SOURCE: Stillman, Linda Klieger. “Machinations of Celibacy and Desire.” L'Esprit Créateur 24, no. 4 (winter 1984): 20-35.

[In the following historically-grounded essay, Stillman examines Jarry's work, especially Le Sûrmale, in the context of the rapidly developing technology at the turn of the century and discusses the ways in which Marcueil, the automaton-like bicycling hero of Le Sûrmale, is machine-like in both love-making and athletics, she notes that Jarry “invented” a “time machine” and a “machine to inspire love,” which caused a stir in the art world of the late nineteenth century.]

Machines, and technology in general, have been systematically associated with human progress and with predictions of life in the future. From the late eighteenth century, when the notion of progress as continual, rapid technological (and social) change captured the popular imagination, literature has concerned itself with coherent and comprehensive prophecies of over-achieving gadgets and utopian robotics. During the nineteenth century, writers such as Jules Verne (De la terre à la lune, Vingt mille lieues sous les mers, Le Château des Carpathes, etc.) and H. G. Wells (The Invisible Man, The War of the Worlds, The Time-Machine) invented a genre that wed forevermore science to fiction. A myriad of discoveries and theories, from Huyghen's pendulum and Papin's steam machine to La Mettrie's 1747 manmachine (developed in L'Homme-machine), fostered the genesis and wide-spread application of mechanical concepts coextensive with the Industrial Revolution. The 25 years spanning the turn of the century saw, for instance, inaugural cycle and automobile races as well as the first telegraph and intercontinental radio communication. It was the era of the Curies, of Einstein, of Eiffel, of Nils Bohr. While Planck contributed the quantum theory, Minkowsky the four-dimension space-time continuum, and Tsiolkowsky research on rockets, Pawlowski was writing Journey to the Land of the Fourth Dimension and Maurice Renard Le Péril bleu. Janet, Freud, and Pavlov investigated psychological automatisms and conditioned reflexes. Freud wrote about a mechanical psychiser Apparat during the years between Jarry's Les Jours et les nuits (1897) and Le Surmâle (1902). Clockwork and machinery became models that seemed to account for the functioning of man's mind and body alike: the nervous system was explained by analogy to wires and telegraphy keys; a living organism, according to Helmholtz, could be described as a transforming power machine, a producer of work energy. Between 1900 and 1920, Futurism institutionalized a cult of machines in art and literature: witness Mayakovsky's poems about electrification, de Chirico's “metaphysical” canvasses of bizarre mannekins, and the machinery in Méliès's cinema. By the mid-twentieth century, conferences announced sessions such as “Newtonian Mechanics and the Romantic Rebellion,” “The Inventor as Literary Hero,” and “Writing as a Self-Reflexive Technology”; college syllabi featured courses in “futurology,” and their adherents, in the tradition of prophets, tended to forecast wondrous and terrifying timescapes.

Machines did not, in fact, tarry in their concretisation of terror. By the time large factories were an essential aspect of English and French industrial development, that is, by the second half of the nineteenth century, the machine had become not only a superior and unfair competitor responsible for massive unemployment, but a veritable vampire and, as the term “vamp” suggests, often a female trouble-maker, an insinuation which is clear in names such as the “spinning Jenny.” The machine's ambiguous relationship to man is, however, everywhere apparent. In Zola's 1890 La Bête humaine, and in Renoir's 1938 film version, the locomotive figures as a mistress. The steam engine has served as a locus of identification for male fantasies of thrusting pistons; of roaring, sweating devouring of fuel; and of penetration into tunnels: in Huysmans's Là-bas, pistons inside cylinders constitute “steel Romeos inside cast-iron Juliets.” Whereas before the Industrial Revolution, machines—music boxes and animated statues in kings' gardens, pulleys and sailing ships—depended on the strength of man and brute, water or wind, the motor takes precedence with the advent of industry, and suddenly man becomes (as Marx wrote in the 1848 Manifesto of the Communist Party) the machine's accessory. This fear took form as early as 1816 when Mary Shelley's Frankenstein foresaw that the machine could and would become its creator's adversary and potential destroyer. By 1872, Samuel Butler's Erewhon (an anagram of “here” and “now”) depicted such a negative utopia—the empire of machines—and called for the destruction of all machines. Writer and illustrator Albert Robida envisaged this terrifying realm with his 1882 Le Vingtième siècle and his 1883 La Guerre au vingtième siècle in which machines control each and every facet of life. While George Orwell's Big Brother has not acceded to power in England and we do not ride in vehicles with “beam control” (as industrial designer Norman Bel Geddes predicted in a 1940 issue of Popular Mechanics), man's ambivalent attitude toward his inventions endures: Jack Dempsey's 1930 article “I Can Whip Any Mechanical Robot” and that era's plan for an expressway on the Great Wall of China counterbalance fears of aircraft safety—the 1950s nervously envisioned highways in the air—and of atomic reactors in every basement.

Machines continue to attract significant critical attention and have, of late, generated numerous articles, special issues of reviews (among them Romantisme, No. 41 [1983] on the fin de siècle machine, and Revue des sciences humaines, Nos. 186-187, on la machine dans l'imaginaire), and several recent books, for example, Noiray's Le Romancier et la machine (1982-83). Of particular and peculiar import to these studies is the major systematisation of a modern myth of the machine achieved by Michel Carrouges in his 1954 critical tour de force Les Machines célibataires.¹ The revelation, in a dream, of numerous, disturbing analogies between the harrow in Kafka's In the Penal Colony (1919) and Duchamp's La Mariée mise à nu par ces célibataires, même (1915-23), led Carrouges to the discovery of a galaxy of what he termed machines célibataires scattered throughout the texts of Western literature since the 1850s. In its most basic form, a machine célibataire represents the mechanical solitude of a sole human, regardless of gender. Raised to the second power, a double solitude comes into play, including masculine and feminine elements but not necessarily man and woman. Based on the model of Duchamp's Grand Verre, where the Bride resides alone in the upper portion while the “bachelor apparatus” remains confined to the lower portion, a machine célibataire consists of the intersection of a sexual unit with a mechanical unit. It recasts the cloven role machines play in the minds of men by functioning as a transformer of love into a death-device. Lautréamont expressed perfectly the form and formula of the prototypic machine célibataire: “Il [Mervyn] est beau … comme la rencontre fortuite sur une table de dissection d'une machine à coudre [female] et d'un parapluie [male]!” (Les Chants de Maldoror, Chant VI).

In Carrouges's scheme, preceding Lautréamont's 1869 bachelor machine by a quarter-century, the mobile-plated cell of the condemned man in Poe's The Pit and the Pendulum holds historical pride of place as the first modern machine célibataire. Tracing the fetichized/sexualized machine's avatars through Jules Verne, Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, and Jarry to Roussel and Kafka, among others, Carrouges's work provides a theoretical model fraught with significance for psychoanalysis and marxism as well as for interpretation of literary texts. Two decades later, in their controversial Anti-Oedipus, Capitalism and Schizophrenia,² Deleuze and Guattari recuperated the focal and fertile designation machine célibataire, using it with the analog machine désirante (a term also used by Duchamp in his Notes and Projects for the Large Glass³) to formulate theories of anti-psychiatry, of the uncertain role of the subject, and of the increasingly mechanical function of desire. Defined as “formative machines, whose very misfirings are functional,” desiring-machines are “engaged in their own assembly (…) bringing into play processes of temporalization, fragmented formations, and detached parts” (Anti-Oedipus, pp. 286-87). Here, the machine célibataire forms “a new alliance between the desiring-machines and the body-without-organs [‘eyes closed tight, nostrils pinched shut, ears stopped up,’ p. 37] so as to give birth to a new humanity or a glorious organism” (Anti-Oedipus, p. 18). This reconciliation takes place “on the level of a new machine, functioning as ‘the return of the repressed’” (Anti-Oedipus, p. 17). This produces raw intensities that never express any ultimate equilibrium. Therefore, an identity can only be a “series of individualities” with an “unlocatable center” (Anti-Oedipus, p. 21). Desire thus lacks a fixed subject (and not its object), while its object is yet another machine connected to it, desire being itself a machine. The pleasure achieved by the new machine, that is, the machine célibataire “can rightly be called autoerotic, or rather automatic: the nuptial celebration of a new alliance, a new birth, a radiant ecstasy, as though the eroticism of the machine liberated other unlimited forces” (Anti-Oedipus, p. 18). Within the energy circuit, desire generates the flow, flows, and also interrupts the flow, so that the machines work only by continually breaking down. “The breaks in the process are productive, and are reassemblies in and of themselves” (Anti-Oedipus, p. 42). Fundamentally, the machine célibataire attains its functional zenith precisely when it overloads, misfires, or otherwise breaks down. Such a model of flows, ruptures, and production pertains to the functioning of the text-machine which neither unifies nor totalizes its elements, but rather preserves difference and fragmentation, having no recourse to original or eventual totality, yet allowing communication among detached parts via aberrant paths.

A 1976 Paris exhibition, “Les Machines Célibataires,” helped bring these daring and enigmatic machines out of the marginal space to which history had relegated them and into the public domain. The surprisingly large crowds that attended beheld, for example, life-size sculptures of Kafka's harrow, Duchamp's Grand Verre, and Jarry's Machine-à-inspirer-l'amour (constructed by Jacques Carelman). Harald Szeemann, organiser of the exhibition and editor of the magnificent and theoretically powerful catalogue, describes in the following terms Jarry's contribution to the golden age of the machine célibataire in literature: “the essential core of the last decade of the nineteenth century [is] none other than the writer Alfred Jarry (1873-1907) and his all-embracing definitive system of pataphysics, which is to metaphysics as metaphysics is to physics, i.e. pataphysics is the science of imaginary solutions.”⁴ Indeed, Michel Carrouges comments in an essay, “Directions for Use,” that “every bachelor machine is first of all a pataphysical machine, or a patamachine” (The Bachelor Machines, p. 44).

From brains to merdre to love, the machines in Alfred Jarry's works serve up a tantalizing menu.⁵ Ubu's disembraining machine rivals his merdre pump in efficacy. The pataphysician's Time-Machine dismantles chronological perception as it hurtles its pilot through an Imaginary present. In Le Surmâle, roman moderne, a sumptuous account of mechanical man pitted against locomotive and robot epitomizes Jarry's unflagging enthusiasm for machines.⁶ Jarry himself, an avid practitioner of the Parisian vehicle dernier cri, referred to his knee, after a minor accident, as his left pedal. Preoccupied from the outset with the relation between man and machine, Jarry pursued his literary investigation of their rapport with ever-increasing vigor. An inventory of the machines his works showcase includes a strength-testing device, the arc-lamp, all sorts of dynamos and batteries, cycles, trains, and the phonograph. A deathbed letter spoke of his motor giving out.

Machines and mechanical men take on mythological proportions under the diminutive Jarry's pen. Man and machine wrestle or merge forces in scenarios at once hypnotic and psychopathological, ecstatic and tragic, with the goal of refusing the gods in favor of a deployment of superhuman powers that originate in the human. In Haldernablou (part of Les Minutes de sable mémorial), for instance, La Machine (capital “M”) is reverentially addressed as “Dieu métallique, essence et idole” (Œuvres complètes, p. 217). The surmâle would be told, “la Science vous observe, la Science avec un grand S, ou plutôt, … la SCIENCE avec une grande SCIE …” (Le Surmâle, p. 111), emphasizing the dangers inherent in the machine age. In Jarry's fiction, death itself displays properties of machinery and vice versa: the literary machine, above all, and an infinitely creative death are reciprocal metaphors. At the same time, these mythological and often erotic passages are traversed by the musings of a decidedly keen-witted potache. In Gestes et opinions du Docteur Faustroll, pataphysicien, roman néo-scientifique, a lobster is imagined to be a “petite boîte automobile de conserves vivantes” and is likened to a mobile can of corned-beef (Œuvres complètes, pp. 669-700). The lobster's shell would sport the inscription “Boneless and Economical” and its tail would hide a key necessary to open it. This observation is, of course, highly pataphysical, and points to the interpenetration of realms essential to the dimension that Jarry dubbed “ethernity,” a neologism combining eternity and his beloved ether.

The “auto-mobile” vehicle extraordinary, however, is a Time-Exploring-Machine, inspired by H. G. Wells's novel, that appears in an essay appended to Faustroll. The pataphysician investigates time by means of “space-exploring-machines.” To begin with, in his Commentaire pour servir à la construction pratique de la machine à explorer le temps, Jarry states that the present is three-dimensional (Œuvres complètes, p. 735), and time therefore becomes a sequence of solids. The ideal exploration of this timescape requires that the machine isolate us from time, that is, to “rester immobiles dans l'Espace absolu, le long du Cours du Temps” (Œuvres complètes, p. 736). Seen from the machine, the past is beyond the future. It follows that if we are able to close ourselves instantly in the machine (thus isolated from time and immobilized), the voyage into the past “consiste en la perception de la reversibilité des phénomènes. On verra la pomme rebondir de la terre sur l'arbre, ou ressusciter le mort, puis le boulet rentrer dans le canon” (Œuvres complètes, p. 742). (These hypotheses uncannily anticipate, with almost verbatim accuracy, modern descriptions of black holes.⁷) For the pataphysician's machine, two pasts coexist: the real one and that “construit par la Machine quand elle revient à notre Présent, et qui n'est que la reversibilité du Futur” (Œuvres complètes, p. 742). In order to regain the real past after its gyroscopic journey through the future, the machine must traverse a point suspended between the future and the past, symmetrical to the real present “qu'on appellerait justement le Présent imaginaire” (p. 742). Ultimately, Jarry deduces, “La Durée est la transformation d'une succession en une réversion. C'est-à-dire: LE DEVENIR D'UNE MEMOIRE” (p. 743).

The machine and its itinerary not only prefigure an ideal proustian journey—Deleuze and Guattari offer Proust's “literary machine” A la recherche du temps perdu as a model of the inclusive disjunctions proper to desiring-machines—but they also prefigure the modernist narrative technique of spatialisation, which is itself coextensive with discoveries of modern physics. Time becomes a function of space conceived as dynamic. Therefore, space exists relative to a mobile viewpoint, rather than being perceived in a flat or linear way. In pataphysics, the machine denies the authenticity of an absolute vantage point, and is described by the same irony, plural and uncertain points of view, and other indications of a fragmented and often solitary (“bachelor”) subject that sabotages the modern narrator's authority.⁸ The Time-Machine, inasmuch as it constitutes a “borrowing” from Wells, also illustrates Jarry's strategic use of intertextuality: the relay between texts, in other words, the permeability or openness between one text and another, becomes self-conscious and constitutive of the production of the narrative itself. Jarry's mimesis never aims at reproduction, but at displacement. The textual “transplant” ironically emphasizes its own presence. Pseudoscientific lucubrations of the Time-Machine variety are especially present in Faustroll: the work whose hero combines Goethe's Faust with Ibsen's troll is subtitled roman, néo-scientifique. At the same time as it glorifies the mechanical, the work pays delirious hommage to several contemporary British scientists, among them C. V. Boys, Lord Kelvin, Faraday, and William Crookes, whose essays inform Jarry's own text.⁹Faustroll incorporates their experiments with extraordinary craft and zany results, while Faustroll turns up his nose at positivism.

Whether they figure in drama or narrative, whether in burlesque or tragic works, machines never fool around. By challenging men to perform superhuman feats, but by gaining the upper hand and ruthlessly destroying their human counterparts, machines, in Jarry's opus, “immetalize” (to borrow a neologism from The Bachelor Machines catalogue) man's own alienated desire. As Jean-François Lyotard writes, “the machine … does not operate without receiving and exploiting natural forces; … it plays a trick on these forces, inasmuch as it is less strong than they yet manages to achieve this monstrosity: that the least strong becomes stronger than the stronger” (The Bachelor Machines, p. 98). This “monstrosity” corresponds, on the one hand, to Jarry's theoretical ideas on theatrical and fictional characterization and, on the other hand, to the rhetorical and psychological implications of his machines. Their malevolence and unstable ontological status indicate the problematical role of the machine in Jarry's writing. Discussing intertextuality in Jarry's œuvre in terms of texts devouring other texts, Michel Arrivé writes astutely, “les textes, à proprement parler, jouent et souffrent dans cette étrange machine textuelle. …”¹⁰

In this framework, art does not equal life, but rather substitutes for it. In a chapter of Faustroll entitled “Clinamen,” a celibate machine par excellence assumes the end of human life (“après qu'il n'y eut plus personne au monde”) and the “survival” of only the Painting Machine, which, “animée à l'intérieur d'un système de ressorts sans masse, tournait en azimut dans le hall de fer du Palais des Machines, seul la polissure morte, moderne déluge de la Seine universelle, la bête imprévue Clinamen éjacula aux parois de son univers” (Œuvres complètes, p. 714).¹¹ Likened to an “unexpected beast,” the autonomous Painting Machine needs no human to plug it in or program it. It “ejaculates,” i.e., paints, multiple and complex pictures whose description by Jarry becomes consubstantial with the text. This resembles the “textual machine” at work elsewhere in Faustroll, where—in the context of a platonic dialogue on the identity of opposites—Ibicrate the Geometer credits Ubu with writing César-Antechrist, Jarry's now esoteric now burlesque heraldic play. Furthermore, to demonstrate the identity of opposites, Ibicrate points out that the plus sign and the minus sign are both constituted by the bâton-à-physique (which rotates on its axis), and he calls the pataphysical stick “l'engin mécanique” (p. 730). Such mechanisms which produce art as not simply a displacement but a replacement for life underscore the simultaneous transcendence and horror inherent in man's rapport to machines. It is precisely the ambiguous presence of fascination and repulsion, freedom and terror, humanity and inhumanity that Père Ubu himself represents: “son activité n'a pas de mobile affectif. Elle est extérieure au plaisir et à la douleur, comme elle est au-delà du bien et du mal. Elle échappe par là à l'humain. Ubu est un robot essentiellement moderne.”¹²

Jarry's deliberate campaign of provocation did not begin, as it is generally believed, with Ubu Roi's vociferous opening word. It surfaced first in the cast of characters. The inclusion of the machine à décerveler on the list, a subtle tactic though it may seem, caused indignant reactions in the 1890s. Inserting the machine on equal footing with father, mother, king, queen, emperor, nobles, magistrates, and financiers, elicited outrage. Critics were appalled by the idea that Jarry would try to make people believe the machine was really a character, and they felt obliged to make statements to the contrary. By personifying the disembraining machine, Jarry meant to subvert dramaturgic conventions and, by implicit contrast, to emphasize a reification of the human. Ubu and his henchmen use the machine to extract payment from objectively innocent subjects. It is also the double of the merdre pump¹³: they are instruments and weapons, used alternately to collect the coveted substance and to pump it on others as punishment. These machines both extract and expel, consecrate and desecrate, imitating, moreover, the paradoxical language proper to their sovereign. (Indeed, Ubu's pet expletive cornegidouille solders corne, used for penetration and impalement—representing the male element of a bachelor machine—to gidouille, the cosmic receptacle for gastric satisfaction and survival—representing the female element of the bachelor machine.) The machine's status in Ubu's kingdom—a paradigm for the pataphysical realm—leaves no room for speculation: Ubu Roi's rallying cry “Merdre” is replaced, in Ubu cocu, by an equally menacing call to arms, “A la machine!” (p. 508). Furthermore, when King Ubu orders the nobles, magistrates, and financiers down the trap door, their fate is not simply to disappear. What awaits them in the palace basement is the jaw of the horrible disembraining machine. Typical of Jarry's metaphors, the machine also signifies its opposite, that is, the act of instituting change in and of itself, or the absolute counteraction of the former regime. In the Acte Terrestre of César-Antechrist, the symbolism of the machine is made clear: “La mâchoire du crâne sans cervelle digère la cervelle étrangère” (Œuvres complètes, p. 304).

Jarry underscores his insult to the doxa by designating Sunday as disembraining day. Like the seven dwarfs, Ubu's palotins have a tune to work by. Its refrain is inspiring:

Voyez, voyez la machin' tourner,
Voyez, voyez, la cervell' sauter,
Voyez, voyez les Rentiers trembler …
Hurrah! Cornes-au-cul, vive le Père Ubu!

(p. 471)

Ubu guaranteed himself a hearty Sunday dinner. A veritable hymn to the ritual, La Chanson de décervelage suggests the Machine's role as the turning trope of fiction and furnishes insights into other connotations of the Machine. Weekly, people assemble to watch its lethal engines operate on the rue de l'Echaudé, the address—by no small coincidence—of the Mercure de France. In the Acte Terrestre (a prototype of the Ubu plays), décervelage and publishing overlap explicitly: here, the décerveleur is the equivalent of the printer, and the turning printing press is likened to an empty skull's jaw digesting foreign gray matter. In the ensuing dialogue, Ubu sends those condemned to death down the trap, where, the text specifies, the printer will disembrain them.

The polysemy of the royal machine does not stop with this satiric assault on publishers. Although the gravity of Jarry's financial situation cannot be exaggerated—his books brought fame but not fortune—there is another, more essential, transfer effected by the symbol of the kingdom's new religion. The machine, like Ubu himself, is both a divine and monstrous modern robot. Likewise, the ceaseless mechanical process of brain transfer and digestion is both infinitely creative and destructive. Décervelage is not simply the business of Ubu's cruelly imposed regime. A passage in Chez la Muse (a vignette in L'Amour en visites) hints that disembraining is a metaphor for one of Jarry's most serious concerns, that is, the mechanism of imagination and writing. In Chez la Muse, a despairing poet banishes the Muse because she offers him only pleasures of the flesh. His dying words accuse death of being plagiarism. The “death” or “plagiarism” that is the outcome of the poet's hallucinatory, isolated adventure, like the deaths of Jarry's other characters, is a literary conceit for the feeding of words and images from the outside into one's newly emptied skull. For Jarry, then, the disembraining enterprise paradoxically replaces brain cells. The notion of “plagiarism” that concerned him was thus neither the unquestioning assimilation or copying of ideas nor the monitoring of thoughts. His literalized conception of a ritualistic, noble, valuable, and honorable (cf. the victims of the trapdoor) transfer of “brains” via a simple mechanical device allows for the acquisition and nourishing of new ideas only by displacement. “Death,” then, is ultimately creative. To claim, as does the poet in Chez la Muse, that “la mort n'est pas éternelle” (Œuvres complètes, p. 893), is to affirm its dynamic and regenerative nature. In this context, Jarry's personification of the Machine à décerveler and its privileged role in his texts correspond to his philosophy of cyclic reciprocity and to his unfailing faith in brain power. He confided to his friend Rachilde that the decomposing brain's posthumous dreams constitute Paradise,¹⁴ concurring presciently with Deleuze and Guattari's formulations of “radiant ecstasy” and “pure naked intensity” with reference to the alliance of the desiring-machines and the body-without-organs, and to their theory of consummate mechanical failure.

In 1902, five years before his death, Jarry published Le Surmâle, roman moderne, the culmination of his cult of machinery. After a dinner party at his château and a stop at a bar, during which his comments foreshadow his quest for superhuman virility, André Marcueil breaks into the Bois de Boulogne zoo where “de grandes formes noires bondirent” (Le Surmâle, p. 47). Marcueil goes on, however, to “kill” the zoo's iron beast (la bête de fer), the strength-testing device. This mechanical measure of human strength “est une femelle,” Marcueil gravely pronounces, “mais c'est très fort” (Le Surmâle, p. 49). His remark about the anthropomorphic dynamomètre foretokens the arrival at his home of his superfemale counterpart Ellen Elson, her arrival signaled by “un bourdonnement d'une acuité croissante (…). On eût dit une sirène de steamer” (Le Surmâle, p. 51). The polysemy of “siren” reflects the ambivalent ontological positions held by man and machine. Ellen, the femme fatale, arrives “piloting” an automobile responsible for the hypnotic sound and likened to “un dieu lubrique et fabuleux” as well as a “bête métallique, comme un gros scarabée” (Le Surmâle, p. 57), comparisons clearly establishing the machine's sacred but suspect function.

Before departing, Ellen mentions an upcoming race between a five-man cycle and a locomotive, La Course des Dix Mille Milles, from Paris to Siberia and back. A driverless, torpedo-shaped pacesetting car precedes the cycle while a small trailer follows, manned by a dwarf. The five pedallers' legs are joined on each side by aluminium rods. Invented and manufactured by Ellen's father, the team's sole nourishment, i.e., Perpetual-Motion-Food (combining strychnine and alcohol), provides periodically dispensed pataphysical endurance. When a suddenly appearing flying funnel zooms past the train and the cycle (although both are moving at 250 kmph), the cyclists exert even more energy: one of the team dies but continues to pedal automatically, allowing the quintuplette to pass the express train. Those aboard (engineer and mechanician Arthur Gough, Ellen, and her scientist father) regroup at the foot-plate after destroying the coaches from whose windows they had observed the race. The express reaches such a fabulous speed that the speedometer breaks down. Unexpectedly, the parallel machines are overtaken by the supermale—in the identity of Le Pédard—who appears calmly from nowhere and handily wins the race. This extraordinary cyclist exemplifies Jarry's obsession with physical strength and endurance as well as his view that the machine created by man's imagination and ingenuity becomes a model against which man must then measure himself. Curiously though, while Marcueil functions like a well-oiled machine, the cold metallic force of the locomotive is mitigated by its animalistic attributes: it is compared to a big beast, boasts a slightly trembling flank, and it grunts.

During Marcueil's second major transformation, that is, the Indian, his desire to break records becomes alarmingly literal. At the center of the novel's central scene—a contest of Olympian love-making—a phonograph threatens the Indian and his partner. A short text, published in 1893 and entitled Phonographe, makes explicit the link between this machine—one that spews forth man's words recorded on turning cylinders—and the machine à décerveler, whose rotation recycles men's brains. In Phonographe, “l'inanimé froid se réchauffe et redevient mobile au contact de la chaude cervelle, à travers les oreilles percées de clous” (Œuvres complètes, p. 186). A similar image of the beloved head held prisoner by the machine closes the text: “la sirène minérale [a description that also evokes Ellen's arrival at Marcueil's] tient son bien-aimé par la tête comme un page d'acier serre une robe” (p. 187). This phonograph, like its avatar in Le Surmâle, portends the lethal Machine-à-inspirer-l'amour that causes the novel's tragic denouement. Like the locomotive that raced against mechanised men, the phonograph seems alive, resembling “la gueule luisante d'un serpent, menaçante et qui ne se cachait plus sous les fleurs” (Le Surmâle, p. 133). Akin to Ubu's machine, it is a character, and a powerful one at that. Its “crystal throat” appears to be “un grand monocle pour cyclope méchant” (Le Surmâle, p. 130), but soon it becomes “le vieux monsieur au monocle de cristal,” who is an intruder more indiscrete than Bathybius, the “real” character who monitors Marcueil's sexual efforts from an observation window.

At first, the phonograph startles by its clairvoyance, and Marcueil shudders at the strange coincidence of his gesture and the recounting of it by the record. The machine quickly takes command of events, directing the actions of Marcueil and Ellen who are mesmerized by its words. The supermale wants to smash the machine to bits but he cannot, for the Machine, once invented, cannot always be dominated by man. He has no choice but to obey: “le monstre ordonna à voix limpide et éclatante” (Le Surmâle, p. 133), and it ordered Ellen to die. Her death unleashes in Marcueil the love he feels for this superfemale. The purpose of their rendez-vous is to beat the love-making record set by Theophrastes's Indian, but as Marcueil suddenly realizes, “faire l'amour assidûment ôte le temps d'éprouver l'amour” (Le Surmâle, p. 138). Central to the myth of the machine célibataire, the refusal of any “conséquences créatrices de l'érotisme” (Les Machines célibataires, p. 84) pertains to the distance between the machine and human solitude: Ellen and Marcueil “se repoussèrent au moment précis ou d'autres s'enlacent plus étroitement, car tous les deux ils se souciaient d'eux seuls et ne voulaient point préparer d'autres vies” (Le Surmâle, p. 113). Unexpectedly, Ellen awakens from what was only a hypnotic trance and confesses her love for Marcueil to her father, William Elson, a famous American chemist. It has been rightly suggested that Elson is modeled on Edison, the American who invented the phonograph in 1877 and on Villiers de l'Isle-Adam's Edison in L'Eve future. Villiers calls his character the mécanicien, a designation Jarry transfers to Arthur Gough, engineer, electrician, and builder of cars and planes. Determined that his daughter get her man, Elson will engage the engineer/mécanicien to help him. When his medical colleague, Bathybius, observes, referring to the Supermale, “ce n'est pas un homme, c'est une machine” (Le Surmâle, p. 146), the plan is hatched: they need a magnetoelectrical device.

Arthur Gough is commissioned to build “la machine la plus insolite des temps modernes, la machine qui n'était pas destinée à produire des effets physiques, mais à influencer des forces considérées jusqu'à ce jour comme insaisissables” (Le Surmâle, p. 148). The Supermale would be conquered by a supermachine. “Si André Marcueil était une machine ou un organisme de fer se jouant des machines, eh bien, la coalition de l'ingénieur, du chimiste et du docteur opposerait machine à machine (…). Si cet homme devenait une mécanique, il fallait bien, par un retour nécessaire à l'équilibre du monde, qu'une autre mécanique fabriquât … de l'âme” (Le Surmâle, p. 148). In other words, a machine is needed to humanize the monster that man becomes when he acts like a machine. Man's salvation, in a world where religion has been replaced by science, takes the form of a Love-Inspiring-Machine. Basing his invention on Faraday's experiments on electromagnetics and on the model of the electric chair (put into use on January 1, 1899 in New York State and touted in France as a more humane and scientific method of execution than “barbaric” hanging), Gough hooks up his wired chair to a magneto. Marcueil's head is fitted with a platinum-toothed crown cum electrodes and ear-flaps. As the 11,000-volt current generated by the machine electrifies the sleeping Supermale strapped into the chair, the desiring machine breaks down.

Just as pataphysics' machine à décerveler instituted Ubu's reign of terror in the place of a corrupt regime, so too modern science misfires and backfires when it imposes a machine-à-inspirer-l'amour. The scene on the front steps of Marcueil's mansion reproduces those in Phonographe where head-phones are likened to nails piercing the ears in order to make contact with hot brains, and where the “mineral siren” holds its beloved by the head like a steel grip. To its inventors' dismay, when Elson, “d'un geste machinal,” throws the switch, Marcueil's energy charges the machine, since, “lorsque deux machines électro-dynamiques sont en contact, c'est celle dont le potentiel est le plus élevé qui charge l'autre” (Le Surmâle, p. 151). Alas, the machine falls in love with the man.

As Jarry hinted with the bestial locomotive and the snake-like phonograph horn, machines take on the historical role of wild animals. To survive, man must become stronger than machines. Marcueil, then, is the “premier [homme] de l'avenir” (Le Surmâle, p. 152), playing Adam to Villiers's android Hadaly.¹⁵ The miracle, however, would be postponed for the battery overcharged by Marcueil's electricity reverses the current. No one knows whether the circuit's boomerang is caused by a momentary lessening of Marcueil's energy or its reaching too fabulous a peak. Love is only a machine that produces more machines. Like other machines célibataires, the Machine-à-inspirer-l'amour transforms love into what Carrouges terms a “technique of death” (The Bachelor Machines, p. 21). The metal crown becomes an incandescent jaw and, reaching its maximum functional potential, fatally sinks its white-hot teeth into the Supermale's head. We can only imagine the sight of his cervelle sautée. He is literally devoured by his own narcissistic image,¹⁶ mimicking the operation of the other machines in Jarry's texts: the brain-eating printing press, the gueule luisante of the phonograph that replays man's song, the Time-Machine that encloses man like the ubuesque gidouille in order that he may relive his memories, and finally, like the very machinery of Jarry's intertextual tactics. In the end, the machine-man and the desiring-machine are tragically reassembled: “Le Surmâle était mort là, tordu avec le fer” (Le Surmâle, p. 154).

Notes

1. Michel Carrouges, Les Machines célibataires (Paris: Arcanes, 1954).

2. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, Helen Lane, Anti-Oedipus, Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983). Originally published as L'Anti-Œdipe (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1972). This political analysis of desire finds the root of society's sickness especially in the figure of Oedipus as it is used by psychoanalysts.

3. Marcel Duchamp, ed. Arturo Schwartz, Notes and Projects for the Large Glass (London: Thames and Hudson, 1969).

4. Le Macchine Celibi/The Bachelor Machines, ed. Harald Szeemann (New York: Rizzoli; Venice: Alfieri Edizione d'Arte, 1975), p. 10.

5. All references to Jarry's works in this essay, excluding those to Le Surmâle, are to Alfred Jarry, ed. Michel Arrivé, Œuvres complètes, I (Paris: Gallimard, 1972).

6. Alfred Jarry, Le Surmâle, roman moderne (Paris: Fasquelle Editeurs, 1945).

7. Walter Sullivan, “A Hole in the Sky,” New York Times Magazine, 14 July 1974, pp. 11, 34-35.

8. For a discussion of Jarry as a precursor of modern novelists see Linda K. Stillman, “Modern Narrative Techniques: Jarry, the Pre-text,” Sub-Stance, XI, 3 (1982), 72-81.

9. The intertexts of Faustroll and the scientific tracts are examined in Linda K. Stillman, “Physics and Pataphysics: the Sources of Faustroll,” Kentucky Romance Quarterly, XXVI, 1 (Oct. 1979), 81-92.

10. Michel Arrivé, Lire Jarry (Brussels: Editions Complexe, 1976), p. 64.

11. “Clinamen,” an ancient theory of matter, accounts for the creation of life by a fortuitous chance collision of atoms, deviating from the line of their vertical fall, at an undetermined place and moment. Jarry interpreted the Epicurean atomic theory (named “clinamen” by Lucretius) to mean that given this original chance occurrence, anything—and, especially, any deviation—was possible. “Clinamen” is an absolute absurdity: logically, geometrically, mechanically, and physically absurd. It cannot be obtained through experiments; it joins the virtual to the actual.

12. Micheline Tison-Braun, La Crise de l'humanisme (Paris: Nizet, 1958-67), p. 90.

13. For a discussion of merdre in Jarry's sign system, see Linda K. Stillman, La Théâtralité dans l'œuvre d'Alfred Jarry (York, S.C.: French Literature Publications Company, 1980), pp. 22-26; John Humphries, “The Machine as Metaphor: Jarry's Pompe à merdre,” Romanic Review, LXXIII, 3 (May 1982), 346-54; and Michel Arrivé, Lire Jarry, pp. 59-61, 120.

14. “Il [Ubu-Jarry] croit que le cerveau, dans la décomposition, fonctionne au-delà de la mort et que ce sont ses rêves qui sont le Paradis.” Rachilde, Alfred Jarry ou le Surmâle des lettres (Paris: Grasset, 1928), p. 223.

15. Hadaly, quite beautiful but made of mechanical parts and electrical currents, looks exactly like Alicia Clary, Lord Ewald's mistress, whose body he cherishes but whose base soul he finds intolerable. Edison, Hadaly's inventor, manages to give her an admirable soul thanks to telepathic communication with a certain Mrs. Anderson, herself abandoned for a beautiful soul-mate of Alicia's. Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, L'Eve future (Paris: J. J. Pauvert, 1960).

16. Textual instances of narcissistic pathology appear frequently in Jarry's writing. Symptoms include, among others, acting without feeling (i.e., like a machine), exploitiveness and arrogance of the ego, sexuality in terms of erective potency, acting out and denying reality by means of props such as alcohol, a need for power often accomplished by the possession and control of a machine, fulfillment of talionic impulses, sex as a mechanical act where feelings are aroused by and focused on fantasy partners, heads not connected to bodies in an energetic sense, and so forth. For an in-depth study of pathological and borderline narcissism see Alexander Lowen, M.D., Narcissism; Denial of the True Self (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co.; London: Collier Macmillan Publishers, 1983) and Otto Kernberg, Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissism (New York: Jason Aronson, 1975). For a discussion of narcissism in Jarry, see Linda K. Stillman, Alfred Jarry (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1983), especially chapter seven.