[In the following essay, Cutshall examines the ways in which Jarry's journalism, plays, and novels commented upon the Dreyfus Affair and the ensuing scandal.]

Alfred Jarry (1873-1907) reached his maturity as a writer during the 1890s, a time of considerable political polarization in France when authors, whether of fiction, journalism, or both, as was the case with Jarry, were accustomed to being embroiled in questions of society and politics. If this was most obviously true of Emile Zola and his imitators, the socially and often socialist-orientated naturalist authors on one hand, and on the other of ultra-rightwingers like Edouard Drumont and Maurice Barrès, then it was in certain respects no less true of the Belle Epoque's more avant-garde writers, although this fact often tends to be rather overlooked.

Perhaps the major problem in assessing the impact on contemporary affairs of the symbolist or decadent¹ authors is that the “school” to which they belonged was so diffuse as to be very difficult to characterize. It was indeed a mixture of many, often contradictory ideas and influences. An author like Rémy de Gourmont could, for instance, be at the same time an enthusiast for Nietzschean philosophy and an active participant in the fin-de-siècle vogue for kabbalism.² Jarry himself apparently saw no paradox in combining Gourmont's “Idealism”³ with an unfeigned passion for technological progress. Ilse Pollack has perhaps come close to identifying the only common feature of the various sorts of symbolisant author when she writes: “The alienation of the writer from society is not just the experience of an individual, but becomes with Symbolism the experience of a whole group.”⁴

If much Decadent literature concerned the alienation of hypersensitive individuals like Huysmans's Des Esseintes and Villiers de l'Isle-Adam's Axël, then the alienation of the group was expressed, predictably, in a range of forms of political sympathy from extreme left to extreme right. Authors much derided for their love of “lassitude” were in this respect surprisingly active. To some, particularly Zo d'Axa, Fagus, Mirbeau and Tailhade, a positive response to the anarchist movement seemed logical enough, at least in the context of the early 1890s. To others, a more messianic avenue was appropriate, whether embodied in the Catholic church or in rabid nationalist associations like Action Française and the Ligue des Patriotes.

If anarchism was the burning question of the circles in which Jarry moved⁵ in the early 1890s, particularly in 1892-94, then from 1894 until its conclusion in 1906 this was replaced by the question of Alfred Dreyfus's guilt or innocence. Jarry was not a notable commentator on the anarchists, although there are a few references to them in some of his earlier works. As a writer, he seizes upon the disparity of spontaneous thought and spontaneous action in a way very similar to that in which Gide later would in Les Caves du Vatican.⁶ This leads to some very equivocal comments concerning individual anarchists such as this one concerning Auguste Vaillant, guillotined in 1894 for throwing a bomb into the Chambre des Députés and about whom Jarry is clearly uneasy:

L'Anarchie Est; mais l'idée déchoit qui se résout en acte; il faudrait l'Acte imminent, asymptote presque—Vaillant de par son nom prédestiné voulut vivre sa théorie. Au lieu du Monstre inconçevable, fut palpable et audible la chute non fendue d'un des grelots de son joyeux bonnet. Et pourtant il fut grand.⁷

In this article, I would like to consider how Jarry reacted to the Dreyfus affair and how he became involved in it. Although he was but one of a plethora of writers to comment on “L'Affaire,” and although he became nowhere near as closely involved as Zola or Anatole France, Jarry is a particularly interesting author to assess from this point of view. If interest there is in this subject, then much of it stems from Jarry's very lack of political commitment. For example, in 1897 he was asked to reply to a questionnaire on the Alsace-Lorraine issue for the Mercure de France. About this he could obviously not care less:

III. Etant né en 1873, la guerre de 1870 est dans mon souvenir trois ans au-dessous de l'oubli absolu. Il me paraît vraisemblable que cet événement n'a jamais eu lieu, simple invention pédagogique en vue de favoriser les bataillons scolaires. … Je demande la guerre, la guerre immédiate (je ne suis point soldat).⁸

It so happens that the two passages I have quoted give a fair impression of the two sides of Jarry's writing. On one hand he is serious to the point of pomposity about questions of literature, and of course the anarchist cause was widely held in Decadent circles to have major affinities with the school's conception of literary creation.⁹ On the other hand, and this comes out most strongly in Jarry's vast corpus of journalism, events in the real world like the continuing repercussions of France's defeat in 1870 are generally held to have importance only as occasions for sardonic lateral thinking, or “speculation,”¹⁰ as Jarry called it. A good example of this is an article from September 1901 that appeared in La Revue Blanche, Jarry's favorite outlet, and was entitled “Psychologie Expérimentale du Gendarme.”¹¹ Here Jarry uses his familiar logic-gone-mad to deduce that, far from being “gardiens de la paix,” the self-interest (“desiderata”¹²) of policemen must entail the promotion of crime if they are not to leave themselves unemployed.

As far as we know¹³ and as might be expected from this much, in private life Jarry was never associated with social or political causes, certainly not to anything approaching the degree of most of his contemporaries. The only possible exception to this was the fact that he became friendly with Lord Alfred Douglas in 1896¹⁴ when the latter was contributing articles on the Wilde case to the Revue Blanche, but again, this hardly amounts to political commitment. From what evidence we do have, it appears likely that Jarry spent the larger part of his time writing, drinking, and fishing,¹⁵ and in the years after 1898 he tended to pursue these pleasures in the countryside around Paris and in the provinces rather than in the city itself.¹⁶

Nor yet did Jarry have any obvious religious (or atheistic) axe to grind. He appears to have been a man essentially without firm beliefs of any kind, though much has been made on occasion of the fact that he agreed to receive the last rites when gravely ill in 1906.¹⁷ For him, the business of being an author of avant-garde leanings in the 1890s led not to a religious conversion of the sort undergone by Huysmans, Jammes, or some of his own friends among the Nabis painters, nor to involvement in the anti-clerical debates that were a constant feature of France in the Third Republic and to which Boris Vian, one of Jarry's most fervent admirers, would still be warming over in the 1950s.¹⁸ Still less did it lead to Peladan's abstract Rosecrucian mysticism, although there are indeed kabbalistic elements in many of Jarry's earlier works,¹⁹ and he undoubtedly shared with the adepts of Rose + Croix an enthusiasm for sacred iconography. This was reflected in the two short-lived art magazines that Jarry founded: L'Ymagier (with Rémy de Gourmont, 1894)²⁰ and Perhindérion (1896).²¹

All this points to the sort of splendid isolation for which Jarry is renowned even today. He was by no means a social animal, being rarely seen even by his friends (at least when sober).²² When he did appear, it was often to play the clown, and indeed Misia Natanson, daughter of the director of the Revue Blanche²³ and then only a child, remembered him in later years as “ce petit clown charmant.”²⁴ Yet by his own standards, the Dreyfus affair retained Jarry's attention more than might be expected, given these comments. Jarry often gives the impression, as in the Alsace-Lorraine questionnaire that current affairs bore him, and we may assume that the Dreyfus case struck him in the same way for the first four years of its progress. When Dreyfus first appears in Jarry's writings, however, some months after the publication of “J'Accuse!,” a train of thought is initiated that will continue to run until Jarry's death. Dreyfus surfaces in both Almanachs du Père Ubu (1899 and 1901), is obliquely referred to in the play Ubu Enchaîné (1899), occupies a good deal of Jarry's journalism between 1900 and 1904, and plays a very important part in his last, unfinished novel, La Dragonne, upon which he was still working at the time of his death in 1907.

Whatever caused Jarry first to enter the fray, it is highly unlikely that it could have been Zola's article. In common with most of his symbolist friends, Jarry nurtured extreme hostility to the naturalists in general and Zola in particular. When asked to comment on Zola's career after the latter's death in 1902, Jarry wrote simply: “il s'est employé à lessiver l'âme populaire et à décorer l'honneur de l'armée.”²⁵ In fact, two things may have fostered Jarry's concern with Dreyfus, though neither quite explains why so much of the first Almanach is devoted to him. The first is obvious, given the circumstances of the case, and easily enough stated. The review of the verdict of Dreyfus's court martial of 1894 took place in August and September 1899 in the hall of the Lycée de Rennes, the verdict being upheld on September 9 and Dreyfus pardoned 10 days later. At this time Jarry was staying with Alfred Vallette, owner of the Mercure de France, and his novelist-wife Rachilde at La Frette, and was busily engaged in writing Ubu Enchaîné. It seems certain, nonetheless, that he followed the events of the retrial, and not just because he had already discussed the Dreyfus case in the Almanach published at the New Year of 1899. Dreyfus was deeply bound up with Rennes (where the court martial had also taken place), of which Jarry had been an inhabitant for several years. More than this, the Lycée de Rennes had been Jarry's school from 1888 until 1890 and was in turn bound up with his literature, because its staff and students had provided the models for many of his characters, including Père Ubu.²⁶ The connection between Rennes, Dreyfus, and Jarry himself is one that obviously struck the author, for it resurfaces in La Dragonne in a way that is, as we shall see, both puzzling and controversial.

The second element that may have attracted Jarry to the Dreyfus case is rather less easily explained. In spite of his almost legendary penchant for firearms²⁷ and other forms of weaponry (the last photograph of Jarry ever taken shows him in a salle d'armes, sabre in hand),²⁸ Jarry was no admirer of the army and things military. This at times violent hostility was nurtured by Jarry until the end of his life, and probably sprang from two sources, neither of them particularly redolent of pacifism. In the first place, Jarry patently detested his own brief and inglorious spell of military service in 1894-95. In 1894 Jarry was starting to become established as both a writer, his first book, Les Minutes de sable mémorial being published in September of that year, and as an habitué of literary salons.²⁹ When news of his impending call-up came he attempted, via the Breton deputy Le Troadec, to ensure that he could at least serve in a Parisian regiment and thus continue with his career relatively unhindered. The Minister of War who turned down the request was a certain General Auguste Mercier, whose name Jarry was not to forget. In November 1894, Jarry was enrolled in the 101st infantry regiment, stationed in his home town³⁰ of Laval, a few miles from Rennes, where Dreyfus was cashiered in December. The 101st infantry regiment formed part of the 4th army corps, whose commanding officer was the future³¹ Minister of War General Emile Zurlinden. Jarry would not forget him, either.

As might be expected, Jarry was not the model soldier. For one thing, he had to be excused from drill because his legs were too short for him to keep in step with the other troops. One of the officers who befriended him, Gaston Roig, has left this description:

“Habillé et armé”, le crane dûment tondu, large képi rouge, veste trop longue, pantalon désolé, Jarry avait cet air martial et ce “chic” si particulier au soldat français, prince incontesté des élégances.³²

Roig's description of Jarry's regime, by contrast, gives us some impression of the highly unmilitary nature of the new recruit's concerns:

il lisait, il buvait, il écrivait. Il écrivait beaucoup. Assez mystérieusement du reste car il fut toujours impossible de lui faire définir avec précision la nature de ces travaux: —Nous-con-si-gnons-des-no-tes, disait-il, sur-un-mé-tier-ce-lui—desol-dat-que-nous-commen-çons-à-bien-con-naître.³³

The book in question is without doubt Les Jours et les nuits: roman d'un déserteur (1897), Jarry's first novel. This work, a thinly veiled account of Jarry's own experiences in the army, reflects both the fact that he resented the events of his military service and another, more ethereal reason for his hostility toward the army. The concepts of regimentation and regularity that the military implies obviously inspired horror in an author who was bohemian even by the standards of his time. Again, we return to the dichotomy of one of the most individualistic exponents of the literature of the individual being confronted, with a situation in which the only requirement is conformity. To this Jarry would return again and again in his novels.³⁴

Les Jours et les nuits is therefore half way between autobiography and a more generalized accusation in the mold of Gourmont's Le Joujou patriotisme. Jarry declines to spare the stupidity of the recruits themselves, their foul-mouthed sergeants, their incompetent, usually sadistic officers, or indeed the military doctors, for whom he reserves a special dislike, given that their ministrations seem to prove fatal more often than not.³⁵ Pitted against these is Sengle, a figure who largely, though not unreservedly, stands for Jarry himself. It is no accident that when Sengle looks in a mirror, he “y relut l'histoire de Sisyphe.”³⁶ Sisyphus here is a lone man pitted against the overwhelming “Eternel des Armées,” who nevertheless overcomes such unlikely odds by succeeding eventually in pushing his boulder to the top of the mountain thanks to the muscular development induced by the exercise.³⁷

Jarry is known to have claimed after his discharge in December 1895 that he had been spared the remainder of his service because of his “imbécilité précoce.”³⁸ In fact, like Sengle, he found the army so unbearable that he almost killed himself with a dose of poison in order to obtain a discharge, finally accorded on the grounds of “lithiase bilaire chronique.”³⁹ Maurice Marc LaBelle has suggested⁴⁰ that the Dreyfus affair provided, along with the Oscar Wilde case,⁴¹ the inspiration for Les Jours et les nuits. In fact, Jarry had at this time no need of such inspiration, having a quite sufficient motive of his own to ridicule the army.

Two years after the publication of Les Jours et les nuits, Jarry would return once more to the topic of conformity in his play Ubu enchaîné, and this time he may well have Dreyfus at the back of his mind when Père Ubu meets Corporal Pissedoux and his squad of “Hommes Libres” exercising on the Champ-de-Mars:

LE CAPORAL:
Portez … arme! (Le Père Ubu obéit avec son balai)
PERE UBU:
Vive l'armerdre!
LE CAPORAL:
Arrêtez, arrêtez! ou plutôt, non! Désobéissants, ne vous arrêtez pas! (Les Hommes Libres s'arrêtent, le Père Ubu se détache) Quelle est cette nouvelle recrue, plus libre que vous tous, qui a inventé un maniement d'arme que je n'ai jamais vu, depuis sept ans que je commande: Portez … arme!
PERE UBU:
Nous avons obéi, Monsieur, pour remplir nos devoirs d'esclave.(42)

Ubu addresses Pissedoux as “Monsieur,” which is exactly how Jarry himself is supposed to have addressed his superiors while in the army.⁴³

The joke here is obviously at the expense of the military and the conformity it demands, but no less is it a critique of the society of which the army is nothing more than an emanation, a point which would be taken up in 1901 in his sixth novel, Le Surmâle.⁴⁴ The squad of “Hommes Libres” see themselves as the incarnation of antimilitaristic refusal to conform, since they will not obey any order. Pissedoux, however, can easily make them do what he wishes by ordering the opposite of what is required. In the comic-book France of Ubu enchaîné, peopled by individuals trying to disguise their obscene-sounding names by adopting grandiose titles (Pissedoux calls himself “Marquis de Granpré”) and by parodic Englishmen (Lord Catoblépas and his servant Jack, distant cousins of Daninos's Major Thompson), the only truly free man is Père Ubu, who chooses whether to obey or disobey as it suits him. Paradoxically, he expresses his freedom by becoming a slave in a country where everyone wishes to be a master. Unlike Ubu roi (1896), which is set “en Pologne, c'est-à-dire Nulle Part,”⁴⁵Ubu enchaîné is specifically set in France and indeed the whole play sets out to undermine “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité” as concepts. As words, Ubu deals with them in a single speech:

Puisque nous sommes dans le pays où la liberté est égale à la fraternité, laquelle n'est comparable qu'à l'égalité de la légalité, et que je ne suis pas capable de faire comme tout le monde et que cela m'est égal d'être égal à tout le monde puisque c'est encore moi qui finirai par tuer tout le monde, je vais me mettre esclave, Mère Ubu!⁴⁶

Whatever the more general implications of Ubu enchaîné, it is yet another mark of Jarry's dislike of the military, here expressed in a form as comic as Les Jours et les nuits is tragic. A humorous perspective on the army also permeates Jarry's whole career as a journalist. His articles on the subject include “Protégeons l'armée” (1901), “Le rire dans l'armée” (1901), and “Lyrisme militaire” (1905).

Jarry's interest in Dreyfus, in the light of this much, probably stems from a certain geographical interest combined with a personal grudge against the military rather than from any discernible political views; and Jarry's first reference to him, as I have said, comes in the Almanach du Père Ubu of 1899. Why Jarry should have composed this work is not immediately clear, but it probably arose partly as a much-needed, moneymaking exercise, and partly as a nod in the direction of Rabelais, Jarry's greatest literary influence and author of the Prognostication pantagrueline of 1533. In part, Jarry's work is an almanach like Rabelais's, full of absurd predictions, lists of saints' days, and so forth. In part, it is made up of stock jokes at the expense of institutions, as when Père Ubu speaks, in a French equivalent of describing the House of Commons as a political asylum, of “Cette borne … une de nos oeuvres politiques charitables, l'asile de vieillards que nous avons fondé et que notre peuple appelle le Sénat.”⁴⁷

A much more important and original part of the Almanach is, however, devoted to the Dreyfus case, and it appears from the outset that Jarry is, as might be expected given his antipathy towards the army, firmly on the side of the dreyfusards. Under the heading, “Ephémerides actuelles,” is a playlet entitled L'Ile du Diable: Pièce Secrète en 3 ans et plusieurs Tableaux. This is a loose adaptation of the part of Ubu Roi concerning the arrest and imprisonment of Captain Bordure by Père Ubu. In the original play, Ubu's motive is sheer greed. Here, however, Bordure, obviously now representing Dreyfus, is punished by Ubu for spying, when the real culprit, as Ubu well knows, is his own son Malsain Athalie-Afrique(!). When Ubu's conscience upbraids him for the injustice, the “picquartements (i.e. Colonel Picquart) de vos reproches acérés”⁴⁸ earn only one of Ubu's favourite threats (“je vais vous marcher sur les pieds”).⁴⁹ Instead, Ubu prefers to put his trust in “notre tout jeune fils Freycinet,”⁵⁰ and in his wife, “Madame France” (a twofold joke, since Mère Ubu was played in the original production of Ubu Roi by the actress Louise France). So Bordure is forced to suffer “la grande décollation par sur le Billot, renouvelée de Saint Jean-Baptiste.”⁵¹ General Billot's name was of course Jean-Baptiste.

The play ends with an enumeration of the members of Ubu's retinue and their enemies:

Soldats, sabre au clair! Chefs des choeurs, Humbert, Meyer, Bec, Méline, Zurlinden, Mercier, Drumont, Pellieux, Gonse, Judet, Xau, Barrès, Gyp, et vous, guerrier chef de notre musique, battez tous la mesure avec vos sabres dans le peuple et spécialement sur les têtes de MM. Clemenceau, Gohier, Quillard, Pressensé, Rochevoort, Anatole France, que l'on entonne bien la chanson du Dércervelage.⁵²

The first list of course is composed of celebrated anti-dreyfusards, including, as promised, Mercier and Zurlinden, not to mention once more the unfortunate Billot. To these three soldiers are added General Gabriel de Pellieux, who botched the investigation of the German spy Count Esterhazy, and General Gonse of the Service des Renseignements, Pellieux's superior and one of Dreyfus's main persecutors. Predictably, since Jarry was a writer, the other “soldats” are all journalists, except for the politician Jules Méline.⁵³ Arthur Meyer, in spite of being Jewish himself, wrote for the monarchist paper Le Gaulois. Edouard Drumont, author of La France juive, had founded with Gyp (pseudonym of Comtesse Martel de Janville) the violently antisemitic paper La Libre parole (motto: “La France aux Français”)⁵⁴ in 1892, and had been the first to announce the news of Dreyfus's arrest. Maurice Barrès was a member of the Ligue des Patriotes and was to be involved in an attempted coup d'état a few weeks after the Almanach was published. Fernand Xau, one-time impressario for Buffalo Bill,⁵⁵ and now very far to the right, had in fact been a journalist on L'Echo de Paris, leaving only shortly before the paper contained Jarry's first published work. Ernest Judet was an equally right-wing journalist on Le Petit Journal.

Among the dreyfusards are a pair of people Jarry knew, and one of his closest friends. Clemenceau, the miserable Gohier,⁵⁶ and Francis de Hault de Pressensé were at this time writing for L'Aurore, and it is doubtful whether Jarry had met any of them. Anatole France, however, was certainly one of Jarry's acquaintances, while Pierre Quillard was a co-contributor to the Revue Blanche, and at the time the Almanach was written, Quillard was one of Jarry's partners in a villa at Corbeil known as the “Phalanstère.”⁵⁷ Quillard, moreover, had already been mentioned in the Almanach in terms of an anecdote concerning the “Phalanstère” and beginning “M. Pierre Quillard est l'un de nos plus grands poètes.”⁵⁸ It is even possible, perhaps even likely, that one of the factors that contributed to Jarry's adoption of the Dreyfus case before the events at the Lycée de Rennes was Quillard's frequent—and his own virtually constant⁵⁹—presence at the “Phalanstère” during the summer of 1898.

Nor yet has Jarry finished with Dreyfus in his Almanach, for in La Fête automobile, in which Père Ubu tours Paris, we find once more “Déroulède (another member of the Ligue des Patriotes), Pellieux, Gonse, Billot, Drumont, Marioni, Xau et autres soldats militaires.”⁶⁰ Gohier, however, since his first name is Urbain, “un nom de pape ou de templier, cet homme, de par ses ancêtres, mérite le bûcher,”⁶¹ and Anatole France, the son, we discover, of Madame France, “fait des choses merveilleuses et dreyfuse dans un journal anti-dreyfusard.”⁶² Finally, among a crowd of people looking at Rodin's statue of Balzac (the main feature of which, it will be remembered, is a huge, erect phallus) are “Meyer, celui qui capitaine … Gyp, celle qui mira Bob … Drumont, celui qui ne parle pas librement (i.e. “Mirabeau” and “La Libre Parole”).”⁶³

Literature like this is, of course, all good clean fun, as indeed is the second Almanach which, although it contains another reference to Mercier,⁶⁴ concentrates for the most part on mocking French colonial ambitions in the wake of the Fashoda incident.⁶⁵ Most of Jarry's remaining comments on Dreyfus come from his journalism, and these include perhaps the only entirely straight-faced remark that he ever made on the affair. This occurs in a review that Jarry wrote for the Revue Blanche in September 1901. The book under discussion is Georges Duruy's Pour la Justice et pour l'Armée:

Avec combien de faussaires l'armée reste-t-elle intègre? Quant à Dreyfus, on sait bien qu'il est innocent, c'est même notre opinion personnelle: nous allons jusqu'à penser qu'il est le type du soldat et du bon officier subalterne, tout discipline et loyauté. La trahison implique un esprit délié, c'est travail de bureau et de grade supérieur.⁶⁶

When Jarry returned to the affair again in 1903, his tone, though once more comic, was just as unequivocal in its support of Dreyfus as it had been two years previously. In “L'Affaire est l'Affaire” he writes, “Les balances de la Justice trébuchent; et pourtant l'on dit: Raide comme la Justice. La Justice serait-elle ivre?”.⁶⁷ I will return to this article in due course, for it contains two enlightening comments on the work later done on La Dragonne, but it is worth mentioning now that Jarry had not quite yet done with General de Pellieux:

M. de Pellieux, un seul mot l'innocente: Paris, 11 fevrier 1899.

“Ma chère mère” …

Il l'aimait tant!⁶⁸

It seems that after this Jarry thought that the Dreyfus case was all over bar the shouting, for his final journalistic comment on it begins: “Il y a eu l'affaire Dreyfus.”⁶⁹ This article, “L'Affaire” (August 1903), is not solely devoted to Dreyfus but seeks instead to take a wider view of public scandals, including the Humbert-Crawford affair, on which Jarry had already written. For a man who made his meager living from journalism,⁷⁰ Jarry is here scathing about his trade. He opines that scandals are created, as is indeed often said nowadays, in order to sell newspapers and make money for lawyers, and cynically looks at how they progress:

L'affaire “jugée” bonne, on la “lance”. Laissez courir, prononcent les spécialistes du bateau. Cela signifie qu'il va sans dire que les malfaiteurs ne seront pas arrêtés. Les juges “chats-fourrés”⁷¹ jouent avec eux comme le chat avec la souris. Mais le chat joue-t-il avec la souris? Pas du tout. Il gagne son dîner.⁷²

Not surprisingly, after this, and after his problems in being published caused by the closure of the Revue Blanche at the end of 1903, Jarry, it definitively appears, lets the affair drop. Indeed, until 1906 he was to be almost solely involved with the attempt to complete a libretto for an opéra-bouffe based on Pantagruel by his friend, the composer Claude Terrasse.

I have already said, however, that Jarry did have one more intervention to make on Dreyfus's account, and this one is much more difficult to interpret than are those he had made earlier. Michel Arrivé has written:

Pendant une bonne partie de l'époque 1900 … Jarry fixa, avec un incontestable brio, l'un des aspects de l'extrême-gauche littéraire. … Mais dès 1903 on le voit amorçer, avec toute l'équipe du Mercure de France (à la réserve, toutefois, de Léautaud) un singulier virage vers l'extrême-droite nationaliste; antisémite et antidreyfusarde … Quant aux opinions politiques dont il lui arrive de s'amuser, de l'anarchisme—si anarchisant qu'il se détruit lui-même—d'Ubu Enchaîné à l'antisémitisme de La Dragonne, ce sont précisément celles du milieu petit-bourgeois d'où il est issu.⁷³

In fact, this view is in most respects shared by the majority of Jarry's critics,⁷⁴ although it is based on several pieces of rather flimsy evidence. The first, and perhaps the most damaging, is paradoxically the easiest upon which to cast doubt.

Toward the end of his life, Jarry is supposed to have remarked that he intended to spend the rest of his days producing reactionary pamphlets.⁷⁵ The fact that he never did produce a political pamphlet of any description has tended to be overshadowed by the dramatic nature of the comment. We might first ask ourselves, in order to judge how much weight to give to this piece of information, whether Jarry was speaking in earnest or in jest, and indeed whether he made the remark at all. Of these, the first possibility is the least likely, given that Jarry never actually wrote a reactionary pamphlet and is only reported to have manifested the intention of doing so to one person. This was Henri de Bruchard, a journalist whom Jarry had known for some time but who had only comparatively recently become involved with the more reactionary activities of Action Française.⁷⁶ The most probable—with Jarry it is always more advisable to speak of probability than certainty—explanation of the reported conversation between de Bruchard and Jarry is that the latter was playing some sort of joke on the former. It would not be the first time that Jarry had done something similar.⁷⁷ It is equally possible, though again unwise to state categorically, that the conversation never took place at all, since a large proportion of especially the more polemical anecdotes concerning Jarry that have been bequeathed to posterity are demonstrable inventions, and de Bruchard was certainly capable of joining the already distinguished list of their inventors.⁷⁸ Whatever the case, it is impossible to accept de Bruchard's claim uncritically.

The question of whether Jarry followed his friends at the Mercure de France in a drift toward the extreme right after 1903 is again difficult to answer unreservedly. The Mercure had always been, and would remain until its disappearance in the mid-1960s, essentially a literary magazine, whereas the Revue Blanche tended to take a more active line, especially in its support of Dreyfus. The Mercure's direction, furthermore, had always been relatively conservative, at least by comparison with the latitude that the Natanson brothers allowed their authors in general and Jarry in particular. This Jarry had discovered to his cost, first in 1897, when Vallette refused to publish another of his novels,⁷⁹ and second in 1898-99 when Vallette virtually forced him to resign from the “Phalanstère.”⁸⁰ Although the Mercure did organize a subscription to pay for Jarry's funeral, in his last years Jarry's contacts with it seem to have been more social than professional. Even assuming that the Mercure's contributors gravitated to the right en masse in the way Arrivé suggests—which is in itself highly dubious—it is extremely doubtful whether Jarry followed them as a matter of course. By the end of his life Jarry had indeed moved far from the Mercure, turning instead, in most instances, to Eugene Fasquelle⁸¹ for the publication of his longer works, and for his shorter ones to Le Canard Sauvage, Apollinaire's Festin d'Esope, Marinetti's Poesia and even the Czech Moderni Revue.⁸²

If Jarry did undergo a change of heart over Dreyfus then it must have happened during the last couple of years of his life, when in fact he was extremely ill for virtually the whole time. Although it is true that “Au terme d'un processus différent [than the development of Barres's thought], un antidreyfusisme de gauche se constitua vers 1906 chez des hommes qui avaient pris parti pour Dreyfus en 1898-1900,”⁸³ it is doubtful whether, given his rather bored reaction in 1903 and the fact that he was, as I say, desperately ill, the anachronism of Dreyfus being awarded the Légion d'Honneur in 1906 would have particularly excited his interest. There is only one piece of documentary evidence that might suggest that it did, and it is this which, finally, we will examine.

La Dragonne, Jarry's seventh and final novel, is in all possible respects a difficult work. Not only is it unfinished, but parts of the manuscript (in Jarry's own hand) are illegible,⁸⁴ whereas others in the hand of his sister, Charlotte, to whom he dictated when too ill to write, are of uncertain accuracy. Because of this, the work has appeared in a variety of different forms, beginning with a version prepared by Jarry's friend Dr. Jean Saltas in 1943.⁸⁵

It is important to stress that, until La Dragonne, there is no evidence to suggest not only that Jarry was anti-Dreyfus, but that he was in any way antisemitic. On the contrary, his most famous work, Ubu Roi, is dedicated to a Jew (Marcel Schwob), and after 1903 he associated socially and professionally with Mécislas Golberg as well as the other members of the Festin d'Esope group. Of course, Urbain Gohier used much the same argument to justify his own antisemitism at this time,⁸⁶ but it does mean that we can consider La Dragonne on its own merits rather than on suppositions about Jarry's previous views.

Keith Beaumont has called La Dragonne “a return to the past,”⁸⁷ for Jarry takes as his setting his native Brittany. He moreover creates another semi-autobiographical hero in Erbrand Saqueville, who bears the name of one of his own ancestors.⁸⁸ Saqueville, like all the heroes of Jarry's novels, is disappointed in love, the object of his affections being seduced by a Jewish army officer named, with Jarry's usual sense of irony, Durand de Saint-Crucifix. This character's brother, an army chaplain of all things, bears the unlikely name “de Rayphusce.” These are of course Alfred Dreyfus and his brother Mathieu, for in “L'Affaire est l'Affaire” we find in the latter case “Il y a Mathieu de Reyfus comme il y a Mathieu de Noailles,”⁸⁹ and in the former:

Et Dreyfus, d'actualité en ces temps de Passion? L' “autre” supplicié, homme modeste, on le força de porter sa croix. La mode a changé: celui-ci on l'a dégradé, ce qui est une façon de l'empêcher de porter la sienne. Un clou—de crucifix—chasse l'autre. Mais on n'a point fait Dreyfus député, estimant que cela gênerait les autres députés pour parler de l'Affaire. Et il est bon que les absents aient toujours tort.⁹⁰

Why Jarry should have drawn a parallel between Mathieu Dreyfus and Princess Mathieu de Noailles, a contemporary neoclassical poetess, is puzzling to say the least. The name “Saint-Crucifix,” however, is at least explained by the analogy he makes between Dreyfus and Christ (“Croix” is one of Jarry's favorite words around which to construct puns).⁹¹

The appearance of the Dreyfus case in a book devoted to Jarry's own past in Rennes should cause no particular raised eyebrows. The controversial section of La Dragonne is, however, that which deals with a “Porc-grome.” As might easily be gathered, this takes the form of an extended pun upon the word “Pogrom,” very current in the early part of this century due to the repression of Jews in Eastern Europe. The “Porc-grome” in question consists of Durand de Saint-Crucifix and his family being eaten alive by a marauding herd of wild pigs while on a stroll. If to some this might appear to be rabidly antisemitic, then to others it will have instead the appearances of a rather bad (this time, kosher) joke, in much the same mold as Père Ubu suggesting that the ubiquitous Urbain Gohier should be burned at the stake. This is all the more so if we remember that one of Jarry's original alternatives for Saint-Crucifix's name was “Schweinfuss.”⁹² Most observers have seized upon the pejorative implications of “Schwein” and missed the comic overtones of “Schweinfuss” meaning “pig's trotter.”

By the time all this was written, at least in Jarry's eyes, the Dreyfus affair was long since over and done with, and thus fair game for use in a comic context not as overtly dreyfusard as that of the Almanachs. Neither is the mere fact of a character representing Dreyfus being pitted against one representing Jarry particularly significant. In Le Surmâle, a figure even more closely drawn from Thomas Edison (via Villiers de l'Isle-Adam)⁹³ causes the death of another semi-autobiographical hero, André Marcueil. Against Edison, Jarry can have borne no conceivable grudge.

What, then, can we make of Jarry's periodic interventions in the most celebrated public scandal of his day? Well, on the basis of the weight of evidence, it is perhaps likely that Jarry was indeed sympathetic to Dreyfus without wishing to become too closely involved, at least no more closely involved than was necessary to facilitate the occasional jibe at the army. This is clearly shown by the predominantly humorous or sardonic tone he adopts when speaking of the affair. Up until La Dragonne at least, Noël Arnaud's estimation of Jarry's role in the Dreyfus proceedings is difficult to argue with:

Jarry finira par regarder les chevaux de bois, et se laissera tenter par quelques tours de manège. Mais il s'y livrera en des postures si inconvenantes que les deux camps préféreront tenir à l'écart cet “incorrigible gamin”⁹⁴

Jarry's last journalism on Dreyfus seems to testify to the joke having worn a little thin. When he does eventually take Dreyfus up again in La Dragonne, there is really no affair left to become involved in. Reasons of locale, Breton color apart, the inclusion of the “Porc-grome” may have been a shrewd move on Jarry's part. It will be remembered that at the end of his life he was sick and, more to the point, seven thousand francs in debt, having even been forced to pawn his beloved revolver.⁹⁵ The “Porc-grome” is not unequivocally antisemitic, and so would not have alienated either his younger friends or his older ones from the Revue Blanche days. Dreyfus being eaten by wild pigs may, however, have been judged by Jarry sufficiently in tune with the prevailing current of opinion as to make the book sell at a time when the success of La Dragonne seemed his only hope of material salvation.

Jarry's comments on Dreyfus, while not being of the magnitude of Zola's on one side or of Barrès's on the other, make instructive reading for the historian for the simple reason that they are not wholeheartedly committed to anything except hostility to the army. Jarry is a sort of intelligent barometer of the opinion of those on the sidelines. He enters the affair with quite a bang in 1899 and gradually his interest wanes as it drags on and on. In spite of this, both in reaction and absence of reaction, Jarry's idiosyncratic slant on Dreyfus gives some idea of just what an underrated witness of contemporary events this “incorrigible gamin” of French literature was.

Notes

1. E.g. by Arthur Symons, “The Decadent Movement in Literature,” Dramatis Personae (London: Faber & Gwyer, 1925), 96.

2. See Michel Décaudin, La Crise des valeurs symbolistes: 20 Ans de poésie française (Paris: Privat, 1960) 46-48 (‘Un Paganisme nietzschéen?’).

3. Hence Jarry's enthusiasm for science-fiction as a genre.

4. Pataphysik, Symbolismus und Anarchismus bei Jarry (Vienna: Böhlau, 1984). (“Junge Wiener Romanistik No. 6”) 72 (my translation).

5. Generally speaking, those connected with the more Symbolist-orientated reviews, such as the Revue Blanche and the Mercure de France.

6. E.g. in Lafcadio's questioning of whether the murder he committed was really an “acte gratuit.”

7. “Etre et Vivre,” OCBP, 343. References to Oeuvres Complètes d'Alfred Jarry, I. (Paris: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1972), ed. Michel Arrivé are abbreviated as OCBP.

8. “Réponse à l'enquête: L'Alsace-Lorraine et l'etat actuel des esprits,” OCBP, 1030.

9. See Julia Kristeva, La Révolution du langage poétique (Paris: Seuil, 1974) 433-35.

10. The “Spéculations” are a series of 54 articles written by Jarry for the Revue Blanche during 1901.

11. One of the “Spéculations.” 1st September 1901.

12. CV, 113. The abbreviation CV refers to La Chandelle Verte (Paris: Livre de Poche, ed. Maurice Saillet, 1969).

13. There is surprisingly little surviving documentary evidence concerning Jarry's everyday life, particularly in the form of correspondence (e.g. no letters to or from his family have yet come to light).

14. In Acrobaties (Paris: Gallimard, 1931) the director of the Théâtre de l'Oeuvre, Aurélien Lugné-Poe, claimed that Douglas had accompanied Jarry to some of the rehearsals of Ubu Roi in 1896.

15. At least according to Rachilde, whose Alfred Jarry ou le surmâle des lettres (Paris: Grasset, 1928) is largely devoted to anecdotes concerning these three pursuits.

16. See Henri Bordillon, Gestes et opinions d'Alfred Jarry, ecrivain (Laval: Editions Siloé, 1986) for a more precise breakdown of Jarry's movement between these dates.

17. This was in fact probably done in order to placate his sister Caroline (“Charlotte”) with whom he was staying at the time in Laval.

18. E.g., in his play Le Dernier des métiers.

19. Especially Les Minutes de sable mémorial (1894) and César-antéchrist (1895).

20. The association was short lived as the two men fell out over the attempts made by Gourmont's mistress, Berthe de Courrière, to seduce Jarry. See Henri Bordillon, “Gourmont et Jarry,” La Quinzaine Litteraire 374 (1982): 12-13.

21. Perhindérion (meaning “pilgrimage” in Breton) ran for only two issues owing to a shortage of money on Jarry's part.

22. Immortalized by Jarry's famous appearance in Gide's Les Faux-Monnayeurs. See also “Le Tir dans Paris,” C.V., 164-67.

23. Thadée Natanson.

24. Jarry seems to have struck most children in this way. See both Misia Sert's (née Natanson) autobiography Misia (Paris: Gallimard, 1953) and a letter from Gabrielle Vallette to Jarry quoted in 16, 125.

25. “Réponse à l'enquête sur Emile Zola,” C.V., 631.

26. Originally a caricature of Jarry's physics teacher, Félix Hébert.

27. See note 22.

28. Jarry had this photograph taken in order to convince his friends in Paris that he was not as ill as was actually the case.

29. Especially that of Stéphane Mallarmé. Jarry was also a permanent fixture at Rachilde's ‘Mardis’ at the Mercure de France.

30. See OCBP, xxxiii.

31. I.e. in 1898.

32. “Mon Ami Alfred Jarry (Souvenirs),” Mercure de France (300.1/7(1947):496.

33. Ibid. 497-498.

34. Especially in Messaline (1900) and Le Surmâle.

35. The death through negligence of Philippe in this work (OCBP, 812) mirrors that of Max Lebaudy during Jarry's own military service.

36. OCBP, 816.

37. I.e. “la force de mes muscles croissait par l'entraînement et la boule n'était pas plus lourde” (OCBP, 819).

38. Rachilde, for one, seems to have actually believed this.

39. OCBP, xxxiv.

40. Alfred Jarry: Nihilism and the Theater of the Absurd (New York: New York University Press, 1980) 116.

41. The concept of “Adelphisme” outlined by Jarry in Les Jours et les nuits is certainly inspired by Wilde's defence (i.e. that his relationship with Douglas was Platonic).

42. OCBP, 432.

43. See “Géroy,” op. cit.

44. Marcueil is destroyed by the “Machine-à-inspirer-l'amour” because he is not able to fall in love like anyone else.

45. OCBP, 401.

46. Ibid. 430.

47. Ibid. 554.

48. Ibid. 548-49.

49. Which he also uses to threaten Mère Ubu in Ubu Roi.

50. OCBP, 550.

51. Ibid. 548.

52. Ibid. 551.

53. President of the Conseil des Ministres in 1896.

54. See Raymond Manévy, La Presse de la IIIe République (Paris: J. Foret, 1955) 93.

55. Xau's remarkable career has been outlined succinctly in C. Bellanger, J. Godechot, P. Guiral and F. Terrou, Histoire générale de la presse française, 3 (Paris: P.U.F., 1972).

56. In less than a decade, Gohier defected from right to left and back again. At this time he was with Clemenceau at L'Aurore.

57. Other partners included Vallette and Rachilde.

58. OCBP, 540.

59. Jarry's use of the “Phalanstère” in this way probably contributed largely to the quarrel with Vallette that led to the liquidation of the partnership in early 1899.

60. OCBP, 555.

61. Ibid.

62. Ibid. 557.

63. Ibid. 560-62.

64. A “sculpteur sur consciences,” OCBP, 597.

65. In the sketch “Ubu Colonial” and in his relation of the exploits of the “Boergres” in South Africa. This, like the Dreyfus case, was carried over into Jarry's journalism.

66. CV, 603.

67. Ibid. 363.

68. Ibid. 367.

69. Ibid. 437.

70. His fictional output invariably failing to sell during his lifetime, and occasionally having to be printed at his own expense.

71. Yet another of Jarry's borrowings from Rabelais (here the Cinquième livre), the reference being to Grippeminaud's retinue of “chatsfourrés.”

72. CV, 438-39.

73. Lire Jarry (Brussels: Editions Complexe, 1976) 16-17.

74. This is no doubt partly due to the fact that evidence, especially in the form of Jarry's literary output, becomes quite sparse toward the end of his life.

75. See Keith Beaumont, Alfred Jarry: A Critical and Biographical Study (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1985) 340 (note 50).

76. It is fair to say that Action Française, though founded in 1899, only gravitated to the outer fringes of right-wing politics after Jarry's death, though before de Bruchard made his claim in 1912. Before its disappearance in 1944, the organization had even managed to be excommunicated.

77. See Rachilde (op. cit.). On Jarry's mockery of Berthe de Courrière see Paul Valéry, “Souvenir d'Alfred Vallette,” Le Mercure de France 264.1/12(1935):343. For his treatment of Christian Beck see (among others) Georges Rémond, “Souvenirs sur Jarry et autres” (part II), Le Mercure de France, 323.1/3(1955):659-60.

78. A list that includes André Breton, and probably Apollinaire as well.

79. The novel in question, L'Amour en visites, both made damaging allegations about Berthe de Courrière and looked like being at least as big a commercial failure as Les Jours et les nuits already had been.

80. The ostensible motive for this was the fact that Jarry had been forced to break into the building. See the letter from Jarry to Vallette, “je démissionne du Phalanstère,” OCBP, 1071-72.

81. Fasquelle had taken over the Editions de la Revue Blanche and therefore the rights to several of Jarry's earlier works as well.

82. See Albert Marencin, “Jarry et la Tchécoslovaquie,” Europe (Jarry issue, March-April 1981): esp. 213.

83. “Résumé” (no author), Les Ecrivains et L'Affaire Dreyfus ed. Géraldi Leroy (Paris: P.U.F., 1983) 297.

84. See, for example, the plates of “Le Mousse de la Pirrouït” reproduced in François Caradec, A la Recherche d'Alfred Jarry (Paris: Seghers, 1974), n.p.

85. Paris: Gallimard/N.R.F.

86. That is, that he could hardly be accused of antisemitism after having written a work like L'Armée contre la nation, published by the Revue Blanche in 1898.

87. Beaumont, op. cit., 262.

88. Who invaded England with William the Conqueror.

89. CV, 364.

90. Ibid.

91. See in particular his article “La Passion considérée comme Course de Côte.”

92. See Beaumont, op. cit., 273.

93. Villiers' L'Eve Future is one of the main sources for Le Surmâle.

94. Alfred Jarry: D'Ubu Roi au Docteur Faustroll (Paris: La Table Ronde, 1974) 205.

95. For a precise idea of the extent of Jarry's penury at his death, see the letter from Vallette to Charlotte Jarry quoted in Bordillon op. cit. (16.) 200-4.