[Gillespie is an American educator and critic specializing in German literature. In the following excerpt, he examines the relationship of Doctor Faustroll to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's character Faust in order to define Jarry's beliefs about the nature of the artist and the imagination.]

The vogue of Goethe reached an apogee in France during the Symbolist period from about 1880 to the outbreak of the Great War; translations and interpretations of his Faust abounded. Writing in the Revue indépendante in April 1882, Gustave Kahn asserted symptomatically:

Le Dante, Goethe, Wagner, Shakespeare, sont symbolistes. . . . L'exactitude à reproduire le mythe n'est rien; et il y a différence entre le mythe et le symbole. Hélène est un personnage historique ou mythique peu importe . . . Goethe, quand il personnifie en elle la beauté antique, l'élève à l'état de symbole.

One of the most remarkable instances of the prejudice against naturalist mimetics fostered by the Symbolists is Alfred Jarry's Les gestes et opinions du docteur Faustroll, pataphysicien, of which some passages appeared as early as 1898 but which was not published in its entirety until 1911, some four years after the author's death. Today the work enjoys a status as the founding document of Pataphysics, the absurdist doctrine. Though Goethe did not regard himself as a Romantic, his Faust posed poetological questions about the theatre and stretched the limits of dramatic imagination more radically than the Romantics themselves. Jarry may have drawn nourishment for the surreal voyage by Faustroll in a sieve from Paris to Paris, within Paris, especially from the fabulous encounters and mythic juxtapositions of the "Klassische Walpurgisnacht" and "Klassisch-romantische Phantasmagoric" of Faust II (published 1832). But he probably was not reacting directly to the example of Goethe; rather, Faustroll exploited the new imaginative capacity which German Romantic drama had released precociously in the first three decades of the nineteenth century. . . .

Jarry's departure from Goethe displays not disregard for the dramatic tradition, but appreciation of the humouristic novel. By compounding the older name of the hero, Faust, with the term Troll from Ibsen's play [Peer Gynt,] Jarry jokingly pushes the evolution of the venerable Western archetype into the adventurous new age of absurdity. In a single stroke he creates a mysterious eccentric being, Faustroll. The main title clearly reminisces about genre, the most immediate parallel being Laurence Sterne's pseudo-picaresque formulation, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. The amusing effect of Sterne's final term is reproduced by the surprising and odd combined designation of Faustroll as docteur and pataphysicien. Jarry's title simultaneously echoes the labelling of the Third, Fourth, and Fifth Livre des faicts et dicts heroïques du noble/bon Pantagruel by Rabelais, as well as the mystifying strangeness of the name Alcofribas, abstracteur de Quinte Essence, and the promise of an abstruse, but beneficial doctrine, Pantagruelisme, in the titles of the First and Second Books. Jarry's puzzling adjective "néoscientifique" hints that the doctrine upheld by Faustroll carries us beyond the limits of modern knowledge.

Before we are whisked away on a magical voyage on the interior intellectual sea, we are permitted, briefly, one last glimpse at the exterior reality which conceals it. Chapter 1 of Book I of Gestes et opinions du docteur Faustroll, pataphysicien consists "literally" of the fictive document drawn up according to the reigning counter-principle of externality and officially stamped by an archetypal figure of French rationalism, the bailiff René-Isidore Panmuphle. The good bailiff, assigned to serve a notice of eviction and seizure of goods, solemnly tries to place Faustroll under the rules of normalcy and the network of legal relationships which define French society. His description of his procedure to find Faustroll and of Faustroll's determinable attributes comically epitomizes the "official" mode of narrative. But Panmuphle has happened upon a fabulous and dazzling realm hidden within the very portals of everyday Paris. He soon cannot resist going along as an observer in the company of Faustroll under the pretext of performing his duties and all too readily allows himself to be pressed into service as a crew member. Thus even while clinging to the conception of reality as legal-historical relationships in a grid of time-space co-ordinates, Panmuphle becomes—in the guise of being a conscientious official—the conduit for the pataphysical revelation. Born and forever remaining at the age of sixty three, bizarre Faustroll is like nothing Panmuphle has ever encountered—if we presume his unfamiliarity with Symbolist and Decadent art! In Book I, Jarry cleverly revises the standard situation of a sudden exposure of dull bourgeois reality and an encounter with some secret poetic realm as this was perfected by the Romantics, especially E. T. A. Hoffmann. Instead of an artist-elect penetrating into higher mysteries, here it is the guardian of the quotidian order who gets to hear Faustroll's pronouncements, read his astonishing manuscript on Pataphysics, and go voyaging with him.

There may be a slight flavour of Rabelais's rogue Panurge, as ubiquitous foil for Pantagruel, in the naming of the bailiff. But the association with an island-by-island episodic tour also brings to mind the dogged tenacity of Pangloss, Voltaire's unshakable proponent of world order under theodicy in Candide. The bailiff is "all-mug", intruding as the "universal rotter" (pan+mufle), with his seizure of Faustroll's books and pictures and his obtuse fascination for the magus. As Faustroll's compounded nature alters his role and he cannot be thought of as just a variant on Goethe's Faust, so the relation of Panmuphle to Faustroll is not at all that of the traditional Mephisto, who in fact has no place here. The principal of evil, with reference to Christian terms such as Lucifer and the Devil, does emerge as a major theme later in the work, notably in Book VI. But although Panmuphle still surfaces as a first-person narrator persona through Book V and even serves as mouthpiece for an important acquired bit of mystical knowledge in paragraph 2 of Chapter 32, essentially he fades away to be replaced by a third-person, freefloating, omniscient narrative point of view. Parenthetically in the middle of Chapter 35, a brief sentence marks the end of Panmuphle's narration. The fully accomplished transmutation of tone appears unmistakably in the opening paragraph of Chapter 36:

Dans le manuscrit dont Panmuphle ne déchiffra que les prolégomènes, interrompu par la monotone prolixité du grand singe, Faustroll avait noté une toute petite partie du Beau qu'il savait, et une tout petite du Vrai qu'il savait, durant la syzygie des mots; et on aurait pu par cette petite facette reconstruire tout art et toute science, c'est-à-dire Tout; mais sait-on si Tout est un cristal régulier, ou pas plus vraisemblablement un monstre (Faustroll définissait l'univers ce qui est l'exception de sot)?

What makes itself felt is not a narrator's approach as a kind of contrastive framing, but behind him the authorial mind informed by the new teaching. The true frame is Pataphysics, which is capable of embracing the diverse episodes of the journey much as Pantagruelism reconciles the contradictions and encompasses the encyclopedic diversity of phenomena examined by Rabelais. In this sense, Faustroll, who always remains at the same age of acquired experience, does not unfold before our eyes as the exemplar of education; rather we chance to glimpse him from an oblique angle of so-called reality and, through the fortunate liberating attachment of our notice, he is revealed as the mystagogue who can conduct us to those interior places known to him—samples of an implicitly greater topography or ocean of Pataphysics. Thus most of the various "islands" and fragments have the character of independent essays and can be appreciated in their own right as prose poems—often dedicated to a specific person who inspired Jarry in certain particulars, and/or whose essence he is evoking, probing, or satirizing. For example, "De l'île de Ptyx" (Ch. 19), dedicated to Mallarmé, was so felicitous that Jarry could publish it independently as high tribute to the deceased poet. Some essays are more than mystical meditations by Faustroll; they are (according to banal normality) "impossible", because in nominal terms the sage is dead when he communicates them. This is a quibble like that of casting doubt on his ability to navigate in the manner of a Celtic saint. When Faustroll in shipwreck "fit le geste de mourir" (Ch. 35) and, "avec son âme abstraite et nue, revêtait le royaume de l'inconnue dimension" (Ch. 36), his message still comes across as a "lettre de Dieu" read by the Marine Bishop (Jarry's incarnation of Valéry). Indeed, Book VIII brings us telepathic letters by Faustroll to the scientist Lord Kelvin (Chs 37, 38), supposed ancient pataphysical notes by Ibicrate the Geometrician, based on his Armenian master Sophrotatos, in Faustroll's translation (Chs 39, 40), and the closing mathematic-mystical speculation "De la surface de Dieu" (Ch. 51).

The final vision of the "neo-scientific novel" has certain qualities of an abstract paradise, attained, but in contrast to Dante's ending in the Divina Commedia, there is no highly structured hierarchy, with its elaborate eosmological referents, nor reaffirmation through mystical adoration of the Female aspect (supreme incarnation, the Virgin Mary), as well as Male aspect, of being. And unlike Goethe, who glimpsed the feminine archetype again in the sublime scene "Bergesschluchten", Jarry arrives by a different route at his own analogue for Goethe's "Chorus mystieus". Curiously, it is as if the book Faustroll confirms the Faustian thirst to know in the contemporary scientific mode, the triumph of scientific theories over mere metaphors. Not only does Jarry talk about key "symbole[s] du Verbe de Dieu" in the final chapter, but mathematical-symbolic formulae begin to crowd out language, and Faustroll acquires the appearance of a science textbook. The absurd character of scientific insights, shown in their reductionist notational system, seems virtually to warrant their purity and reconnect the modern mind with the ancient quest for understanding. If in this sense Jarry recapitulates some of the modernist spirit in Goethe's serious play with ancient ideas and symbols, the Goethean desire or capacity to conjour in vivid embodiment the lost worlds from which they came is nowhere in evidence. Jarry shares with Joyce a fascination for the great fifteenth-century German mathematician, nature philosopher, and mystic Cusanus, who haunts the novel Faustroll. But Jarry derives his Cusanan motifs not from Goethe, who was steeped in his teachings, but from Cusanus's great admirer in the French Renaissance, Rabelais. To some extent, then, Pataphysics is a revisionary doctrine that attempts to bypass a long intervening era of classicism and rationalism, yet to "affirm" science. By absorbing inter alia the Cusanan belief in the superiority of "scientific" over scholastic metaphysical vision into his own revisionist principle of higher folly, or Pantagruelism, Rabelais provided an appealing guide to supersede the Middle Ages.

The Pythagorean colouration of so many moments in the fabulous voyage of Rabelais's explorers is not surprising, when one considers the Renaissance penchant for discovering numerological and architectonic evidence of world harmony. Jarry is a twentieth-century avatar who readily accommodates contemporary science—theories of energy, mass, light, time, etc.—to his own interpretation of traditional symbolism, which derives largely from pictorial-emblematic sources. For example, in connection with the notion of "Clinamen" (Ch. 34), or Lucretian atomic "swerving" which gives rise to bodies, Jarry undertakes a series of fourteen fragments or tableaux, linked by swift chromatic modulations, as well as by underground association of emblems, geometric forms, and organic-sexual motifs. If we focus just on the fourth and fifth fragments—"Vers la Croix" and "Dieu défend à Adam et Ève de toucher à l'arbre du Bien et du Mal. L'ange Lucifer s'enfuit"—Jarry's manner of treating Christian myth would be envied by many a Symbolist painter. Parasyntactic restatements—for example, of the "green" or hope in the Pierrot figure (wise fool) as the greening of the innocent trees of nature, the "diagonal" movement by the angel as the "feuillage oblique" of the Tree, the "pink" of the Dragon's tongue as the nimbus of God, etc.—occur simultaneously with transformations which are both abstract and organic (for example, out of the completed square or universal symbol emerges the problematic Cross, and the Cross metamorphoses into the Tree).

Book VIII deals numerologically with the generation of stages of being, but the patterns are all subject to the basic Cusanan insight of the coincidentia oppositorum. Chapter 39 reiterates themes broached in César-Antechrist: the minus sign, horizontal and feminine, contradicted by the plus sign, vertical and masculine, opposites which both annul and fecondate each other, constitute aspects of a oneness that yields manifoldness in its own tension with zero or nothingness. Arrival at "l'idée du nombre deux" anticipates the symmetry of the tetragon, when the fourth, or Evil, will alter, interconnect, and complete the resultant progression from two, the tripartite soul of God/Man. "Le tetragone par l'intuition intérieure, hermaphrodite engendre Dieu et le mauvais, hermaphrodite aussi parturition. ... " The closing meditation "De la surface de Dieu" (Ch. 41) leads us to the famous definitions, "Dieu est le plus court chemin de zéro à l'infini" and "Dieu est le point tangent de zéro et de l'infini", quite in the spirit of Cusanus. Although citing the mystic Catherine Emmerich in support, Jarry furthermore identifies the Cross with the Pythagorean ypsilon and thus revives this favourite symbol of Rabelais as a variation upon the central Cusanan symbol of the triangle.

The purpose of noting these details is not to add yet another exposition of Pataphysics; rather, it is to highlight the artistic logic behind the new incarnation of Faust, whom Jarry reconceives not as the by definition incomplete Goethean quester, but as the complete alternative and exception to the ordinary world. Faustroll's name exhibits his compounded totality, a synthesis of contradictions. His permanence in his essential being both in life and in death is associated with the positive pattern of the syzygy and spiral. He identifies himself as God (Ch. 14), because he unifies the tripartite soul, in contrast to Bosse-de-Nage who remains blocked at duality and "n'avait évidemment aucune notion de la sainte Trinité, ni de toutes les choses triples, ni de l'indéfini, qui commence à trois, ni de l'inconditionné, ni de l'Univers, qui peut être défini le Plusieurs" (Ch. 39). When Faustroll defies the laws of dull normalcy without compunction and in fact escapes its grasp through his voyage to the alternate interior, he reflects the genuine poet as outlaw and demiurge. Faustroll strikes us as inhuman in lacking the sentimentality characteristic of earlier artist figures, including the criminal and demonic variants. But the radical shift of the grounds of action away from any mimesis of ordinary reality or even of the psyche and toward appreciation of the inner lineaments of art itself in no way derogates from Faustroll's heroic function as a standard-bearer of art; his demiurgic certainty and imperviousness suggest the hardness of fabled heroes. In Goethe's Faust, the title hero's universality is established by his striving to experience and cope with evidence and mysteries of human evolution stretching over several millenia; and the playwright constantly reminds us that his work deals with the complexity of our whole cultural repertory as kinds of vision in a theatre which is ultimately that of the human mind. The universality of Jarry's figure Faustroll, who unifies all levels of soul, is not traced in a simulated temporal dimension; instead, time is spatialized as those moments (works of art) he visits, and any extension denoting historical process disappears in favour of depiction of particulars inherent in "epiphenomena" taken under his scrutiny.

Through his own unreal creature Faustroll, Jarry attempts to imagine the conjunction of "completion" and "freedom"—notions which seem mutually exclusive. Faustroll embodies the "universal" as an "exception", as a particularity which implies the freedom of creative mind. We readers are assured that it is not necessary to remain bound to oppressive, supposed laws of reality, since Pataphysics improves upon normal, limited science and makes profitable use of the absurdity which science spawns through its postulates:

Ex.: l'épiphénomène étant souvent l'accident, la pataphysique sera surtout la science du particulier, quoiqu'on dise qu'il n'y a de science que du général. Elle étudiera les lois qui régissent les exceptions et expliquera l'univers supplémentaire à celui-ci; ou moins ambitieusement décrira un univers que l'on peut voir et que peut-être l'on doit voir à la place du traditionnel, les lois que l'on a cru découvrir de l'univers traditionnel étant des corrélations d'exceptions aussi, quoique plus fréquentes, en tous cas de faits accidentels qui, se réduisant à des exceptions peu exceptionelles, n'ont même pas l'attrait de la singularité (IV, 8).

This proud assertion links the Symbolist creed with the pull toward the Absurd in the search for that dazzling singularity. At a time when others such as La Forgue and Mallarmé had pre-empted the obsessive figure of Hamlet as a vehicle for Symbolist sensibility, Hamletism represented an ambivalent introspective approach to literature, not a defiant assertion of the supremacy of art. In "dehumanizing" the Faust figure through a merger with trolldom, Jarry restores the magus of ancient lore, removes the taint from the power of the artist.