[In the following essay, Edwards provides an in-depth discussion of Jarry's early work and his literary influences.]

Clown? Practical joker? Nihilist? For many, Jarry has been the trickster of modern literary history. He is primarily remembered for creating Ubu, a monster often thought to be a force beyond his control, and in consequence Jarry is imagined as the victim of his creation, as a man made over into a puppet. In the face of this persistent attitude, revived at intervals by unscrupulous publishers, an increasing number of scholars, gravitating around the inspirational work of the College of 'Pataphysics, have been diligently editing the individual works, supplying a broader view, and painting the portrait of Jarry the writer. Despite the legendary anecdotes, which bring to mind Mozart's exuberant pranks following the completion of a work he knew to be great, Jarry spent his short life doing virtually nothing but reading and writing. Familiarity with Jarry's life and œuvre makes it easier to see what he was not. The time is long overdue to break another taboo and put forward the idea that Jarry was also a poet.

Alfred Jarry (1873-1907) was six when he moved with his mother from the Mayenne to neighbouring Brittany, staying first in Saint-Brieuc, then attending the Rennes Lycée where he was taught physics by Félix-Frédéric Hébert, the original for Père Ubu. He finally settled in Paris in 1891, considering himself an adopted Breton by virtue of his childhood. He never published his juvenilia (1885-90), in which he imitates the (French) Romantics, but saved it, later copying some out neatly and calling it “Ontogénie” (Ontogenesis), with a possible pun on “the birth of a genius”. From the Romantics he derived his taste for the destructive forces of nature and for the fantastic, from the hurricane to Walpurgisnacht. From Hugo's Les Djinns he learnt the poetic effect to be gained from picture poems and page-layout. In addition to Romanticism, the child Jarry was influenced by Molière's comic spirit, which he likewise adopted; the combined result was mock-heroic epics, or mini-epics, in classical alexandrines. The best example of this is his verse drama The Antliad, a battle of shit-pumps, and of schoolboys armed with ink-pots. Scatological and irreverent in the style Ubu would later come to stand for, it should, however, not hide from view the contemporaneous La Seconde Vie, ou Macaber, Jarry's first mature poem and a turning-point in his production. Its hero, Aldern (“Alfred” in Breton), goes one step further than Goethe's Faust in that he actually drinks the phial of poison and penetrates into hell: from this experience he learns a “deep wisdom” for the future conduct of his life. Whether this poem was an account of a mystical experience, the recollection of a dream or sheer bravado, Jarry at fifteen was projecting himself as a poet-seer.

In Paris he went to the Henri IV Lycée, where he met Léon-Paul Fargue (the “Ablou” of Haldernablou) and was taught philosophy by Henri Bergson. Having hesitated between the sciences and the humanities, he finally opted for literature and sat the entrance exam for the prestigious École Normale Supérieure, intending to be a teacher. He was rejected three years in succession, and moreover failed to get a degree (“Passed with the grade: ELIMINATED”, in the words of his certificate). Ironically, he had in the meantime been publishing Symbolist poems, articles and reviews in the established and newer Paris journals. Jarry's career as a “man of letters” had already begun. He followed the progress of Symbolist theatre, and participated in the first French production of Ibsen's Peer Gynt, rewriting some lines of the translation and playing the Troll King himself, until, in 1896, he succeeded in getting Ubu Roi staged. He also attended Mallarmé's Tuesday salons and those of the Mercure de France, the review and publishing house run by Alfred Vallette and his wife, the novelist Rachilde. He frequented two erudite writers in particular, Marcel Schwob and Remy de Gourmont, who introduced him to works of literature and art from periods and countries (notably Britain) likely to interest him.

Jarry's career as a poet strictly speaking lasted just two years and resulted in only one collection of poems, Les Minutes de sable mémorial (1894). The first edition of 216 copies is what the French call an “artist's book”: the typography is carefully calculated, the paper precious, and there are woodcuts in different colours. The text is given plenty of “poetic space”, that is to say plenty of white paper to let it breathe. It should be approached slowly, like a series of allegorical illuminations in an old parchment that tell their own secret story.

Jarry's poetic forms in Les Minutes are mostly traditional. He employs alexandrines or octosyllabics, sometimes heterometric lines, rarely the “impair”, the line with an odd syllable count which had recently been made famous by Verlaine. There is virtually no free verse, a still more recent invention, for Jarry preferred not to relinquish the magic of fixed forms, rhyme and number (French verse works by counting syllables, including mute “e”s). Nor does the poet borrow from oral expression; on the contrary, Jarry even went so far as to pronounce mute “e”s in everyday conversation. For the eye there is a picture poem, and for the ear, resoundingly assonant metrical prose (as employed by Catulle Mendès before him, in Lieds de France, and Paul Fort after him, in Ballades). The several passages of strictly metred prose are the only novel features as regards form (and have in one instance been translated here into “trochaic prose”, a corresponding novelty). Various typographical possibilities are also explored: serif and sanserif titles and sub-titles answer one another, while ideograms conjure up the printing practice of the sixteenth century (following Gourmont's example in Le Château singulier). Marinetti, his admirer, and Apollinaire, his friend, on being made aware of such aesthetic use of typography, would seek to use it to break with tradition, whereas Jarry was more interested in folklore than in the avant-garde: he was a friend of the Pont-Aven painters, had been first published as an art critic, and now in his poetry he described Gerhard-Louis Munthe's paintings of Norse legends, and the “primitive” work of Paul Gauguin.

For all its traditional and folkloric elements, Les Minutes is a typical fin-de-siècle production, recognisably Idealist (in the limited sense of “anti-Naturalist”) by its Gothic and fairy-tale motifs, reinforced with Celtic mythology and the Breton landscapes of Jarry's childhood. The vocabulary is Decadent, full of Latinate compounds, resuscitated etymologies, Rabelaisian and regional words, but also scientific terms taken from botany, entomology, zoology and mathematics. It is in his use of scientific thought and expression that Jarry sought to distinguish his writing from the French literary tradition of his peers. The established Symbolist authors and their sources are plundered by the twenty-year-old for their linguistic beauties and stylistic opportunities. Jarry does not get the tone quite right, however, when he tries to imitate Lautréamont, despite a common interest in science and “severe mathematics”, because the characteristic style of Maldoror depends on the hero's single-minded search for the expression of evil and a wholesale defiance of God, neither of which Jarry pursues systematically. Haldernablou, his homosexual play, is written in a conspicuously borrowed idiom, and although its Prolegomena hit a convincing note the play as a whole may give the impression of being a mere show of style, notwithstanding its autobiographical elements. Paralipomena III is written in a style that echoes Lautréamont's parody of popular novels, but employed by Jarry to describe a dream that resembles a play by Maeterlinck. The mixture of tones is impossible, since Maeterlinck depends on effect, and Lautréamont on critical distance. The result may set the reader's teeth on edge, but that is of no importance when mixing elements in a crucible.

Received opinion smells a rat. The mixture of styles, even within a single text, coupled with the absence of clear allegiance to any of the literary schools within the wider Symbolist movement (psychological, idéo-réaliste, Roman, Anarchist, etc.) does not help Jarry to stand out as a “recognisable” author in the market-place. A painter, for example, who exhibits thirty dissimilar canvases, sells few; a painter who shows thirty examples of the same thing has good sales, because he has a “recognisable” style. It is all too easy to conclude that Les Minutes was “everything and nothing”; certainly Jarry's early books play upon themselves, since his writing is highly metatextual and relativistic, but that he wrote pastiches has always been argued out of hand and lacks positive evidence. Even the excrement he heaped upon Pierre Loti and a few others (in Faustroll) is not pastiche, and nor is it parody. Might the situation, in fact, be the opposite, that Jarry does not indulge in parody at all?

There is something necessarily obvious about parody, and no individual author is thus ridiculed by Jarry in Les Minutes. He certainly made use of the Symbolists' techniques, but did not seize upon their tics and exaggerate them to humorous effect. Jarry's modus operandi is to combine opposites in a scientific way, like an alchemist, or a zoologist in the style of Leonardo da Vinci, who grafted the wings of a dragonfly on to a lizard. And so Jarry tried out the various schools … in combination.

A great many new “-isms” were proclaimed in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and a burgeoning poet could be forgiven for having done his apprenticeship in a number of them. Téodor de Wyzewa, in a review of Marcel Schwob's Mimes, starts with an anecdote about a young writer who wishes to compose something in a fashionable style about a pretty redhead and who, being a little slow to compose and literary styles being quick to change, finds himself obliged to imitate in turn an epic poem modelled on Victor Hugo, a Naturalist novel, a series of complaints in free verse, a psychological study, a symbol, an essay on the Self, and a neo-Christian short story (Mercure de France, July 1893, pp. 193-202). Jarry, accepted into the coteries of the Mercure and other journals directed by the new generation, wrote in the styles that were then fashionable.

A closer examination of Les Minutes reveals certain impurities. The Funeral Lieder are laments written in the metred prose of Jarry's patron Catulle Mendès, but even stricter in form, and which take up the themes from two poetic generations ago (the Romantics: Aloysius Bertrand, Achim von Arnim, Petrus Borel, Victor Hugo …). The fashionably occult or magical elements of Three Antiques are in fact only given lip-service, being merely the “furniture” of a memento mori in three tableaux; and the apparently Decadent alliterations, rather than being comic exaggeration are more likely to have been modelled on medieval Latin poems, which were much appreciated by Gourmont. The Aristophanean drama Puppet Play is ensconced in anomalously precious prose, and the music in its interval, Phonograph (a Symbolist exercise in which Mallarméan “suggestion” is supposed to replace description), has a modern mechanical contraption as its poetic subject, in the wake of Villiers de l'Isle-Adam. Following this, the closet drama returns Ubu to the scene, but suddenly a Platonic monologue describes him as the symbol of perfection; the Platonic Form then seats itself on the toilet. In his Lullaby for the dying, Jarry employs liturgical distichs for his black scenario, weaving between Gothic morbidity on the one hand, and the innocence of Max Elskamp and Saint-Pol-Roux on the other. In his Opium dream he borrows from all the “authorised” sources (Villiers, De Quincey, Gautier, Schwob, Baudelaire), even slipping in a reference to the occultists, before the personal themes of guilt and bereavement return (with surprisingly Freudian twists). The ecclesiastical architecture leads to The Regularity of the Reliquary, which, while being an overt homage to Saint-Pol-Roux's shapely ideo-realist picture poems, also seems to be a silent re-creation of De Quincey's Savannah-la-Mar (in Suspiria de Profundis). Jarry's Tapestries are descriptions of paintings from the new school heralded by Munthe, but are inaccurate in their details and careless in their interpretation of Norse mythology. Without reproductions of the originals, the scenes are impossible to reconstruct because the reader cannot know what is description and what is metaphor. The folk-tale atmosphere is there to build up a sense of superstitious fear before Jarry's incongruous introduction of monera at the very end (these were the putative origin of the chain of life according to a recent scientific controversy). The monera give way to the Five Senses, in which Jarry employs the Jesuitic technique of describing the sensations of each sense in turn, as recommended in Ignatius Loyola's Spiritual Exercises (famously exploited in Huysmans' A rebours), to describe here not the life of Christ but rather something which resembles artificial insemination (or worse). There follows a poem dedicated to the painter most venerated by the Symbolists, Gauguin, but Jarry's Man with the Axe is more a definition of art than a straight description of the painting. Two related poems were originally to accompany this: Ia Orana Maria uses Elskamp's Catholic tone to conjure up Tahitian “primitivism”, and Manao Tùpapaù the almost animistic experience of Death's presence—a return to the autobiographical, perhaps too directly, for the poem was withheld from the book. The sources for Haldernablou and Caesar-Antichrist, too numerous to mention here, are discussed in the notes.

From this general overview a pattern may be seen to emerge, in which styles are juxtaposed like complementary colours, to bring each other out. If the pattern consists mostly of experimentation, one element remains in the crucible after the fireworks: the autobiographical. The notes at the end of this volume are in part intended to amplify this aspect, and in particular to draw out the theme of mourning from under its cloak. As a book about loss, mourning and memory, Les Minutes is entirely serious.

The poems about loss had, as their indirect object, Jarry's mother. “Indirect”, because the literary treatment of death is an inevitable rite of passage for a poet, especially one imbued with the lore of Brittany; and indirect also because Jarry had written about death long before having to deal with it in real life. His mother had watched over him during a serious five-month illness, and died shortly afterwards, in the spring of 1893. Did he believe that he was responsible for her death, that he had killed her? The themes of loss and guilt, so much a staple of Christian poetics, are at the centre of Jarry's reading at the time, especially of English literature. He translated Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and read De Quincey's Confessions and Suspiria de Profundis. Poe's Raven, a favourite of the Symbolists and translated by Mallarmé, appears to have been a model of poetic structure for Jarry, with its hammered rhythm used to reinforce the feeling of fatality and never-ending remembrance. Jarry's interest in death, or rather in the transition from the wide-awake dream to death (Lullaby, Funeral Lieder III, …), is contemporary with Maeterlinck's plays, such as La Mort de Tintagilles and L'Intruse, which are, from beginning to end, an enactment of the awareness of death's approach. Death, for Jarry, is “the concentrated recapturing of Thought” (Prologal Act) and his recurring symbol for the inexpressible, as developed beyond its status as a subject of melancholy to become for him a symbol of the poetic process itself—another attempt to confound two opposites.

Jarry's collection is also a treasure trove of metatextuality and manifestos. Les Minutes opens with an orthodox, slightly schoolboyish statement of allegiance to Mallarmé's creed of “suggestion”, polysemy and difficulty: it will be up to the reader, he writes, to “dissect” his “diamonds”, these words that are the “polyhedra of ideas”. His foreword, his “Lintel”, presupposes the entrance to an edifice, maybe even a cathedral, but the reader soon discovers that the chapels it contains are heterogeneous. The accumulation of genres—poems, poetic prose, theatre, engravings—makes the reader wonder if Jarry was not in fact searching for a form of Total Art, a marriage of the arts, but a marriage of paired opposites, the grotesque with the sublime. Hugo, in his celebrated Preface to Cromwell, had called for the grotesque and the sublime to alternate, but Jarry's response to this is extreme: the sublime depiction of bereaved love in The Regularity of the Reliquary falls to the grotesque scene in which Ubu is about to be cuckolded in the toilet, not to mention his stuffing his Conscience into his suitcase.

Despite the fact that leading Symbolists proclaimed Les Minutes a masterpiece, when the book came out the reviewers suspected it was a piece of mystification (like Adoré Floupette's tongue-in-cheek Les Déliquescences). Today it is almost universally frowned upon by dons and students alike, unable to make it fit the absolute criterion of seriousness: internal coherence. Those who consider Les Minutes to be a parody of Symbolism rather than a product of it, usually refer to the inclusion of Ubu as proof that the book as a whole has been sapped from the inside. But it is Ubu above all who unites the sublime and the ridiculous: he is the sovereign Self of the writer, Caesar-Antichrist, the creating Word-God, the temptation of absolute possibility, the Platonic sphere of perfection, and the black sun of writing's self-reference.

Les Minutes virtually disappeared during the twentieth century, and this may be explained by a more serious objection. The book lacks “a sense of other people” (Wallace Stevens), a factor which has become the condition of poetry amongst poets over the last century. Although Jarry copied down every word of Bergson's eclectic lectures, Nietzsche (taught at Rennes before the German philosopher was available in French translation) had already impressed him deeply, and the egoism of the Self seems to have struck a deeper chord. Gourmont's essays on Idealism, which argue that the radical subjectivity of experience should be reflected in poetry, must likewise have been close to Jarry's concerns, since we find echoes of the idea in his manifestos Visions of the Present and Future and To Be and To Live.

Jarry succeeded in pushing Symbolism to new limits while at the same time anchoring it to traditional forms and themes. He drew its strands together, seeking contrasts and paradox, turning its energies inwards and against themselves. He did not “explode” Symbolism so much as implode it, producing a concentrated creative chaos which either resists the reader, or allows him to grow his own crystals in its super-saturated solution. It is, as we say, a hard act to follow.