SOURCE: Jannarone, Kimberly. “Puppetry and Pataphysics: Populism and the Ubu Cycle.” New Theater Quarterly 17, no. 3 (August 2001): 239-53.

[In the following essay, Jannarone argues that the 1896 production of Ubu Roi represents a complicated mixture of folk culture and highbrow art, and suggests that Jarry envisioned his audience in a more complex way than did other Symbolist artists.]

I expressed my astonishment at the attention he was paying this species of an art form intended for the masses.

—Kleist, ‘On the Marionette Theatre’

The biography of Alfred Jarry (his eccentric behaviour, his adoption of Père Ubu's name and persona, his alcoholism and early death) is as well known as the biography of Père Ubu (his evolution from the incompetent professor of physics in Rennes to the brilliant and worldly professor of pataphysics).¹ This essay uncovers the biography of a third character equally essential to understanding the phenomenon of Ubu roi—that of the rural French puppet, the working-class guignol who found himself thrust upon the stage of the Théâtre de l'Oeuvre in 1896.

The entry of the small-town puppet into the Parisian avant-garde scene of the fin de siècle will be discussed here as signifying a moment that has not been fully considered in its cultural context: a moment of tradition and the avant-garde, and of urban and rural fusion. I bring this third biography together with an understanding of pataphysics to read Jarry's appropriation of puppet-theatre conventions as an attempt to make his own theatre a catalyst for imaginative action, not a product for consumption by the audience. This emphasis on catalysis is what makes Jarry's project a philosophically developed populism. Through this discussion, I will argue that pataphysics can be used as a model for the avant-garde as a whole: it is social agitation wearing the garb of aesthetic sophistication.

My entry to this discussion is an examination of the practices of the nineteenth-century rural puppet theatres in the north of France that Jarry frequented as a child and referenced throughout his career. These traditions not only influence the Ubu cycle stylistically, but also suggest a new understanding of its intended impact. My approach to Ubu roi foregrounds the interaction of the play and the audience—specifically, the methods the production employed to encourage individual creative activity—on both formal and social levels.

The theorem of pataphysics is that it is possible (and essential) to adopt a personal strategy of interpreting and creating a world that rejects existing paradigms. Jarry sought in his life to prove that this is possible; his works are meant to be catalysts that will inspire the adoption of pataphysical principles by others. Pataphysical reasoning evacuates the notion of incompatibility. If the imaginary and the real are identical (as pataphysics insists),² there are only two crimes of perception one can commit: the first, to insist upon the supremacy of any one version of the truth;³ and the second, to accept a preexisting theory as one's own. Thus, the duty of the pataphysician is to provide his audience with a catalyst for individual action.

Jarry's conception of theatre reaches far beyond the proscenium into the audience's imaginations: the event on stage is not intended to be a finished work of art. My argument is that the 1896 production of Ubu roi represents a complicated intertwining of folk and highbrow culture. I unravel this in terms of the working class and le beau monde, praxis and aesthetics, signified by small-town puppets and big-city philosophy.

For an avant-garde artist to delve into traditions of the past for inspiration is not uncommon,⁴ but Jarry's appropriation of puppet theatre conventions is important not so much for its continuity of artistic tradition as for the relation between art and its audience that puppetry represents. This relation must be understood in terms both of the milieu in which French puppetry operated in the nineteenth century, and of the physical forms of the puppet theatre. In the following sections, I delineate the characteristics of rural French puppetry essential to understanding Ubu's ancestry.

RURAL PUPPETS AND THEIR PEOPLE

Puppetry, until the end of the nineteenth century, was a rural, working-class phenomenon in France.⁵ The class placement was evident on all levels: the puppeteers, the audience, and the puppets themselves all possessed manifestly working-class attributes. Discussions of puppet characters inevitably begin with a history of their origins: for example, Guignol, certainly the most famous French puppet character,⁶ originated in Lyon around 1800, a by-product of Lyon's floundering silk-working industry. Paul Fournel, in his history of Guignol, describes the audiences at Guignol's theatre, the Caveau: ‘The clientele of the Caveau is exclusively common, representing the same diversity as the Lyonnaise people at the beginning of the nineteenth century’⁷—a people that included a range of workers ‘from day labourer to silk worker’, ‘from extreme poverty to the working poor’, ‘young and turbulent artisans and workers’, and, the majority, who were ‘porters from the Port d'Ainay’.⁸ This is Lyon, but the characteristics of the puppet theatre milieu are the same throughout rural (most of non-Parisian) France.⁹

The puppeteers often worked at the same jobs as their audiences. Léopold Delannoy's Théâtres de marionnettes du Nord de la France¹⁰ describes in great detail the puppet theatres, both permanent and travelling, of northern France at the fin de siècle—puppetry of the kind that Jarry would have seen as the troupes travelled west near Rennes and Laval (where he grew up).¹¹ Delannoy describes the practitioners of puppetry in Lille as having occupations as diverse as ‘those one would find in Lille: weaving, filtration, metallurgy, or construction’.¹²

The puppeteers who made the puppet theatre their single occupation were condemned to a hand-to-mouth existence; many worked at another job, or made the puppet show a family enterprise, which was helpful for ‘economic viability’.¹³ In either circumstance, a puppeteer earned ‘about the same as a poorly-paid day labourer’.¹⁴ In other words, puppeteers occupied the same social and economic class as their audiences. Louis Poire-Cuite, a popular puppeteer of Lille, housed his theatre in his basement. His wife was the daughter of a worker: ‘One could say that his theatre knew the masses.’¹⁵

Throughout rural France, puppeteers provided their audience of equals with popular entertainment that reflected the concerns of their shared working-class milieu. The days of the performances and the admission prices provide strong evidence for this: for puppet plays coincided with the only days a worker had for leisure (Sundays and holidays), and admission, when charged, was often less than the price of a loaf of bread.¹⁶ The vast number of plays that were performed over a weekend or during the course of a fair testifies to the small audience and the large number of people who watched the show repeatedly.¹⁷

These shared social and economic (and, inevitably, educational) circumstances point towards the shared values of the puppeteers and their audiences. In addition to being an extremely popular form of entertainment, the theatre also served a larger social function. Whether it was in a basement theatre or on the street, the puppet theatre brought the people together, addressed topical local issues, and disseminated information: ‘For all the illiterate townspeople, it was the neighbourhood gazette.’¹⁸

Puppetry also sometimes served as social agitator. McCormick and Pratasik argue that the ‘ethos of Guignol was decidedly populist, and off-the-cuff political comments slipped into the dialogue every evening’.¹⁹ This argument is put forward most frequently about the theatre of Guignol, due both to the popularity of Guignol himself and to the markedly unstable social atmosphere of Lyon in the mid-nineteenth century, but the arguments carry equal weight for puppet theatres in northern France.²⁰

CLASSICS MADE COMPREHENSIBLE

The rural puppeteers, in addition to being financially ill-furnished, were often ‘almost illiterate’,²¹ and had little access to any of the sophisticated literary or artistic traditions of their country. But in the mid-nineteenth century, the Bibliothèque Nationale undertook the publication of its great authors—and other European authors in translation—in cheaply-bound editions known as ‘livraisons’. They were sold everywhere, and became immensely popular.²² Thus, uneducated puppeteers found the sources for their plays among the great classics of French and European literature: plays by Dumas, Balzac, Scribe, Hugo, Shakespeare, etc. The result of this was the creation of a repertoire that Delannoy describes as a kind of ‘atticisme populaire’.²³

The puppeteers, however, manifested no great regard for the literary nature of their sources. The dramatic literature on which a puppet play was based was reduced to the fundamentals of the plot, resulting in what Delannoy describes as a ‘schéma’, ‘an outline as condensed as possible, which they filled in following their imagination’.²⁴ They would then take even more liberties with the text: ‘they would mix them up in their fashion, adding or subtracting according to their fancy’.²⁵ The masterpieces of European literature were stripped to bare scenarios and then performed with comical and vulgar embellishments: the workers got their culture and their amusement at the same time. The great benefit of the travelling popular theatre for the workers was that the classics were divested of everything that might otherwise have rendered them inaccessible: they were brought directly to the town, they were practically (if not in fact) free, and they were perfectly comprehensible.

What was anathema to the Comédie Française was thus the pinnacle of entertainment for the majority of the country. The classics were appropriated by puppeteers, not venerated; they were baldly employed for entertainment, not for meditation. If to use the great works of dramatic literature as springboards for popular performance is a distortion of the original function of the works, it is a distortion that operated on all levels of rural puppet theatre.

The twistings of plots and texts mirrored the contortions of grammar and abundant malapropisms that accompanied a puppet performance. The language did not retain the precision of either the original works, of standard French, or even of any local patois. Often it was a perversion of all three (due to varying degrees of literacy among the performers and the itinerant nature of most of the puppeteers), resulting in a manner of speaking that had no real-world correlate.

Fournel outlines three characteristics of puppet-speak: ‘distortions (involuntary or comical), a lexicon, and an accent’.²⁶ These distortions and accents identify the voices of the puppet characters as steadfastly rustic. The strange accents and bold neologisms identify them as friendly figures, defiant, fiercely funny. In addition, the irregularity of the puppet's speech licensed a more outrageous commentary on local events than the use of regular language would have allowed: its significant remove from reality allowed it an outsider status, from which more could be dared. During elections, festivals, and any public event, the puppeteers would utilize their peculiarities of speech to make ‘transparent allusions’²⁷ to political and social activities—allusions that would not have been possible for a regular actor or person.

Much may be said about the distinctive characteristics of speech employed by rural French puppeteers. For our purposes, a brief quotation from Delannoy will suffice to suggest the sound of a performance. He describes the language of the puppets of the north: ‘They spoke in the patois of Lille in rolling the r's and in abusing a bit that which we call rhotalism.’²⁸ This sound—of a fiercely rolling r decorating a malapropism within a lawless sentence based on Scribe or Shakespeare—is the sound of atticisme populaire.

STAGING THE SHOWS

The puppeteers in the north of France in the nineteenth century operated either out of basement theatres (such as the Caveau in Lille), in a portable booth (as at the fair), or from inside a castelet,²⁹ which was formed by the puppeteer draping most of the lower half of his body (usually his legs or feet would show) and placing the puppet stage on top of his head to manipulate the puppets from below. In a basement theatre, the atmosphere was as noisy and as active as at the fair: ‘In a brouhaha of cries and songs, of laughter and noise, the show begins. It is very hard to distinguish the voices of the actors.’³⁰ In each case, the performance space is crowded, active, and makeshift, with an audience that is rarely still.

Puppet conventions of mise en scène evoke, from a modern perspective, a fading cultural conception of performance, in which the show is both a more collective and a more individual endeavour than is typical of contemporary theatre. In contrast to most modern spectators, who watch performances on a lighted stage from a darkened room, the traditional puppet theatre spectators gather around the framed space, with a full view of the puppets, the stage, and even the moving strings (if used).³¹ Due to the nature of the audience—loud, boisterous, and usually crowded together—its members were constantly aware of their position as members of a group. For this was a public event that brought performers and spectators into the same physical and—most significantly—the same creative space.

The crude nature of the theatrical elements played an essential role in the level of imaginative participation by the audience. The sets, for example, were decorated with scenery and props that announced the scene more through easily translatable signs than through representation. Often a puppeteer would own only one backdrop, and that with ‘little iconic significance’ and ‘little attempt at realistic representation’.³² Delannoy describes the toiles de fond (back-cloths) in Lille: ‘garishly painted, better to catch the eye, and without much care for design, from either a natural or a theatrical perspective’.³³

Often the styles would be haphazardly mixed, as on one curtain which depicted ‘a public place in Rome with the Sainte-Ange chateau reflected in the Tiber!’³⁴ The audience members deciphered the scenic confusion from placards, the puppets' dialogue, and their own imaginations. Thus, at the same time as the audience members were quite conscious of their situation in a crowd, they were also active in the individual process of interpreting the simple props being conspicuously manipulated before them.

The last detail of the formal characteristics of the rural puppet theatre that is important for understanding Jarry's project is the movement of the puppets—sudden, jerky, and liberated from all limitations of gravity and verisimilitude. The puppet, in its freedom from most conventions of realism, from written texts, and from regular language was giddily carefree and unashamedly vulgar: an example par excellence of popular theatre.

THE AESTHETICS OF THE WOODEN MAN

The reader familiar with Ubu roi will already have noticed the similarities in temperament and form between the rural puppets and Jarry's creation. I will draw the connections more explicitly in a later section; first, we need to contrast this milieu with the one which is usually invoked in reference to Ubu: that of Symbolism and the Parisian artistic elite.

The popular puppet described above is at a far remove from the idea of the puppet that by the 1880s had made its way among the Parisian artistic elite. In the salons and the theatres of the Left Bank, the question of the non-human performer was much in discussion. This discourse was not homogenous, or even linearly defined, but it can be understood as a flux of three main tendencies.

First, the puppet represented for some a pure form, an untainted abstraction that would allow for a complete understanding of character to emerge from a work of art. Second, the marionette was touted as the model of the perfect actor because of its complete manipulability. Third, on a practical level, wide dissatisfaction with contemporary theatre encouraged a search for the most radical change imaginable: the elimination of the human actor. These three ideas all point, as we will see, toward a similar theory of the practice of the theatre: that of the individual auteur and the fully-realized artistic vision. I will discuss these three tendencies synchronically to illustrate the position the wooden man occupied in the Parisian avant-garde.

First, however, we must briefly examine the text that many point to as the first serious aesthetic treatment of the puppet by a European artist: Kleist's ‘Über das Marionettentheater’ (1810),³⁵ an essay that dramatizes a conversation with a professional dancer who extols the superiority of a marionette's movements compared to that of a human. Because marionettes do not think or act consciously, their motions are free from the flaws of humanity. ‘Grace’, Kleist's fictional dancer argues, ‘appears purest in that human form which has either no consciousness or an infinite one, that is, in a puppet or in a god.’³⁶ The essay puts forward the argument that metaphysical authenticity may only be found in those who have never eaten ‘from the Tree of Knowledge’;³⁷ once having eaten, the only way back to a pure state is to eat again: i.e., to become a god. Neither of these being possible, the human (the essay implies) is trapped in an imperfect state. The puppet provides glimpses of a lost (and now unattainable) perfection.

Kleist's essay was hugely influential in Paris, where we find this description of the sublimity of the wooden performer repeatedly echoed in Symbolist experiments with marionette theatre. In spite of its title, however, ‘Über das Marionettentheater’ makes no practical demands or suggestions about the theatre whatsoever—a point with important consequences to our understanding of the Left Bank discourse.

The metaphysical implications of Kleist's essay influence the elaboration of a theory of the puppet actor that the Parisian artists bring closer to the theatre. André Antoine, a founding figure in theatrical naturalism, exemplifies this theory in a letter of 1893, in which he contends that the best dramatic actors are ‘in reality mannequins, more or less improved marionettes (according to their talent), that the author decorates and manipulates according to his fancy’.³⁸ This is an argument taken up on many fronts by avant-garde artists arguing for the use of marionettes in their theatre.

However, Antoine's enthusiasm for the puppet is, again, more metaphysical than practical. Antoine extols the marionette en route to an argument for the supremacy of the director: the marionette is cited as merely an example of the complete manipulability the human actor should strive to achieve.³⁹ On the whole, the naturalists were ‘too attached to the human, in its most ordinary and most corporal dimension, to interest themselves in marionettes’.⁴⁰

Maurice Maeterlinck posits this objection to human actors with a slightly different emphasis: he argues that a human actor fossilizes the fictional character. His statement on non-human actors had serious theoretical repercussions for, among others, Aurélien Lugné-Poe and Jarry. Maeterlinck writes: ‘Something in Hamlet died for us, the day when we saw him die on the stage. The spectre of an actor dethroned him, and now we can never banish the usurper of our dreams.’⁴¹ Once a character has been portrayed by an actor, it is liable to be forever married in the viewer's mind to that actor. Maeterlinck proposed the use of a wooden or shadow actor that would inspire the creation of a ‘character’ in the viewer's imagination, while itself remaining abstract in its very concreteness. He wrote in his Théâtre d'androïds:

It is perhaps necessary to dispense entirely with the living being on the stage. … Will the human being be replaced by a shadow, a projection of symbolic forms, or a being that has the aura of life without being alive itself? I don't know; but the absence of the human seems essential.⁴²

In spite of these views, and of the plays Maeterlinck wrote that were published in 1894 under the title Trois petits drames pour marionnettes, none of his plays was performed by marionettes in his own lifetime.⁴³ Further, these formulations of the superiority of the marionette to the human actor fall precisely in line with those of Antoine: the human actor is insufficiently able to convey the aims of the artist (director, author). For Maeterlinck, who envisioned the drama of man in spiritual and not in active terms, the composition of the actual performer was irrelevant beside its ability to channel the metaphysical dimensions of the piece.

PUPPETS IN THE RUE VIVIENNE

For examples of the use of the marionette in actual performance in fin de siècle Paris before Jarry, we must turn to the brief but important career of the Petit Théâtre de la Galerie Vivienne.⁴⁴ Founded in 1888, the mission of the Petit Théâtre was to present marionette performances of the world's classic dramas, from Aristophanes to Hrosvitha to Shakespeare.

Although the Petit Théâtre used mechanized puppets, not the hand-operated puppets which we have been examining, the productions of the theatre are the closest we come to Symbolist puppet performances in Paris, and they are characteristic of the Parisian high-art attitude toward marionettes. The Petit Théâtre attracted a regular audience of both established and soon-to-be avant-garde artists throughout its existence, from 1888 to 1894. Its founders, Maurice Bouchor (author) and Henri Signoret (operator of the theatre), aimed to reveal the spiritual essence of classic dramas by staging neo-mystery plays with marionettes.

The Petit Théâtre had an immense following among the artistic elite. The most vocal member of its audience was Anatole France, who reviewed the performances of the theatre regularly and ecstatically. His pieces on the Petit Théâtre, all of which emphasize the mystical qualities of the pure, mysterious, and divinely innocent puppets, strongly echo the formulations of Kleist—while being based in practical examples, and in a real interest in the institution of theatre. Therefore, his essays deal directly with the performances he witnesses, and with the implications for other theatres. He argues for a puppet's superiority to people via a condemnation of the human actor and of the human incapacity for metaphysical purity.

I am grateful to [the rue Vivienne marionettes] for replacing the live actors. … Actors destroy the art of the theatre. … I cannot stand the eminent actors such as those in the Comédie-Française. Their presence is so overwhelming that it overshadows everything else. Only they exist. They distort the dramas which they should be truthfully representing on stage.⁴⁵

France's reverence for the rue Vivienne puppets extends to impassioned praise of the lead puppet in a performance of Hrosvitha's Abraham:

A beautiful puppet such as you, Madame, would excel over any actress of flesh and blood. … Nowadays it is only you, Madame, who can still convey religious sentiment. … I would express it thus: true artistic ideas and refined thoughts find their way into the wooden head of the puppet as never into the brain of the fashionable actress.⁴⁶

He was far from alone in this view of the superiority of the rue Vivienne puppets. Paul Margueritte believed that these marionettes were bringing the theatre closer to artistic perfection and transcendent spirituality:

These impersonal puppets, beings of wood and cardboard, possess a pale and mysterious life. Their aura of truth surprises, disquiets. Their essential gestures contain the complete expression of human sentiments.⁴⁷

Essays such as these flourished during the Petit théâtre's existence, all discussing the marionette's aesthetic and spiritual superiority to the human actor.⁴⁸ It is crucial to note, however, that the natural puppet is never invoked.

Bouchor himself is careful to distinguish between his puppets and the crude handheld form. This distinction is emblematic of the wide gap between the Symbolist and the popular use of the marionette:

I have to admit that if the marionettes are, in principle, superior to ordinary actors, this is not the case in all spheres. I was not at all thinking, of course, of modern drama or the bourgeois comedy. I abandoned the merry satire and the coarse farce to our friend Guignol … [whose] marvellous agility is precisely the opposite of our sluggish marionettes who are well formed, above all, and, except by chance, very noble in their movements.⁴⁹

Bouchor writes that even the comedic scenes in Shakespeare had to be cut for the Petit Théâtre's puppets: ‘Nothing rough or violent was appropriate to the marionettes.’⁵⁰ These comments reveal with utmost clarity that the marionette, even in practice, still represents for the Parisian avant-garde an idealized, abstracted form. It is not adopted out of a real interest in folk culture or for its public appeal: it is employed as a metaphysical exercise, or as the only theoretical solution to a broadly-perceived theatrical crisis.

In sum, although individual perspectives differ, the issue of the marionette relates, in each case, to artistic control: control of the author or director over the performer; and, as evidenced in these reviews of the Petit Théâtre, imaginative control over the audience member. Only an impersonal performer will be able to avoid the obtrusive individual nature of an actor and perfectly channel the vision of the artist. If a total vision is to be given to the audience, the puppet is the best vehicle.

THE RURAL PUPPETS COME TO TOWN

I have given a sampling of the most striking features of this complex discourse within the Parisian circles in order to establish the unique situation of Jarry, who had moved to Paris from Rennes in 1893 and brought Père Ubu with him. Jarry's ideas intersect with this discourse on many levels, but his exposure to Symbolist aesthetics and ideas combines with his experience of the puppet theatre he saw in Laval and Rennes. Having a real admiration for the puppet theatre in practice as well as in theory, and having been a part of the rural community in which the puppet was born, Jarry's indebtedness to the makeshift porte-paroles of the working-class French (the ancestors of Père Ubu), is considerable, and he readily embraces it.

In stark contrast to the theatre described above, the Ubu cycle includes all the vagaries and the vulgarities of the rural castelet. Whereas much of the discussion of puppetry near the end of the century focused on the aesthetic and metaphysical dimensions of the wooden players, Jarry viewed the crudity of the popular form as of no less importance than the philosophical implications of its roots.

The trucs and funny voices of Ubu are a far cry from Symbolist appropriations of the form of puppetry: we will now see that this is directly related to the different aims Jarry has in employing this form. If the Symbolists admired the puppet for the completeness of vision it allowed the artist, Jarry admired the ideals of individual identity and communal activity that the rural puppet represented.

Jarry borrows from the puppet theatre and employs its forms in a philosophically developed context. The capital difference between Jarry and the Symbolists in this regard is that, in the midst of a discourse on the aesthetic and metaphysical nature of artificial man, Jarry introduced the artificial man himself in all his vulgarity, crudity, and simplicity.

Roger-Daniel Bensky suggests that the introduction of the ‘jeu dans le castelet’ into Parisian society was the most brazen part of Jarry's manoeuvre:

It is precisely in this ambition of a theatrical transposition that the audacity and originality of his endeavour resides.⁵¹

And Didier Plassard argues that Ubu roi transcends ‘its original dimension of a schoolboy farce to become a theatrical manifesto, the grotesque inversion of the Symbolist ideal’.⁵²

Jarry was not the first to attempt to bring the homme de bois⁵³ into high artistic society: what I am arguing is that his introduction of the jeu de le castelet had the impact it did because of the nature of the fusion his work represented. Guignol and Polchinelle⁵⁴ both had made it into Paris by mid-century, but in a severely compromised form—that of ‘folk culture’ enjoyed vicariously by city-dwellers. Deprived of a social context, the rural puppets were deprived of their punch. Fournel notes the consequences of such a change in context: ‘In Paris and the big cities, it wasn't the common people who came to Guignol, but the curious and the intellectuals.’⁵⁵

As the century moved on, ‘the curious and the intellectuals’ found increasingly more room for puppetry in their lives, as evidenced in Maurice Sand's move of his mother's puppets from Nohant to Passy (at that time a suburb of Paris) in 1880. But the Sand theatre (which played for ‘an educated and artistic audience personally invited by Maurice’)⁵⁶ was already very much a fashionable salon enterprise, which became ever more elite as it inched its way closer to the centre of Paris.

This move to the centre—of Paris and of artistic culture—is what we need to understand in order to grasp the idea of puppetry as it was flourishing at the time of Ubu roi. The move was simultaneously geographical and cultural. Bensky's suggestion that the introduction of castelet puppetry into Parisian theatre constituted the scandal makes sense in spite of the widespread discourse on marionettes I outlined above: although the avant-gardists were discussing puppetry, Jarry's invention is singular. He combines the vulgarity of the working-class puppet with an ideology that is part philosophical, part aesthetic, and part scientific, owing as much to Nietzsche and Bergson as to the schoolchildren who originated the Ubu cycle:

This curiously impervious personage seems to be both a simple puppet traversing an improbable series of adventures with rapacious imbecility, and the enormous axis of his own cosmos, which obeys unfathomable laws.⁵⁷

Traditional rural puppetry has met the urban aesthetic elite, and the resulting synergy can only be called pataphysics. The following sections of this essay pair the crude forms that Jarry employs with the sophisticated justifications he gives for their use.

FUSION: PATAPHYSICS

The connective tissue in Jarry's project is pataphysics. Thus, a working definition of pataphysics is necessary to discuss the project of the Ubu cycle. Jarry's creation, which is often described by a hyphenated series of words (such as ‘pseudo-scientific-philosophical-aesthetic-metaphysical-programme’), is, above all else, an attitude, a perspective on reality—‘the absolute right of the individual perspective’.⁵⁸ It is epistemological in nature: it questions the givens of the world and proposes perpetual questioning as a way of life. It is an undogmatic, outward-directed phenomenon that asks its adherents to practice its tenets themselves. It does not exist as an end, but as a means to an infinite number of ends.

The few authorial explications of pataphysics that we have⁵⁹ have been cited by most Jarry scholars in attempts to explain this creation: here, I want to emphasize a particular characteristic of the following quotations—their boundless enthusiasm for the boundless nature of thought. First, a definition: ‘Pataphysics will be, above all, the science of the particular, despite the common opinion that the only science is that of the general.’⁶⁰ Second, a proof: Jarry argues that the common conception of a watch as round is no better than the conception of it as rectangular (as it appears from the side), thereby rendering ‘universal assent’ an ‘incomprehensible prejudice’.⁶¹ Third, a mandate: ‘opposites are identical’.⁶²

So pataphysics is a doctrine of absolute relativism—and yet it is grounded in emerging scientific and philosophical models: subjectivism directly related to Schopenhauer, Kirkegaard, and Nietzsche;⁶³ a scientific approach influenced by Charles Boys, Lord Kelvin, and William Crookes.⁶⁴ One of the many paradoxes of pataphysics resides in this fusion of science and art (presumed) objectivity and subjectivity. Even as the individual is galvanized to disregard existing theories of science, thought, and reality, he or she is encouraged to construct his or her own theories with rigorous logic, or at least with elegant idiosyncrasy.

The philosophical underpinning of Jarry's project is that radical agnosticism in the universe on all levels, exercised with rigorous scientific methods, creates faith. Absolute relativism paves the way for absolute conviction—the conviction of the legitimacy of one's invention. Thus, a pataphysical project will ideally lead not to a result, but to a process of creative exploration.⁶⁵ What pataphysics requires is a catalyst to get that process going. And the theatre is the ideal site for such a project: the Ubu plays thus represent practical as opposed to theoretical pataphysics.

The Ubu cycle's considerable inheritance from the puppet theatre centres on simplicity of form. Jarry adopts a style born of necessity for traditional puppeteers and consciously utilizes and transforms it for its configuration of the audience/performer relationship. Pataphysical reasoning requires not only that the artist/pataphysician/perpetrator encourage the creative feeling in his audiences, but also that he ensure their creativity as central a place in the performance as that of the artist. One man for an army, a cardboard horse's head for a horse, a plain backdrop with placards—each of Jarry's suggestions for the first production of Ubu roi,⁶⁶ direct borrowings from the puppet theatre, are catalysts: they are meant to stimulate, not to limit, the viewer's imagination.

THE SUGGESTIVE POWER OF SCENERY

Jarry writes in 1896 that audiences enjoy feeling that ‘they are participating in the creation of the play’.⁶⁷ For Ubu roi, a play set in ‘Eternity’, with action that takes place ‘Nowhere’,⁶⁸ with constumes that have ‘as little local flair or period-specific colour as possible’,⁶⁹ and having for scenery a blank curtain and a sign, minimalized theatrical accouterments, like those of its puppet theatre precedents, allow the activity of the audience—their creative interaction with the performance—to command centre stage.

‘Every spectator has a right to see a play in a decor which does not clash with his own view of it.’⁷⁰ Jarry's first suggestion for the decor for the premiere of Ubu roi at the Théâtre de l'Oeuvre embodies this decree:⁷¹

One single stage set, or, better still, a plain backdrop. … A formally dressed individual would walk on stage, just as he does in puppet shows, and hang up a placard indicating where the next scene takes place. … (I am absolutely convinced that a descriptive placard has far more ‘suggestive’ power than any stage scenery.)⁷²

What Jarry adopts from the puppet theatre is the ‘suggestive’ power of the form. The ‘stupidity of trompe l'oeil’⁷³—the standard in contemporary theatre scenery—resides in its aspiration to present a fixed interpretation. But a non-representative background with placards, as in puppet shows, will force the viewer to engage in the creative act himself. ‘Each spectator can then conjure up for himself the background [l'endroit] he requires, or, better still, … the spectator can imagine, by a process of exosmosis, that what he sees on the stage is the real decor [le vrai décor exomosé sur la scène].’⁷⁴

Exosmosis: what the viewer imagines becomes the ‘real’ event. The simple suggestive power of traditional puppet theatre scenery is theorized into a metaphysical act of empowerment—one which grants the viewer's imagination absolute legitimacy. Precisely the same process of exosmosis is at work in the backdrop for the 1896 production of Ubu roi, in spite of the curtain being the polar opposite (in terms of formal design) to the blank curtain. The final curtain—a fantastical blend of elephants, skeletons, bookshelves, and trees—still takes its cue from the puppet theatre.⁷⁵

Crowded with such seemingly antithetical images inhabiting the same space—‘indoors and out of doors, and even the torrid, temperate, and arctic zones’⁷⁶—and populated with apple trees, boa constrictors, and a gallows, the Ubu roi curtain embodies both rural naivety and urban sophistication: a style is adopted, but more important is the type of audience-performer relationship the style implies. The Nabis'⁷⁷ crude anti-realism prohibits the audience from viewing the background as ‘scenery’ in a conventional manner; instead, it encourages active interpretation and engagement. Provided with a multitude of images, the audience members can perform a reading of the curtain, choosing which elements suit them best.⁷⁸ What they choose becomes the scenery, according to the process of exosmosis.

Jarry argues in his essays preceding the Ubu roi production that, given a trompe-l'oeil backdrop or a naturalistic setting, the spectator will accept that scenery as necessary for the play. ‘It is far more arduous to extract the quality from a quality than the quality from a quantity.’⁷⁹ Like a human actor and a character, the two will become wedded in the viewer's mind by their unproblematized presentation and identification. But the frenzied backdrop of Ubu roi approaches more nearly Jarry's pataphysical mission:

It is right that each spectator view the stage in the decor which fits his vision of it.⁸⁰

The audience will choose from the apparently incompatible and unrelated elements ones that correspond to their own ideas. The creative freedom of the castelet's simple curtain remains, but enters a new realm when combined with Jarry's notion of the catalyst.

LANGUAGE AS A CATALYST

The Ubu cycle's language serves a related function to that of the curtain: it catalyzes the viewer into creative interpretation. The continual employment of neologisms—‘merdre’, ‘cornephynance’, ‘cornegidouille’, etc.—forces the hearers to supply their own meaning for the undefined terms.

This feeds into a critical concept in Jarry's work: to suggest rather than to say: ‘To suggest instead of to say, to make in the path of phrases a crossroads of all the words.’⁸¹ A pataphysical theatre will not escort its audience to a specific image or idea; instead, it is intended to serve as a spur to the imagination of the viewer by providing a supply of provocative images, words, and combinations.

Again, this pataphysical concept has a solid foundation in the puppet theatre. The Ubu cycle's rhetorical flights from mock-Shakespearean bombast to childish oaths and vulgarities mirror the liberties rural puppets took with their texts. The language of the Ubu cycle, with its origins in schoolboy mispronunciations (intentional or otherwise) and distortions of classroom French, clearly relates to the idiosyncratic puppet patois discussed above. Amidst the linguistic confusion, the audience must make its own decisions as to meaning.

In the 1896 production of Ubu roi, another kind of lingual anomaly with roots in puppet traditions was added: the ‘special accent’ Gémier adopted for Ubu (which closely resembled Jarry's own evenly-accentuated manner of speaking)⁸² can be read as analogous in function to the blank curtain: with a lack of emphasis given to any syllable, the listener must provide every nuance. These adopted conventions indicate more than a lineage in form: in each case, the audience, by creatively interpreting the non-representation and unfamiliar signs, supplies much of the imaginative force of the performance.

This specialized language may also be intended to ensure the liberty in content of the characters' words in Ubu roi, as it did for the working-class performers discussed above. ‘Merdre’ might have escaped rural censors in a way it couldn't escape outraged notice in Paris. And the ‘special voice’⁸³ Jarry advocates may also have been intended to serve this purpose of masking: of course, it has roots in the most ancient puppet traditions. Henryk Jurkowski's A History of European Puppetry describes the ‘distorted speech’ of antique puppets, the nose-pinching of the sixteenth-century English puppeteers, and the invention of the ‘swazzle’ (a device put in the mouth when speaking to deform the voice).⁸⁴ A wooden puppet is freer in speech than a human; a human puppet, as the 1896 premiere proved, is not.

However, the practical consequences of puppetry for Jarry's project cannot be overstated: puppet theatre conventions, and especially puppets themselves, are better suited to Jarry's plays than are human-performer-based traditions. Puppets can be made to do things humans cannot. Many of the Ubu cycle's apparently unstageable stage directions make more sense when viewed through the lens of puppet theatre: characters can be impaled, split in half, shoved into suitcases, all while continuing to speak. Boats can sail on land and crocodiles can come and go as they please.

All of these have direct precedents in the rural puppet theatre: puppet versions of Faust included a sinner's body being ripped in half and then re-assembling itself, and crocodiles had made their presence felt on puppet stages by the eighteenth century.⁸⁵ The imaginative freedom of such conventions extends equally to the artist, the performers, and the audience member.

UBU: THE ELITE LOWBROW

Jarry was not disingenuous: the Ubu cycle was not atticisme populaire, but an appropriated (re-Atticized) form of it. The difference between his project and that of the Symbolists lies in the amount of populaire manifest in the work. Arthur Symons, the unamused critic who has left us one of the most detailed reviews of the 1896 performance, describes the appearance of Père Ubu and his vulgarity as the sign of a mostly regrettable conclusion to a hyper-refined era:

In our search for sensation we have exhausted sensation; and now, before a people who have perfected the fine shades to their vanishing point, who have subtilized delicacy of perception into the annihilation of the very senses through which we take in ecstasy, a literary Sans-culotte has shrieked for hours that unspeakable word of the gutter which was the … ‘Leitmotiv’ of this comedy of masks.⁸⁶

The verdict, ‘Des Esseintes relapses into the Red Indian’,⁸⁷ serves as a sarcastic counterpart to the more tristful conclusion of Yeats on the spectacle: ‘After Stéphane Mallarmé, after Paul Verlaine, after Gustave Moreau, after Puvis de Chavannes, after our own verse, after all our subtle colour and nervous rhythm, after the faint mixed tints of Conder, what more is possible? After us the Savage God.’⁸⁸

Père Ubu defies these one-dimensional portrayals of himself as a nihilist and a destroyer. The theatrical attack of which he is the protagonist is not meant to be a mere sweep into the ‘slop-pail’, as the preface to Ubu enchaîné reveals:⁸⁹

Hornstrumpot! We shall not have succeeded in demolishing everything unless we demolish the ruins as well. But the only way I can see of doing that is to use them to put up a lot of fine well-designed buildings.⁹⁰

In a burst of pataphysical brilliance, Père Ubu states the purpose of the Ubu cycle's apparent destruction: to make room for the construction of something else afterwards. If Ubu is the end of one era, he is just as powerfully the beginning of a new.⁹¹

The above discussion shows that Père Ubu resists alignment with barbarism just as surely as he resists being of a piece with the aesthetic elite: he is composed of equal parts of both worlds. Symons, Yeats, and other outraged or despairing critics of Père Ubu focus only on half the picture: the primitive form alone was not enough to spark the legendary riots of Ubu roi, nor, even, was the vulgarity of Ubu's character. What is remarkable in Jarry's creation is the synergy created from a combination of le beau monde and the working-class puppet, a synergy born not from the insubstantial connective of novelty, but from the rigorous logic of pataphysics. Bensky illustrates the paradox of Ubu:

On the one hand, Ubu is perhaps a rudimentary character, nothing but a stylization of a real prototype, exhibiting a schematized character; this is the ‘embryonic’ aspect of the type. On the other hand, this schema retains numerous significations—far from the childish originals—and invests them with a more complete nature; it is then a complex symbolic creation in which the multiplicity of signs approaches perfection.⁹²

Ubu signifies a synthesis, a kind of pataphysical generosity, which Jarry's words to the opening-night audience of Ubu roi confirm: ‘You are free to see in Monseiur Ubu as many allusions as you wish, or a simple puppet.’⁹³

Jarry's essays on the theatre, although they are written in a deceptively pompous style, repeatedly demonstrate a belief in the crowd's imaginative potential. ‘Light is not detached from shade, but, given sufficient time, penetrates it.’⁹⁴ ‘The mind desires that what has been revealed should be known by the most ignorant.’⁹⁵ ‘Ubu roi has the advantage of being accessible to the majority of the public.’⁹⁶ This belief in the masses is a crucial distinction between Jarry and the Symbolists. Anti-bourgeois in the most categorical sense, Jarry is both a populist and a member of le beau monde; he embraces working-class aesthetics and aristocratic garb, gutter-talk and poetry, tradition and innovation. What pataphysics excludes is bourgeois mentality: Monsieur Prudhomme, the tradition of nontraditions that comprise the activities and the entertainments of the benumbed middle class.

A PRODUCTION OF UBU ROI

The production of Ubu roi, then, centres not on producing a work or a commodity, but on a process of becoming. The Ubu cycle, like pataphysics itself, encourages a total recreation of the world by the individual, on the individual's own terms. To find the proper spurs to prick the sides of the audience's ambitions: this was what Jarry sought, in his weirdly dexterous conflation of philosophy and theatre, tradition and innovation, art and life. Jarry's oeuvre, which includes his life, can be read as a manifestation of pataphysical principles.

Once again, we have intersected with the tenets of Romanticism and Symbolism, which aspire to realms of creativity and existence that transcend the merely human. But the most significant point in this comparison, for our purposes, is when it breaks down. Jarry enacts this creation on all levels: artistic, philosophical, scientific, and personal. Further, and more consequential, pataphysics extends this principle beyond the capabilities of the genius artist, making the ‘virtue of originality’ attainable even for the foule.

Peter Bürger, in his Theory of the Avant-Garde, posits that the task of the avant-garde artist is not to produce finished works of art, but to bring art into the praxis of life. His theory catches the driving impulse of Jarry's project: the desire to erase the learned distinctions between ‘art’ and ‘life,’ between creative and factual existence, between the artistic and the quotidian. For Jarry, the impulse to make people perceive daily life differently annihilates all other concerns.

We can read Jarry's creation of Ubu, and the subsequent re-invention of his own life, as setting an example, bringing pataphysics into praxis. From a posthumously published manuscript:

Thus, it is more difficult for the spirit to create a character than it is for matter to create a man, and if one absolutely cannot create—that is to say, give birth to a new being—then one should keep quiet.⁹⁷

Total re-invention is proved to be possible, and not just for Jarry, who emphasizes: ‘What one man has done, another man can do.’⁹⁸ Practical applications of pataphysical principles prove that people are not bounded by what they perceive as their given lot: they actually possess limitless power—imagination—which they can incarnate at will. A pataphysical theatre creates the ideal conditions for the individual's imagination, with the assurance—which Jarry provides in his very identity—that what we imagine can become reality.

These are serious consequences for ‘an art form intended for the masses’,⁹⁹ but the rural puppet can support them. Jarry's endeavour demonstrates that the ‘low’ is just as complicated as the ‘high’: the working-class puppet theatre thus affirms the individual while acknowledging the collective, something the Parisian puppet theatres did not achieve. His radical fusion of popular forms with elite philosophy attempts to catalyze the individual imagination of the audience members in order to force a rejection of bourgeois values—values that include laziness, inertia, and unquestioned acceptance.

By rejecting the Symbolist theatrical ideal of creating a total vision for the audience, and, instead, deliberately aiming to create only a partial vision, Jarry found a way to utilize the traditions of the rural puppet theatre—which had been in active use as catalysts for its audiences for centuries. The Ubu cycle encourages its audience to embark on its own imaginative flight, and to demand not perfection, but incompleteness, from theatrical performance.

Notes

1. For the most engaging accounts, see Roger Shattuck's The Banquet Years (New York: Vintage, 1955) and Rachilde's Alfred Jarry, ou le surmâle de lettres (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1928). Also see Keith Beaumont, Alfred Jarry: a Critical and Biographical Study (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1984).

2. It constantly equates the two, as in ‘Pataphysics is the science of imaginary solutions’, from Alfred Jarry, Selected Works of Alfred Jarry, ed. Roger Shattuck and Simon Watson Taylor (New York: Grove Press, 1965), p. 86.

3. Since ‘the truth … exists in several different versions’. See Selected Works, p. 86.

4. The Russian Futurists and the French Nabis leap to mind as other avant-garde artists who mined methods of creative activity that seemed to hearken to a simpler or purer tradition—an impulse that has clear foundations in Romanticism. Both the Romantics and the Nabis will surface again in the course of this examination.

5. And in the rest of Europe: see John McCormick and Bennie Pratasik, Popular Puppet Theatre in Europe, 1800-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) for an overview.

6. Guignol is so representative of French puppets that his name now generically signifies puppets and puppetry: ‘un guignol’, ‘en guignol’, etc.

7. Paul Fournel, Guignol: les Mourget (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1995), p. 27. All following translations are mine unless otherwise noted.

8. Ibid.

9. For a detailed examination of the singular status of Paris in France at this time, see Christophe Charle, in Paris fin de siècle: culture et politique (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1998).

10. Léopold Delannoy, Théâtres de marionnettes du Nord de la France, ed. Marie-Claude Groshens and Pierre Soulier (Paris: G.-P. Maisonneuve et Larose, 1983).

11. In the early nineteenth century, the majority of travelling marionette shows in France ‘functioned almost entirely within their own region or immediately adjoining ones.’ (See McCormick, p. 34)

12. Delannoy, p. 41. ‘Il ne faudrait pas croire que les propriétaires de théâtres de marionnettes, qui existaient dans la seconde moité du XIXe siècle, étaient des spécialistes et qu'ils se contentaient de donner des représentations pour gagner leur vie. Ils faisaient ce métier … en dehors de leurs occupations habituelles.’

13. McCormick, p. 29.

14. Ibid., p. 30.

15. Delannoy, p. 44.

16. McCormick, p. 73.

17. Ibid., p. 75.

18. Fournel, p. 27.

19. McCormick, p. 28.

20. As the documents of Delannoy demonstrate, perhaps unintentionally. The accounts of the conditions of the theatres and the hardships the performers and audience members endured are recounted not with an acute political awareness, but with an attitude of fond reminiscence and an attempt at precision in regard to the facts.

21. Delannoy, p. 72.

22. Delannoy credits these editions with the inspiration for the puppetry repertoire in Lille. ‘Les auteurs classiques de notre pays, ceux de l'étranger traduits en français, étaient à la portée de toutes les bourses modestes, sous forme de petits livres … publiés sous le titre général de ‘Bibliothèque nationale,’ vendus à raison de vingt-cinq centimes le volume’ (Delannoy, p. 72).

23. Delannoy, p. 97.

24. Delannoy, p. 71. This resembles the practices of the commedia dell'arte more than any other dramatic form, and shares a few significant factors, including the use of scenarios instead of memorized lines as the basis for any individual performance. The comparison is not purely formal: both, of course, shared economic and social status, and plied their trade more for profit than for pleasure, for an audience of equals.

25. Delannoy, p. 97.

26. Fournel, p. 109.

27. Delannoy, p. 97.

28. Ibid.

29. The term ‘castelet’ is one of several European versions of ‘little castle’, a term for a one-man portable puppet booth. The term orginates in fourteenth-century Flemish puppetry, which hid its manipulators within the scenery itself, which often included a castle. See Henryk Jurkowski, A History of European Puppetry, two vols. (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen, 1996), Vol. I, p. 60-1.

30. Delannoy, p. 51.

31. The history of puppet conventions often considers marionettes and puppets together (a marionette as we understand it in English can be included in the general category of ‘puppet’ as a puppet with strings). Throughout this discussion, I use ‘puppet’ as a default referent for hand puppets, marionettes, and rod puppets. See McCormick, p. 127-47, for precise delineations.

32. McCormick, p. 88. The authors also note that the scenes might be painted on cloth from sacks of flour or sugar, if (as was often the case) the puppeteer could not afford to buy new cloth.

33. Delannoy, p. 27.

34. Ibid.

35. See Jurkowski's chapter on Romantic interest in marionettes in History, Vol. I, p. 246-90, and Harold B. Segel's section on Kleist's essay in Pinocchio's Progeny: Puppets, Marionettes, Automatons, and Robots in Modernist and Avant-Garde Drama (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), p. 14-17.

36. Translated by Christian-Albrecht Gollub in German Romantic Criticism, ed. A. Leslie Willson (New York: Continuum, 1982), p. 244.

37. Ibid.

38. In a letter of 1893, quoted in Dider Plassard, L'Acteur en effigie: figures de l'homme artificiel dans le théâtre des avant-gardes historiques (Lausanne: Editions l'Âge d'Homme, 1992), p. 28.

39. These ideas reach a height of radicalism in the later (1911) formulations of Edward Gordon Craig, who objects to human actors on the grounds of their independence: ‘The whole nature of man tends towards freedom; he therefore carries the proof in his own person that as material for the Theatre he is useless.’ See Edward Gordon Craig, On the Art of the Theatre (London: Heinemann, 1968), p. 56. Of course Craig was English and appeared on the scene later, but he exemplifies the desire to replace the human actor, and his ideas found solid support in Paris. This was also happening in Italy and in Zurich on an even more dehumanized scale, but the experiments of the Italian Futurists and the Dadaists are beyond the scope of this essay.

40. Plassard, p. 28.

41. Quoted in Plassard, p. 35.

42. Ibid.

43. In spite of Lugné-Poe's plan to do so in 1893. In a parallel occurrence to the 1896 Ubu roi performance, Lugné-Poe had agreed to produce Maeterlinck's Pelléas et Mélisande with puppets, but in the end he used a live cast. (See Henderson, p. 126.) Another interesting note is that, much later, the author claimed never to have intended his plays to be performed by non-human performers. In a 1931 letter, found in Reginald S. Sibbald, Marionettes in the North of France (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1936), Maeterlinck protests: ‘Comme je n'avais à cette époque [1894] aucun espoir de voir les petites pièces représentées par des acteurs, sur un théâtre normal, je m'étais, un peu ironiquement, résigné à les destiner à un théâtre de marionettes. Mais je n'avais songé à les écrire pour les marionettes. Je me suis reste fort peu occupé de marionettes’ (p. 4). This may well suggest an exaggerated indifference: however, the facts remain that his plays were never performed en guignol and his treatises were always theoretical.

44. See Jurkowski, Vol. II, p. 13-19, and Segel, p. 79-86.

45. Translated in Jurkowski, Vol. II, p. 19.

46. Ibid.

47. From Paul Margueritte, Le Petit Théâtre, 1888, quoted in John A. Henderson, The First Avant-Garde, 1887-1894 (London: Harrap, 1971), p. 123.

48. A role which Bouchor himself was eloquent in elaborating: ‘Marionettes … are above all lyrical, and the ideal place of their action cannot be other than that of poetry; all the gates of dream open before them; the highest speculations are naturally familiar to them, and these strange figures move comfortably within the systems, beliefs, and symbols of all times and peoples; everything that is distant, fairylike, and mysterious, is particularly suited to them’ (translated in Segel, p. 83).

49. Ibid.

50. Ibid.

51. Roger-Daniel Bensky, Structures textuelles de la marionette de langue française (Paris: Librarie A.-G. Nizet, 1969), p. 44. Bensky, however, emphasizes the transgression of the traditional rules of puppetry.

52. Ibid. Plassard emphasizes the dual nature of the performers of the premiere of Ubu roi (half-human, half-puppets) as essential to this ‘retournement’.

53. As Rachilde refers to Jarry/Ubu (see Rachilde, p. 29).

54. When Guignol went to Paris in 1866, he had a tremendous initial reception, even playing at Les Tuileries, but his theatre lasted only a year.

55. Fournel, p. 50.

56. Jurkowski, Vol. I, p. 382.

57. Bensky, p. 45.

58. Ibid., p. 55.

59. The most concentrated of which are found in Jarry's posthumously published novel. See Alfred Jarry, Exploits and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, Pataphysician, trans. Simon Watson Taylor (Boston: Exact Change, 1996).

60. Jarry, Faustroll, p. 21.

61. Ibid., p. 23. ‘Why should anyone claim that the shape of a watch is round—a manifestly false proposition—since it appears in profile as a narrow rectangular construction, elliptic on three sides; and why the devil should one only have noticed its shape at the moment of looking at the time?—Perhaps under the pretext of utility.’

62. Alfred Jarry, Oeuvres complètes d'Alfred Jarry, ed. Michel Arrivé (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), I, p. 342.

63. See Henri Béhar, Jarry: le monstre et la marionnette (Paris: Librairie Larousse, 1973), and Jurkowski, Vol. I, p. 15-17, for an overview of the emerging thinkers whom Jarry read.

64. See the extensive notes to Faustroll for Jarry's specific application of these and other scientists and mathematicians.

65. As shown by Jarry's response to a friend who confronted him after a lecture at the Salon d'Automne in 1903. The friend confessed he hadn't understood a word of Jarry's speech. Jarry replied: ‘That was precisely my intention, because recounting comprehensible matters serves only to dull the mind and confuse the memory, whereas the absurd exercises the mind and makes the memory work hard.’ (See Simon Watson Taylor, ‘The Magnificent Pataphysical Posture’, Times Literary Supplement, 3 October 1968, p. 1133.) This apparently worked; Rachilde writes that Jarry's constant defamiliarizing in speech ‘compliquait la conversation’ (Rachilde, p. 149).

66. Delineated in his letter to Lugné-Poe, Oeuvres complètes, p. 1042-4.

67. Selected Works, 70.

68. Jarry, Oeuvres complètes, p. 400-1.

69. Ibid., p. 1043.

70. Selected Works, p. 71.

71. Jarry had previously suggested heraldic decor in the stage directions to his unproduced drama, César-antechrist (1895).

72. Selected Works, p. 67.

73. Ibid, p. 71.

74. Ibid.; Tout Ubu, p. 141, emphasis in the original.

75. See the discussion of scenic confusion in the puppet theatres in Lille, above.

76. Arthur Symons, ‘A Symbolist Farce’, Studies in Seven Arts (London: Constable, 1906), p. 373.

77. Painters of the curtain included Bonnard, Ranson, Sérusier, Toulouse-Lautrec, Vuillard, and Jarry himself.

78. Marvin Carlson has described this process of subjective reading as latent in the nature of theatrical performance in his Signs of Life (1990). He describes a ‘psychic polyphony’ created by the complex array of signifiers on stage, which provokes ‘an unique and individual’ reading by the audience member.

79. Selected Works, p. 71.

80. Jarry, Oeuvres complètes, p. 406.

81. Ibid., p. 171.

82. This speech has its precedent in Guignol himself: Fournel describes the speech of the Lyonnais puppets as an accent ‘qui valorise quelque peu les syllables non accentuées’. See Fournel, p. 114, and for many references to Jarry's habit of accenting even the unaccented syllables, especially Rachilde, op. cit., and André Gide, ‘Le groupement littéraire qu'arbritait le Mercure de France’, Le Mercure de France, 298 (July 1940-December 1946, No. 1000).

83. Selected Works, p. 68.

84. Jurkowski, Vol. I, p. 48, 110, 140.

85. Jurkowski, Vol. I, p. 113. And McCormick and Pratasik point out that in the nineteenth century ‘few companies were complete without one or two animals’ (McCormick, p. 109).

86. Symons, p. 376-7.

87. Ibid., p. 376.

88. Remarked after watching the premiere of Ubu roi. See William Butler Yeats, Autobiographies (London: Macmillan, 1926), p. 348-9.

89. Symon's phrase. (See Symons, p. 371.)

90. The Ubu Plays, ed. Simon Watson Taylor (New York: Grove Press, 1968), p. 104.

91. In César-antechrist, Père Ubu takes over the role of Anti-Christ in the continual oscillation from God to Anti-Christ, which Jarry portrays as a cycle as natural and eternal as that of day to night.

92. Bensky, p. 45.

93. Jarry, Oeuvres complètes, p. 399.

94. Selected Works, p. 82.

95. Ibid., p. 80.

96. Jarry, Oeuvres complètes, p. 1044.

97. Ibid., p. 412.

98. The Supermale, trans. Ralph Gladstone and Barbara Wright (New York: New Directions, 1964), p. 10.

99. The epigraph from Kleist; Willson, p. 240.