SOURCE: Schumacher, Claude. “Jarry's Theatrical Ideas.” In Alfred Jarry and Guillaume Apollinaire, pp. 98-109. London, England: Macmillan Publishers Ltd., 1984.

[In the following essay, Schumacher builds upon Jarry's own writings to articulate Jarry's ideas about the theater as represented by his plays.]

Jarry is a subjective writer, who belongs in that stream of literary tradition which began in earnest with the Romantics. His personal obsession with a schoolmaster coincided with a whole attitude to life and became embodied in the Ubu fantasy. Jarry was essentially concerned with the expression of his personal ‘world within’. He was not solely, or even primarily, a man of the theatre, though he undoubtedly had a theatrical instinct of a highly individual kind. Nor was he, a priori, a theatrical reformer. He broke with naturalist theatrical conventions because such conventions could not possibly serve his personal vision. However, his ideas on the theatre have an independent validity which, as the twentieth century wore on, exerted an ever-increasing influence on dramatic writing and theatrical practice. ‘De l'inutilité du théâtre au théâtre’ was published in the Mercure de France in September 1896 and paved the way for the forthcoming production of Ubu roi, but the text also puts forward a number of far-reaching proposals which call for nothing less than a fundamental transformation of the theatre as a whole. This article, together with the letter Jarry wrote to Lugné-Poe expounding the style of production required by Ubu, amounts to a theatrical manifesto, deliberately symbolist and anti-naturalist.

In ‘De l'inutilité’ Jarry declares that he writes for the ‘five hundred people, who, compared with the infinite mediocrity, have a touch of Shakespeare and Leonardo da Vinci in them’. He goes on to declare that many features of the traditional stage are both disgusting and meaningless, particularly the set and the actors: for him, ‘the set is a hybrid, neither natural nor artificial’, and thus to be discarded as artistically impure. Even a poetically conceived setting creates problems, inasmuch as it limits the intelligent spectator's imaginative freedom to construct in his mind his own, pure and perfect set in response to the poet's words:

It would be very dangerous to impose on a public of artists a set such as the author himself would paint it. A reader who can read will find, in any text, the hidden meaning placed there especially for him … A painted backdrop only seldom conjures up more than one image in the spectator's mind. And it is right that each spectator see the play in the set which corresponds to his own personal conception.

(Ubu, p. 308)

Art of necessity means invention and creation. If the naturalistic artist were true to his professed aim—namely, to record the world exactly as it is—he would have to construct an exact replica of the corner of nature he had chosen to reproduce. If such a reproduction were possible and it were absolutely indistinguishable from the original, it would be superfluous—whereas Jarry sees the act of creation as the essential human activity. Art is the re-creation of the outside world inside the mind of the artist; the communication of art is not to impose the re-created picture on the spectator, but to act as a catalyst for the spectator, who is prompted, in his turn, to re-create worlds in himself. Diagrammatically the process of artistic creation and dissemination, according to Jarry, could be represented as shown in Figure 1.

The ideal response to a genuine artistic creation must be free from imposed limitations, and, as far as the theatrical set is concerned, this aim is best achieved by the absence of any constructed decor.

A backdrop without colour can be obtained easily and in a way which is symbolically accurate with an unpainted canvas or the reverse side of a set, each [spectator] creating the space suggested by his own imagination, or, better still if the playwright has done his job properly, the real set exosmosed on the stage.

(Ubu, p. 310)

Jarry's fuzzy neologism ‘to exosmose’ conveys the clear meaning that it is the text of the playwright/poet which creates the set in the mind of the spectator. Although Jarry opted for a highly colourful and richly painted backdrop for his production of Ubu roi, many later productions have proved the effectiveness and fascination of an empty stage.

Jarry goes on to say that items of scenery needed for special effects (a window or a door, for example) can be brought on stage in the same way as more conventional objects, such as a table or a lamp. This convention has the added advantage that such properties can be removed as soon as necessary. To help the dull-witted spectator (Jarry calls him a ‘non-esprit’) placards identifying the location can be nailed to the proscenium arch at appropriate moments.

The same tendency towards the abstract informs his attitude toward the actor: the physical presence of the human actor, with his idiosyncrasies, embarrasses Jarry as it prevents him from seeing the ideal character conceived by the author. Guilty of being an individual, the actor is also guilty of being less than thorough in the performance of his duties:

The actor ‘makes up’ his face when he should create the whole body of the character. By contracting and distending his facial muscles he makes his face express emotion, mimicry and so forth. No one has realised that the muscles remain the same under the make-up and that Mounet [1841-1916; Mounet-Sully was a star of the Comédie-Française] and Hamlet do not have the same facial muscles, even though one thinks that, in anatomical terms, there is only one man. Or one pretends that the difference is negligible. The actor should replace his head with the effigy of the Character, by the use of a mask. …

(Ubu, p. 310)

What Jarry is advocating here is the advent of the super-marionette, a concept later made famous by Craig, but which rightfully belongs to the Frenchman. The super-marionette is to be the perfect, abstract, ideal character made manifest to the spectator without the ponderous, accidental, material intrusion of the actor. The super-marionette is the opposite of both the star and the naturalistic actor. The stars, epitomised in the 1890s by Sarah Bernhardt and Mounet-Sully, are not interested in portraying some ideal Phèdre or Hamlet: their aim is to dazzle the audience with their own charm, beauty and melodiousness. In contrast to such exhibitionism, the naturalistic actor strives towards total identification with the character, to the point where the two become indistinguishable. Such abnegation on the actor's part is dismissed by Jarry as a ‘futile’ endeavour, as no puny human being can ever capture and fully realise a complex character conceived by a playwright of genius.

The theatre, bringing impersonal masks to life, can only be apprehended by those who are manly enough to create life: a clash of passion more subtle than any already known or a character who is a new being. Everyone agrees that Hamlet, say, is more alive than the man in the street, being more complex and more fully integrated, and perhaps the only one alive, for he is a walking abstraction. Therefore it is harder for the mind to create a character than for the flesh to beget a man; and, if one is absolutely unable to create, i.e. to give birth to a new being, it is better to keep quiet.

(Ubu, pp. 318-19)

A character born in the mind of a playwright possesses that quality of abstraction without which there can be no art. This character thinks thoughts more subtle, is in the grip of passions more profound, reacts with a violence more devastating than any ordinary human being's. That is why a realist/naturalist interpretation is bound to fail, as the ‘human’ actor is unable to approach these quintessential qualities.

The use of mask is the first step towards a depersonalisation of the performer. Of course, the mask belongs to the most ancient theatrical traditions, but Jarry advocates the use of encasing the whole body—not just covering the face. Inside this constructed shell the actor should be able to attain absolute impassivity, which for Jarry is essential to the creation of beauty. The super-marionette would model his acting-technique on the diminutive doll of the puppet booth, which ‘requires only six basic positions to express all emotions’. Jarry declares that he deliberately does not give any examples of ‘basic positions’, because all masks are different and react differently according to the precise theatrical circumstances provided by scenic architecture, lighting, and so forth. But he states that a slow nodding of the head or slow lateral movements will displace the shadows over the entire surface of the mask and gradually alter its expression. Such a conception of theatrical communication relies upon a constant alertness on the part of the spectator, who must extract meanings and emotions from the rather intimate acting of the marionette. More abrupt and explicit are ‘the universal gestures’ used by the traditional puppets of the French Punch and Judy shows (the Guignol from Lyon). Jarry gives a single example: ‘the puppet displays bewilderment by starting back violently and knocking its head against the proscenium arch’. Basic or universal gestures such as this should be evolved to express all important human emotions.

Guignol, the French Punch, traditionally speaks in a high-pitched nasal drone and uses only a minimum of inflexions. The puppeteer produces the sound with the help of a tiny whistle, and the result is both instantly recognisable and peculiar to Guignol. Similarly, says Jarry, it behoves the actor to identify the specific voice of each individual part:

It goes without saying that the actor should have a special voice, which is the voice of the part, as if the cavity of the mouth of the mask could only utter what the mask intends to say, if the muscles of the lips could move. And it is better that they do not move and that the delivery throughout the play be monotone.

(Ubu, p. 313)

In other words, to achieve absolute unity in a given character, Jarry denies the actor any freedom of interpretation. After having straight-jacketed him in a body mask and limited him to half-a-dozen simple physical expressions, he commands him to speak his whole part mechanically.

Jarry's ideas were not evolved solely with the performance of Ubu in mind, but form part of a general and essentially symbolist rejection of traditional theatre. At the end of the nineteenth century, both naturalists and symbolists rejected both bourgeois society and the theatre that it favoured. The naturalist reaction favoured a more ‘honest’ and ‘life-like’ stagecraft, while the symbolists, contemptuous of the liberties that star actors took with the author's text, turned against the personality of the actor, who came to seem an unnecessary intruder rather than an indispensable link between author and audience. Gordon Craig, in On the Art of the Theatre (1905), was to repeat many of the same ideas.

If we turn now to the letter Jarry wrote to Lugné-Poe in January 1896, eleven months before the production of Ubu, we find yet another statement of Jarry's theory of stagecraft. The demands set forth in it again come as no surprise, and we know that not all these demands were met by the production. What is important, however, is to see the letter as an enunciation of principle.

It would be interesting, I think, to stage this thing (at no cost by the way) in the following manner:

1. Mask for the main character, Ubu, which I could get you if need be. I am right in thinking, am I not, that you have yourself studied the mask problem?
2. A cardboard horse's head, which he would hang around his neck, as on the old English stage, for the only two equestrian scenes—all these suggestions being in the spirit of the play, since I intended to write a guignol [a puppet play].
3. A single set or, better still, a plain backdrop, eliminating the raising and lowering of the curtain during the single act. A formally dressed character would enter, as in puppet shows, to put up signs indicating the location of the scene. (Note that I am convinced that such signs have a far greater ‘suggestive’ power than any set. No set or extras could convey the sense of ‘the Polish army on the march in the Ukraine’.)
4. Abolition of crowd scenes, which are all too often badly staged and are an insult to intelligence. Thus, a single soldier on parade, a single soldier in the scuffle when Ubu says, ‘what a crowd’, ‘what a retreat’, etc.
5. Choice of an ‘accent’ or, better still, a special ‘voice’ for the main character.
6. Costumes with as little local colour or chronology as possible (the better to suggest something eternal); modern preferably, since the satire is modern; and sordid, for the tragedy will appear still more wretched and horrifying that way.

(Ubu, pp. 412-13)

This letter could legitimately be given the title of ‘the necessity of the theatrical in the theatre’. Not only does the author of Ubu not want to recreate an illusion of reality on the stage, but the grotesque nature of the action presented casts doubt on the sanity and on the reality of all human activity, outside as well as inside the theatre. The letter might also be regarded as a pamphlet directed against naturalist reformers such as Zola, Antoine and Strindberg, who were campaigning for the very theatrical features Jarry wanted to destroy. In brief, the counter-demand of naturalism might be set out as follows:

1. The actor should be made up as meticulously as possible.
2. Props should, as far as possible, be the genuine article (in Zola's La Terre, produced by Antoine, live hens animated the courtyard).
3. The set should be accurately researched, with a view to reproducing a genuine milieu, in minute detail.
4. Crowds should create an overwhelming illusion of reality. The life of the characters and of the community to which they belong continues beyond the boundaries of the stage.
5. Stilted delivery should give way to ordinary, everyday speech-patterns. Characters should be heard to be ‘chatting’ to one another—as if oblivious of the spectator's presence.
6. In every aspect of the production local colour and historical accuracy should be respected. (The present-day equivalent is the television historical series, such as Henry VIII or Disraeli.)

During the summer of 1896 Jarry was making notes, in answer to a questionnaire, perhaps with a view to writing a fully considered theory of the stage. These notes remained unpublished until 1958. In them he pays homage to a number of contemporary playwrights and singles out Maeterlinck for special praise:

Among us is a tragic author, possessing new terrors and pities, so private that it is pointless for him to express them in any other way but silence: Maurice Maeterlinck. We are convinced that we are witnessing a rebirth of theatre, for in France for the first time there is an Abstract theatre, and at last we can read, without the trouble of a translation, plays as eternally tragic as those by Ben Jonson, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Cyril Tourneur, Goethe.

(Ubu, p. 316)

Jarry ranks Maeterlinck so highly because he writes not for the ‘crowd’ but for an elite who are capable of active participation in the creation of a masterpiece:

The minority theatre is neither a holiday for its audience, nor a lesson, nor a pastime, but real action … an active pleasure which is God's own pleasure and which the common crowd achieves in caricature in the sexual act.

(Ubu, pp. 317-18)

Aware of the sanctity of his mission and having identified his ideal audience, the playwright must write for the stage only if ‘he thinks primarily in dramatic terms’. Jarry warns that one can always make novels out of plays, as it is always possible to narrate an action, but that the translation of a novel into a play practically never succeeds.

For this reborn theatre a more civilised audience is required. Latecomers and inconsiderate spectators are taken to task and managements are urged to close the doors before the performance begins. Jarry insists that the auditorium should be plunged into darkness—not so much to achieve perfect illusion as to reduce distraction and the temptation to ‘peer round to see what everyone else in the theatre is wearing’. On these practical matters, Jarry is in total agreement with the naturalists, who had been calling for these small reforms for years. He also agrees with them in his criticism of actors' training. He rejects the teaching of the Conservatoire (the school of the Comédie-Française), which prided itself on carrying on a tradition harking back to Molière and Racine, and insists that ‘the means of expression be brought up to date’. Against the inhibiting tradition of the school, he argues for a kind of creative anachronistic approach to the classics, which he himself puts into practice in Ubu roi:

Classical plays were acted in the costumes of the day (the Greek and Roman heroes of Racine's tragedies wore the lavish clothes of Louis XIV's courtiers); let us do as these old masters who painted antiquity in contemporary settings and costumes. ‘History’ is so boring, therefore useless.

(Ubu, p. 322)

These views echo Antoine's, who had had first-hand experiences of the Comédie-Française, as a long-serving extra. Jarry also concurs with the naturalist director when he calls for a tight-knit company of actors and declares his hostility to the star system. But his opposition stems from different reasons: Jarry fears that actors of genius, who possess a deep individuality, will betray the poet's intentions—and, the greater the actor, the greater the betrayal. Once again he insists on the need for a passive ‘marionette’ that can be freely manipulated by its creator, because a theatrical character ‘is not bounded by common humanity’.

‘A masterpiece is a symbol and a symbol never brooks the active presence of man. In fact, the absence of man appears to be the indispensible prerequisite’, declared Maeterlinck regarding ‘the theatre of the abstract’. Like the dramatist he most sincerely admired, Jarry considered a living presence as an intolerable intrusion on his poetic creation, and it was with the utmost reluctance that he put up with the business of staging his plays—yet ('pataphysically) he took an active and direct interest in Lugné's mise en scène.

Like most original creators, Jarry was immersed in the whole current of ideas of his own epoch. Although at first glance we appear to be dealing with a startlingly abrupt break with the past, Jarry's work is continuous with the symbolist stream in literature and theatre, which had grown out of romanticism and which became part of the antibourgeois movement which dominated nineteenth-century art and is still influential today. And, as we have just seen so far as theatre is concerned, it would be a mistake systematically to oppose symbolism and naturalism. Perhaps the great difference between Jarry and his contemporaries is the violence and aggressiveness which characterises his work. When we think of ‘symbolism’ the word conjures up the dreamy worlds of Maeterlinck, the majestic settings of Craig or the religiosity of Paul Claudel, rather than the virulently gross Ubu, spitting out obscenities and waving a lavatory brush, with a deliberate desire to offend. In that respect Jarry prefigures, in France, Apollinaire, Dada and the surrealists, who represent the next stage along the path.

Bibliography

Works in French

Œuvres complètes d'Alfred Jarry (Paris: Gallimard, 1972).

Tout Ubu, ed. Maurice Saillet (Paris: Livres de Poche, 1962). Strongly recommended.

Ubu, ed. Noël Arnaud (Paris: Gallimard, 1978). The best and most comprehensive edition of the Ubu plays and related texts.

Works in English

Caesar Antichrist, trs. James H. Bierman (Tucson: Omen Press, 1971). Not strictly speaking a play, this text none the less belongs to the Ubu cycle.

King Ubu, trs. Michael Benedikt and George E. Wellwarth, in Modern French Theatre, ed. Benedikt and Wellwarth (New York: Dutton, 1966).

Selected Works, ed. Roger Shattuck and Simon Watson Taylor (London: Methuen, 1965). Most valuable for the student of drama.

The Supermale, A Modern Novel, trs. Barbara Wright (London: Jonathan Cape, 1968).

The Ubu Plays, ed. Simon Watson Taylor (London: Methuen, 1968).

Ubu roi, trs. Barbara Wright (London: Gaberbocchur Press, 1961).

Criticism in French

Arnaud, Noël, Alfred Jarry, d'Ubu roi au docteur Faustroll (Paris: La Table Ronde, 1974). Excellent and indispensable.

Béhar, Henri, Jarry dramaturge (Paris: Nizet, 1980).

———, Jarry, le monstre et la marionnette (Paris: Larousse, 1973).

Cahiers du Collège de 'Pataphysique (Paris, published at irregular intervals since 1949, also under the title of Dossiers and Subsidia du Collège de 'Pataphysique).

Europe, revue littéraire mensuelle, nos 623-4 (March-April 1981).

Criticism in English

Esslin, Martin, The Theatre of the Absurd (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961).

LaBelle, Maurice Marc, Alfred Jarry, Nihilism and the Theater of the Absurd (New York: New York University Press, 1980).

Melzer, Annabelle, Latest Rage the Big Drum (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1980).

Shattuck, Roger, The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France from 1885 to World War I (London: Jonathan Cape, 1969; first published 1955). Essential reading; as authoritative as it is readable.

———, ‘What is ‘Pataphysics?’, Evergreen Review, no. 13 (New York: Grove Press, 1960).