As a means of transport, a bicycle differs from a train, plane, car, and the like, in that this machine requires personal effort on the driver's part, thereby affirming his or her will, directive, acumen, and energy. Secondly, the driver is responsible for maintaining the bicycle's equilibrium and speed, that is, its performance in the outer world. Thirdly, the rider sits astride on the bicycle, as did the horseman in medieval times. The constant motion and friction induced by the motility of the machine suggests the possibility of an erotic or masturbatory experience.

Who better than Jarry, for whom bicycle riding was a passion, knew the attributes of this machine and could describe them in ample and accurate detail? He understood how a bicycle could imbue his protagonist with feelings of autonomy as he forged ahead in the open space before him, thereby symbolically declaring his independence from anyone else.

Such hyperactivity, however, has psychological side-effects. An introverted and egocentric type, Marcueil is unable to relate to people in a normal way. Living as he does in his own secluded domain, his fantasy world alone is alive as he roams about in unheard of realms. The source of his constantly-generating libido (psychic energy) focuses solely on the gratification of his needs and desires. Never does he examine a situation or a personality. Such a psychological condition is dangerous since it allows an undifferentiated object/subject to gain greater dominion over the ego (center of consciousness), thereby diminishing its importance proportionally. Because of the ego's defective relation to the subject/object it neither grows nor evolves. Rather than attaining some kind of freedom or independence, it veers continuously between subject and object, increasingly enslaved by the subliminal pulsions that hold sway.

Five bicyclists—one of whom is Marcueil—participate in the frenzied race described with brio in The Supermale. The bicycles, vintage 1920 and geared to cover a 10,000 mile course, are described as having tires fifteen millimeters in diameter, no handlebars, and seats that force the rider to practically lie horizontally as he pedals at breakneck speed. Not only do the riders wear masks to protect them from the dust and the wind, but the aluminium cord that binds them to each other is attached to their headgear and to their bodies in such a way as to prevent them from looking toward the side or in back of them. Nor can they move about on their seats. Such a vise-like condition suggests, symbolically, a sort of imprisonment: in the manner in which they live, think, and feel.

That each cyclist wears a mask for protection is understandable. Purposeful anonymity is also served via the mask which leads us to suggest that the five cyclists are really one: each a facet or mirror-image of Marcueil, the Supermale. Jarry's propensity for using the mask, in this and other works, indicates a need to hide the inner being, to maintain privacy by secreting the individual behind a facade that at the same time allows him or her to peer out into the world. In Jarry's essay “The Uselessness of Theater in the Theater” he suggests that the mask points up the collective quality of the characters involved, imposing upon them a visual expression of a personality trait. In another essay, “Twelve Arguments on the Theater,” he further declares that the writer who breathes life into his masked beings creates a new existence; a fresh dynamism that comes into existence with the exteriorization of an inner conflict. The mask, then, frees the forces within the personality that cannot be integrated, enabling them to crystallize on the stage or in the novel, and there to live out their lives in conflict or in harmony.

The spectators watching Marcueil race take seats in the train against which the cyclists are racing. The lead automobile rolling in front of the cyclists is shaped like a high explosive shell. When it takes off, like a bullet in space, the racers, following its momentum, keep increasing their speed, until they reach 120 kilometers per hour. The excitement generated by the velocity of the cyclists, the automobile, and the train, and the images that catapult paroxystically before the reader spawn tension—which is of course Jarry's goal.

Since the race is to last four days, food is provided the participants by a “Perpetual Motion Food Machine.” The “food,” made from a combination of alcohol and strychnine, is, according to the doctor who invented this concoction, highly nutritive and beneficial. Small, colorless, bitter, and broken cubes are placed on five trays (one for each of the riders), which are then attached to a small table placed in front of each of the riders' mouths. While he pedals, he consumes. Not a minute is lost.

At the end of the first day, Marcueil first notices a drumlike mechanism suspended beneath his white speedometer on each side of his bicycle, its function being to attenuate any shock coming from the front wheel. Unfortunately or fortunately, the drum gets caught in the wheels of the lead car, which then unwittingly pulls it and the bicycle along. Although such a situation could be disastrous, Corporal Gilbey, in charge of the racers and unseen by the spectators riding in the train, takes advantage of the automobile's momentum to pull the bicycles “fraudulently” along. Although Marcueil is unable to look about and sees the train only out of the corner of his eye, he notices that it is going at a fast clip, which he thinks, is what gives him the distinct impression of being completely immobile. Certainly an optical illusion, he thinks.

Problems arise on the second day of the race. Piercing and strident sounds of grinding metal coupled with enormous vibrations, almost break Marcueil's eardrums. As he looks in front of him, he realizes that the lead automobile has been replaced by a “flying machine” shaped like a trumpet. This strange apparition seems to be turning on itself in the air, then zooming toward the cyclists, the wind generated by these stunts nearly drawing Marcueil and the other cyclists into a funnel-like whirlwind. Upon recovering from what he considers a surprising situation, Marcueil looks at his ivory speedometer which tells him he is going 250 kilometers per hour.

Something horrible and unprecedented occurs on the third day of the race. The rider directly in front of Marcueil is Jewey Jacobs, whose knees are but a yard from his own, and who has been going at such a “fantastic” clip ever since the beginning of the race that Marcueil has had to counterpedal several times so as to slow his pace down, thereby keeping to the schedule. Now Marcueil observes a stiffening of Jacobs's hamstrings. The toes on his right foot, having been tied to a leather toe-clip, seem rigid, without any ankle play; his marble-colored legs, going up and down isochronously, never waver in their movement. Another, apparently minor detail mentioned by Marcueil, is the unpleasant odor which seems to be emanating from Jacobs. Moments later, he realizes that he is inhaling the smell of a decomposing body.

Stunned, Marcueil screams out the news, but the noise made by the train and the “flying machine” overhead is so deafening that it blocks out all other sounds. No one in the train notices anything strange, particularly since Jacobs's bicycle is going more rapidly than the others. In fact, cyclists and observers all scream out their praise of him unaware that rigor mortis has already set in. Nor does the “Perpetual Motion Food Machine” stop serving Jacob simply because he is dead. Were it to cease doing so, its inventor would lose a great deal of money since he had contracted for five people to be fed and not four.

On the fourth day Marcueil's speedometer reads 300 kilometers per hour. The riders, including Jacob, are still traveling at breakneck speed, seemingly unhampered by the smoke issuing from the locomotive that blows their way, even blinding them momentarily.

In time, Marcueil figures out the kilometers they have traversed and notes that he can actually hear the trans-Siberian express in the distance. Speed is increased still more, when one of the riders begins putting all of his weight on his back wheel, thereby forcing the others to peddle more rapidly. Then something incredible occurs: a ghostlike cyclist, Pédard, appears as if from nowhere right in front of the train, exceeding its speed as well as that of all the cyclists. Who is this Pédard sporting a pince-nez, a high hat, and short elastic boots? Marcueil wonders, asking himself whether he is hallucinating. When, at a certain moment, a light appears behind the horizon and encircles Pédard's countenance as does a halo, then illuminates his entire being, he thinks he is in the presence of some divine figure sent by heaven to aid the cyclists.

The Terminus is finally in sight. The bicyclists win the race. How is it possible for the human machine to surpass the mechanical one? And who is this Pédard who has succeeded in energizing the cyclists to such an extent that they surpass anything and everything. Mystery? Magic? A miracle?

Marcueil's singular interest in cycling indicates an instinctive urge to surpass, to outdo, to transcend others, particularly those he considers weak or even average. Psychologically, he is attempting to destroy what he considers to be his own shadow qualities: his small physical stature, his frail appearance, his lack of macho, everything his ego (center of consciousness) cannot accept about himself and, therefore, seeks to destroy. His obsessive approach to life progressively obliterates his identity, thus encouraging a further loss of consciousness of himself as an individual. Rejecting and casting aside characteristics he dislikes, but which are his own, is tantamount to self-destruction. Indeed, one can suggest that such comportment is suicidal. The nonpersonal power drive, and the frenzy and excitement of the constant competition between himself and the machine (or himself and the goals he sets), are instrumental in further debilitating his already shaky ego.

Because the ego, the director of the conscious personality, is so shaky the purely physical (autoerotic) condition aroused by the bicycle and the motion of riding itself keeps Marcueil imprisoned in the madness of his frenetic activity, thereby preventing any broadening of view from becoming operative.

That body consciousness alone prevails divests Marcueil of any kind of conflict or healthy reactions to situations, acts, or people who might in some way counter his idée fixe and so pave the way for psychological growth and broadening of vision.⁸

It might also be suggested that the prolonged concentration and the intensity of the energy or libido used to fulfill the racer's objective, precludes the necessity of forming any permanent relationships with another person and of delving into his own psyche. No camaraderie or fraternal spirit exists with the other cyclists. Indeed, as the race progresses, the reader grows aware of the fact that the five cyclists are but split-offs of Marcueil and not individuals in their own right.

Marcueil's will to succeed as a cyclist, conceals both unconscious feelings of inferiority as well as of superiority. An arrogant belief in his ability to outdo everyone else and the continuous discipline needed to fulfill his goal, enables him to gain dominion over what he considers unconsciously his inferior body, thus inferring a belief in his own perfection—and continuous perfectibility.⁹ Intent upon winning the race so that he may prove to the world that he is in fact outstanding and so reveal the Supermale-Deity residing within him, he is arrogating to himself what is not properly his. Marcueil, attempting to portray himself as an exceptional individual, is in reality the plaything of his instinctual world. As a robot-like individual, unfeeling, and unthinking, Marcueil is the puppet of nonpersonal forces within his psyche, and, as such, seeks only to gratify his needs—and nothing more.

THE SEX MACHINE

The same energy expended by Marcueil as a bicyclist is later focused on sexual matters. Just as the sporting event was different from the norm, so, too, is the performance of the sexual act. Marcueil wears a powdery mask while performing his virtually nonstop bodily acrobatics. Such a persona is designed to hide what his ego considers his inferior characteristics and reveal only those factors that correspond to and meet with its goals. When Marcueil achieves his goal by successfully demonstrating his superior sexual prowess, he earns adulation from his entourage.

Nor does Marcueil enjoy any emotional rapport with his sexual partner. Achievement is what counts and not the depth of the experience. Furthermore, like the bicycle, the female participating in the event is merely a means to an end: a machine whose sole function is to enable him to pursue his intent.

As Jarry resorted to caricature in his description of the bicycle race, so he indulges in imagistic portrayals of Marcueil's ribald acts. His intent for the most part is to disfigure and unmask what he considers to be a corrosively restrictive notion of morality. Caricature as a technique, Freud declared, is one of the ways used by the artist to reject those who stand for “authority and respect and who are exalted in some sense.”¹⁰

To give credence to Marcueil's sexual feats, Jarry quotes and misquotes statements made by historical and religious figures of old: Diodorus, Proclus, Pliny, Muhammad—the last of whom, he says, had the vigor of sixty men. Rabelais, also mentioned by Jarry, is reported to have stated that Theophrastus (372-287 B.C.), Aristotle's successor as the head of the Peripatetics, wrote about an Indian who, after having taken certain herbs, performed the sexual act seventy times in one day. A pseudoscientific discussion of reproduction, priapism, satyriasis, aphrodisiacs, diet, alcohol, and stimulants is also included.

Under Marcueil's tutelage, Ellen Elson, the daughter of William Elson, a celebrated American chemist (the identification with Edison is intended), develops her potential: nymphomania. Like Marcueil, she is devoid of identity. She is all women in one, a collective power. Marcueil's unconscious reaction to what he looks upon as a formidable force is one of fear: she, like all other women, is ready to strike out at the innocent male, to castrate and dismember him. Understandably, then, one of the factors involved in the performance of his sexual acts is his intent to subdue and subjugate his partner.

As an anima figure (the unconscious aspect of the man's personality), Ellen is pictured as a vamp. Never does he assume the sublime or divinely endowed proportions of Dante's Beatrix or Petrarch's Laure. Although Ellen is depicted frequently as beautiful on the outside, Marcueil sees her subliminally as deformed and grotesquely destructive, particularly when he identifies her with a Siren.

Half-woman or half-bird, this feminine image, as viewed in myths and legends (the Lorelei, Mélusine etc.), although a seductive power, is a negative instrument. She is capable of luring and capturing the young, unsuspecting male, whom she then devours in her embrace, but frustration and despair ensue, since she can neither satisfy him nor herself. Moreover, Sirens, whose goal is to conquer the male so as to acquire power over him, have been featured in literary works as devoid of human feeling. Yet unmediated instinct, which Sirens symbolize, has been attractive to men since time immemorial. Let us recall in this regard that when hearing the mesmerizing songs of the Sirens, Ulysses filled the ears of his crew with wax and had himself tied to the mast of his ship so that he would not yield to their allure. So mesmerizing and frightening were Sirens considered that Aristotle, Pliny, and Ovid wrote about them and in Christian times figures of these maidens with double tails were depicted on the chapel at Saint Michel at d'Aiguillhe at Le Puy, while sirens in the shape of birds are found at Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire.

On another occasion Marcueil identifies Ellen with her car, which he depicts as a “metallic beast” a “fabulous and lewd God,” a “large scarab which flapped its outer wings, scratched, quivered …” (64). The chauffeur's mask she wears, he remarks, transforms her head into that of a sea-bird. Its eyes fascinate him. There is something supernatural about them. When peering into them, he feels he is going back to ancient times: Ellen is a reincarnation of the Queen or Courtesan archetype—the woman forever ready to satisfy any and all needs of the male.

Intent upon conveying his great appreciation for the favors she is to bestow, Marcueil takes out his knife to cut some flowers to give her. Moments later, and inexplicably, he thinks better of it.

That mention is made throughout the novel of cutting and sticking instruments such as knives, and pins is not surprising. Identified with the phallus, activity, and aggressivity, these sharp objects are also associated with acts of dismemberment. Hindus (Marcueil disguises himself as one during his sexual encounters with Ellen) relate them to some of their “terrible” divinities, who use these implements for cruel and bloody purposes. That Marcueil decides not to cut the flowers, indicating a spiritual and emotional rapport, suggests a redirecting of libido on his part: a rechanneling of this powerful energetic force.

Such dismembering instruments, in Marcueil's case, suggest the presence of murderous instincts. His obsession with death (indicated with the demise of Jacobs, the cyclist) may be coupled with his love-hate relationship with Ellen and his unconscious desire to kill what he considers to be her Lorelei, or Siren-like, factors. Those, as previously mentioned, are manifested when he pictures her as a giant bird of prey: a domineering, destructive. and castrating woman.

Marcueil's unconscious fear of failing to reach his goal of seventy or more orgasms in one day becomes obvious in the trip he takes to the zoo on the day planned for this “great” event. It is the animal in him, and nothing more, that he seeks to develop to its ultimate. Amid the many caged beasts on display at the zoo, he spots something very special and strange: a very special and strange animal: a dynamometer, a machine which both fascinates and acts as a threat to him. Because it measures the limits of human strength and can perform any activity indefinitely, he views it as dangerous competition. Marcueil wants to be able to surpass everything and everybody in the sporting sphere, be it human or mechanical. He decides, therefore, that this automatic power, which the public considers monumentally useful, must be destroyed.

Significant as well is the sex Marcueil projects onto this dynamometer: he identifies its shiny “vertical cleft” or “slot” with the feminine gender. Although the machine is massive, he is convinced that it can be easily destroyed How? By injecting a 10-centime piece into the proper slot. After doing just that, he grabs the chair-like contraption and shakes its two arms, after which a terrible clanking sound can be heard. Suddenly heaps of broken tubing, screws, bolts, nuts, dials, twisted springs—like animals' innards—fall to the ground before him.

Since the dynamometer, paradigmatic of Marcueil's relationship to the feminine principle and hence representing a threat to his well-being, has been destroyed, the next step is to do away with Ellen, even though she helps him prove his virility. Is Ellen Marcueil's only human victim? According to some reports, several young women on and surrounding his estate have been violated innumerable times recently and have died from the experience. No one accuses Marcueil overtly of having perpetrated these acts; nevertheless, the reader senses that he is the culprit.

The great day of sexual acrobatics approaches. Marcueil accomplished twenty-four hours of virtually uninterrupted coitus as if participating in a religious ritual. First performing his ablutions, then eating special foods, he dons his Indian mask (consisting of golden powder, rouge etc.) likening him to the incredible orgiastic performer mentioned by Theophrastus. The room in which Marcueil and Ellen fulfill their sexual antics is fitted out like an altar: with candles, incense, soft cushions. As for the event, it is viewed as an apotheosis and an epiphany, two deities becoming one: duality transformed into unicity. The successful conclusion to the climactic drama is marked by the playing of a Te Deum on the victrola.

That Marcueil disguises himself as an Indian when performing the sexual act is not surprising. Yogico-tantrics, known for the extraordinary power they have over their bodies, perform the maithuna rite, consisting of sexual union which is viewed as a transformation ritual: the mortals become a divine couple. A period of preparation, consisting of meditation, prayers, fasting, and other such rituals and sacrifices, always precedes the act, which never terminates with ejaculation of semen. To permit emission of semen is to fall into the law of time and death: that is, to be the victim of empirical existence. Under such conditions, lovers would be merely libertines and not the detached, Godlike beings they seek to become. Before “supreme great happiness” can take place and “unity of emotion” be experienced, all thought and notion of identity (ego-consciousness) must be obliterated. Only then can the condition of emptiness be achieved.¹¹

Although Jarry was well versed in Hindu religious practices, there is little resemblance between Marcueil's sexual stunt and the maithuna ritual, except perhaps for the number of times coitus is repeated. What does emerge from Marcueil's lovemaking procedures is the emphasis on sadomasochism, implicit in many of Jarry's works. Voyeurism also comes to the fore in this instance, since, to give the sexual experiment a scientific cast, Dr. Balthybus observes the events “discreetly” through a small window in the wall. It is he who confirms the fact that the love-act was performed eighty-two times within the space of twenty-four hours; that it could have been extended indefinitely had an artificial rather than a human fecundating machine been used.

Although elated by the fact that he has succeeded in outperforming Theophrastus' Indian, Marcueil still feels a desire to kill Ellen—or Hellen, as he now calls her, after the Greek beauty. He is convinced that only after her demise can his compulsive sexual desires be alleviated. He does not kill her, however, since he mistakenly believes her dead when she has only fainted as a result of her ordeal. Then, and only then, does he laugh, wax sentimental, and say: “I adore her” (140).

In the days to come, after Ellen has awakened from what has been diagnosed as a hypnotic trance, she tells her father she loves Marcueil and wants to marry him. When he refuses, Science takes over. Ellen's father calls upon Arthur Gough, an American mechanic who has built a most unusual electromagnetic machine: one that would “Inspire Love.” Since Marcueil, the Supermale, considers himself a machine with an iron organism, Gough posits that to combine human and nonhuman machines would transform Marcueil into a loving husband.

The knowledge needed to build the machine to inspire love is predicated on some of Faraday's electromagnetic inventions as well as on the electric chair. Here, too, the satiric intent is quite obvious Since the electric chair gives instantaneous death at 2,200 volts, Gough assumes (and we do not know why) that nothing hurtful can happen if Marcueil is exposed to 10,000 volts. Marcueil is placed in the chair and tied down, after which a strange-looking platinum crenulated crown, with teeth pointed downward, is placed on his head. A diamond-like object carved in the shape of a table is installed in both the front and the back of the crown. Ear-flaps made of copper and a sponge-like fabric extend over his temples, thus assuring contact between the human and the mechanical machines. Pieces of semicircular metal, that shine like cabochons, are placed on specific areas over his scalp and hair.

No sooner is the current turned on, putting the Supermale's nervous system into contact with the 10,000 volts, than something goes awry. Rather than the Machine to Inspire Love influencing the human being, the opposite seems to have taken place. Dire results ensue: the machine behaves erratically, spiking and sparking madly and uninterruptedly. Its inventor diagnoses the problem: this incredible instrument has fallen in love with the Supermale. Because the Scientists had not foreseen such a possibility, they had made no provisions to prevent it. As the speed of the mechanical parts accelerates, the voltage increases and the metal of the crown turns white-red. Marcueil, in a paroxystic frenzy, bursts the chains imprisoning him and jumps up from his seat. It is too late. The melting metal flows onto his face like so many tears, explodes, and burns: his demise is preceded by pitiful screams.

As for Ellen, she eventually finds a husband—normal in every way.

Although The Supermale is a farce and its humor is based on man as machine, beneath the bicycle race and the sexual antics exists a fiercely macabre and negative note. That Marcueil dies at the hands of the machine indicates the fragility of the human species and its negative view of the machine age and its increasing power over individuals and societies.

The bicycle, the Perpetual Motion Food Machine, the dynamometer, and the Machine to Inspire Love suggest a takeover by the very instruments designed to alleviate pain and suffering in the world and to facilitate daily living. Even more dangerous, perhaps, is the fact that the machine is increasingly cutting people off from nature in general and from their nature own, in particular. The dehumanization process, which Jarry foresees as his protagonist competes with the machine, encourages a condition of facelessness. Psychologically, neither Marcueil nor Ellen have identities; both are unrelated to others as well as to themselves. Robot-like, they go through life as others, insensitive, unable to relate or become emotionally involved. Will twentieth-century men and women succumb to the same fate?

Notes

1. Alfred Jarry, Le Supermale (Paris: Eric Losfeld, 1977) 147. All quotes come from this edition.

2. C. G. Jung, Collected Works. 10. Translated by R. F. C. Hull (New York: Pantheon, 1964) 268.

3. Charles Baudelaire, Œuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1961) 981.

4. James Feiblemen, In Praise of Comedy (New York: Russell and Russell, 1962) 88.

5. See Jacques Henry Levesque, Alfred Jarry (Paris: Seghers, 1951) 12-64.

6. Helen Gardner's Art Through the Ages. Sixth edition. Horst de la Croix and Richard G. Tansey, editors (New York: Harcourt Brace Javanovich, Inc, 1975) 733.

7. Henri Bergson, Le Rire (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1960) 4, 5, 20.

8. Esther Harding, Psychic Energy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973) 208-18, 8, 107.

9. Harding, Psychic Energy 107.

10. Sigmund Freud, The Basic Writings. (New York: Random House, 1939) 77.

11. Mircea Eliade, Yoga (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973) 260.