[In the following essay, Hubert examines the significance of food and the act of eating in Ubu Roi, arguing that Ubu—and by extension, the petit-bougeoisie he represents—is the ultimate consumer in a world dominated by and reducible to food and human refuse.]

Alfred Jarry is one of the heroes in Roger Shattuck's Banquet Years, a lively evocation of “la belle époque” in which the barriers between literature and life are drastically diminished and where anecdotes are rapidly metamorphosed into criticism.¹ Shattuck, who considered the banquet a supreme rite in these years, informs his readers that even the poverty-stricken Jarry contributed his share:

In these drafty dirt-floored premises he decided to repay his social obligations by throwing a banquet of his own … Jarry had caught a fish for every plate, and had laid in on credit enough wine and absinthe for a regiment … The banquet ran its intemperate course from general conversation to demonstrations of how mightily the guests could make the river resound with shouted commands of “forward march.”

(p. 213)

Such eating conventions and culinary rituals, in parodied or satirized forms, found echoes in Jarry's works in general and in Ubu roi in particular.

The play is “filled” with expressions which, directly or indirectly, refer to food, to the act of eating. Jarry, in his famous drawing, represented his Ubu with a huge stomach and legs sturdy enough to support it.² He stressed his corporality, his obesity which, as the play tells us, results from excessive nutrition. Voracity, not spiritual or moral values, characterizes the protagonist who never misses an opportunity to indulge, who never practices abstinence. The play refers to several meals, some overtly represented, some primarily created by linguistic means. Act I, scene 2, known as the banquet scene, parodies mainly Macbeth, where the usurper's ritualistic banquet is disrupted by the unappetizing presence of Banquo's shade. In Ubu roi, the banquet scene also presents an apparent stasis, a peaceful if plethoric stage which precedes cascading acts of violence, a transition from oral exchange to physical aggression, the killing of the king and two of his sons. The banquet scene primarily focuses on the act of devouring and on nutrition at the expense of social intercourse. Ubu, an impatient character who cannot wait to become rich and powerful again, who having lost the throne of Aragon must seize the Polish crown as soon as his wife “stuffs” this ambition into his skull, is incapable of waiting for his guests. He must know the menu in order to skip the preliminaries and devour the “pièce de résistance” without further ado. He bites into a whole chicken, then consumes much of the veal intended for an army of guests. Jarry out of admiration for Rabelais endowed his protagonist with a truly Gargantuan appetite. But Rabelais' vigorous and enthusiastic giants have little else in common with Jarry's simplistic and pot-bellied consumer. Contrary to the 16th-century hero whose appetite incorporates all aspects of life, including the spiritual, the modern character is strictly limited to his gut. Rabelais' famous “Trinch” is not a statement expressing sybaritic philosophy but epitomizes the search for knowledge, truth and understanding of reality. It contrasts with Ubu's instinctual existence. The Oracle's invitation is an injunction to endorse the hero's voyages as necessary ordeals in a protracted quest. Conversely, Ubu's orders and insults lead to a cowardly retreat to France.

Ubu, as we have stated, feasts in solitary squalor before the arrival of his guests who must feed on leftovers, first made impalatable and later poisoned. Most of the meal consists of meat; and Ubu, the epitome of fleshiness, fills himself with flesh. The eaters and the eaten are by various devices equated and indeed assimilated to one another throughout the play. Ubu is comparable to a container that needs to be crammed in order to function and even to survive. Being overstuffed in no way discourages him from stuffing himself even more; and when he temporarily ceases to eat, he fears that others will turn him back into food, which is both his end and his origin. He is, before his guests arrive, starved before he goes into battle. Jarry parodies many a protagonist whose tragic flaw manages to surface at the very beginning of the play.

The physical sight of the victuals—“Une table splendide est dressée”—provides an aesthetic spectacle concerning which “le père” and “la mère” Ubu immediately clash. Ubu by his bestial and disproportionate appetite, by the plebeian insults he hurls at his ugly spouse, destroys the ritual and the etiquette that should accompany festive occasions. Molière's Le Bourgeois gentilhomme enables us to establish a telling contrast. Monsieur Jourdain offers a sumptuous dinner for the benefit of Dorante and Dorimène. The count verbalizes the menu so as to transform dishes into a display of elegant, erudite and heraldic language.³ Dorante suggests that any flaw in the festive dinner would destroy the rules of harmony required of all the arts. Jourdain in his attempt to graduate to the nobility has taken dance, speech and music lessons before subsidizing this aristocratic tête-à-tête. Conversely, dissonance predominates in Ubu roi without any reference to norms. After the arrival of Capitaine Bordure and the other guests, “la mère Ubu” condescends to announce the menu in two installments. The first, abounding in meat courses, begins with “soupe polonaise” and ends with “charlotte russe.” Both of these dishes consisting of mashed up ingredients obliquely refer to political strife between these neighboring nations. In the second installment, an orderly menu, proceeding from soup to dessert, is no longer recognizable, while fancy, prestigious and allegorical titles disappear completely. However, the presence of minced ingredients, not usually offered for consumption, mark the two bills of fare. Both sets of enumerations allude less to tantalizing food than to violence, cruelty and destruction. The term “bombe” heightens the ambiguity between food and warfare, whereas “chou-fleur à la merdre” crowns the systematic reversal between temptation and repulsiveness. Combinations of various dishes such as “croupion de dinde” and “Chou-fleur à la merdre” confirm the scatological aspects relating to food.

“Merdre” repeated throughout the play defies “bienséant” theatrical language and the dignity of the dramatic hero. The complex implications of the term “merdre” have been commented on by Linda Klieger Stillman in her Alfred Jarry.⁴ According to her, “merdre,” “Phynance” and “physique” consolidate the mythical existence of Ubu. The presence of “merdre” in the menu presents a defiance of the adult world but also and primarily a glorification of anality. What is eaten and what is evacuated in the course are no longer distinguishable, and the various stages of nutrition are collapsed into one. Ubu, still at the anal stage, wants to reduce if not eliminate his non-eating moments, his non-eating activities. This explains his opposition to the ritual duration of a banquet, to the interaction of culinary and verbal occasions. The Ubus reverse the accepted ritual not only by the strangeness of their menus and by the coldness of their welcome, but by their unwillingness to let their guests enjoy the food. As if the names of the dishes would not offer enough discouragement, Ubu has to persuade his guests that the food tastes bad and to wreck it by throwing a poisonous broom on the entire spread. Guests are poisoned or ushered out; Ubu, having eaten his fill and no longer anxious to grab another chop, must needs seize a throne. He once again will be way ahead of the game, for he turns cutlets into cutlasses capable of devastating his guests with the exception of the happy few whom he needs in his political conspiracy. Linda Klieger Stillman, stressing Ubu's sadism, states: “His sticks, hooks, pistols, scissors and horns à merdre as well as à phynances and à physique serve as instruments of torture to extract payment and thus to procure him gastric satisfaction” (op. cit., p. 49). The dinner table does not imply in Jarry's play an isolated gathering, circumscribable in time and place. The dishes as well as those who partake belong to the world of belligerence. Ubu does not hesitate to bite into anything even if it is not listed on the menu. He considers all materials and all surfaces potentially comestible; and any instrument can serve either to make anything whatever edible or to sharpen his teeth for the next meal, which looms in the immediate future.

Among the dishes, real and fantastic, named in the play, Ubu favors the “andouille”; his royal dream consists in having his every wish for andouilles fulfilled on the spot. Jarry appears to hark back to 17th-century burlesque literature where epic dimensions are drastically curtailed while sensuality, usually erotic, and greed for vulgar or common food replace the heroic behavior normally ascribed to protagonists. The following lines by Charles d'Assoucy are particularly revealing in this context:

Mon Anchise, mon Adonis,
Mon petit cœur, mon petit fils,
Ma fraissure, ma petite oie,
Ma petite andouille de Troye,
Malgré mari sot et badin
Je suis à toi tripe et boudin.(5)

“Andouille,” repeated again and again though not as frequently as “merdre” denotates another meat dish: a skin stuffed with tripe. An “andouille” can pass for the true image and symbol of Ubu. When “la mère Ubu” calls him by this word, it would seem to function not only as an insult meaning a stupid person, but as a description. Moreover, the fact that the inside of an “andouille” consists of chopped up guts repeats ad nauseam the identity of eating, digesting and evacuating. As the “andouille” becomes the promise and the reward for the usurpation of the crown of Poland, we can surmise that Ubu fails to rise up in his quest for and his ascent to the throne. He assumes a debased status not only by reason of his foul deeds and his stupidity, but as an “andouille” he is bereft of a head and reduced to his intestines.

Jarry, in order to establish equations between human and animal, man and food, does not rely merely on words such as “andouille” and “merdre.” Repeatedly Ubu threatens to “décerveler” or to exercize an “extraction de la cervelle,” to commit acts of cruelty which would officially and openly deprive a human being of his brain and degrade him to bestiality. After threatening to blow out his wife's brains, he ironically asks: “Cela va-t-il, andouille?” Ubu in a way always provides increments for brainless flesh.

The appearance of the bear corroborates the equation between man and beast, between consumption and consumerism. The bear upon its arrival arouses fear by its hugeness rather than by its ferocity. Ubu, after having stuffed all the containers of his treasury and amassed every kind of provision, is afraid of a creature more voluminous than himself that threatens to devour him as he has in a sense devoured the state. He who has so often sharpened his teeth in order to bite and chew more effectively, he who has given orders to empty heads of their contents and to turn his opponents into victuals must now confront a monster with teeth bigger and sharper than his own. His panic is so great that he has recourse to prayer. In Ubu, religious allusions and cursing are never far removed from each other. After all, the Bible, or so Ubu seems to think, specializes in violence, notably the beheading of John the Baptist. Biblical martyrs can provide models for Ubuesque behavior if we place the emphasis on physical mayhem and substitute the chopping and mincing of meat for spiritual and ethereal values. Suffering has been ruled out with the exception of the bear's shrieks of pain, which go unnoticed in a world where our comic hero strives exclusively to fill up vessels, to turn his dominion into the too, too solid and sullied flesh. It is not Ubu's prayer but Cotice's explosions that bring an end to the bear whose death will of course coincide with the preparation of still another feast. Just as Ubu has not been able to shift from his ordinary culinary taste to that of a splendid banquet, so here he fails to acknowledge that the grizzly is cut up, quartered and quite dead. When he had first spotted the bear he had screamed: “Me voilà mangé.” As his fear refuses to abate, he cannot readily fathom his own reinstatement as eater. “La mère Ubu,” who so often opposes her husband by word and deed, here shares his fright of becoming the predator's dinner.

The bear turns into a haunting vision for Ubu. Confusion between the raw and the cooked, the quick and the dead dominates the hero. Ubu transforms the monster into a wild fantasm, at once the image of his preying self and that of his other, the drive of hunger and the fear of destruction: “Quel ventre, messieurs! les grecs y auraient été plus à l'aise que dans le cheval de bois, et peu s'en est fallu, chers amis, que nous n'ayons pu aller vérifier de nos propres yeux sa capacité intérieure” (Tout Ubu, p. 107). The animal, seen at once as the enemy and the self, remains alive in Ubu's consciousness, whether he eats it hot or cold, whether he finds its flesh palatable or repugnant. The bear combines sadism, which is a purely human trait, with bestiality, at least in appearance, because an actor more or less successfully plays its part on stage. Thanks to this theatrical ambiguity the author suggests once again the practice of cannibalism.

Ubu, so other characters remark, stinks. He is unclean, negligent, unhygenic and slovenly in his habits. Not only does he strike the other performers as no less repulsive than the nauseating feast to which he invites them, but he sees in them potential cuts or joints and dreams of them as delectable dishes. He focuses on their “cul,” the juicy part of their anatomy that would provide good ham. He fantasizes about sinking his teeth into them: a truly cannibalistic dream. At the same time, he reduces his own enthronement as monarch to the act of having his “cul installé.” Jarry suggests that the supreme punishment for Ubu's opponents would be to tear out their teeth, thereby preventing them from biting while inflicting upon them a speech impediment, the direst fate for thespians. Eating and speaking are but one and the same performative activity: “Torsion du nez et des dents, extraction de la langue et enfoncement du petit bout de bois dans les oneilles” (p. 88). Ubu even threatens the Tzar with the torture of going through life sans teeth and sans tongue, which would amount to the ultimate upstaging of an enemy forever rendered incapable of biting into the flesh of the tenderest “andouille” and regurgitating verbal textures. Making good use of one's teeth not only suggests the functions of sharp instruments such as knives or swords, but also exemplifies the predacity of Ubu who hungrily grabs a kingdom as he would a joint of mutton to make it by force his own.

Ubu, as we have already suggested, is simultaneously a voracious eater—a “goinfre”—and a warmonger. He treats even his wife and his temporary accomplices either as opponents, as slaves, or consumable goods. The threats he hurls at others can be seen interchangeably as preliminary stages in warring or feasting. As these menaces are often quite overt: “couper en quatre,” “cuire à petit feu,” torturing and cooking become inseparable operations. Moreover, the orders that Ubu gives regarding rules for taxation or for dining are formulated in precisely the same authoritarian voice, for they satisfy an identical bulimia. Indeed, “phynance” and “physique” scarcely differ from one another. Ultimate possession does not consist for him in burying treasure in a cathedral crypt or, for that matter, in a more modern bank vault, but in securing it inside himself. However, such devices appear to have little future and can hardly result in permanent savings.

Ubu has no sense of value and hierarchy as he himself displays in the first word he utters, his famous neologism implying scatological reductiveness. Unlike Macbeth who also usurps a throne, who is also driven by a woman, and who moves from one encounter with his enemies to another, he has no real sense of power.⁶ He merely seeks to plunder all resources of his kingdom for himself. He does not wish to provide a model kingship which would force his subjects to look up to his title and to his role; he does not want to create an everlasting dynasty. As a result, he is far more poorly cast in the part of king than the usurper Macbeth, whose head could not fill Duncan's crown.⁷ Ubu, whose stomach is too big and whose brain is too small, begins his reign with an acute case of indigestion which destroys the image of a king eager to establish wisdom and spiritual equilibrium. His gesture to feed everyone, to provide food for the people, whatever his motivation, again destroys his image as king, in spite of the precedent set by Henri IV's famous “poule au pot” for every household. This gesture does not supply the heretofore needy with the essentials, but pushes Ubu, with his typically infantile behavior, to terrible orgies, preposterous even if we the spectators are spared the details of the endless menus and preparations. He temporarily transforms Poland into a huge banquet. Kingship does not provide him or his queen with even the semblance of dignity. There is no etiquette, no protocol, no regal language to acquire. Soon after his inauguration he addresses his wife as “Madame femelle.” Far from fitting into a traditional monarchy and gaining status, he takes over an animal farm. The fact that his spouse, in lieu of ermine trimmings, covers herself with animal skins lends credence to this interpretation. Her coverup cannot hide but only reveal her true nature or rather her fundamental role. As we have intimated, the menus of the banquets combine verbal inventions with plausible dishes. The play throughout sustains a fantastic mode, prompted by verbal ambiguity, neologisms, and transgressions of various categories. Toward the end of the play, when nobody seems to know whether the bear is dead or alive, “la mère Ubu” is paradoxically attacked by the animal even though it has already undergone preparation for a feast. The spectator moves into a dreamworld where additional confusions compound those to which we have just alluded. Ubu speaks at length in his sleep, intimately associating the bear with his other consumable enemies. The reductive drive of his monomaniacal appetite informs his dream, unrelieved either by intimations concerning the future or any kind of repression stemming from his past: “Décervelez, tudez, coupez les oneilles, arrachez la finance et buvez jusqu'à la mort …” (p. 112). The dream repeats Ubu's one-track terror which had continuously merged the consumer with the consumable, the aggressor with the victim. Ubu, if he could become a character in another dramatist's play, would undoubtedly appear even less privileged than Ionesco's Smiths and Martins, who thrive on verbal recollections provided by their English Assimil meals, or Beckett's Didi who forgets whether it is a turnip or a carrot that he still carries in his pocket.

In 1982, Sebastian Matta provided eight colored etchings and a number of black and white drawings to illustrate Ubu roi.⁸ Our interpretation, which insists on the importance of food as a unifying element, is corroborated by Matta's plates. On the title page appears a modified version of Jarry's familiar drawing. The shield with its spiral design covering Ubu's belly is transformed into circumvolutions hinting at digestive organs. Matta introduces the mock-hero's anal nature without needing to reconstruct a banquet scene with table and dishes. For him the banquet is not an episode which takes place at a specific moment of the play, but must manifest its presence by the representation of oblong objects, sausages or rather the persistent “andouilles” available to the characters or preserved in their digestive system. Teeth play a significant role in his interpretation by assuming many bold shapes verging on those of a crown or partially articulated letters. Matta, in his eagerness to update the play so that it will belong to the age of the cartoon, stresses the strong elective affinities between the consumer and his language.

The failed quest of 19th-century fiction, the inevitable dissolution of traditional artistic forms, reach ridiculous heights in Jarry's portrayal of the petit-bourgeois and long-toothed Ubu as trencherman, soldier, and usurper. This ultimate consumer in a world dominated by and reducible to products cannot indeed fill any part but his own, which involves the capacity to eat God, dead or alive, out of house and home.

Notes

1. Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years (N.Y.: Anchor, 1961).

2. “Le véritable portrait de Monsieur Ubu,” by Jarry, is often reproduced. Cf. Tout Ubu (Paris: Livre de Poche, 1952).

3. Cf. J. D. Hubert, Molière and the Comedy of Intellect (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962), p. 228.

4. Linda Klieger Stillman, Alfred Jarry (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1983). Cf. also Henri Béhar, Jarry dramaturge (Paris: Nizet, 1980), p. 61.

5. Passage from Le Jugement de Paris, quoted by J. D. Hubert, “L'Erotisme et la solution burlesque,” Papers on French XVIIth Century Literature, No. 10 (1978-79), p. 117.

6. For relation of Shakespeare to Ubu roi, cf. Banquet Years, p. 29 and Jarry dramaturge, p. 62.

7. For a metadramatic interpretation of Macbeth, cf. J. D. Hubert, “Text as Theatricality in King Lear and Macbeth,” in Tragedy and the Tragic in Western Culture (Montréal: Determinations, 1983), pp. 95-102.

8. Alfred Jarry, Ubu roi, 8 gravures originales de Matta (Paris: Dupont-Visat, 1982).