SOURCE: Lobert, Patrick. “Ubu Roi, Jarry's Satire of Naturalism.” French Literature Series 14 (spring 1987): 124-32.

[In the following essay, Lobert argues that Jarry's Ubu Roi is a satirical reaction against the naturalism of nineteenth-century writers such as Emil Zola.]

The comic character is defined by a lack. He is chronically incapable of making meaning of his situation. This is certainly what Bergson implied in his celebrated definition of the comic:

Un homme, qui courait dans la rue, trébuche et tombe: les passants rient. (…) On rit de ce qu'il s'est assis involontairement. (…) Une pierre était peut-être sur le chemin. Il aurait fallu changer d'allure ou tourner l'obstacle. Mais par manque de souplesse, par distraction ou obstination du corps, par un effet de raideur ou de vitesse acquise, les muscles ont continué d'accomplir le même mouvement quand les circonstances demandaient autre chose. C'est pourquoi l'homme est tombé, et c'est de quoi les passants rient.¹

The term “distraction” best explains the comic character's lack, since his deficiency is first and foremost a failure of reading. Simply stated the comic character holds an idea of action which conflicts with the material “circumstances” of his situation. Or to use a term favored by many modern critics, the comic character is incapable of reading the meaning of his situation self-referentially.

Bergson's runner proves illustrative for the case I am making here regarding the nature of the comic. The runner's “obstination” is symptomatic of just such an inability to read self-referentially. In order to maintain continuous movement the runner depends after all upon his idea, upon his representation or mental map of the terrain before him. Such a map affords him possession of that terrain by giving him prior knowledge of all its twists and turns. Yet just as surely as the runner's idea gains him mastery over the path beneath his feet, so the unforeseen obstacle in his way dispossess him suddenly of that course. His stumbling reveals the insufficiency of his representation, and if he is to regain his stride, he must find, through his fall, a way to withdraw his attention from the terrain and to focus it self-reflexively on a reading of his representation.

The comic character, however, is incapable of a self-referential reading of his situation. He learns nothing from his collision with the obstacle. If he picks himself up after his fall, it is only to stumble and fall stupidly once again.

The protagonist of farce is no doubt the most extravagant representative of the comic character's reading failure; he portrays an extreme degree of inelasticity and ideational fixity in the face of an obstacle whose meaning is supremely obvious.

This idea of farce certainly applies to Jarry's Père Ubu. As I intend to show presently, Ubu's status as farcical protagonist derives from his inability to read his situation self-referentially, since in his pursuit of power he holds an idea of power which is blind to the material circumstances which surround the possession of power.

In addition, and most importantly, I will demonstrate that Ubu's search for power satirizes the situation of French theater at the fin de siècle. Ubu roi, composed and staged against the backdrop of the esthetic conflicts pitting bourgeois realism and naturalism against symbolist theatricalism, comments pointedly upon a self-referential lack in naturalist doctrines, doctrines which stumble ineptly as they try to create dramatic meanings all the while ignoring their theatrical milieu.

I will first consider Ubu's quest for power and the reading failure which it portrays before examining how that quest satirizes the esthetic conflicts of French theater at the turn of the century.

Ubu is identified primarily with his enormous “gidouille”, that is to say with his voracious gut. He is a devourer. Power for him means appropriating for himself exclusively the kingdom of Wenceslas. In his voracious hunger for power, everything that is other must fall into his “gidouille” and there be made over into his own substance.

Even having usurped the position of King Wenceslas, Ubu's thirst for power remains unabated. He turns his tyranny against the nobles of the realm announcing that he intends to claim their property and possessions for himself alone. The famous “trappe” into which Ubu forces all resisting noblemen, magistrates and financiers is a fitting counterpoint to his “gidouille”. Having stripped the Polish nobility of its wealth, the hatch in the stage, known as the “trappe”, becomes the repository of any residue of otherness which the devourer cannot distill and transform through his “gidouille” into his own substance.

Ubu's quest for power reaches a point of impasse however. He stumbles in his search for absolute power. At the beginning of act three he complains to Mère Ubu: “De par ma chandelle verte, me voici roi de ce pays. Je me suis flanqué une indigestion et on va m'apporter ma grande capeline”.²

Ubu's appropriative project is here once again metaphorized in the figure of hunger and digestion. But here also his devouring is rebuffed by an obstacle. His indigestion suggests the erosion of his power, or that his “gidouille” has finally run afoul of the “trappe.”

Ubu is beset by a rapid succession of obstacles as his coconspirator Captain Bordure, seeking to avenge a betrayal, enlists the forces of the Czar of Russia to overturn and dethrone him. Prince Bougrelas, son of the assassinated Wenceslas, rallies the Polish people and forces Mère Ubu to flee the palace at Warsaw. Ubu's army is routed and decimated by the combined might of Bordure, the Czar and Bougrelas. In final humiliation Père Ubu is obliged to take refuge in a mountain cave, in the very bowels of the kingdom, where he is assailed by nothing less than a hungry bear. In the figure of the bear, the “trappe” arises in full revolt against the “gidouille”, as it becomes increasingly apparent that Ubu the devourer is in fact the object to be devoured. Ubu sums up his own transition from devourer to devoured in a mocking reminiscence of Corneille's Horace: “Combat des voraces et des coriaces, mais les voraces ont complètement mangé et dévoré les coriaces …” (TU [Tout Ubu], p. 115).

Ubu's quest for absolute power has failed decisively. Caught in the grips of a rebellion, in the jaws of the “trappe”, his devouring “gidouille” remains powerless and paralyzed.

Ubu is quite simply blind to the reality of power. It is through that incurable blindness and confusion as to the reason for his inability to maintain power that we see his failure as a self-referential reader of signs as well as an affirmation of his status as comic character, as the brunt of satirical farce.

Ubu's blindness becomes especially apparent when one considers the action of the play in its totality, since that total action suggests an idea of power which contrasts sharply with Ubu's reductive idea of power.

Just as Ubu's search for power is cast in the metaphor of digestion, so the complete action of Ubu roi from start to finish traces a cycle of digestion from absorption to evacuation. Thus the total action of the play suggests the image of a natural cycle, of a biological exchange of self and other wherein absorption and evacuation, even as they are two separate and distinct actions, remain unified as two poles of a single movement.

It is no doubt the just and fair, though naively trusting, King Wenceslas who guarantees the integrity of the natural cycle which rules Poland. The natural cycle which the royal family oversees involves a solidarity of needs and self-interests which might be described in the biologist's discourse as symbiosis. Symbiosis in the biologist's frame of reference evokes those mutually advantageous partnerships formed by organisms of the natural world wherein the self, even as it absorbs the other for its own welfare, simultaneously surrenders itself to the other for the welfare of the other. In a natural cycle commanded by the symbiotic idea of power, power is not exclusively the absorption of the other, but it is equally the gift of self to the other as the self discovers continuity and movement by letting itself be bound in a kind of transcendental self.

Ubu, of course, does not hold the symbiotic idea of power. His idea of power is best described as predatorial, since he seeks to absorb the other without surrendering any of himself. Upon being awarded the rank of count of Sandomir as recompense for his faithful service to the realm of Wenceslas, Ubu seeks to absolutize his gain by overthrowing the king and appropriating the kingdom for himself alone. That is to say that Ubu the predator seeks to absolutize the absorptive phase of the natural cycle. Yet his vain project stumbles and falters at every turn. He is incapable of reading, self-referentially, the folly of such an idea of power. Absorption implies evacuation. Possession implies loss. The power of the “trappe” must inevitably assert itself against the inelastic force of the “gidouille”, and so also must Ubu be purged from Poland.

Ultimately it is the relationship between Père and Mère Ubu moreso than the relationship between Père Ubu and the Polish nobility, that sums up the devourer's predatorial idea of power. It is Mère Ubu after all who initiates her husband's appropriative project by painting for him in the most seductive terms the meaning of power: “A ta place, ce cul, je voudrais l'installer sur un trone. Tu pourrais augmenter indéfiniment tes richesses, manger fort souvent de l'andouille et rouler carosse par les rues” (TU, p. 35).

After Père Ubu seizes power, Mère Ubu, it is true, does make something of an effort to moderate her husband's appropriative furor urging him to pacify Bougrelas and Bordure, advice which Ubu, of course, rejects out of hand. But Mère Ubu really has ambitions of her own to fulfill. In those scenes showing Mère Ubu robbing her unsuspecting husband of gold, and riches, we recognize that she pushed him to win “des richesses”, “de l'andouille”, and “une carosse” less for himself than for herself.

In a final scene of the play, Mère Ubu lays something of a “trappe” for her “gros polichinelle” who is pondering the reasons for his sudden state of penury. Costumed as a divine apparition, she stages an action whose purpose is to force her husband to forgive her all she has stolen from him. That is to say that the purpose of her little “play within a play” whose uncomprehending spectator is her obtuse mate, is precisely that of entrapment. The divine apparition presenting herself to Père Ubu clothed as a symbiotic other promising fulfillment and forgiveness through self-surrender and contrition, is in reality the predatorial other disguised as a divine object the better to lure and entrap her prey.

While I intend to return to Mère Ubu's mise en scène a little later when I take up the issue of how Ubu roi satirizes the esthetic doctrines of French theater at the fin de siècle, it is sufficient to note at this point that Ubu's identity as a protagonist of farce is most evident in these final scenes. It is clear that his predatorial idea of power can never deliver material power but only the Punch and Judy farce which is the destiny of Mère and Père Ubu. In the play's last scene representing Père Ubu fully evacuated from Poland, traveling aboard a ship headed for France, we see clearly the failure of Ubu's inelastic approach to signs. Ubu declares his intention once in France to get himself appointed “Master of Phynances” of that land. Having learned nothing from his untimely exit from Poland, he will begin his predatorial strategy in France all over again only to stumble blindly, farcically, against the symbiotic reality of power.

I will now turn to the question put forth at the beginning of this essay concerning the manner in which Ubu roi satirizes some of the issues of dramatic theory debated at the end of the nineteenth century.

Artaud articulated one of the major themes of modern theater when he affirmed the need to establish “direct communication … between spectator and spectacle”:

Nous supprimons la scène et la salle qui sont remplacées par une sorte de lieu scénique, sans cloisonnement. (…) Une communication directe sera rétablie entre le spectateur et le spectacle, entre l'acteur et le spectateur, du fait que le spectateur placé au milieu de l'action est enveloppé et sillonné par elle.³

Artaud demonstrates here a self-referential reading of the meaning of theatrical space. The traditional spectator to whom Artaud offers his ideal, might be understood as one whose continuity of communication and action is broken by the obstacle of the proscenium. Or to extend Bergson's metaphor linking the runner and the comic character, the situation of the spectator in the theater might be described as that of the actor of a material theatrum mundi, dispossessed suddenly of his stage and forced to read self-reflexively his map of time and space. Theatrical representation is an attempt to reestablish movement and communication, and the meaning of the play lies in the power it wields to make the spectator conscious of the way in which his idea of action can both impede and advance possession of the communication he seeks. Thus Ubu's search for power and his inability to become fully conscious of the function of his idea of power, suggest an essentially theatrical metaphor. Ubu can be seen to figure the theatrical spectator, in this case the naturalist spectator who, like the protagonist of farce, is incapable of making meaning of his situation due to his inability to read the meaning of that situation self-referentially.

Ubu roi must be read in the context of the esthetic battles of the fin de siècle which pitted naturalistic stage representation against the theatricalized and conventional stagings of the symbolists. Ubu roi brings the naturalist-symbolist opposition into sharp focus. For the symbolist Jarry, naturalism is essentially farce, since it remains willfully blind to the manifestly theatrical environment in which its search for dramatic meaning takes place.

This deficiency of naturalism can be seen in the writings of Zola, the main proponent in France of theories of naturalism in the theater. Zola stressed that actors should carry themselves on stage as they would do in real life, and that they do so in response to a naturalistic, that is to say, non-theatrical, milieu. Any hint of a theatrical milieu should be evicted from the theater by the use of realistic stage settings whose sole aim is to oblige the actor to use realistic movement, diction and gesture. It is clear that this naturalist's program, so out of place in the theatrical environment, has much in common with Père Ubu who in his realist's “chapeau melon”, is so clumsy and ill at ease in the world of Shakespeare.

The spectator is, after all, in his essence the representative of real “slice of life” action in the theater. The naturalist's program would reduce the autonomy and the essential otherness of stage action to the spectator's idea of “real life” action. Thus the naturalist spectator, much like Ubu, would absorb and transform autonomous stage action into his own “real life” idea, into his own essence as spectator. For the naturalist spectator the auditorium must be something akin to Ubu's “gidouille”, for this spectator would reestablish communication by devouring the stage spectacle all the while consigning any irreducible residue of theatrical otherness to a kind of backstage “trappe”.

Yet even Zola eventually conceded, however begrudgingly, the irreducible otherness of stage spectacle, the autonomy of the theatrical against which the naturalist's project was ultimately powerless:

Il serait absurde de croire qu'on pourra transporter la nature telle quelle sur les planches, planter de vrais arbres, avoir de vraies maisons, éclairées par de vrais soleils. Dès lors les conventions s'imposent, il faut accepter les illusions plus ou moins parfaites à la place des réalités. Mais cela est tellement hors de discussion, qu'il est inutile d'en parler.⁴

Zola's statement here betrays something of the essence of Bergson's comic character. Zola would extricate himself from the theatrical “trappe” by simply refusing to acknowledge its obvious hold over him. His rather inelastic naturalism refuses to read the meaning of theatrical space self-referentially, since its esthetic logic depends on a willful blindness to the theatrical milieu. If theatrical conventions are “hors de discussion”, they remain nevertheless the most urgent question. Here the naturalist's “gidouille” seems to have stumbled headlong into the symbolist's “trappe”.

Against this naturalist's blindness, Jarry's notes for the staging of Ubu roi are a clear affirmation of theatrical action and décor. Jarry wrote:

(…) vous verrez des portes s'ouvrir sur des plaines de neige sous un ciel bleu, des cheminées garnies de pendules se fendre afin de servir de portes, et des palmiers verdir au pied des lits, pour que broutent de petits éléphants perchés sur des étagères.⁵

To suppress any suggestion of everyday reality in Ubu roi, Jarry insisted that his actors should wear masks, use marionnette-style gestures and speak in a monotone. Thus the actors in this theatrical milieu were urged to use theatrical, that is to say non-realistic, gestures and to employ theatrical diction, “the sort of voice”, wrote Jarry, “the mouth of the mask would make if the muscles of its lips could move.”⁶

The surreal milieu which Jarry imagined for Ubu roi asserts the integrity and autonomy of imaginative and theatrical action unrestrained by the need to imitate an idea of reality. Such surreality functions much like the “trappe” which engulfs Père Ubu. It aims to “de-realize” the naturalist actor thus counteracting the “de-theatricalizing” of acting which the naturalist milieu sought to enforce. And perhaps most importantly, just as the symbolist's theatrical milieu “de-realizes” the actor, it also challenges the reductive idea of reality which the naturalist spectator would use to apprehend and appropriate for himself the autonomous action of stage spectacle.

I stated earlier that the relationship between Mère and Père Ubu was a central image conveying Ubu's predatorial idea of power. In the final scene depicting Mère Ubu the actress staging a little farce whose uncomprehending spectator is her slow-witted husband, that relationship takes on an added theatrical dimension. The relationship reveals the satire of naturalist drama implicit in Ubu roi.

That satire comes into sharp focus upon considering that Mère Ubu can be seen to be something of a parody of Zola's quintessential actress, Nana. Nana is the dazzling theatrical illusion, the “mouche d'or” who mesmerizes and blinds her spectator the better to entrap and exploit him. Nana, the “blond Vénus”, hides her predatorial essence behind an enchanting, seductive surface.

In her little “divine apparition” farce Mère Ubu also attempts to convince her husband that she is every bit the equal of the “Vénus de Capoue”, the purpose of her mise en scène being to catch Père Ubu in a “trappe”, to ensnare him in a net of illusion which might force him to forgive her all she has stolen from him. Here Nana and her symbolist parody Mère Ubu incarnate the action of the “trappe”, of autonomous stage spectacle as conceived by the theatrical doctrines of the naturalists. These doctrines characterize the action of stage illusion as a seductive lure whose hidden objective is to rob and exploit the spectator.

Yet just as the predatory actor-spectator exchange implied in the relationship between Mère and Père Ubu exists within the larger symbiotic action of the total play, so the actor-spectator exchange of theater itself exists within a wider context, a wider context which frames the totality of the theatrum mundi.

For the symbolist Jarry, the seduction of stage illusion is only apparent theft. For him the force of the stage “trappe” must resist the tyranny of the spectator's “gidouille”. Insofar as the illusion of spectacle is a seductive lure and bait, its entrapment nonetheless implies a kind of paradoxical freedom. “Vous verrez des portes s'ouvrir sur des plaines de neige sous un ciel bleu”, wrote Jarry. Even as it ensnares the “trappe” aims to open a doorway beyond the farce of a reductive naturalism, beyond his predatorial idea of meaning, to possession of the “direct communication” which he seeks in and through the theater.

Notes

1. Henri Bergson, Le Rire, (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1967), p. 7.

2. Alfred Jarry, Tout Ubu, (Paris: Livre de poche, 1962), p. 66. Further references to this edition are given parenthetically under the abbreviation TU.

3. Antonin Artaud, Le Théâtre et son double. (Paris: Gallimard, 1965), p. 146.

4. Emile Zola, “Le Naturalisme au théâtre”, dans Oeuvres complètes, (Paris: Cercle du livre précieux, 1968), p. 288.

5. Alfred Jarry, “Discours d'Alfred Jarry”, dans Tout Ubu, (Paris: Livre de poche, 1962), p. 21.

6. Marvin Carlson, Theories of the Theater, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), p. 292.