[In the following essay, Vickroy demonstrates that Julia Kristeva's theory of “semiotic motility”—which does not presuppose that meaning preceding language—provides a useful methodology for reading Jarry's Ubu Roi, which creates neologisms with the effect of undercutting preconceptions about meaning and symbol.]

Père Ubu is, without a doubt, semiotic motility personified. Like Alfred Jarry, whose strange behavior has by now been well-documented, Ubu exemplifies Julia Kristeva's vision of the “semiotized body as place of permanent scission.”¹ Her theory of the subject, with its emphasis on the sujet-en-procès (in process/on trial) and the continuing interplay between what she calls the semiotic and the symbolic, has already been applied to certain texts of avant-garde writers (i.e. Mallarmé, Joyce, Lautréamont), but nowhere have the conflicting forces manifested themselves more dramatically and more playfully than in Jarry's theater. Ubu emerges as a teeming mass of drives whose very language reveals his obsessions with eating, eliminating, and accumulating, and yet his instinctual energies constantly meet with the resistance of various forms and constraints—meaning, syntax, the demands of order, and even the structure of tragedy that Jarry parodies.

KRISTEVA: PSYCHOANALYSIS AND SIGNIFICATION

In her Revolution in Poetic Language, Kristeva uses psychoanalytic theories of dream interpretation and psychosexual and linguistic development to posit a “theory of signification based on the subject, his/her formation, and his/her corporeal, linguistic and social dialectic” (15). Since the writing subject is a complex heterogeneous force, Kristeva proposes studying a text (or subject) the way Freud studied dream narratives. Psychoanalysis focuses on the “symptomatic places in the dream-text”—distortions, ambiguities, absences and elisions which can give access to the “latent content” or unconscious drives; similarly, literary criticism can observe evasions, ambivalences and points of intensity in a text.²

In the first chapter of Revolution in Poetic Language, Kristeva introduces two inseparable modalities which pertain to externality (signifiance) or “meaning” in language: the semiotic and the symbolic. The first designates primary processes and drives in the unconscious which motivate the relation between signifier and signified (a relation expressed in displacement and condensation) and account for empty signifiers (such as obscenities—see merdre, below) which, according to Kristeva, are connected to psychosomatic functioning. The second modality designates social or structural constraints such as semantics and logic.

Kristeva's discussion of the chora is particularly useful for understanding of how these two modalities contribute to the processes of signification. She calls the chora a process of negativity, where the subject is generated and negated through the dialectics of change and stasis. Analogous to vocal and kinetic rhythm, the chora precedes and underlies “figuration and specularization” and can be understood as a totality of drives and stases simultaneously full of movement but also regulated by the semiotic (unconscious) as well as the symbolic (social effects). Natural and socio-historical constraints are imprinted on the chora through the mediation of an ordering or a preverbal functional state. According to Kristeva, this mediation is distinguished from “symbolic operations that depend on language as a sign system” but is associated with semiotic functioning that “precedes the establishment of the sign … it's not cognitive in the sense of being assumed by a knowing, already constituted subject” (27). Only by revealing the pre-symbolic functions within the subject can these semiotic functions be elucidated.

The drives which involve “pre-Oedipal (pre-sexual) identity, semiotic functions and energy discharges that connect and orient the (subject's) body to the mother” precede and work against symbolic operations (27). Because drives are assimilating and destructive at the same time, the semiotized body lives in a permanent state of scission. The negativity process of the chora (drive charges working against stases, social constraints, and the symbolic) is itself marked by discontinuities which are “material supports” such as the voice, gesture, or colors susceptible to semiotization. Kristeva believes that criticism should make the connections between these discontinuities which are “based on drives and articulated according to their resemblance or opposition, either by slippage or condensation” (28). Therefore, as in dream interpretation, displacement and condensation appear vital to the organization of the semiotic, similarly metaphor and metonymy cannot be separated from the drive economy informing them in the process of signification.

The Kristevan semiotic does not presuppose a meaning preceding language, nor does it presume (like Descartes) that thought is preconditioned by factual data, but is pre-cognitive. Kristeva views the subject as a dialectical process of structured language and heterogeneous drives which already exist before articulation, so that articulations have the dialectic working in them, too. Unlike the traditional study of language which has presupposed the conscious deliberation of the judging subject and has examined the syntheses of signification while neglecting how signification comes about or how meaning is corrupted, Kristeva insists that the subject is always “in process” or “always becoming.”

The signifying process, as Kristeva suggests, involves a balanced intertwining of the semiotic and symbolic functions (indeed, without such balance the artistic text, like any signification, risks becoming neurotic “nonsense”). Kristeva proposes that by investigating the field of the semiotic we can discover the process of the signifier: “The semiotic is articulated by flows and marks: … energy transfers, the cutting up of the corporeal and social continuum, as well as that of signifying material, the establishment of a distinctiveness and its ordering in a pulsating chora, in a rhythmic but nonexpressive [nonintentional] totality” (40). The relationship of the semiotic, the symbolic, and signification is that of a “differentiated unity (of separate but inseparable elements) which is ultimately that of the process of the subject (41; emphasis mine).”

Kristeva borrows Lacanian theory in Revolution in Poetic Language to explain the connection between the subject-in-process and the signifying process. As a psychoanalyst, Lacan relies on Freud's theories of psychosexual development, but also posits a theory of signification within this development. Kristeva inserts her idea of the thetic phase of the signifying process (a break in that process which produces the positing of signification) at two points within the Freudian/Lacanian model: at the mirror stage and in the discovery of sexual difference (castration). As Lacan describes it, in the mirror stage the child remains separated from the unified mirror image of itself because s/he is agitated by the drives which fragment rather than unify the child. According to Lacan, human physiological immaturity (we are still helpless and unformed at birth) is what permits the permanent positing of a separate and heterogeneous image. For Lacan, the mirror image functions as a prototype for the world of objects: “… positing the imaged ego leads to the positing of the object, which is, likewise, separate and signifiable” (46). Discovery of castration (sexual difference) detaches the subject from the mother and leads the subject to find his/her identity in the symbolic order. Although pleasure had been connected with the mother, after separation the subject must “transfer semiotic motility onto the symbolic order,” which includes language (47). Separation from the mother creates a lack, and this lack (or want-to-be, as Lacan describes it) confers on something else the role no longer held by the mother, that of containing the possibility of signification. This other presents itself as the place of the signifier.

Signifiance (or meaning) is an unlimited, heterogeneous generating process, an “unceasing operation of the drives toward, in, and through language; toward, in and through the exchange system and its protagonists—the subject and his/her institutions” (17). Thus, signification takes place on the threshold between the semiotic and symbolic realms: “[T]he (symbolic) includes part of the (semiotic) and their scission is thereafter marked by the break between signifier and signified” (48). The symbolic is “an always split unification that is produced by rupture and is impossible without it” (49). This, we shall see, is an apt description of Jarry's theater.

The chapter “The Signifying Process” in the first part of Revolution in Poetic Language sums up the semiotic as a negativity introduced into the symbolic order, a “transgression” of that order, although the semiotic and symbolic remain contradictory and interdependent. The subject takes great risks in producing a text because of the difficulty of “maintaining the symbolic function under the assault of negativity” (69), as Kristeva puts it. While maintaining that through reproduction of signifiers (vocal, gestural, verbal) “the subject crosses the border of the symbolic and reaches the semiotic chora, which is the other side of the social frontier,” Kristeva proposes art as the only means by which jouissance (pleasure) can infiltrate the symbolic order: “Art—this semiotization of the symbolic—thus represents the flow of jouissance into language” (79).

JARRY AND THEORY

Interconnections and conflicts between semiotic motility (or the movement of unconscious drives) and symbolic or socially-oriented structures inform several aspects of Jarry's works: his characterization (especially the enumeration of appetites), his use of language, his use and abuse of the theatrical/tragic tradition, and his ideas about theatrical production. Ubu himself is a teeming mass of drives, obsessed by the activities of eating and eliminating, and “reduced to the ego-centered structure of the infant;”³ even the persistent use of the word “merdre” (used 33 times)⁴ recalls the basic instincts. Particularly graphic examples of Ubu's gluttony occur at the banquet, where he eats almost all his guests' food, and during the battle with the Russians, where he stops to eat when he's about to be attacked, only to chase after the Czar for the latter's wine bottle. As the play progresses (especially after he becomes king), Ubu's greedy appetites extend to money as he appropriates the nobles' goods and the state coffers.

Ubu is motivated purely by his instincts. He lacks emotion (except concerning himself when in danger), intellect, and the sense of right and wrong which might temper these instincts (drives). Such characterization runs counter to western theatrical tradition where great characters have complex “psychological” motivations even when they are evil. Written partially as a reaction against the psychological realism of plays of that time, Ubu Roi is structured so that characters other than Ubu express conscience or sense of moderation (Mère Ubu, for instance, often warns him to be less bloodthirsty).⁵ Ubu simply wants those in his way, those who are blocking his id (desires, instincts), to be eliminated.

The conflict or movement (pulsions) within Ubu manifests itself in his alternating bravado and cowardice as, for example, in his vacillation about killing the king. Although willing to act, he fears being caught, and he will readily sacrifice other conspirators (including his wife) to save himself. He will have bouts of cowardice for no apparent reason; they originate within himself rather than as a response to action or characters around him. After the battle, for instance, when he is no longer being pursued yet exclaims, “je n'ai pas peur, mais j'ai encore la fuite” (I'm not scared, but I'm still running⁶—IV, v), it is clear that Ubu retains his essential cowardice. Although this absurd contradiction expresses a conflict between rational thought and instinct, the drives nevertheless triumph in their conflict with the symbolic order (rational thought).

Ubu's drives propel the plot or narrative thrust. Mère Ubu (in a parody of Lady MacBeth) has motivated him to kill the king by appealing to his greed (more food and money), and thereafter, his insatiable instincts take over. After the regicide, he will placate the people with gold only in hope of collecting taxes later. His murdering of the nobles, magistrates, and tax collectors is ultimately motivated by greed rather than power: he wants their possessions for his personal use, and to change the laws to make himself richer. With his tax collectors dead, he must go to the people and collect the taxes himself (several times). This insatiability precipitates a revolt and Ubu's eventual dethronement; his unwillingness to share the spoils with Bordure contributes to the latter's defection to the Russians.

In addition to manifesting itself in Ubu's characterization, Kristeva's concept of unconscious and social structures working through “gestures of confrontation and appropriation” (16) is clearly seen in the way the Ubu plays undermine and ridicule the tragic tradition (particularly Shakespeare) while simultaneously appropriating this tradition. Jarry worked within tragedy, he said, to do something which would be familiar to the audience. Kristeva hypothesizes that much as the drives transgress the social order, poetic language (or the avant-garde) challenges the literary tradition (in this case, tragedy). As the semiotic and symbolic work together and against one another, Jarry subverts dramatic tradition while working within it. It is only in this manner, Kristeva contends, that language can be revolutionary (or cause change): to overturn from within the system of oppression is most effective because it critiques the very foundations of that system (190).

Ubu Roi uses the tragic tradition in order to make a mockery of it. It presents the universal dramatic types of good king, bereaved queen and avenging prince, but these are only minor characters. One sees many elements from Shakespeare here: Bougrelas' situation recalls Hamlet's (the ancestral ghosts, his avenging his father, etc.), and the queen's dream resembles that of Calpurnia in Julius Caesar. The primary Shakespearean counterpart to Ubu Roi is, however, MacBeth. One has only to compare the first-scene exchange between the Ubus regarding ambition (I, i) with the same scene in MacBeth to see how the horrible becomes ludicrous with threats of violence, bickering and obscenities, or else the two banquet scenes, where Jarry derides the notions of kingship, nobility, generosity and hospitality so respected in Shakespeare's drama.⁷

Jarry lampoons two very important tragic concepts: catharsis and “heightened awareness.” Instead of providing relief, Jarry sought to make the audience uncomfortable by confronting them with their own base appetites in the form of Ubu. Instead of having his hero come to a profound realization about himself and the world (as is the case, for instance, with Lear or Oedipus) Jarry presents the Ubus as carefree in the final scene of Ubu Roi, unaffected by what has passed during the previous five acts. In fact, Ubu appears almost endearing in his stupidity in the last scene, as though his violence and cruelty never existed. In the second to last scene of Ubu Enchainé (V, vii) Ubu makes his great realization:

Je commence à constater que Ma Gidouille est plus grosse que toute la terre, et plus digne que je m'occupe d'elle. C'est elle que je servirai désormais.

Private sources have revealed to me that my Strumpot is huger than the whole world, and therefore worthier of my services. From now on I shall be the slave of my Strumpot.⁸

Of course, throughout both plays Ubu has always been foremost a servant to his belly, and his statement is a great absurdity.

Nowhere, however, does Kristeva's theory of semiotic/symbolic confrontations manifest itself more clearly than in Jarry's use of language, especially his use of neologisms, syntactical distortion, enumeration, contradiction, and repetition. The signifier merdre, for instance, is a distortion which elongates and emphasizes the common scatological obscenity merde. An audience in 1896 (when Ubu Roi was first performed) would expectedly be shocked at such a word being uttered on the stage, but as Kristeva points out, obscenities do not have signifieds but are “minimal marks of a situation of desire, where the identity of the signifying subject … is exceeded by a pulsional conflict which is linked to an other.”⁹ The obscenity also “mobilizes the signifying resources of the subject … and connects (it) … to the pulsional body, to movement of rejection and appropriation of the other” (Polylogue, 168). Merdre is a signifier functioning heterogeneously, creating an eruption of signification. It may serve as an evocation of disgust so deep that conventional language [is] powerless to express it,”¹⁰ or it may signify endearment: “Madame de ma merdre.” Merdre also signifies aggression, functioning as the battle cry/warning for the conspirators to attack the king. As these different meanings and connotations accumulate, merdre, as signifier, becomes evocatively complex: a metonymy for all of Ubu's instincts, connected with elimination (therefore, food), aggression “sabre à merdre” and desire (“Madame de ma merdre”). In its various uses merdre is linked to pulsional conflict as posited by Kristeva: to the body (the instincts) and to rejection (its shock value: it was to be used in a public setting).

Like his use of merdre, Jarry's invention of neologisms further demonstrates a conflict between the subject and social constraints (in this case, tragedy and noble or elevated language); Michael Issacharoff, in “Ubu and the Signs of the Theater,” has already pointed out how neologisms are both signs and anti-signs and how, in Ubu's speech, “neological compound substantives are used to subvert the normal transmission of sense and reference” (282). For instance, Ubu's weaponry such as “sabre à merdre,” “pistolet à phynances,” “ciseau à oneilles,” etc. all subvert in the same manner. The second noun in this sort of a French construction would normally modify the first word, yet in these examples, the latter mocks the first and breaks the forward thrust of the phrase the way “Je n'ai pas peur, mais j'ai encore la fuite” (IV, v) disrupts the flow of a thought. This is an example of the syntactical distortion and discontinuities (in the form of contradiction or oddly-paired signifiers) which Kristeva has said mark the conflict of drive facilitation and constraints and prevent completion of the forward thrust or motion of sentences and/or phrases.

Some of the play's neologisms were meant to have a powerful evocative significance, and variations of the same word accumulate to emphasize their importance, such as gidouille, cornegidouille and other distortions of andouille (chitterlings) which, according to Jarry, represent the powers of the lower appetites.¹¹ Other neologisms appear for comic effect, to undercut the credibility of characters, for instance. The “noble” Bougrelas is literally a “lazy bugger.” Bordure is a distortion of ordure (excrement or garbage). Palotins is a play on paladins (knights) and palot (sickly, weak). Jarry has denied these characters positive name identification by making them not only ridiculous, but evocative of several different meanings in these word-combinations.

The various idioms of violence in Ubu Roi seem simultaneously revolting, disturbing, comic, and entertaining; indeed, they combine in a “cutting of the social continuum” which is one of the articulations of the semiotic. The oft-repeated “mettre dans ma poche,” like the more direct “extraction de la langue … torsion du nez” (I'll put him in my pocket with twisting of the nose and extraction of the tongue—III, viii), or “extraction de la cervelle par les talons” (extraction of the brain by the heels—to Mère Ubu, V, i) appear horrid and absurd at the same time. Like these idioms of violence, ludicrous (and sometimes obscene) non-sequitors also function as disruptive elements. For example, in I, vi, Ubu says in front of the king and court: “je me suis rompu l'intestin et crevé la bouzine” (“I split my gut and bruised my butt”); or, in the last battle with Bougrelas before flight (V, iii): “Ah! J'en fait dans ma culotte” (“Oh! I just crapped in my pants.”).

“Le Parler Ubu” (Ubuspeak) is characterized by its use of neologisms, archaisms, slang and scatology, and it disrupts and subverts the social continuum by rhetorical techniques such as repetition, accumulation, exaggeration, puns, and platitudes.¹² Ubu's speech during the battle with the Russian army (IV, iv) provides one of the best examples:

Ah! j'ose à peine me retourner! Il est dedans. Ah! c'est bien fait et on tape dessus. Allons, Polonais, allez-y à tour de bras, il a bon dos, le miserable! Moi, je n'ose pas le regarder! Et cependant notre prédiction s'est complètement realisée, le baton à physique a fait merveilles et nul doute que je ne l'eusse complètement tué si une inexplicable terreur n'était venue combattre et annuler en nous les effets de notre courage. Mais nous avons dû soudainment tourner cadaque, et nous n'avons du notre salut qu'à notre habileté comme cavalier ainsi qu'à la solidité des jarrets de notre cheval à finances, dont la rapidité n'a d'égale que la solidité et dont la légèreté fait la célébrité ainsi qu'à la profondeur du fossé qui s'est trouvé fort à propos sous les pas de l'ennemi de nous l'ici présent Maîtres des phynances. Tout ceci est fort beau, mais personne ne m'écoute. Allons! bon. ça recommence!

I'm afraid to turn around. Ah! He fell in. That's fine; they've jumped on him. Let's go, you Poles; swing away; he's a tough one, that swine! As for me, I can't look. But our prediction has been completely fulfilled: the physical stick has performed wonders, and without doubt I would have been about to have killed him completely, had not an inexplicable fear come to combat and annul in us the fruits of our courage. But we suddenly had to turn tail, and we owe our salvation only to our skill in the saddle as well as to the sturdy hocks of our Phynancial Horse, whose rapidity is only equaled by its solidity and whose levitation makes its reputation, as well as the depth of the trench which located itself so appropriately under the enemy of us, the presently-before-you Master of Phynances. That was very nice, but nobody was listening. Oops, there they go again!

Ubu's use of elevated language in the royal “we” and the complex sentence structure in this disquisition on his cowardice emphasize the disparity between mode and signification of discourse while utilizing the discontinuities (articulated through oppositions) which are traced to Kristeva's chora. This disparity is an essential quality of Jarry's humor because it combines elevated style (royal, intellectual) with ridiculous action (weakheartedness for no apparent reason, and a brilliantly complicated exposition on nothing). The idea of a long discourse on this topic seems absurd enough, but the absurdity is magnified precisely because the speech occurs in the midst of a long battle. Even Ubu, usually in a cloud of self-absorption, must eventually acknowledge that no one wants to listen.

If, as Kristeva suggests, the semiotic can be detected in the “tone, rhythm, the bodily and material qualities of language …” (Eagleton, 188), then the language of Jarry's characters is certainly infused with the semiotic. Because Ubu Roi was written to be performed, the aural aspects of language have special importance. In a grand display of enumeration and alliteration, the most childish exchange of insults can take on a poetic quality (V, ii):

BOUGRELAS:
(le frappant)
Tiens, lâche, gueux, sacripant, mécréant,
musulman!
PèRE Ubu:
Tiens! Polognard, soûlard, bâtard, hussard,
tartare, calard, cafard, mouchard, savoyard, communard!
MèRE Ubu:
Tiens, capon, cochon, félon, histrion, fripon,
souillon, polochon!
BOUGRELAS:
(hitting him)
Take that, coward, tramp, braggard, laggard,
Musulman!
PèRE Ubu:
Take that, Polack, drunkard, bastard, hussar,
tartar, pisspot, inkblot, sneak, freak, anarchist!
MèRE Ubu:
Take that, prig, pig, rake, fake, snake,
mistake, mercenary!

Jarry has raised the insult to an art form and maintained the adolescent tone to undercut what should be a very dramatic scene (the last encounter with Bougrelas, their enemy). The sounds have a rhythmic flow, particularly the Ubus' lines, where all their words rhyme. Because of their identical endings, each of these insults merges into the others to produce an overall effect of arbitrariness; one insult will do as well as another.

Later in the same scene, many of these same techniques reappear in the final battle with Bougrelas (V, ii):

PèRE Ubu:
Ah! j'en fais dans ma culotte. En avant, cornegidouille! Tudez, saignez, écorchez, massacrez, corne d'Ubu! Ah! ça diminue!
PèRE Ubu:
Oh! I just crapped in my pants. Forward, hornbuggers! Killem, bleedem, skinnem, massacrem, by Ubu's horn! Ah! It's quieting down.

The first sentence expresses fear and inappropriate commentary. The second, bravado and the reference to his appetites. Then, enumeration of words with the same meaning and the curse by the power of the lower instincts. The last phrase subverts the ferocity of the previous one and indicates another change in tone and mood, a manifestation of conflicting drives and stases. These few sentences encapsulate the flows and marks and energy transfers which predominate in Ubu's speeches and which, Kristeva maintains, articulate semiotic motility.

It was primarily the way Jarry used and invented language which makes him a precursor to the surrealists and a purveyor of the poetic (revolutionary) language of which Kristeva speaks; Jarry's language emphasizes the multiplicity of meaning and its connotative rather than denotative traits. Jarry himself would speak in distinct syllables: ma-da-me, with uniform enunciation on each, a lack of emphasis which indicated a purposeful subversion of particular interpretation and meaning. Like his language, Jarry's own gestures were equally dramatic and spectacular. After shooting at someone who annoyed him (and on similar occasions) he was reported as saying, “Wasn't that as beautiful as literature?” Such deliberate intermingling of the esthetic with the quotidienne was surely an attempt at an entire way of being: to make life and art his creations. A Kristevan analysis would interpret such intermingling as an attempt to integrate instinct with and within an artistic structure. Jarry needed the theatrical structure within which to create and to rebel and (much as both the semiotic and symbolic elements are equally necessary for signification to take place) to semiotize the symbolic order.

Notes

1. Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, tr. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia UP, 1984), p. 27.

2. Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983), p. 182.

3. David Zinder, The Surrealist Connection (Ann Arbor, Michigan: UMI Research Press, 1980), pp. 17-18.

4. Michael Issacharoff, “Ubu and the Signs of the Theater,” in Pre-Text, Text, Context, Robert L. Mitchell ed. (Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1980), p. 281.

5. In Ubu Cocu, Ubu's conscience is depicted as a man whom he keeps with him in a suitcase: his conscience is an entity altogether separate from himself.

6. All translations of Jarry by Michael Benedickt and George E. Wellwarth, Modern French Theater (New York: Dutton, 1966), except where indicated.

7. Claude Schumacher, MacMillan Modern Dramatists: Alfred Jarry and Guillaume Apollinaire (New York: MacMillan, 1980), p. 61.

8. Translation by Simon Watson Taylor, Alfred Jarry: The Ubu Plays (New York: Grove Press, 1968), p. 147.

9. Julia Kristeva, Polylogue, (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1977), p. 168 (translation mine).

10. George Wellwarth, The Theater of Protest and Paradox (New York: New York UP, 1971), p. 9.

11. Roger Shattuck and Simon Watson Taylor, Selected Works of Alfred Jarry, (New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1965), p. 83.

12. Judith Cooper, Ubu Roi: An Analytical Study (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1966), Chapter 4.