SOURCE: Fell, Jill. “Alfred Jarry's Alternative Cubists.” French Cultural Studies 6, Part 2, no. 17 (June 1995): 249-69.

[In the following essay, Fell suggests that Jarry was one of the first to use the word “cubisme” and that Jarry practiced a linguistic cubism in essays such as “Commentaire pour servir à la construction practique de la machine à explorer le temps” and plays such as César-Antechrist, as well as through his neologisms and textual acrobatics that emphasized multiple points of view.]

The emergence of the artistic movement of Cubism is officially put at about 1907-8.¹ Given that its origins have been the subject of fierce debate, however,² and that neither Apollinaire, who set himself up as the Cubists' theoretician, nor Picasso, ever accepted that Cubism was only a matter of translating the visual image into cubic form, it may be worth investigating an alternative usage of the word cubiste, coined in 1894 and in limited circulation in French avant-garde circles well before Cubist painting was defined and named. Given also that this early use of cubiste was a mischievous neologism based on the Greek words kubistitire (κυβιsτητηρε) and kubistontes (κυβιsτωντεs), both used to refer to acrobatic tumblers and that Picasso's work of 1904-5 focused intently on acrobats, the apparent fluke takes its place in a mysterious cluster of flukes, if not a meaningful pattern.

The word cubiste in its Greek sense of ‘acrobatic tumbler’ was coined by a writer who was venerated and courted by four of the leading figures of the avant-garde around 1901-5. The writer was Alfred Jarry, whose uncompromising ‘Umour’ fitted well with the aims of Apollinaire's periodical, Le Festin d'Ésope,³ to which the future Surrealist writers Max Jacob, André Salmon and eventually Picasso himself also contributed. Jarry's coinage, which snips off the final syllables of the two Greek variants used by Homer and Plato, to produce a succinct Gallic compromise, first appears in an article of May 1894 and recurs in subsequent texts published in 1895 and 1900.

In considering the origins of Cubism it is also important not to overlook Jarry's artistic collaboration with Paul Fort, poet, editor and onetime director of the Théâtre d'Art, whose early collection of poetry, Ballades. Louis XI, Curieux Homme, he helped to illustrate and to whom he lent his personal typeface, especially cast for his own luxury journal, Perhinderion. Fort's so-called Closerie des Lilas circle in Montparnasse included Apollinaire and Metzinger, who have been said to represent the two distinct wings of Cubist theory in its early stages.⁴ Jarry attended their meetings during his sporadic visits to Paris in the final three years of his life from 1904 to 1907.⁵

It has been suggested that the 1896 production of Ubu roi canalized the ‘Jacquerie artistique’ of the time and that Jarry transmitted a taste for the strange and marvellous to Apollinaire and the Festin d'Ésope group. His ironical system of a universe additional to this one, put forward in Gestes et opinions du docteur Faustroll, pataphysicien, is moreover thought to have encouraged Picasso in his project of disrupting accepted appearances.⁶ More seriously, the austere, shamanic figure of the Roman acrobat, Mnester, whom Jarry introduced as foil to the debauched Empress, Messalina, in his novel of the same name, highlights the movement towards a more ascetic form of art and the search for purity of thought and expression. This purity of thought which can be achieved by the ascetic or hermit parallels the physical achievement of the acrobat who maintains his skill through painful and rigorous training, a discipline to which Picasso's circus paintings bear witness. Jarry's purpose in writing Messaline was entirely serious and, taken with other texts, clearly demonstrates his intellectual affinity with early Cubism.

The term cubisme as the name for a certain style of painting is said to have sprung from a review of the Paris Salon d'automne of 1908 by the critic Louis Vauxcelles. Vauxcelles's inspiration apparently came from overhearing Matisse, in his capacity as an official on the jury, criticize Braque's submissions for having ‘trop de petits cubes.’ Piqued by the jury's opprobrium, Braque withdrew all his paintings and it is not now certain whether Matisse was offended by a particular painting or by all of them. In his review Vauxcelles accused Braque of over-simplification and of reducing everything to cubes. His subsequent article discussing Braque's two exhibits at the spring Salon des Indépendants likewise referred to ‘bizarreries cubiques’.⁷ Vauxcelles had been responsible for adopting the term fauve several years earlier: now his derogatory reference to Braque's cubes gave rise to the label of Cubism. Matisse refused to acknowledge the initial remark⁸ but wrote the following account in 1935:

According to my recollection it was Braque who made the first Cubist painting. He brought back from the south a Mediterranean landscape that represented a seaside village seen from above. In order to give more importance to the roofs, which were few, as they would be in a village, in order to let them stand out in the ensemble of the landscape, and at the same time develop an idea of humanity that they stood for; he had continued the signs that represented the roofs on into the sky and had painted them throughout the sky. This is really the first picture constituting the origin of Cubism, and we considered it as something quite new, about which there were many discussions.⁹

Matisse is here referring to one of Braque's Estaque landscapes, probably Maisons d'Estaque.

Opposing Vauxcelles's sneering view of the new art, Apollinaire, from his position of intimacy with several of the artists who were struggling to create new forms, set himself up as their theoretician. He disliked the simplistic label of Cubism as a term to describe their very different efforts. He evolved his own term, orphisme, which pointed to the new art's strong relationship with music, but had to compromise in 1911, when the Salon des Indépendants assembled the exhibits of eleven avant-garde painters in the same room under the heading of Cubism. Apollinaire felt bound to accept the invitation to write the explanatory piece in the exhibition catalogue, despite his resistance to a simplistic name, coined in mockery.

Apollinaire's later book, Les Peintres cubistes, divides the new movement into four categories: ‘Scientific Cubism’, ‘Physical Cubism’, ‘Orphic Cubism’, and ‘Instinctive Cubism’. It could be said that Orphic Cubism, as described by Apollinaire, defines the artistic ideals towards which both Jarry and the young Picasso were striving, and that it is the plasticity and swift-moving feats of the acrobat which exemplify it more than the rigid angles of the cube. We can relate Apollinaire's statement that Orphic Cubism portrays an individual imaginative reality to Jarry's wish to be able to recreate forms and colours according to a personal vision. In his novel Les Jours et les nuits Jarry advocates a rapid assimilation of images as his ideal:

Capturer dans un drainage rapide les formes et les couleurs, dans le moins de temps possible le long des routes et des pistes (…) et l'esprit peut d'autant plus aisément après cette assimilation recréer des formes et les couleurs nouvelles selon soi. Nous ne savons pas créer du néant, mais le pourrions du chaos.¹⁰

Jarry's theory is based on his faith in the creative unconscious part of the mind and partly derives from his observations as a racing cyclist. Apollinaire's statement lays similar emphasis on new visual combinations deriving from an individual perception:

Le cubisme orphique est l'autre grande tendance de la peinture moderne. C'est l'art de peindre des ensembles nouveaux avec des éléments empruntés non à la réalité visuelle, mais entièrement créés par l'artiste et doués par lui d'une puissante réalité. Les œuvres des artistes orphiques doivent présenter simultanément un agrément esthétique pur.¹¹

Although Jarry was writing about poetic creation and Apollinaire about painting, the belief in a visual element which derives uniquely from the artist's own imagination was shared by both writers.

In 1894 Jarry was just becoming known as a poet and commentator on contemporary art. That same year he published an article, philosophical in content but facetious in tone, in L'Art littéraire titled ‘Visions actuelles et futures.’ It is in the second Vision that we find cubiste, or rather demicubiste, used as a noun and applied to a kinetic oddity of Jarry's own design. Here is the passage in all its dense neologistic glory:

Phallus déraciné, ne fais pas de pareils bonds! Tu es une roue dont la substance seule subsiste, le diamètre du cercle sans circonférence créant un plan par sa rotation autour de son point médian. La substance de ton diamètre est un Point. La ligne et son envergure sont dans nos yeux, clignant devant les rayures d'or et vertes d'un bec de gaz palloïde. (…) Ne fais pas de pareils bonds, demi-cubiste sur l'un et l'autre pôle de ton axe et de ton soi! (…)

OC I 339

The introduction of a huge hopping phallus into an Aristophanes comedy or a piece of medieval mummery would normally signal a comic interlude. Jarry introduces the entrance of the so-called Bâton-à-physique with such a fanfare of erudition that the comic element of the Phallus is killed dead. The Physick-Stick¹²/Phallus arrives on stage with an armoury of complex geometrical and literary credentials (of which the corrupted word cubiste is one), assembled by Jarry to dignify his creation and to dazzle his readers.

Jarry read Greek and Latin literature as a private passion and has here modified the rare word kubistitir which means ‘acrobatic tumbler’ or, more precisely, ‘circularist’, into the prophetic cubiste, whereas French writers on Greek dance forms ordinarily render it as kubistétère. This is the first recorded occurrence of the word cubiste in French literature and represents Jarry's private delight in a word which seems to say the very opposite of what it actually means. The archaic Greek verb kubistan was in fact first used to denote the movement of jumping and diving fish. The term was then transposed to denote the forward and backward flips of acrobatic tumblers in their gymnastic routines. The Iliad contains the word in both senses. It is used by Plato and Xenophon to describe the dangerous stunts performed by acrobats engaged to entertain at private banquets. In 1895 a French academic, Maurice Emmanuel, published a thesis on Greek dance forms, Saltationis disciplina apud Graecos, preserving the Greek terms intact. He then transcribed the Greek word kubistitir, meaning tumbler, into a French equivalent, kubistétère, when translating the thesis into French for publication under the title Essai sur l'orchestique grecque (subsequently expanded into La Danse grecque antique the same year). This form of the word was retained by Louis Séchan in his 1930 book of the same title. Emmanuel helpfully points to the piscatorial origins of the various verb forms kubista, ekkubista or exekubista, describing these gymnastic movements as follows:

Exécuter des ‘sauts de carpe’ qui permettent à l'acrobate à franchir un obstacle en prenant pour points d'appui alternatifs les mains et les pieds.¹³

Séchan omits the fishy connection but here gives a very exact description of the action kubistan:

L'art de kubistétère consistait essentiellement à se jeter sur les mains (kubistan), puis, à revenir à la position normale soit en rabattant ses jambes, soit en achevant un tour complet. Il pouvait faire ainsi une série de tours rapides, et parfois même peut-être, l'appui des mains étant supprimé, il accomplissait de véritables ‘sauts périlleux’.¹⁴

In his detailed account of the dance by the Roman mime, Mnester, Jarry's description of the movement is exact, but he perverts the Greek kubistitir to cubiste:

Le mime, après un saut et demi périlleux, est retombé sur les mains, en posture de cubiste.

OC II 111-112

Jarry's italics indicate the use of a technical term, but he leaves the nonclassical scholar in the dark as to the frame of reference.

Jarry's use of the neologism is aptly chosen to describe the Bâton-à-Physique or Physick-Stick, (OC I 339) a hybrid creation of his own, based on the stick of Papa Guignol and Punch,¹⁵ but promoted to the status of sacred Hindu Phallus, with attributes drawn from the brothel scene of Lautréamont's Chants de Maldoror. The Physick-Stick's end-to-end method of self-propulsion accurately imitates the difficult gymnastic routine whereby the acrobat or gymnast performed a series of forward flips (ekubista) formerly over upright swords, and backward flips (exekubista) in a straight line, landing on hands and feet alternately.¹⁶ The even more difficult gymnastic stunt ‘faire la roue’, in which the acrobat twines his feet round his neck and rolls like a wheel, had survived unchanged from antiquity as the most demanding exercise, through which a Greek gymnast kept his body at the peak of suppleness. Jarry's description of an actual performance by the acrobat Juno Salmo gives his first hand impression as follows:

Jambes croisées derrière sa tête, noeud compliqué de membres ou de tentacules, (…).

OC II 335

This is the final position of the fictitious acrobatic dance by Mnester miming the seduction of the sun by the moon and the one in which his statuette is cast by the Empress Messaline. Emmanuel's account meanwhile attests to the antique pedigree of the stunt:

Exercice du τροχοs, merveilleux pour assouplir les membres: le pédotribe oblige l'élève à se transformer en boule et le fait rouler sur lui-même comme un cerceau.¹⁷

Jarry's textual researches and the fairground entertainments where he was able to observe acrobats at first hand clearly backed each other up. In his article ‘La mécanique d'«Ixion» Jarry admits to absconding from school trips to the Théâtre-Français in order to watch the clowning routines of Pierantoni and Saltamontes in their street performances and refers to the fairground feats of ‘circulating Snake-men’:

Ixion, d'après les poètes, est ligoté sur la roue, extérieurement à la circonférence. Ainsi ‘circulent’ les hommes-serpents dans les foires, la nuque aux talons.

(OC II 405-7)

Maurice Emmanuel confirms Jarry's observations.¹⁸

As far as the future artistic movement of Cubism is concerned, an interesting feature of the acrobatic Physick-Stick is that it ejaculates images gyroscopically, as described here with continuing neologistic verve by Jarry:

Tu es l'emblème bourgeon de la génération (…) spontanée, vibrion et volvoce dont les images gyroscoposuccessives révèlent à nos yeux, hélas trops purs, ta scissiparité, et qui projettes loin des sexes terrestres le riz cérébral de ton sperme nacré jusqu'à la traîne où les haies d'indépendantes pincettes des chinois Gastronomes illustrent la Vierge lactée.

OC I 339-340

This rotatory motion is the characteristic which makes it recognizable as Jarry's later Painting Machine which appears in ‘Clinamen,’ the chapter of Faustroll dedicated to Paul Fort, spinning randomly like a top to ejaculate thirteen pictures, whose transmutation into words is the only evidence of their existence but which probably belonged to Fort, Jarry's main supplier of exotic woodblocks for the early numbers of L'Ymagier. Faustroll/ Jarry chooses to make a gesture of faith in the future reputation of his friend Henri Rousseau by placing the operation of the machine in his charge.¹⁹ That Jarry should invent the word cubiste when recording his visions of the future and link it to the idea of a rotating mechanical projection of pictures is a curious coincidence.

If we turn from Jarry's acrobatic stick to his later ‘Commentaire pour servir à la construction pratique de la machine à explorer le temps’, we find interesting observations on rotation, cubic rigidity and the visual aspect of passing through time:

Trois gyrostats en rotation rapide, dont les lignes des coussinets soient parallèles aux trois dimensions, engendrent la rigidité cubique.

Following on from this in a complex argument, which has been compared to modern descriptions of black holes,²⁰ Jarry here sets out to prove the reversibility of the future:

La marche dans le Passé consiste en la perception de la réversibilité des phénomènes. On verra la pomme rebondir de terre sur l'arbre, ou ressusciter le mort, puis le boulet rentrer dans le canon. Cet aspect visuel de la succession est déjà connu, comme pouvant être obtenu théoriquement en dépassant la lumière, puis continuant à s'éloigner d'une vitesse constante, égale à celle de la lumière.

OC I 742-3

His conviction of the possibility of conveying simultaneous actions together places him intellectually at the nucleus of the Cubist debates out of which Duchamp's Nue descendant l'escalier eventually emerged and identifies him as one of the early supporters of experiments which conjure up aspects of visual reality different from the norm. He concludes his argument with the following definition:

La Durée est la transformation d'une succession en une réversion.
C'est-à-dire:
LE DEVENIR D'UNE MÉMOIRE.

Jarry's deliberations do have a similar ring to the comments of the critic, Léon Werth, who, in a review of an exhibition of Picasso's work that took place in May 1910, referred to ‘turning forms’ and ‘opposition of planes’ relating them to Bergson's concept of Durée. Werth wrote of having his attention drawn to the ‘thought’ to which they were cumulatively equivalent: that is, to the ‘power and right of these forms to transfer on to the plane of a picture the sensations and reflections which we experience with the passage of time’.²¹

Jarry was not content to let his philosophical pronouncements on the Physick-Stick sink without trace in a minor ephemeral journal and decided to introduce the Stick as a leading character in the ‘Acte héraldique’ of his strange and unproducible drama, César-Antechrist. The text of Ubu roi made up the so-called ‘Acte terrestre’ of this hybrid four-act play, published by Mercure de France in 1895, a fact which gave it considerable collector's value. Within ten years, copies of this book were extremely rare and Apollinaire was only able to obtain one through Jarry himself. The heraldic manifestations of Ubu and the Palotins follow the Physick-Stick and César-Antechrist in the ‘Acte héraldique’, as luminous, spherical forms. Indeed Ubu's rotatory progress ‘semblable à un œuf, une citrouille ou un fulgurant météore’ imitates that of the Physick-Stick as wheel. We cannot ignore the glaring centre of the word cUBiste in such close proximity to the kernel figure of Jarry's satirical work. Indeed in a later text Père Ubu, antithesis of Picasso's bone-thin acrobats, boasts that he can perform ‘le saut périgiglyeux.’ (OC I 504). The ‘UB-’ brandmark, which diverts the Greek upsilon away from its true Greek ‘I’ or ‘Y’ sound to the Latin ‘U’ sound reveals the cunning linguistic tampering which makes this word singularly Jarry's own.²²

Turning to the other dramatis personae of the ‘Acte héraldique’ we find that they are conventional armorial bearings in name alone. Jarry's mischievous imagination selects from the heraldic vocabulary only those words which, with slight variations, have an obscene or mildly vulgar second meaning.²³ Representing a practical demonstration of the identity of opposites, the Physick-Stick's freedom of movement, unique in a landscape of frozen escutcheons, allows it to be pale or fess—vertical or horizontal bar. Jarry repeats the same piece of text from Les Chants de Maldoror: ‘NE FAIS PAS DE PAREILS BONDS … !’, a quotation which he now uses as the Physick-Stick's theme tune, bequeathing it a ready-made identity, that of God's lost and errant giant strand of hair, the fantastic product of Lautréamont's imagination, whose gruesome act of flaying an unwitting young man in a brothel was later depicted by both Magritte and Dalí.²⁴ Jarry also points to his exact source for the word cubiste and lends a particular shading to it by introducing a quotation from Plato's Symposium—a part of Aristophanes' discourse on Love. Variants of the word kubistitir in the sense of an acrobatic tumbler occur in several classical texts. In another work, Euthydemus, Plato represented the acrobatic movement of imitating a wheel, as the acme of physical and mental skill.²⁵ In César-Antechrist Jarry is at pains to draw an equation between the cartwheeling kubistitir of private banquets, as described in Xenophon's Banquet and Plato's eight-limbed hermaphrodite of myth which could revolve on its eight limbs at great speed like a tumbler.²⁶ Zeus cut the creatures in half to produce the monosexual four-limbed human beings of today. The harshness of the punishment consisted in the yearning which the sundered halves, whether cut from a purely male, female, or hermaphrodite whole, would continually feel for their missing ‘other half’ and is probably linked to the homosexual theme of Jarry's previous drama, Haldernablou. Jarry's quotation from Plato refers to Zeus' threat to splice the two-legged beings a second time:

La droite cherchera la gauche, et l'homme fendu longitudinalement sautera sur une seule jambe²⁷

OC I 291

This colourful myth is mentioned by Rabelais, from whose works Jarry borrowed on more than one occasion and whose validation must have made it doubly attractive. It seems likely that Jarry concocted the word cubiste purely for bafflement—a prize in his private collection of ambiguous words. A peculiar coincidence with regard to the unlikely link between the name Cubist to designate a type of painting and its archaic antecedent is that Plato's cartwheeling androgyne was selected by Gargantua to be his personal sign—the ymage or emblem that he wore in his cap, another link in the chance chain which ties this abstruse word to an aesthetic context. Here is the relevant passage:

Pour son ymage avoit, en une platine d'or pesant soixant-huit marcs, une figure d'esmail competent, en laquelle estoit portraict ung corps humain ayant deux testes, l'une virée vers l'autre, quatre bras, quatre pieds et deux culz, telz que dict Platon, in Symposio avoir esté l'humaine nature a son commencement mysticq.²⁸

In this review of Messaline in La Revue blanche, Jarry's reference to its form as that of a medal could almost be taken to indicate a conscious effort on his part to link the novel to the above passage:

La forme de ce roman est nette, éclatante et définitive, comme un camée ou une médaille de ces temps anciens.

OC II 606

If the reference to Gargantua's ymage is intentional, it would certainly help to connect the demi-cubiste of César-Antechrist to the cubiste of Messaline.

Jarry's esoteric personal jargon was noted by the novelist Rachilde, who credited him with ‘les tournures grecques’.²⁹ The erudite writers, drawn to her mardis at the Mercure de France offices would certainly have been capable of taking part in the game. Amongst the classical scholars within this circle at least Henri de Régnier, Pierre Louÿs, Pierre Quillard and the Greek poet, Jean Moréas, should have been able to tune in to Jarry's use of cubiste in relation to the well-known passages from Plato and Xenophon from which he had plundered it.³⁰

The fact that Jarry comes back to the word cubiste when writing Messaline five or six years after he had originally coined it suggests that it had remained in his personal jargon even after his written style had shed most of the more cumbersome trappings of the Symbolist style. First published in serial form in La Revue blanche at the very watershed of the two centuries, Messaline represents a new style of suggestive writing with many points of reference in Greek and Latin literature³¹ and brings into focus the otherwise murky intertext running through Jarry's previous poetry and novels. It evinces Jarry's clear belief that his works would one day be collected and read as a whole. The word cubiste, resurfaces for the first time since César-Antechrist. carrying the associations of the previous work and new ones of considerable pertinence to twentieth-century art and literature.

Once more Jarry gives a careful pointer to his source text for cubiste, which is not the same as previously, but which is yet again linked to an aesthetic context, however improbable this link may seem. Now his textual reference points to a passage from the Iliad which had entered the annals of the history of aesthetics through Lessing's Laocoön. In his discussions on the differences between the sister arts of poetry and painting Lessing had selected Homer's dynamic account of Hephaistos' life-like engraving on Achilles' magic shield as a unique example of ‘visual literature’. Homer's description of the scenes on the shield is singled out as an exceptional case of a poet successfully describing a static series of pictures set in space (‘das Nebeneinander der Dinge’) in terms of a dynamic sequential narrative (‘das Nacheinander der Dinge’). The rhythms and typical scenes of human life are depicted in microcosm with added sound effects. Jarry's choice falls on the scene of the ploughman, whose circling he compares to the motion of the chariots in the Emperor Claudius' arena and whose small beaker of mead mirrors its cupped form in microcosm, described as follows in Messaline:

Et selon l'enseignement d'Homère, en images sur le bouclier d'Achille, après chaque virage aux traces parallèles autour des deux bornes de porphyre vert surmontées par des œufs d'or, l'aurige laboureur³² vidait une grande coupe, au fond de la grande coupe du cirque.

OC II 103

The description ends with two acrobats or kubistitire whirling at the centre, as if Homer intended to indicate a blurring of the boundaries between life and art under the aegis of a whirling dance. Jarry himself adopted a similar narrative technique in Faustroll to describe the pictures of three of his contemporaries and friends.³³ It is odd to discover that the word cubiste had already been linked by Jarry to one of the most important texts on aesthetics well before the official advent of Cubist painting.

In Messaline the chapter describing the dance of the mime and cubiste, Mnester, is significantly positioned at the end of Part I as the coupling point of the novel's two halves.³⁴ Reputed to be the familiar and homosexual companion of the late Caligula, to whom he dedicates his dance, Mnester combines the characteristics of Plato's cartwheeling, double-sexed kubistontes, rendered in gold and enamel to form Gargantua's emblem, with Homer's whirling kubistitire/acrobats graven by Hephaistos at the very centre of Achilles' impenetrable magic shield.³⁵ Mnester is so flexible that he can assume almost any position, dislocating his joints and undulating like an oriental belly dancer—also spinning and humming like a top and, indeed, like Jarry's own Painting Machine.

Leaving aside the rebellious icosahedron and the polyhedron crystals which appear at various points in the Ubu cycle and which are invoked by Jarry in his earliest pronouncements on words and meaning, there are certainly similarities between his literary experiments and the Cubist experiments in art, especially in his idealization of Pure Thought (the archaic concept of Nουs) as opposed to Reason³⁶ and in his search for new truths through disrupting, deforming and looking beyond the familiar world. The motif of the impossibly bent kubistitir prefigures the grossly distorted forms of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon and other so-called Cubist works. Furthermore Jarry's description of the three superimposed ‘arenas’ of Barnum's circus, given here, could be seen as a paradigm of his own highly condensed literary texts:

Ce n'est qu'un grand cirque a-t-on dit. Soit; mais imaginez une arène dans laquelle vous en versez trois autres de dimensions respectables. Une fois posées, vous vous apercevez qu'elles tiennent juste autant de place que trois assiettes sur une nappe de banquet. Dans chacune de ces trois pistes, vous lâchez quelques troupeaux d'éléphants (…) Dans les airs s'enchevêtre une forêt vierge d'agrès nécessaires à plusieurs douzaines de funambules et gymnasiarques (…) Au-dessous grouille un peuple de clowns, une harde de chevaux.

OC II 333

Indeed the acrobatic leaps of Jarry's imagination and his many-layered text has been likened to Joyce's literary technique.³⁷

In 1928, with the advantage both of hindsight and her intimate knowledge of the man and the work, Rachilde placed Jarry at the very source of the Cubist movement, not only by virtue of his own tiny woodcuts but because of his role in unleashing what she calls (after the title of one of her own books) the ‘Demons of the Absurd’:

Il a été, qu'on le veuille ou non, l'animateur du mouvement cubiste en France. On n'a qu'à comparer ses bois gravés par lui-même avec les plus récentes créations de ce genre hermétique (je dis hermétique par pure politesse). Alfred Jarry fut vraiment le premier fondateur de l'école que j'appellerai, faute d'expression plus technique: l'école des démons de l'absurde.³⁸

That Jarry's attention should light on the rare archaic word kubistan and that he should adapt it into a word which was to brand one of the foremost artistic movements of the future century is one of those quirks of fate akin to the phenomenon of Clinamen which would have delighted him.³⁹ The connection with physical and mental discipline bestowed on this word by Plato and Xenophon, together with the magical gift of animating inert designs that Homer seems to suggest the acrobat possesses, could have been exploited by theorists to give the so-called Cubist movement an interesting extra dimension. The strange myth of our many-limbed, cartwheeling hermaphrodite ancestors, cut up by Zeus and sewn together by Apollo, also has rich, if coincidental aesthetic implications for the dislocated, hacked about and queerly pieced-together bodies of Picasso's Cubist canvases. The bi-sexual overtones which Jarry lent to the word cubiste as a result of his reading of Plato and Rabelais, allied to the very personal ‘-UB-’ hallmark, may have outlawed it to a realm of personalized jarryesque argot poised between the absurd, the risqué and the esoteric, too far removed from the simple cube and beyond the pale of serious debate.

Two facts certainly make it seem very strange that Apollinaire omitted to link the Greek word kubistan with the Cubist movement, at least in his more speculative writing on the subject: firstly, that Jarry set aside a copy of César-Antechrist for him in 1903 at his specific request and it is therefore unlikely that he did not take note of Jarry's cubiste/acrobate analogy;⁴⁰ secondly, his linguistic pleasure from the fact that two prominent Cubist painters outside France were the Czech, Kubicsta and the German, Kubin,⁴¹ implies that he would have been equally delighted by Jarry's chance coinage of cubiste thirteen years too early. Bearing in mind that Apollinaire edited his reference to Kubicsta and Kubin out of his final version of Les Peintres cubistes, we could speculate that he likewise refrained from introducing such a peculiar red herring as Jarry's premature coinage for fear that this eccentric sidetrack could undermine his efforts to define the complex new movement in an intelligible and serious way. The public was crying out for elucidation, not more bafflement. In order to justify his acceptance of the term Cubism, Apollinaire, in his turn, coined the verb cubiquer to indicate an effort on the part of the new painters to create the illusion of a three-dimensional image.

If we collate Jarry's very dispersed pronouncements, however, particularly ‘Visions actuelles et futures’, ‘Être et vivre’, ‘Clinamen’, ‘La mécanique d'Ixion’, ‘Pataphysique’, and ‘Commentaire pour servir à la construction pratique de la machine à explorer le temps’, we find him theorizing about Time being the fourth dimension of Space, about memory, movement and form in a way which touches closely on Cubist debates. His violent novelties and love of the irrational are thought to have been a crucial ingredient in the atmosphere which gave birth to Cubism.⁴² It would not be too far-fetched to posit that the detail of his more complex theories was so well known to Fort, Fargue, Apollinaire and other key figures within the Closerie des Lilas circle as to be part and parcel of the arguments which helped to model the new more exploratory and explosive aesthetic spirit. Although intended to be derogatory, a little-known review of the Spring Salon des Indépendants of March 1908 which appeared in Le Rire actually senses the spirit of Ubu, (Rachilde's ‘Démon de l'absurde’), to be at the root of the new painting:

It's Ubu Roi but in painting. I particularly recommend the painting Hunger, Thirst, Sensuality, in which a woman—if one may call her such—is eating her right leg, drinking her blood, and with her left hand … No, I could never tell you where her left hand is wandering, no doubt in memory of Titian.⁴³

Out of Braque and Picasso, the two accepted originators of Cubism, Picasso certainly had a fervent admiration for Jarry and there are apocryphal stories of their roaming the Paris streets firing revolvers. Picasso's portrait of Jarry cruelly captures the pathos of the ageing alcoholic, suggesting that it was indeed drawn from life, but it is not certain that they actually met.⁴⁴ It is also unlikely that Picasso, whose French remained rudimentary for some while, knew Jarry's theoretical texts at first hand as did Francis Picabia. Nevertheless his Arlequin of 1915, which he boasted was the best thing he had ever done and which depicts Harlequin as a cross between a knobbed cane, the hand of a clock and a keyhole, with its displaced sliver of a grin doubling as a sticking out tongue, displays similar characteristics to Jarry's Physick-Stick, stacked in a boxroom but waiting to bound out.

The advent of Dada and Surrealism finally revealed Jarry's contribution to the artistic ferment in the first two decades of the century and the debts which the prime initiators of the avant-garde movement owed him. As to the emergence of the word cubiste via Jarry's pen, with its archaic associations of Protean plasticity, so much apter to the aims of the so-called Cubist painters than the word ‘cube,’ denoting geometric rigidity, Jarry would have no doubt liked to claim some Delphic sense of its imminence. Perhaps Apollinaire's knowledge that the word cubiste had a shadow meaning made it easier for him to come to terms with his title Les Peintres cubistes whilst deploring the designation cubisme. The composition of Picasso's well-known Acrobate à la boule (1905) happens to place a massive cube supporting a monumental Strong Man in opposition to the frail androgynous figure of a young acrobat, thus uniting cube and cubiste and colluding with Jarry's prophetic invention.

We cannot however credit Jarry with mysterious powers. Words have lives of their own and we can only note two distinct usages of the word cubiste, the one a neologistic noun, short-lived and occulted, a swift phantasm of a past culture blipping momentarily on to the literary screen a few years before its famous Double, the adjective pertaining to cubisme, became a lasting monument to one of the most important artistic movements of the century.

RéSUMé

Alfred Jarry coined the word demi-cubiste independently for his article, ‘Visions actuelles et futures,’ published in L'Art littéraire. From the implication that his source was Plato's Symposium, we can infer that he intended the word to mean ‘half an acrobat,’ i.e. a halved, one-legged being, (‘l'homme fendu longitudinalement’) forced to hop like the Physick-Stick. This passage was reworked as a dialogue for the ‘Acte héraldique’ of César-Antechrist published in the March 1895 number of the Mercure de France journal. The bound volume of the full four-act play of César-Antechrist (which contained the first published version of Ubu roi as its ‘Acte terrestre’) then came out under the Mercure de France imprint in November 1895. The word cubiste does not occur again in Jarry's published work until the novel Messaline, which was serialized in the Revue blanche in 1900 and published in book form the following year. Jarry uses it at first to denote the handstand position adopted by the Roman acrobat, Mnester, during his dance routine as follows:

Car le mime, après un saut et demi périlleux, est retombé sur les mains, en posture de cubiste.

His second reference is to the report of an actual find of a bronze effigy of a Greek acrobat discovered at Capri, which he must have come across during his own random literary excavations:

Et les fouilles modernes ont exhumé un de ces cubistes de bronze à la piscine à Caprée⁴⁵

OC II 119

This time the acrobat is depicted not in mid-leap, but as the rolled up ball or wheel (τροχοs) referred to above, one of the fetishistic souvenirs (‘effigies, semblables à des œufs d'or,’) struck by Messalina to placate the populace after Mnester's execution.⁴⁶ The description of the little statue as a ‘portrait de métal’ carries resonances of Jarry's 1894 reference to the androgyne of Gargantua's personal emblem, his gold and enamel ymage or ‘figure d'émail.’

The noun cubiste therefore occurs four times in published works of Jarry's between 1894 and 1900, but in three subtly different forms:

• (i) as mythical hermaphrodite, halved and quartered (demi-cubiste);
• (ii) denoting a handstand (posture de cubiste);
• (iii) as acrobatic tumbler typical of Greek private entertainments (cubiste).

Each one of these references has a valid, if chance, bearing on aspects of Cubist painting unconnected with any geometrical or cubic aspect, whether it is the slicing of the visual image into its many parts, the reversing of the image, or the twisting, contorting and spinning of the object or body to dematerialize it in the attempt to capture a new form of visual reality.

The re-coining of cubiste took place in 1908 in relation to the artistic movement of Cubism and to Braque's cubic forms. It is simply a curious coincidence that the writer who wrestled most passionately with the defining of the so-called Cubist movement had in his possession a rare first edition of a book containing the earlier 1895 coinage of his close friend, Alfred Jarry of the rapid ‘parler Homère’. By sheer fluke Jarry had purposely concealed his own artistic ideal of the ‘circulating’ acrobat, with its connotations of upsidedownness, gymnastic shape-changing and the conciliation of opposites, within the same word. Whether any echoes of Jarry's usage afforded Apollinaire secret pleasure or whether his copy of César-Antechrist remained a collector's piece with the pages uncut can only be a matter of speculation.

Notes

1. The following dictionary definition taken randomly from the 1973 edition of the Grand Larousse could serve as a rough guide to the public perception of the artistic movement of Cubism and its origins. It begins as follows:

   CUBISME n. m. (de cube) Le cubisme est une révolution plastique sans précédent, qui à partir de 1907, va relever le concept de forme de son discrédit académique, mais en obligeant les apparences à entrer, à leur corps défendant, dans une sorte de cristallisation polyédrique où ne subsistent plus que des vestiges de l'apparence.

2. A concise account of the contradictory stories surrounding the coining of the term ‘Cubism’ is given in the Introduction to William Rubin, Picasso and Braque: Pioneering Cubism (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1989), 389; also in the same book, Judith Cousins with the collaboration of Pierre Daix, ‘Documentary Chronology’, 435, n. 62.

3. Apollinaire published a shortened version of Jarry's L'Objet aimé in Le Festin d'Ésope in December 1903.

4. See Mark Roskill, The Interpretation of Cubism (London and Toronto: The Art Alliance Press, 1985), 24.

5. See Lucien Aressy, La Dernière Bohème. Verlaine et son milieu (Paris: Jouve et Cie, 1923), 225-6. The list of writers and artists within the Closerie des Lilas group given here extends until 1914, seven years after Jarry's death. His name can, however, be linked to those of his known associates, Gustave Kahn, Mécislas Goldberg, André Fontainas, Lugné-Poë, Pierre Quillard, André Salmon and Marinetti for the earlier period of 1904-7.

6. ‘Jacquerie artistique’ is the term used by Charles Chassé, author of D'Ubu roi au Douanier Rousseau (Paris: Nouvelle Revue Critique, 1947), quoted in Anthony Blunt and Phoebe Pool, Picasso the Formative Years (London: Studio Books, 1962), 23-4. See also Gerald Kamber's Introduction to Max Jacob and the Poetics of Cubism (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1971) citing Jarry's belief in ‘un univers que l'on peut voir et que peut-être l'on doit voir à la place du traditionnel' as ‘a kind of ground for the whole cubist movement.’

7. See Louis Vauxcelles, ‘Le Salon des Indépendants,’ Gil Blas (20 mars, 1908) 2 and Louis Vauxcelles, ‘Exposition Braque. Chez Kahnweiler, 28, rue Vignon.’ Gil Blas, 14 novembre, 1908. Reprinted in Edward Fry, Cubism (New York: McGraw Hill, 1966), 50-1 cited in the bibliography of Rubin, op. cit.

8. Cf. Henry Hope, Georges Braque (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1949), 30-3.

9. Cited in Rubin, op. cit., 355.

10. Alfred Jarry, Oeuvres complètes, volume I, ed. Michel Arrivé (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1972), 770, referred to hereafter as OC I; volume II, ed. Henri Bordillon, Patrick Besnier and Bernard le Doze (Paris: Pléiade, 1987) referred to as OC II; and volume III, ed. Bordillon, Besnier and le Doze with the co-operation of Michel Arrivé (Paris: Pléiade, 1988) as OC III.

11. See Guillaume Apollinaire, ‘Les Peintres cubistes’, Oeuvres complètes de Guillaume Apollinaire, ed. Michel Décaudin (Paris: André Balland et Jacques Lecat, 1966), IV, 24-5.

12. I am using Roger Shattuck's translation in ‘Visions of Present and Future,’ Selected Works of Alfred Jarry, ed. Roger Shattuck and Simon Watson Taylor (London: Jonathan Cape, 1965), 111-12.

13. Maurice Emmanuel, La Danse grecque antique (Paris: Hachette, 1896), 277.

14. Louis Séchan, La Danse grecque antique (Paris: de Boccard, 1930), 225.

15. See Louis Lemercier de Neuville, Histoire anecdotique des marionnettes modernes (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1892), 34:

    Le bâton! Voilà le grand argument de Guignol comme aussi de Polichinelle. Le bâton résout tout: il termine les différends, il paye les dettes, il renvoie les importuns, il corrige les femmes, il se venge des hommes, c'est le Deus ex Machina de tout ce petit monde lilliputien.

16. Xenophon's Banquet, II, 11-16, gives the best-known description of an acrobat performing the perilous somersaults (ekubista and exekubista) over swords in and out of a hoop at a private banquet. Jarry's friend, Pierre Louÿs, describes a more leisurely version in his poem ‘La Jongleuse’:

    Parfois elle faisait la roue sur les mains et sur les pieds.
    Ou bien, les deux jambes en l'air et les genoux écartés,
    Elle se courbait à la renverse et touchait la terre en riant.

    Pierre Louÿs, Les Chansons de Bilitis (Paris: Librairie Charpentier et Fasquelle, 1900), 288-9.

17. Emmanuel, op. cit., 228.

18. Kubistan, c'est se jeter sur les mains, la tête en bas, pour exécuter dans cette posture incommode des exercices variés. Il suffit d'avoir sous les yeux les représentations antiques de cette danse acrobatesque pour y reconnaître des tours chers à nos bateleurs.

    Emmanuel, op. cit., 276.

19. Et ayant braqué au centre des quadrilatères déshonorés par des couleurs irrégulières la lance bienfaisante de la machine à peindre, il commit à la direction du monstre mécanique M. Henri Rousseau, artiste peintre décorateur, dit le Douanier, mentionné et médaillé.

    OC I 712

20. See Linda Klieger Stillman, ‘Machinations of Celibacy and Desire,’ L'Esprit créateur, Winter 1984, Vol. XXIV, No. 4, 25-6. Stillman points out Jarry's uncanny anticipation of black holes, with his theory of reversibility: the apple returning to the tree and the cannon ball to the cannon as here stated in his personal vision of a Time Machine's ability to convey reversed or simultaneous Durée which dates from 1899.

21. Quoted in Roskill, op. cit., 31.

22. Was it an inspired or an informed twist of Vauxcelles's vitriolic pen which led him to dub Juan Gris's 1912 Homage to Picasso ‘Père Ubu-kub’? Christopher Green relates this remark to Jarry's antilogical philosophy, rather than to the philological connection with Greek contortionists. Christopher Green, Juan Gris (London and New Haven: Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1992), 15. The reference is cited in Judith Cousins with the collaboration of Pierre Daix, op. cit., 389.

23. Cf. Michel Arrivé, Lire Jarry (Brussels: Éditions complexes, 1976), 27-41.

24. Isidore Ducasse, Les Chants de Maldoror (Paris: Gallimard, 1973), 141-9.

25. Arising from the argument about whether Dionysodorous and Euthydemus knew everything from Plato's Euthydemus 294e:

    In the end Crito, I too was carried away by my incredulity and asked whether Dionysodorous could dance.

    —Certainly he replied.

    —And can you vault among swords and turn upon a wheel at your age? have you got to such a height of skill as that?

    —I can do anything, he said.

26. Plato, Symposium, 190b:

    In the first place there were three sexes, not as with us, two, male and female; the third partook of the nature of both the others and has vanished, though its name survives. The hermaphrodite was a distinct sex in form as well as in name, with the characteristics of both male and female, but now the name alone remains, and that solely as a term of abuse. Secondly, each human being was a rounded whole, with a double back and flanks forming a complete circle, (…) These people could walk upright like us in either direction, backwards or forwards, but when they wanted to run quickly they used all their eight limbs, and turned rapidly over in a circle, like tumblers who perform a cartwheel and return to an upright position.

27. For a through discussion of Jarry's use of the word cubiste in relation to Plato's usage, to which this article is much indebted, see Thieri Foulc, ‘Mnester ou l'art du sphéricubiste’, Europe (mars-avril 1981), 120-5.

28. Rabelais, Gargantua VIII. For a commentary of this passage see M. A. Screech, Rabelais (London: Duckworth, 1979,) 140-3. Screech refers to Horapollo's On Hieroglyphics and Alciatis' Emblemata, which prove that pictures can have meanings in themselves without calling upon words to express them. He draws an analogy between the emblematic pictures of the Renaissance and Egyptian hieroglyphs.

29. Rachilde, Alfred Jarry. ou le Surmâle des lettres (Paris: Grasset, 1928), 149.

30. To take two examples of the vogue for Greek words: Jean Moréas (Papadiamantopoulos) had already drawn criticism for overuse of Greek neologisms in his review of Félix Fénéon's Les Impressionnistes. The Nabis were in the habit of referring to their workshops as ‘ergastères’ from the Greek εργαsτιριο. Paul Sérusier signed some of his work ‘Erg. Sérusier.’

31. See Brunella Eruli, ‘Sur les sources classiques de Messaline’, L'Étoile-Absinthe, Tournées 1-2 (mai 1979), 67-83.

32. The word aurige from the Latin aurigus meaning ‘charioteer’ was in more general use than kubistétère, referring to the recently discovered bronze charioteer at Delphi.

33. The ‘islands’ visited by Dr Faustroll are examples of the technique. In particular the pictures of Beardsley, Bernard and Gauguin are given the Homeric treatment, as are the unidentified pictures in ‘Clinamen’, dedicated to Paul Fort. Jarry's description of Dürer's engraving of the martyrdom of St. Catherine, titled ‘Considérations pour servir à l'intelligence de la précédente image’ and described by several commentators as a forerunner of Dalí's paranoia critique, is a more complex amalgam of spoof and erudition which as much looks forward to the picture legends of Just So Stories as back to the Iliad. OC I 998-9

34. Cf. Eruli, op. cit. After examining the two versions of the Messaline manuscript Brunella Eruli formed the view that Jarry intended to emulate the geste of Apollo in knotting the split being together, by electing to divide the novel at this particular point.

35. Several commentators have remarked that Jarry endows Mnester with some of his own external characteristics such as the very small feet, pale face and painted lips. Jarry played up to his expected role of clown, entertainer and Kobold (as Gide depicted him). Mnester's central role in the novel, his ambiguous sexual identity and athletic prowess point clearly to the author, cubiste and ubiste.

36. Cf. Haldernablou:

    Nous, Pure Pensée, alourdis [sic] par notre corps trop de chair.

    OC I 217

    and ‘Pataphysique’:

    Il résultait de ces rapports réciproques avec les Choses, qu'il était accoûtumé à diriger avec sa pensée (…) qu'il ne distinguait pas du tout ses pensées de ses actes ni son rêve de sa veille.

    OC I 793-5

37. This observation was made by Carola Giedion-Welcker, art historian and author of Anthologie der Abseitigen. See her monograph, Alfred Jarry (Zürich: Verlag die Arche, 1960), 81, for an interesting analogy between Jarry's many-faceted character, Varia, in L'Amour absolu and James Joyce's Anna Livia Plurabelle.

38. Rachilde, op. cit., 88.

39. Paul Sérusier, who was known for his study of Plato (see note 26) and who collaborated closely with Jarry as scenery painter and bit-part actor, refers enigmatically to ‘la contrefacon kubiste’ as follows:

    Maintenant que la contrefaçon kubiste va s'écrouler, je pense qu'il sera permis de faire de la géométrie plane, simple, avec un esprit de claire simplicité chrétienne et française.

    In a 1915 letter to Maurice Denis, Sérusier is here bemoaning the corruption of the pure geometrical forms, which would have made Cubism a natural development of the Beuron Abbey aesthetic doctrine embraced by Maurice Denis and himself. Is Sérusier using ‘kubiste’ in its Greek or Jarryesque sense or is he simply denigrating the movement?

    Quoted in Agnès Humbert, Les Nabis et leur époque (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1954), 100.

40. See Jarry's letter to Apollinaire of 27 October 1903, OC III 578:

    Voici bien six mois que j'ai mis de côté un César-Antechrist, quoique ce bouquin n'ait pas grande importance, mais il a été long de retrouver le premier acte. Maintenant, j'ai tout complet.

41. Apollinaire, op. cit., IV, 931:

    L'art français du cubisme a déjà de l'influence à l'étranger, et particulièrement en Espagne et en Bohême ou toute la jeune école de peinture est cubiste, et par une singulière coincidence l'un des cubistes tchècques se nomme Kubicsta de son nom véritable. Il y a également des cubistes en Allemagne où par une coïncidence presque aussi singulière, l'un d'eux se nomme Kubin.

    This digression which Apollinaire included in his much reworked manuscript Méditations esthétiques—Les Peintres nouveaux was omitted from the final version which was published as Méditations esthétiques—Les Peintres cubistes.

42. Cf. Blunt and Poole, op. cit., 23-4; and especially John Richardson, A Life of Picasso, Vol. I, 1881-1906 (London: Pimlico, 1992), 359-67.

43. Translated and cited in William Rubin, op. cit., 351. Rubin credits Étienne-Alain Hubert with drawing his attention to this review.

44. See Sylvain-Christian David, ‘Jarry et Picasso’, L'Étoile-Absinthe, Tournées 9-12 (1981), 109-10, who quotes an account attributed to the years 1905-1907 given in La Vie imagée de Pablo Picasso, published in Arts, no. 340 (4 janvier, 1952):

    Picasso vient d'ailleurs de connaître Jarry, dont la passion pour l'usage du revolver est devenue légendaire. ‘Il faut, dit-il, 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 …’ Il n'est pas rare que Picasso et Jarry déambulent ensemble des nuits entières.

    Quoting Pierre Cabanne, Le Siècle de Picasso (Paris: Denoël, 1975, vol 2), 305, David gives the disprover:

    Un soir de grande dépression, il avoua à ses compagnes, Jacqueline et Hélène ‘qu'il regrettait de n'avoir pas connu Jarry, un autre pitre désespéré. Il était allé voir un jour chez lui, avec Apollinaire, mais il était sorti et il n'est jamais revenu.’

45. Cf. Pléiade Note 3 to II 119 which gives Don Cassius (LX, xxii and xxviii) as the reference for this find but charges Jarry with fabricating the posture.

46. Thieri Foulc, op. cit., touches delicately on the obscene connotations of this posture, termed by Jarry ‘le baiser de Narcisse,’ but which can also represent the alchemical knot—the dragon devouring its tail.

I should like to thank the University of Kent for help with funding the reproduction fees, Professor Graham Anderson for advising on the Greek and most of all Professor Roger Cardinal for encouraging this inquiry and for rigorously criticizing the deficiencies of early drafts. Any faults that remain are my responsibility. Address for correspondence: Mrs Jill Fell, 21 Ridgway Place, London SW19 4EW.