[In the following essay, Eruli argues that although Jarry's novel, Messaline, may be set in ancient Rome, it resembles the symbolist Art Noveau of Mossa and Klimt in that it is concerned with representing a place outside of space and time; also the phoenix in Messaline serves as a symbol for the work itself, repeatedly dies and is reborn, one meaning killed off as another arises, always provisional.]

One might easily think that, in writing Messaline, Jarry was simply indulging in one of the commonest of male fantasies: the female at once insatiable and impenetrable, virgin and sinner, whore and mother.¹ It was one which, sublimated as an artistic myth, ravaged all before it last century, from Mallarmé's Hérodiade to Moreau's Messaline, from the Salomé of Oscar Wilde or Strauss to Berg's Lulu. Had Jarry really been so directly influenced by a fashion which, with a few notable exceptions, mostly produced the second-rate? From Champsaur to Lorrain, from Anatole France to Nonce Casanova and Louis Dumont,² Jarry's empress has for company a veritable procession of scantily-clad and heartless beauties straight out of a musical comedy of Ancient Rome. It is certainly hard to decide how much he was influenced by this current, which went hand in hand with a return to classical sources (the “Renaissance Latine,” as opposed to the Wagneristes and the alleged obscurities of Germanic Symbolism).

Jarry cared little about the intrinsic worth of his raw materials, using them simply to spark his imagination. Languishing empresses and other antiquities served the same purpose as Poles in the invention of Ubu Roi. While Messaline may at times recall symbolistic trappings à la Alma Tadema, it belongs in spirit to Art Nouveau and is reminiscent rather of Mossa and Klimt. Its structures bear a similar relation to classical antiquity: the fidelity of detail simply makes its distance from the original all the more evident.

Messaline may, as the title implies, be “a novel of Ancient Rome” but it is neither a compilation of Roman antiquities nor a kind of pastiche on the lines of La Belle Hélène. Jarry does not slip anachronisms into his situation in order to bring ancient history up to date, but to show the conventional nature of such general categories as space and time. To render a work eternal, said Jarry, in his talk on “Le temps dans l'art” (1901), simply place it outside time.

Jarry's follow-up of Messaline with Le Surmâle—a “modern novel” this time—indicates that he was not, even unconsciously, following a passing mode, but was thinking on lines that took him well beyond the scope of most of the contemporary fancy-dress novels. Compare Jarry's Messalina with other Messalinas, based on her actions and behaviour, and this is at once evident. There are striking similarities, even troubling coincidences—and these did really worry Jarry himself³—but both again underline the differences evident at the very heart of this propinquity.

Messaline—and, incidentally, Le Surmâle also—is known to have derived from a line of Juvenal, “Lassata viris necdum satiata recessit.” The line served Lorrain in L'Inconnue (1891) and several times subsequently, and he reverted almost “obsessionally”⁴ to this image, which for him summed up the climate of debauch and sybaritic luxuriousness of Ancient Rome: “La Messaline éhontée, brisée non rassasiée, lassa (sic) sed non satiata, affamée de noces crapuleuses et d'amours hasardées, la patricienne féroce et délicate.”⁵

The quotation Jarry adopted had thus been already used and was well-known, but he characteristically deviated from the sense or rather invented it anew. As he said in Spéculations (Héliogabale à travers les ages), he translates “dans le texte” because words have not fixed, immutable meanings, so that the best “translation” is one that is made in this spirit. He thus makes of a banal story of nymphomania, a paradox: Messalina's unassuaged desire is the physiological result of her very excesses. Made virgin by her debauchery, the problem of this Messalina is less one of “translation” (as the characters in Surmâle seem to think) than of metaphysics: every truth is plural, words are senseless traps with which one can juggle until reality—if there is such a thing—becomes transformed.

If Jarry was certainly well-versed in Greek and Latin literature, his reading of the texts was so fresh and penetrating that he could frankly imagine what others mentally repressed. Messaline is not the schoolboy's revenge. It is a view of antiquity that recalls Freud reading his own problems into the tragedy of Oedipus. Gourmont and Schwob were probably Jarry's guides in his researches and he had no hesitation either about delving into dictionaries or encyclopaedias. The first Messaline manuscript, with its references and cross-references, has an apparatus of notes whose function is not mere erudition.⁶ Jarry does not hesitate to mix false marble with real stone, the sham with the authentic, as if to underline the absence of any criteria for establishing a truth: the Asian dies as Tacitus indicates, but his name relates him back to the long-pigtailed Chinese of the 17th century.

As Jarry paints a portrait of the empress and the others involved in her love quest that is in strict conformity with what the classics indicate (Tacitus, Dion, Suetonius, Pliny the Elder and Pliny the Younger⁷), he is suggesting a metaphor, at once subtle and profound, of all artistic creation—one which is staggeringly up to date. Pushing the ideas contained in Linteau (1894) to their extreme, Jarry implies that a work exists only by and through its re-creation by the reader, whose imaginings and aberations form as much a part of it as the “mauvais textes” that Jarry would himself reject.⁸

Like the phoenix, emblematic bird of Messaline, a work lives by incessantly dying and being born anew: its meaning killed off, new meanings arise, always provisional. The text becomes a place where the possibilities of potential creation accumulate without ever exhausting their possible combinatories. Author and reader stand equal in the face of this enigmatic multiplicity: each faces the same risk of not using his ears sensitively enough to measure the “scruples” of words, too intent upon regarding the major idea that runs through the text.

(DILEMME.) De par ceci qu'on écrit l'œuvre, active supériorité sur l'audition passive. Tout les sens qu'y trouvera le lecteur sont prévus, et jamais il ne les trouvera tous; et l'auteur lui en peut indiquer, colin-maillard cérébral, d'inattendus, postérieurs et contradictoires. […]

Il est stupide de commenter soi-même l'œuvre écrite, bonne ou mauvaise, car au moment de l'écriture on a tâché de son mieux non de dire TOUT, ce qui serait absurde, mais le plus du nécessaire (que jamais d'ailleurs le lecteur ne percevra total), et l'on ne sera pas plus clair. Qu'on pèse donc les mots, polyèdres d'idées, avec des scrupules comme des diamants à la balance de ses oreilles, sans demander pourquoi telle ou telle chose, car il n'y a qu'à regarder, et c'est écrit dessus.⁹

Like the phoenix, the reader too, in turn, dies and relives in the metamorphoses taking place under his eyes; the mixing of disparate materials causes him to lose the thread and, if he finds it again, it is only so that he may the better lose it again.

The phoenix has an important role in the novel, for this fabulous bird—the mirror of the universe according to Borges in his “Manual of Fantastic Zoology”—is the father of the Asian, the god Priapus so sought after by Messalina.

Like the desire of which Priapus is the god, the mythic bird exists only through its own death and re-birth; it feeds on itself and can exist only by disappearing.

Issue of a process of alchemistic rot and sublimation (is not the “great work” called the “work of phoenix”?), the fabulous bird arises from the funeral pile of the Asian where, as in an athanor, diverse materials—trees and dried fig-trees painted red because dedicated to Priapus—become equal through the purifying action of the flames. The birth of the phoenix results from the

souffle de tous les arbres, de tous les livres, de toutes les statues et des gemmes et des étoffes et [il] se leva comme tout l'Orient capté sous le crâne jaune et le ventre gonflé de l'Asiatique dans son envol vers le soleil oriental.

(Messaline, op. cit., p. 83)

The fascination exercised by the phoenix is not unlike that exercised by any monster, the unaccustomed concords between disparate elements which Jarry poses at the center of his aesthetic universe.¹⁰

The asbestos sack containing the Asian's body “gonflé de vide, de poussière, d'os et d'âme,” becomes a “golden egg.” The philosophers' egg, which contains the orphic principles of its rebirth, surrounds a totality which is only emptiness and dust. Indeed, it is in its own transforming movement, delivered of mortal cares in the final product, that the “work” finds its real essence. Thereby can phoenix and text become the metaphor of a single creative process. The void within the cosmic shell, far from signifying a negative reality, represents a totality of forms which, preceding all distinctions, are merely potentialities, the void being like the lack of colour that results from a mixture of all colours. Faustroll indeed asked, “sait-on si Tout est un cristal régulier, ou pas plus vraisemblablement un monstre … ?”¹¹

As against the idea of a literary work conceived as an object, with an objective existence in accordance with defined or definable laws which can be described, Jarry offers the idea, very close to our own conceptions, of art as a network of signifiers, successive and superposable, involved in the creative process which gives rise to the work itself.

Perspectives overlap, the better to reveal unexpected propinquities. Condensed images and alterations of meaning act like illusions with mirrors, as when Messalina discovers the forbidden palindrome ROMAAMOR, “Roma” being the word which must not be pronounced lest the city be destroyed.

Messalina, virgin of her own debauchery, becomes the metaphor of a text whose virginity affirms itself with every attempt to decode it. A desire machine, and by that same never assuaged; it is only in death, in the void where opposites coincide and where “elle s'abîme dans le néant des fleurs” (Messaline, op. cit., p. 162) that she will ever assuage her desire while continuing to experience its ardour.

That death, of meaning also, brings the words closer to another linguistic reality—that of the unconscious. Between silence and words, these two ultimate realities, the text becomes a kind of mediating space in which they can simultaneously co-exist. Their simultaneity petrifies time.

Under the impulse of a creative flux—such as the cycle of the phoenix—which cannot assume permanence in a form, the marbles, the mouldings of its architecture disintegrate. The text constantly becomes other, submitted as it is to a kind of transformational fury: the better to display the throbbing creative activity which underlines it. The boundaries of logic are upended, as the circus chariots in a race break every bound that might attempt to contain their ardour.

Novel of mutations, reversals, metamorphoses and anamorphoses; objects accumulate in it, cross their perspectives. Traversed by anguished presentiments of the circumambient void, words, sounds, meanings can exist only in continuous change. The dolphins are the circus bounds before, imbued with Christian symbolism, becoming the protagonists of the fishing in Lack Latera (Messaline, pp. 144-45). The murrhines, the transparent eggshaped cups, link with myrrh and thus with death and tie into the paradigm of the egg of the phoenix, where life and death are simultaneously present; Messalina incarnates the suckling she-wolf, totem of the City, and likewise the woman, a creature half human and half animal, who (like Max Ernst's Grand Séducteur) mounts the Suburra, enveloped in the colours of the phoenix, purple and gold.

This text, so dense, is a text about the void. Indeed, Jarry himself declared that superabundance is always a lack. The absence apparently in question in the novel is that of the god Priapus, of desire in its state of perpetual turgescence. But, as Lacan says,

… le phallus est un signifiant, un signifiant dont la fonction, dans l'économie intrasubjective de l'analyse, soulève peut-être le voile de celle qu'il tenait dans les mystères. Car c'est le signifiant destiné à désigner dans leur ensemble les effets du signifié, en tant que le signifiant les conditionne par sa présence de signifiant.¹²

Messalina's search becomes not so much the search for hidden objects whose reality is suggested by the superabundance of its representations in her toilet and other objects, but a moral search, an adventure which opens up on the consciousness of the death of God and the apocalyptic revelation of the void. “God is dead,” thus spake Zarathustra. “Le grand Pan est mort,” says Messalina. “Nothing is true, all is permitted,” again said Zarathustra, and Messalina repeats in echo, “absolu-ment.”

The absence of Priapus (as likewise the death of Marcueil, the Surmâle) has a Nietzschean accent. The death of God deprives the world of a center; the world's umbilicus—as Artaud might say—is no more longer than “une mosaïque d'éclats”.¹³

The “Divina Voluptas” of which Lucretius spoke is lost: in her desolating embraces the empress finds coldness only. The natural abundance of gardens becomes “topia,” trompe-l'œil. Nature is only anamorphosis, writing itself becomes “grass,” “écriture d'herbe,” as in Chinese calligraphy. Absinth juice, one of the abortifiants which Messalina affects, produces an ink which, keeping away the rats—says the doctor, Vectius Valens—renders the work immortal. Words are aborted of the potentialities of their silence; perpetuating their arrested chrysalids, they have lost their vital lymph.

The exchange of materials—typical, incidentally, of Art Nouveau—underlines the ontological impossibility of equating reality with its potentialities. Affirming that “absolu-ment” (the absolute lies), Messalina announces that all writing is lies.

Several elements suggest a relationship between certain ideas of Jarry and passages of Nietzsche known and translated in France since 1891.¹⁴ The Surmâle and Messaline could be two aspects of the Superman with a sexual connotation indicating that his humanity is something different. They announce—like Zarathustra—a humanity which will encompass their destruction. Messalina, piercing the secret of creation through the mirror, eliminated God, and became the machine of desire who would be destroyed by her own mechanism. The Superman, like God, will be killed by man and, like the crucified Dionysus of Nietzsche, he will at the same time know happiness—“je l'adore”—and the most awful pain. The quest of Marcueil and of Messalina arises from the desire to go beyond all human limits and demolish all certainty. Faced with a failed reality—Nietzsche said in the preface to Gai Savoir—the only protest one can advance is “the great suspicion,” that “which makes of every U an X, a really authentic X. That is to say, the second-last letter before the last.”

In other passages in his writings, Jarry uses the sign x and accords it sometimes a sexual connotation (x, the owl and the phallus being interchangeable¹⁵), sometimes that of the unknown quantity in mathematics. In the Surmâle, x is death, the unexpected: “ce qui est terrible c'est que RIEN n'a jamais signifié autre chose, en matière de science, que l'“on ne sait quoi”, la force inattendue, l'X, peut-être la mort.”¹⁶

The phoenix, with its cycles of rebirth, could evoke the very Nietzschean idea of the eternal return. But there where Nietzsche saw the most desolating repetition, Jarry seems intent on breaking the closed-in movement of the wheel. Thanks to pataphysics, the creation of imaginary and parallel worlds, where contraries meet, the wheel “works loose,” “prend du jeu,” and so escapes from the constraints of repetition.

Ixion, as we are told by the myth, was sentenced to be tied to a wheel for having tried to seduce Hera while he was already paying his debt for violating the marriage and social laws. The Ixion myth is closely connected with the jynx used for magic spell-binding, a wheel whose circular motion charmed lovers. Jynx was first the name of a witch who tried to seduce Zeus with this instrument and was punished by Hera who changed her into a bird. This bird, the wryneck, can turn about at will and was one of the instruments of fascination used by Aphrodite. To expiate his transgressions, Ixion is himself transformed “en une espèce de iunx, fixé aux quatre membres sur une roue tourbillonnant sans fin entre ciel et terre”¹⁷.

For Jarry this wheel is not limited to turning in infinity, but creates other worlds:

Ixion ne tourne plus dans le même plan: il revit, à chaque circuit, son expérience acquise, puis pousse une pointe, par son centre, dans un nouveau monde liseré d'une courbe fermée; mais après il y a encore d'autres mondes! Il remonte la chute des bolges de Dante; le progrès, tel qu'un clown crevant ses cerceaux, débouche de nouveaux mystères comme une spirale de bon acier des bouteilles.¹⁸

Jarry's writing takes on a spiral movement, which the “gidouille” on the great belly of Père Ubu, symbol of pataphysic powers, in some way recalls.

At the crossroad of meanings, at the whim of author or reader (all the more absolute by having no purpose but its own operation), words, objects change functions; their meanings mingle, lose definition; images mutually engender images endlessly from each other. Never the same, the text, like an impenetrable enigma, provokes responses which only bring forth other enigmas. The wheel of the martyrdom of St. Catherine (in the Dürer engraving to which Jarry devotes an article inspired by the most perfect, Dali-like “paranoia critique”) turns eternally. The forms hidden beneath the visible image block it from crystallising. The wheel's revolution prevents the executioner's sword from reaching the Saint's neck and the reader must not settle his eyes only on what he is given to see.

The myth of Ixion showed the connections that exist between seduction and the circular movement of the wheel, links confirmed by the sexual dance of the emperor's mime Mnester in the circus arena. At the foot of Caligula's obelisk, Mnester sometimes assumes phallic form, sometimes a feminine form, making a lunar ball, “glomeramen,” of his body. The “arène sphingitique” is connected up with the sphincter and lewdness and the—Lautréamont—bonds of Mnester around his own axis are not without recalling the gyrations of Ubu's bâton à physique (a lavatory brush—le balai innommable—emblem of his pataphysic powers), and the circular movement which Plato attributes to hermaphrodites. The hermaphrodite, living symbol of the coexistence of contraries, is the “moteur d'une universelle illimitation.”¹⁹ Monstrous creature, supremely beautiful.

The nature of Messalina and of Surmâle are analogous to that of the hermaphrodite since, affirming the coexistence of contraries, they demand the return to chaos. They are the crowned anarchists, the precursors of Artaud's Heliogabolus. To ordered reality, knowable in accordance with laws, they oppose a monstrous existence, shot through by desire, bereft of purpose and ungraspable. Opposites are identical. Sexual excess become their opposites. Messalina is virgin, Surmâle knows not love, Mnester, potential Surmâle, becomes impotent Surmâle. Priapus is a cold man, says Messalina.

The identity of opposites makes life and death coexist. The importance Jarry attributes to Coleridge's Ancient Mariner and the person of Life-in-Death will be remembered.

The wheel, vital movement of renewal, emerges on mystery, the only veritable mystery, death. Surmâle says love is an act without importance since it can be repeated, the only human event which is really unique and, hence, vital, being death. It is not by chance that the quest of all of Jarry's characters emerges on death, or, more correctly, life-in-death.

The apparatus which is supposed to inspire love in Surmâle is constructed on the basis of an instrument of enchantment mentioned by St. Jerome in his Life of St. Hilary. This instrument, the tabula defixionis, is the jynx. Jerome recounts how the holy man set a girl free of the charm which had plunged her madly in love by pronouncing this phrase: “Certes ta force, Démon, doit être bien grande, puisque tu est ainsi enchaîné et arrêté par une lame de cuivre et par une tresse de fil” (Jarry, Le Surmâle, p. 144).

This description of the instrument which Jarry cites in Le Surmâle is “translated in the text” by the engineer Elson who immediately identifies an electro-magnetic apparatus from these few indications, and this gives him the idea of a machine for inspiring love:

Il s'inspira de l'expérience de Faraday: entre deux pôles d'un puissant électroaimant, si l'on jette une pièce de cuivre, la pièce de metal non magnétique, ne peut être influencée, et pourtant elle ne tombe pas: elle descend avec lenteur comme si quelque fluide visqueux occupait l'espace entre les pôles de l'aimant. Or, si on a le courage d'exposer sa tête à la place de la pièce—et Faraday, comme on sait, affrontait cette expérience—on n'éprouve absolument rien; et ce qui est terrible, c'est que RIEN n'a jamais signifié autre chose, en matière de science, que l'“on ne sait quoi”, la force inattendue, l'x, peut-être la mort.

(Le Surmâle, p. 144)

Athwart so many metamorphoses, dissolutions and rebirths, every act of creation gets around the impossibility of saying what cannot be said, which is nevertheless the only source of life. Of the void that underlies every work, nothing can be said, as the magic palindrome (ROMAAMOR), which contains the secret of its own construction, may not be pronounced. By its power of meaning, language avows itself incapable of expressing a “monstrous” reality at once luxuriating and contradictory. The never-closed spirals of the text oblige the reader to realise that l'absolu-ment (the absolute lies) and “la Vérité humaine, c'est ce que l'homme veut: un désir” (L'Amour absolu, O.C. [Œuvres complètes], p. 950). Although founded upon an ontological lie,²⁰ the text in its incessant movement wells forth and maintains the reader's desire to glimpse a different kind of reality, to raise the veil on a universe from which gaps and contradictions are excluded.

Through the eyes of desire, the reader discovers, beyond the words, as in a palimpsest, the inexplicable, yet evident, language of the unconscious. To express it, we can only repeat, “Ah! Ah!,” with Bosse-de-Nage, Faustroll's travelling companion, the dog-headed monkey. Considering the unity of opposites, these sounds open up on to the worlds of Pataphysics.

Notes

1. This article is based on a contribution by the author to the Colloquium on Jarry, held in Cerisy-la-Salle (1981).

2. Louis Dumont published La Louve in 1907, but it had already appeared in 1902, published by La Plume with the title La Chimère.

3. For the Jarry-Casanova quarrel see the preface by Thieri Foulc to A. Jarry, Messaline (Paris: Losfeld, 1977).

4. J. De Palacio, “Messaline décadente, ou la figure du sang,” Romantisme n. 31 (1981), pp. 209-28.

5. J. Lorrain, Sonyeuse, in L'Inconnue (Paris, 1891).

6. B. Eruli, “D'une Messaline à l'autre,” Europe, March 1981, pp. 112-120.

7. See B. Eruli, “Sur les sources classiques de Messaline: collages et montages,” L'Etoile Absinthe, May 1979, pp. 67-83.

8. “Et il y a divers vers et proses que nous trouvons très mauvais et que nous avons laissés pourtant, retranchant beaucoup, parce que pour un motif qui nous échappe aujourd'hui, ils nous ont donc intéressé un instant puisque nous les avons écrits; l'œuvre est plus complète quand on n'en retranche point tout le faible et le mauvais, échantillons laissés qui expliquent par similitude ou différence leurs pareils ou leurs contraires—et d'ailleurs certains ne trouveront que cela de bien.” A. Jarry, “Linteau,” in Les Minutes de sable mémorial, in A. Jarry, Œuvres complètes [O.C.], (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), p. 173.

9. A. Jarry, “Linteau,” O.C., pp. 172-73.

10. See B. Eruli, Jarry: I mostri dell'immagine (Pisa: Pacini, 1982).

11. A. Jarry, Gestes et opinions du Docteur Faustroll, pataphysicien, O.C., p. 722.

12. J. Lacan, “La signification du phallus,” Ecrits II (Paris: Seuil, 1971), pp. 108-09.

13. A. Artaud, L'Ombilic des limbes, in Œuvres complètes, vol. II (Paris: Gallimard 1970), p. 62.

14. See G. Bianquis, Nietzsche en France (Paris, 1929). Nietzsche was first translated and published in French in several revues (Revue Bleue, Le Banquet, La Revue Blanche, Le Mercure de France since 1891). H. Albert began his translations in 1898. Albert was a friend of Schwob whose Le Livre de Monelle was influenced by Nietzsche. See B. Eruli, “Schwob, Jarry e altri ribelli,” in Saggi e ricerche di Letteratura francese, XV (Roma, 1976), pp. 413-48.

15. See M. Arrivé, “De quelques aspects de la lettre dans le texte de Jarry,” in Lire Jarry (Paris, 1976).

16. A. Jarry, Le Surmâle (Paris: Losfeld, 1977), p. 144.

17. M. Detienne, Les Jardins d'Adonis (Paris, 1972), p. 166.

18. A. Jarry, La Mécanique d'Ixion, in La Chandelle verte (Paris, 1968), pp. 285-6.

19. T. Foulc, “Mnester ou l'art du sphéricubiste,” Europe, op. cit., p. 124.

20. “Il faut que l'homme s'amuse à l'image de son Créateur. Dieu s'amuse férocement depuis qu'il est Dieu, seulement il ne s'amusera pas longtemps, car je suis là … Toujours quelque bon Dieu détrône un autre Dieu … de sorte que personne n'a jamais su ni jamais ne saura où le vrai mensonge prend son point d'appui. Avec un vrai mensonge—qu'on m'en donne un!—je soulèverai le monde.” A. Jarry, “Chez la muse,” in L'Amour en visites, O.C., p. 891.