SOURCE: "Sexual and sporting feats: Messaline and Le Surmâle," in Alfred Jarry: A Critical and Biographical Study, St. Martin's Press, 1984, pp. 227-61.

[In the following excerpt, Beaumont studies themes in Messaline, especially that of sexuality.]

Messaline appeared in six successive issues of La Revue Blanche from 1 July to 15 September 1900, triumphantly marking the beginning of Jarry's regular contribution to that review, and was published in volume form by the Éditions de la Revue Blanche in July 1901. Jarry's main source for the events of the novel is Book XI of Tacitus' Annals, supplemented by details from Juvenal, Suetonius and other classical authors. These sources recount in censorious tones the scandalous promiscuity of the Empress Messalina, wife of Claudius, her debauchery and corruption of the whole imperial court, her deplorable influence on the Roman populace, and her eventual death on the orders of Claudius, whose eyes were finally opened.

Jarry follows these sources closely for the main framework of events in his novel. Part I, 'Le Priape du Jardin royal', begins with Messalina, having left her husband sated and sleeping, descending by night to the squalid suburbs of Rome, where she takes her place alongside the professional prostitutes of a common brothel, 'la maison du Bonheur', consumed by a desperate, compulsive desire which even the brutal assaults of countless men are unable to satisfy. We are next introduced to the eccentric and enigmatic figure of Claudius, 'ce personnage falot et si incompréhensible qu'on n'a jamais su si ce fut un homme de génie ou un idiot' ['this colourless, so utterly incomprehensible character that no-one has ever known whether he was a genius or an idiot'], so concerned with his innumerable volumes of history and his memoirs that he alone in the imperial palace—most of whose male occupants have at some time or other been her lovers—knows nothing of his wife's infidelities. Claudius' dictating of his memoirs offers a convenient device for sketching in his past life—his rejection by his family, the universal belief in his idiocy, his debauchery, the circumstances of his accesssion to the throne following the murder of Caligula—and for conveying his blind attachment to Messalina. The same chapter recounts also Messalina's awakening and rising, describing her train of thoughts on the morning after her night spent in the brothel. We see her cult of her own naked body, and above all her worship of her chosen god, Phallus, together with her despairing belief that he has fled from the house in which he seemed to have lodged and taken refuge in some new, unknown place. Gradually the idea takes hold of her that Phallus, a god who has many different names—'Pan, Priape, Phallus, Phalès (qui est son nom divin), Amour, Bonheur, le dieu de qui elle sait le plus d'invocations!' ['Pan, Priapus, Phallus, Phales (which is his divine name), Love, Happiness, the god for whom she knows more invocations than any other!']—and one of whose forms is that of Priapus, 'dieu des Jardins', has taken refuge in the vast and magnificant Gardens of Lucullus, now in the hands of the mysterious and exotic 'Valérius l'Asiatique'. In her desire to obtain for herself both the key to the Gardens and 'la clé du dieu', she determines to secure the death of Valerius through the services of Publius Suilius, a professional denouncer. Valerius is dragged before Claudius by a motley band of soldiers, where he is accused, amongst other charges, of conspiracy against the Emperor. Condemned to death by a reluctant Claudius, he is allowed the privilege of taking his own life: that evening, he ceremonially cuts his throat, and his body is cremated on a huge funeral pyre in a corner of the Gardens. That same night, Messalina visits the Gardens of Lucullus in search of her god. The visit is the occasion for a lengthy description of this vast and mysterious domain, as seen through the eyes of the Empress, in all the splendour of its weird and fantastic exoticism. After a long search, Messalina encounters, in the centre of the huge 'hippodrome' of Lucullus which is surrounded by precious objects, a human form which she takes to be that of the god—and which turns out to be the mime, Mnester, from whose attempted embrace she flees. But this event is followed by the description of a performance by Mnester in the circus to mark the Emperor's fifty-eighth birthday, during which the fortuitous coincidence of his dance and song with an eclipse of the sun convinces Messalina that Mnester is after all an incarnation of the god she seeks.

Part II, 'Les Adultères légitime , recounts Messalina's vain attempts to make Mnester, who has sunk into a state of apparent stupor, return her love, followed by her love for other men—for 'il n'est du caractère d'aucune femme d'hésiter longtemps entre un dieu unique, fût-il de l'amour, et un nombre pluriel d'hommes' ['it is not in the nature of any woman to hesitate for long between a single god, even were he the god of love, and a plurality of men']. She conceives a passion for a dashing young patrician, Silius, whose facile eloquence had seduced her, and with cold-blooded venality organizes the mass sale of the privilege of citizenship and allows men to go to their death in order to attempt to buy Silius' love with a flood of costly gifts. By this means, and by the force of her own ardour, she succeeds in her designs. But Silius becomes increasingly jealous of her legitimate husband, and desires to have the exclusive possession of her. Bowing to his wish, Messalina, without divorcing Claudius, secretly marries him. The marriage is celebrated by Bacchanalian revelries, terminated by a gladiatorial combat during which Messalina, consumed by a sudden desire for a Negro gladiator, causes the death of his adversary and then, in a frenzy, calls upon the unwilling Negro to kill her. At last Claudius, absent from Rome, learns of his wife's adultery through the denunciation of his secretary, and Messalina's piqued former lover, Narcissus. Returning to Rome, he allows himself to be persuaded into ordering her death and that of Silius and his accomplices. Messalina is trapped by Claudius' soldiers in the gardens to which she has fled at night, reduced by her terror to a state of apparent idiocy and childishness. A dagger pushed into her hand brings her back to the present, but at this point she falls once again into her former religious frenzy, deploring the flight of her god. Before her refusal to take her own life, a soldier advances with drawn sword; and it is this object in which Messalina sees the final incarnation of the god whom she had sought in these same gardens, which she embraces and which she now implores to possess her entirely. Pierced by the soldier's blade, she falls to the ground, and the novel closes with Claudius, at first unable to convince himself that she is really dead, then succumbing to despair, finally meditating upon his next, and fourth, wife.

As a background to these events, Jarry presents us with a vivid and memorable portrait of Rome in the first century A.D., emphasizing such features as the venality of the soldiers, the ferocity, fickleness and barbarity of its crowds, the universal treachery and fear of treachery, and the barbarity of Roman 'justice' which appears as a mere travesty of justice. He also describes certain of the customs and laws, such as those relating to denunciation and marriage. Three features in particular stand out in this portrait of Imperial Rome. The first is the universal cruelty and bloodlust, whether in the form of the savagery of the crowd, of the frequency of bloody gladiatorial combats, of the numerous murders and executions ordered by Claudius (who, however, is less savage than his predecessors), or of the long list of murders and assassinations carried out at the instigation of Messalina. The second feature is the universal obsession with sexual pleasures, seen not merely in Messalina and her entourage, but in the Emperor and in Rome as a whole, which becomes 'la ville des adultères depuis l'exemple de l'impératrice' ['the city of adultery in the wake of the Empress's example'.] Prostitution, both male and female, abounds, while the omnipresence of erotic statues and other objects serves as a constant reminder of the preoccupation with sexual satisfactions. The third feature is the dominance of religious preoccupations. Everywhere we see images of Rome's pagan gods, in statues and other objects representing them, and everywhere we see evidence of religious cults and beliefs, from a preoccupation with auguries and fortune-telling to the worship of pagan deities.

The picture which Jarry paints of Roman life is thus a stark and impressive one. But his aim in creating this portrait is not historical reconstruction as an end in itself. On the contrary, these features remain subordinate to the needs of the narrative, and serve also to express and to echo the main themes of the novel. The same applies to Jarry's numerous descriptions of objects. Occasionally the extent of the detail in some of the novel's descriptive passages (for example, that of the fabulous Gardens of Lucullus) seems to reveal a measure of self-indulgence on the part of the author, a succumbing to the temptation, to which he referred in Le Temps dans l'art, of the fascination of strange and forgotten words. The same is true of the extreme detail of his descriptions of Mediterranean fish, or of Vectius Valens' learned reflections on the origins and varieties of absinthe and other potions distilled from plants. But though the detail may appear excessive, the underlying aim of the description is never either purely decorative or historical: all of these objects incarnate and symbolize the major themes of the novel.

These themes can be approached most directly through the characters themselves, of whom only two, Messalina and Claudius, are of major importance. Claudius appears as a weak, indecisive individual, wilfully blind or else too lost in his own erudition to see clearly into events around him, given to speech-making and play-acting in order to hide his own weakness, but dominated, like his wife (though to a lesser extent), by sexual needs. His portrayal is not without touches of humour, through such comic details as his stuttering, his nervous tics and trembling and his habit of lapsing in moments of distraction into Greek. His young wife, on the other hand, is a woman of limited intelligence, superstitious, jealous and vengeful, cruel, cynical and murderous in pursuit of her aims, relying on an almost animal cunning and on awareness of her own irresistible sexual power.

Neither character is fully 'rounded', though Messalina at least does 'live' through our seeing directly into and participating in her anguish. But Jarry's aim is not to create fully rounded characters: it is to show us a woman totally dominated by a single passion and idea. For the true subject of Messaline is not a woman, nor womankind in general, but the impersonal force of sex itself. Messalina is the incarnation of unbridled sexuality, the incarnation of the eternal prostitute whose shadow has hung over Rome from its foundation. This theme of sexuality takes on four main attributes in the novel. The first is that of insatiability. The brothel in Chapter I is described in images of overflowing and of things uncontainable, and Messalina's own is insatiability emphasized by a graphic detail borrowed from the poet Juvenal:

Et il vint des hommes, des hommes et des hommes.

Jusqu'à l'aube, où le leno congédia ses vierges.

La dernière, après même sa suivante, elle ferma sa cellule, mais le désir la consumait encore.

[And there came men, and more men, and yet more men.

Until the dawn broke, when the leno dismissed her virgins.

The last of all to close her cell, after her attendant even, was Messalina, yet she was still consumed with desire.]

Secondly, sexuality is linked, through Messalina's association with images of darkness and night, with the dark and vaguely sinister hidden world of the subconscious. Messalina is a 'divinité des ténèbres', and as she descends to the brothel, and later goes to meet Silius, she is la Nuit elle-même'. (Sex is also associated, briefly, with squalor and sordidness: the brothel is situated in a 'rue obscène' in Tun des plus bas bouges de Suburre', amidst 'les tas d'ordures du faubourg' and with 'des baquets d'excréments devant la porte' ['an obscene street' in 'one of the lowest hovels of the Suburra', amidst 'the piles of refuse of the suburb' and with 'buckets of excrement in front of the door']). Thirdly, sexual desire is associated in the person of Messalina with rampant animality. Messalina is 'comme une bête en chasse' ['like a beast hunting its prey']; she prowls in search of her prey 'à pas de louve' ['with the stealthy footsteps of a she-wolf']; she is likened in her passion to an animal in heat, 'un monstre . . . infâme et . . . inassouvi' ['a vile and . . . unsated monster']; and she is the very incarnation of the She-wolf, symbol of Rome since its foundation and which, according to legend, suckled Romulus and Remus, the city's founders. Finally, Messalina is the embodiment also of the irresistible power of sexual forces, a power which expresses itself in the universal cruelty and bloodlust of Rome, and which impels Messalina to commit a long series of bloody deeds. Thus her desire to obtain the key to the Gardens of Lucullus causes her to engineer the death of Valerius. Her sudden lust for the Negro gladiator leads her to disarm his opponent by the sheer force and irresistibility of her sexual magnetism. And her jealous passion has been responsible for countless murders, including those of numerous members of her own and Claudius' families.

But Messalina represents more than just the insatiability, unconscious force, animality and power of sexual passion. In her, the sexual and the religious also are united. For the sexuality which she incarnates is both animal and divine, and, ultimately, the whole drama of Messaline is one acted out by 'the gods' themselves. The city of Rome itself is regarded by its inhabitants and by tradition as divine and even as a 'god'. Messalina, as Empress, enjoys from the outset the status of a semi-divine being, while, even more clearly, she is explicitly identified by the author and by Claudius, and identifies herself, with the goddess Venus (whom Claudius worships above all other gods). Thus it is that Messalina can address Phallus as her 'frère dieu'. Through the novel's complex imagery, in fact, Jarry establishes a three-way identification between the 'divinities' of Messalina, of Rome and of Sex itself, the Empress and Rome both being seen as incarnating the themes of love and of prostitution, which are in turn embodiments of the universal, creative life-force itself:

Le plus vieux mythe du Latium renait dans cette chair de vingt-trois ans: la Louve, nourrice des jumeaux, n'est qu'une figure d'Acca Larentia, déesse tellurique, mère des Lares, la Terre qui enfante la vie, l'épouse de Pan qu'on adore sous l'espèce d'un loup, la prostitution qui a peuplé Rome.

[The oldest myth of Latium comes to life again in this twenty-three-year-old flesh: the She-wolf, who suckled the twins, is but an embodiment of Acca Larentia, the earth goddess, mother of the Lares, the Earth which gives birth to life itself, the wife of Pan who is worshipped in the form of a wolf, a symbol of the prostitution which has populated Rome.]

It is, however, above all through Messalina's cult of Phallus, in which sexual passion and religious aspiration are inextricably interwoven, that this fusion of sexual and religious themes is developed. Of the many representations of gods in Rome, it is those of Phallus, in his manifold forms and under his various names, which predominate. The huge phallus which stands above the entrance to the 'maison du Bonheur' is at once 'animal et divin'; it is 'la bête-dieu', 'le dieu roide', a symbol of the 'dieu générateur, dieu suprême aux temps antiques', 'l'emblème de vie universelle, le dieu solaire [qui] fulgure . . . au fronton de son temple' ['the god-beast', 'the rigid god'; 'the god of reproduction, the supreme god of ancient times' ; 'the symbol of universal life, the sun god [whose image] flashes forth from the pediment of his temple']. It is to this, her god, that Messalina cries out in a frenzy of longing:

Où es-tu, Phalès, Priape, fils de Bacchus et de Vénus? et de ton seul nom qui ne change point, où es-tu, dieu des Jardins? Ma contemplation est de toi si absolue, mon désir si certain, que je sais que tu existes quelque part ailleurs que dans le saint de l'étable ou la parure morte des femmes.

[Where are you, Phales, Priapus, son of Bacchus and of Venus? And by your only unchanging name, where are you, god of the Gardens? My adoration of you is so absolute, my desire so certain, that I know that you exist somewhere else other than in the holy statues of the cowshed or the lifeless finery of women.]

In her worship of Phallus, sexual passion is transformed, or sublimated, into a religious ardour, and her passionate search for the god extends far beyond merely sexual longing to become a truly religious quest.

Messaline is in fact as much a religious as an erotic work, in which Jarry has raised the theme of sexuality to the level of myth, and in which the true protagonists are the forces of male and female sexuality respectively. The novel expresses his own fascination with this subject, and perhaps hints at a more general relationship between sexual desire and religion. In elevating his subject to this plane however, Jarry is also following the time-honoured procedure of religion and myth; for outside of the monotheistic cultures of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, sexual and reproductive forces have from time immemorial been personified and worshipped as gods, and their power has seemed a no less evident and no less essential factor of existence than that of other natural forces.

Alongside this myth, Jarry also makes use of that of the phoenix, the mythological bird which is consumed by fire but rises again from the ashes. The god Phallus or Priapus, symbol of male sexuality, is likened first to a bird and then implicitly to the phoenix with its cycle of death and resurrection, as Messalina recalls to mind her brief encounter with the god in Chapter I:

Elle l'a vu.

Il est favorable aux hommes d'une faveur brève et il meurt dès qu'il touche une femme . . .

Et s'il ressuscite c'est pour mourir encore . . .

[She has seen him.

He favours men with a short-lived favour and he dies the moment he touches a woman. . . .

And if he rises again it is to die yet once more. . . . ]

But the theme of death has another, starker and more definitive application. As in earlier works of Jarry, the theme of love is once again associated with that of death, and the one seems inevitably to lead to the other. A relationship between the two themes is suggested at several points in the novel through its imagery: in Chapter I, the brothel is situated between 'la maison du charcutier et celle du bourreau' ['the house of the pork-butcher and that of the executioner']; the twin attributes of Priapus are his sex, and his scythe—symbol of death, which, 'en même temps que l'autre geste du dieu qui féconde, semait la mort par tout le champ' ['simultaneously with the other act of the god which fecundates, sowed the seeds of death throughout the whole field']; and the flames which consume the body of Valerius are likened to the wing-feathers of birds, which become ruffled at mating-time. There is also the curious episode of the murrhins—goblets carved from a rare and precious stone which surround the arena of Lucullus, one of which lodges in a fold of Messalina's cloak during her search for her god and is rediscovered by Silius. The detailed description of these murrhins suggests that they constitute a symbol of the female sexual organ; while the name given to them recalls phonetically the word myrrhe, associated both in the embalming practices of the ancient world, and in L'Amour absolu, with la mort (death). The association of love and death also has a more direct expression. Twice before the final chapters Messalina reveals a wish for death, when she envies Valerius his fate and when she calls upon the gladiator to kill her; and in the penultimate chapter, she seizes the sword of the tribune, which she identifies with the god Phallus, in an ecstatic and frenzied embrace, exclaiming as she does so:

Emporte-moi, Phalès! L'apothéose! Je la veux tout de suite, avant d'être vieille! Ou fais-moi vieillir tout de suite, jusqu'à la divinité. Emporte-moi chez nous, au plus haut ciel! le plus haut! le premier! Tu es le premier, ô Immortel! tu vois bien que je suis vierge! . . . Bonheur, ô comme tu me fais mal! Tue-moi, Bonheur! La mort! donne . . . la petite lampe de la mort. Je meurs . . . je savais bien qu'on ne pouvait mourir que d'amour!

[Carry me away, Phales! Oh apotheosis! I want it here and now, before I grow old! Or else make me old at once, so that I may attain the status of divinity. Carry me away to our home together, in the highest heavens! the highest! the first! You are the first, oh Immortal One! you can see that I am a virgin! ... Oh Happiness, how you hurt me! Kill me, Happiness! Death! give me ... the little lamp of death. I am dying ... I knew that one could die only of love!]

One of the greatest problems confronting any novelist aiming to portray characters drawn from a culture or civilization distant in time or space from our own, and motivated by beliefs and ideas foreign to us, is to render psychologically convincing the behaviour and mental processes of such individuals. In Messaline, Jarry to some extent sidesteps the problem by attempting to fuse psychology with symbolism. The marriage is, on the whole, a successful one, though there are occasional false notes. But alongside this, the novel contains a number of elements which damage, no doubt deliberately, the credibility of the world it creates, reminding us that this is after all a purely imaginary construction. Certain of his occasional comparisons with the contemporary world create just such a jarring effect, as for example the statement that the façade of the brothel would appear to 'un passant d'aujourd'hui' as 'une gendarmerie provinciale, quand il n'est pas dimanche', or his comparison of the cramped cells of the prostitutes with a modern water-closet. There is also the incident of Messalina's (unconscious?) playing upon the word 'absolument', which she enunciates—repeating a pun already used in L'Amour absolu—as 'abso-lu-ment' [absolute-lie]. But whether or not these details are deliberately intended to detract from the fictional 'illusion' and to shatter the total plausibility of the novel, reminding us of the art, or artifice, which it entails, one episode certainly is: that surrounding the strange character of 'Valerius the Asiatic'.

Valerius is an historical figure, the details of whose role in Roman politics, fabulous gardens, denunciation and suicide Jarry found, along with the other main events of the novel, in Tacitus. But other details of his portrayal strike a totally and intentionally false note. The name 'the Asiatic' probably derived from the exploits of Valerius or of other members of this family in Asia Minor; but Jarry, inspired by the name (and while keeping the historically accurate but deliberately contradictory detail of his birthplace, Vienna), makes of him a native of the most distant country known to Roman civilization: China. Though Rome did have tenuous trading links with China, the existence in Rome itself in the first century A.D. of such a figure is historically inconceivable. Moreover, Jarry makes of Valerius not just a native of China, but a caricature of the Chinaman. Every detail of his description (Valerius' shaven head with one long jet-black pigtail, his long blue and gold silk robe, his long fingernails, his stance 'dans l'attitude d'une idole rare, exotique et incompréhensible' ['in the stance of a rare, exotic and inscrutable idol']) as well as that of the objects with which he surrounds himself (the giant porcelain dogs, one paw resting on a ball, which guard his palace, his 'artificial fingers'—i.e. chopsticks—with which he eats, the rice paper on which his will is written by a scribe, his concubines with their tiny feet, and the cymbals which resound in his palace) goes to make of Valerius an embodiment of the popular nineteenth-century image of a Chinese mandarin!

But there is another dimension also to the figure of Valerius, which shatters even further the 'historicity' of Jarry's portrait of the ancient world: he contains certain resemblances to Jarry himself. Accused by Publius Suilius of having prostituted himself 'au mépris de son sexe', he replies in the following manner: '"Interroge tes fils, Suilius", vibra une voix qui isolait toutes les syllabes.... "Si tu ne m'a jamais vu, leur chair a eu toutes les preuves que je suis un homme!'" ['"Question your sons, Suilius", vibrated a voice which clearly separated each syllable. . . . "If you have never seen me, their flesh has suffered abundant proof that I am a man!'"]. This idiosyncracy of speech establishes a clear identity between the novelist [Jarry had peculiar speech mannerisms] . . . and his protagonist, as well, perhaps, as constituting a defence of the former's sexual powers. Similar remarks apply, moreover, to the enigmatic figure of the mime and acrobat, Mnester, with his tiny feet 'plus courts que des sabots de chèvre'—reminiscent of those of his creator as well as those of both Sengle and Faustroll [in Days and Nights: Novel of a Deserter and Exploits and Opinions of Doctor Faustroll, Pataphysician, respectively]—and his 'jambes de Pan', which look forward to Jarry's description of the hero of Le Surmâle whose feet are 'extraordinairement petits, comme les vases antiques figurent ceux des faunes' ['extraordinarily tiny, like the feet of fauns which figure on antique vases'].

Neither figure, however, is merely the subject of a spoof on Jarry's part; for both Valerius and Mnester have a crucial role to play in the complex sexual symbolism of the novel, a symbolism which they ultimately reveal to be utterly aberrant. Both figures are associated at one point or another with the phallus, and also, implicitly or explicitly, with the image of the sun-god with which it is identified. But Mnester is also associated, both symbolically and in the mind of Messalina, with the moon, a symbol in the ancient world (popularized by Flaubert's Salammbô) of the female principle and of fecundity. Whence Messalina's declaration to Claudius at the end of Part I of the novel: 'Claude, mon mari, empereur, dieu . . . : je veux LA LUNE' ['Claude, husband, emperor, god . . . : / want THE MOON']. Not only does the culmination of Mnester's acrobatic performance before the Emperor and Messalina coincide with the eclipse of the sun by the moon, but the shape which he himself finally assumes—that of a ball—itself suggests the sphericity of the full moon. Or rather, in the course of the acrobatics and gyrations which he performs his body takes on both the shape of the perpendicular, symbol of male sexuality, and of the circle or sphere:

car le mime, après un saufet demi périlleux, est retombé sur les mains, en posture de cubiste. . . . Le mime saute sur un seul bras par bonds énormes . . . et le voici qui tourne très vite et de plus en plus vite sur sa main, ouverte à terre. . . . Quelque chose avait roulé à bas de l'estrade du théâtre, et occultait encore la lumière par terre: une boule aussi parfaitement ronde que le disque d'une planète chue, le corps inextricablement pelotonné de Mnester à la fin de sa danse.

[for the mime, after a perilous somersault and a half, has landed on his hands, in the position of a Greek acrobat... . The mime, supporting himself on one arm only, performs huge leaps in the air . . . and now he spins around very quickly and more and more quickly resting on his open hand which alone touches the ground. . . . Something had rolled to the bottom of the rostrum of the arena, and still occulted the light upon the ground: a ball as perfectly round as the disk of a fallen planet, the inextricably ravelled body of Mnester at the end of his dance.]

Mnester thus implicitly unites both male and female sexuality in his own person, and comes to suggest, symbolically, the figure of the Androgyne (indeed, he is described, when first seen by the Empress, as performing 'le baiser de Narcisse'), whose se/f-suffieiency therefore explains his failure, or inability, to respond to Messalina's amorous advances. That the Empress should thus fall in love with such a sexually ambiguous figure is itself odd, to say the least; but even more remarkable is the resemblance which exists between the terms in which his acrobatics are described in the above passage and those used some years earlier in both Visions actuelles et futures and César-Antechrist to describe the gyrations of the bâton-à-physique, which similarly unites the shapes of both the perpendicular and the circle, and which is addressed in the words: 'Ne fais pas de pareils bonds, demi-cubiste sur l'un et l'autre pôle de ton axe et de ton soi' ['Do not leap about so, demi-acrobat resting upon both poles of your axis and of your self'].

The complexities of the novel's symbolic associations do not by any means stop here, and it is not possible in this brief account to do more than hint at those complexities. But, as the above example of Mnester suggests, there is much in the sexual and religious 'symbolism' of Messaline which reveals itself to be, ultimately, as aberrant as that of César-Antechrist, with which it is implicitly linked. As with the latter, too, the nature of this 'symbolism' serves to point to the underlying character of the work as a whole: far from representing the fruits of an effort at historical 'reconstruction', or even of an attempt to create a coherent network of symbolism, Messaline is first and foremost an imaginative, or more exactly verbal construction. No less than in Les Minutes de sable mémorial and César-Antechrìst, words are here 'polyèdres d'idées', and Jarry has sought to create a complex and intricate network of correspondences between words and images which echo back and forth throughout the work, from his description of Messalina in Chapter I descending to the brothel à pas de louve (instead of the usual à pas de loup), which enables him to establish a link with the she-wolf which symbolizes Rome and with the word lupa (prostitute), through the palindrome AMOR/ROMA in Chapter II, to the play on words between the name of the goddess Artemis and artemisia (absinthe) and dozens, if not hundreds, of other examples. In this way he has set out to make of the text of Messaline also 'un carrefour de tous les mots', and the embodiment of a self-contained imaginative and verbal universe, opening up an almost inexhaustible field of imaginative possibilities.

Thus Messaline is truly one of Jarry's most complex, but also most secret works. Nevertheless it remains, even for the reader who has failed to penetrate all its secrets, a powerful and impressive novel, containing moments of intense drama and a wealth of powerful imagery. The language, though still erudite and sometimes technical, is simpler than in some of his earlier works, and a comparison of surviving manuscripts shows his efforts to render both language and style more accessible to the reader. As to the novel's dramatic structure, though unusual, this admirably reflects the development of its themes. It is the first chapter, describing Messalina's descent at night to the brothel in the suburbs of Rome, which constitutes the climax of dramatic intensity, and contains also the novel's richest and densest imagery; it is followed by a progressive fall in tension which corresponds to the Empress's failure to satisfy her insatiable longing, both sexual and religious. Only at the end does the narrative again approach the same level of dramatic intensity, thus describing a curve falling and then rising again, as Messalina believes that she is at last about to find the fulfilment of that longing and the object of her quest—in death.