SOURCE: "Physics and Pataphysics: The Sources of Faustroll," in Kentucky Romance Quarterly, Vol. XXVI, No. 1, 1979, pp. 81-92.

[An educator and critic specializing in French literature, Stillman has published two works on Jarry, La Théâtralité dans l'oeuvre d'Alfred Jarry (1980) and Alfred Jarry (1983). She is a membre honorifique of the Collège de Pataphysique, a somewhat fantastical organization embodying Jarry 's philosophy of pataphysics, and a member of the Société des Amis d'Alfred Jarry. In the following essay, Stillman finds that Jarry used scientific theories as the basis for much of Exploits and Opinions of Doctor Faustroll, Pataphysician.]

Alfred Jarry's invented science, Pataphysics, informs all of his writings, from the most sober to the most jocular. Among the bizarre characters who people Jarry's texts, Ubu (King, Cuckold, or Slave) is perhaps the most renowned pataphysician. The true specialist in the field, however, is Docteur Faustroll, the peripathetic hero of Gestes et opinions du docteur Faustroll, pataphysicien, roman néo-scientifique. From the Doctor's dereliction regarding payment of his rent to René-Isidore Panmuphle, envoy of Law and Justice, to his ensuing voyage from Paris to Paris in a sieve, to his calculations on the surface of God, the entire novel syncretizes the theory and the application of Pataphysics. Precepts and demonstrations appear to emerge from the giddy retreat of pure Imagination. It is thus pertinent to note that this pseudo-science, which putatively eschews affiliation with the "real" world, exhibits, in Faustroll, a remarkable similarity with the findings of contemporary physics. What, exactly, does the "science of imaginary solutions" have to do with genuine scientific research of the nineteenth century?

Before proceeding to the crux of this analysis, an examination of what Jarry called "the Science" will illustrate how and why he "recycled" scientific publications into his significant and ambitious text. Initially, experiences in Jarry's lycée physics class engendered the nascent science of the "supplementary universe". Along with his fellow students, he ridiculed an ill-fated teacher, Monsieur Hébert (who unknowingly served as the model for Ubu), whose pompous phraseology and botched experiments led his students to perceive the aberrant and the absurd, to envision science as some sort of universal game. For these impressionable youths—and especially Jarry—, science became a rigorous method whereby one could imagine and consequently create a World. Forever indebted to the misguided teachings of Monsieur Hébert, Alfred Jarry would structure his fiction with the formal aspects as well as the terminology of so-called real science, but with the combined zaniness and gravity of a chemical reaction gone beserk. In Faustroll for example, via an impeccable logic and mathematical notation (s = y (x + a) = √o (- a + a); ∞ - 0 - a + a + 0 =∞), progressing from postulate to corollary to conclusion, he adduces proof that God, being the shortest path from zero to infinity, is the point tangential to both. Epiphenomenal, Pataphysics reveals the unusual or the accidental in what appeared supremely conventional or predictable.

As early as 1893 (Jarry was twenty years old) an explicit reference to Pataphysics appeared in "Guignol", a protomorphic version of Ubu cocu, in which Ubu's calling card announces him as a "docteur en pataphysique". Ubu explains to his quizzical host, "La Pataphysique est une science que nous avons inventée, et dont le besoin se faisait généralement sentir." An allusion to Pataphysics exists as well in Part III of "Guignol" (appropriately entitled "L'Art et la Science"): to Barbapoux's hymn "par notre art sans parèdre, l'Immonde est glorifié," Ubu replies, "nul ne voudra désormais voir exercer leur art. Car dans notre Science nous leur substituerons les grands Serpents d'Arain que nous avons créés, Avaleurs de l'Immonde." In a note preceding Les Minutes de sable mémorial, Jarry's major symbolist-style work that nevertheless incorporates the ubuesque "Guignol", Jarry states that he is preparing a text named "Eléments de pataphysique", which came to fruition as Book II of Faustroll. Clearly then, having evolved from lycée pranks, Pataphysics motivated Jarry early in his literary career. He reformulated and reapplied the axioms of Pataphysics in all of his plays and novels; indeed, it accounts for the recondite concinnity of his total work, a work often considered chaotic and obscure. Pataphysics constitutes the philosophico-scientific system of which each text is a function: Jarry's heraldic play César-Antechrist offers a magisterial enactment of it—the Christ and the Antechrist are the alternating forms of the same Being who subsumes all opposites within himself; his oneiric novel Les Jours et les Nuits includes a chapter entitled "Pataphysique" devoted to a further elaboration of its tenets—thoughts, volition, and acts become as indistinguishable as the days and nights of the title; the list proliferates.

By 1894 Jarry had formulated the pataphysical theory of equivalence and condensation which would result in his skewed version of the physicists' texts: in Etre et Vivre, a text appended to César-Antechrist, Jarry avows, "on sait que les contraires sont identiques." In the preface to Les Minutes de sable mémorial he declares, first, that all meanings attributable to a sign have equal value (that is, their relationship to words is "constant; en celle-là, indéfiniment varié"), that words are but polyhedral ideas, and thus all concepts are equally valid; second, he specifies that "la simplicité n'a pas besoin d'être simple, mais du complexe resserré et synthétisé", to which he adds a parenthetical note "cf. Pataph.". There is no doubt that synthesis as well as paradox contributes to Pataphysic's limitless power to assimilate and transform everything, all things being equal. Indeed, the metaphor which Jarry offers to explicate "simplicity" as he intuits it, that of a diamond transmuted from coal, emphasizes the notion of the paradoxical existence in one and the same object of stereotypic [- value] and [+ value], owing to a pressurized conversion of its elements. Furthermore, Jarry unequivocally ennobles the domain of the diamond by identifying it with the Other (which for Jarry includes the entire universe of the Double, of Being, of Purity, of the Absolute, as opposed to the discontinuity of physical life). Simulating the method by which coal becomes diamonds, Jarry will reorganize the elements of physics in order to accede to the supplementary universe.

Formally defined in Faustroll (Book II, Ch. viii), Pataphysics is "la science des solutions imaginaires, qui accorde symboliquement aux linéaments les propriétés des objets décrits par leur virtualité." Contrary to the science of the common crowd, the Science will be "surtout la science du particulier". It will therefore study "les lois qui régissent les exceptions et expliquera l'univers supplémentaire à celui-ci". As an example of some of the transformations Pataphysics would effect, Jarry proposes to ignore the principle of induction he believed basic to contemporary science: "Au lieu d'énoncer la loi de la chute des corps vers un centre, que ne préfère-t-on celle de l'ascension du vide vers une périphérie, le vide étant pris pour unité de non-densité, hypothèse beaucoup moins arbitraire que le choix de l'unité concrète de densité positive eau?" But perhaps the most consequential principles of Pataphysics are the universal equivalence of all things and the periodic conversion of opposites between poles. The identity and reconciliation of opposites (day/night, being/living, diastole/systole, rest/change, plus/minus, solid/liquid, zero/infinity, waking/dream), along with the subsequent rejection of all valuative hierarchies of significance, permits one to accede to the life of a hallucinatory continuum. Charted in accordance with such pataphysical laws, the rabelaisian navigation of Docteur Faustroll "through the Looking Glass" to a dimension where cabbages equal kings, allows Jarry—by means of the absurd—to shrewdly point out that the reality investigated so seriously by science (small "s") is, to a large degree, imaginary.

Pataphysics, the science of Possible Worlds, projects the scientist into a universe not unlike that of the dream, the masked ritual, the narcotic or psychotic hallucination. Such a realm characteristically condenses vast networks of information and images, schematizing them into symbolic representations and processes. Cryptic and transformational in the same sense as is a mathematical equation, Pataphysics projects an extraordinary new world, alchemizing the ordinary (as Ubu does the Immonde, as Nature does coal) while at the same time unmasking the illusory nature of objectivity which science presumptuously—in Jarry's opinion—assumes it respects. Realizing that science, in the nineteenth century, no longer dealt exclusively with actual facts or observable data but with evermore abstract (and symbolic) explanations of the physical and chemical worlds, Jarry experimented with this phenomenon and produced an emblematic metacommentary that epitomizes the absolute limit of science: to merge with the imaginary.

Not content to restrict Pataphysics to his literary creation, Jarry welcomed the consummate science into his quotidian existence: Pataphysics became a way of life, an experiential, not a conceptual science. He took nothing serious but the comic, emphasized the ludicrous nature of life at every turn, cultivated eccentric behavior, and reveled in startling the more conventional ruck. Acting in real life like his faustrollian or ubuesque models, Jarry too was not, so to speak, of this world. Impoverished, alcoholic, and fond of ether, he was an eager participant in the bohemian antics of fin de siècle Paris. Amidst the currents of occult religiosity and murky symbolism, Jarry (who just for the record received numerous awards in mathematics, physics, and chemistry during his lycée years) kept pace with the research of the leading contemporary, British scientists: Faustroll reveals that he diligently read their lengthy treatises and lectures.

By presupposing the factual character of certain hypotheses purported by those scientists—that is, by taking them at face value—, Jarry encoded their texts into highly concentrated, kaleidoscopic lucubrations of his own, in which the real imperceptibly dissolves into fantasy. The "transcoding" from the level of the scientific publication to the secondary system of Faustroll involves a generation of meaning connected to the basic pataphysical concepts of equivalence and condensation. The signs of the initial (scientific) text become functions which store a voluminous range of meanings. While signs in the scientific report designate specific and distinct referents, in the faustrollian idiolect their conventional referents may converge in a novel referent or they may a foriori signify their conventional opposite, so that non-being becomes being, irreality becomes the sole reality, and numbers become the only things that really exist. The meanings words have in the physicists' texts serve as raw material for the pataphysician's, even when transcribed verbatim. Perhaps the most salient feature of the portions of Faustroll linked to extra-textual systems (scientific but also those literary, artistic, and musical systems not under discussion in this study) is the economy of means with which they integrate extensive informational input: this is the pataphysical method.

Systematizing this procedure, Jarry, in his inimitable way, pays homage to three principal scientists: William Crookes, Lord Kelvin, and Charles Vernon Boys. It does not surprise us that Jarry, always eager for innovation, shunned the otiose positivism on the wane in France in favor of the inventiveness of the British discoveries. He dedicates chapters to the three, in which he alternately parallels and condenses their texts, in order to defamiliarize them. Following the inaugural chapter of Faustroll's Book II, "Eléments de Pataphysique", which defines the néo-science, the chapter dedicated to Crookes, "Faustroll plus petit que Faustroll" (II, ix), celebrates the critical mode of perception cultivated by the pataphysician, that of perceiving through participation. Textually inspired by Crookes' presidential address to the Society for Psychical Research delivered in London on 29 January 1897, Jarry pursued his goal of dismantling standards of perception generally presumed adequate to measure and represent reality. He demonstrates the arbitrariness of those convenient standards, and in place of the relativity inherent to convention sought the absolute of individual percipience.

Individualist par excellence, Docteur Faustroll, miniaturized to the size of a mite (II, ix), strolls along a cabbage leaf upon which he examines transparent elastic spheres which turn out to be water droplets. From his new vantage point, they are twice his size and seem to be gigantic crystal globes. This pataphysical exploration had already been invented by Crookes, who posited a homunculus who, placed on a cabbage leaf, would be left to get along on his own. To quote Crookes, "To this minimized creature the leaf is studded with huge glittering transparent globes . . . each globe vastly exceeding in height the towering Pyramids." Crookes' hypothetical situation served to illustrate the elasticity of water—how water drops maintain their spherical shape, combine with other drops to form larger ones, and split into miniscule spheres amidst a burst of sound and light. He wished to attune his audience to notions such as the molecular forces of capillarity, surface tension, and brownian movements. Unconcerned with scientific validity, Jarry adopted the supposition literally as fact, using it as an exposition of the oblique vision of Pataphysics. When integrated into the faustrollian cosmos, Crookes' thesis proves that in Pataphysics perception—which for Jarry often merges with hallucination—is the key to reality. In other words, things exist exclusively as a function of how they are perceived. For Jarry, then, water merely represents the abhorred banal that must be infused with new life, so as to become extraordinary. The phenomena studied by Crookes undergo no analysis, but rather are reconstructed and described in their virtuality. Jarry's epistemological break would have us perceive our surroundings as absolute potentiality, not relatively from a "prescriptive" point of view. Crookes' speculation, as surely delighted Jarry, was in fact addressed "to those who not only take too terrestrial a view, but who deny the plausibility—nay, the possibility—of the existence of an unseen world at all . . . the world of the infinitely little". As a closing remark, Crookes ventured to assert, "our Society's work and publications will form no unworthy preface to a profounder science both of Man, of Nature, and of 'Worlds not realized' than this planet has yet known". Unconsciously pataphysical, the physicist, by means of his imaginary solution, opened the door to the supplementary universe.

Docteur Faustroll procedes to gallivant around the globe, observing and speculating on mille sortes de choses, seized—from time to time—by delirium. He eventually addresses two letters to his colleague Lord Kelvin to open Book VIII, suitably entitled "Ethernité", fusing two signs pertinent to Jarry's universe: ether and eternity. Ethernity is the temporal medium of the world of imaginary solutions and is thus conducive to the telepathic communication of these letters, a further allusion to Crookes' assumption of invisible physical phenomena. All of the scientific data presented in the two letters regarding such areas as luminiferous ether, units of measurement, or solar physics, transpose the considerations of Lord Kelvin's Popular Lectures and Addresses (1855-1887). Spanning some four hundred and fifty pages in the original, Lord Kelvin's text examines capillary attraction, electrical units of measurement, the size of atoms, a kinetic theory of matter, the six senses, the wave theory of light, the age of the sun's heat, Clerk Maxwell's theory of the viscosity of gases, Sir Humphrey Davy's theory of repulsive movement, and more. The text refers to Dr. Werner Sieman's mercury unit, Lord Rayleigh and Mrs. Sedgwick, Tait and Dewer, Méchain and Delambre, the mathematicians Navier, Poisson, and Cauchy, and Faraday's theory of polarized light. In a mere four pages, Jarry touches on the details and names mentioned in each and every lecture, recomposing them into a coherent pataphysical event, that of Faustroll's experience of death. To describe his sojurn away from earth, Faustroll pilfers Lord Kelvin's text, borrowing entire expressions, but by juxtaposing and melding them with others not closely associated in the original, he intensifies them, forging a language more kelvinesque than Lord Kelvin's. Again, Faustroll/Jarry continues his quest towards an absolute, here become the quintessential scientific statement, Lord Kelvin's text alchemized to perfection.

Intending to demonstrate the validity of certain hypotheses, Kelvin posits a man having no access to normal units of measurement—watch, tuning fork, and measuring rod. Thus deprived, he must imaginatively devise a substitute measuring rod: "Our unit of length is independent of the earth, and is perfectly portable, so that the scientific traveller roaming over the universe carries his measuring-rod with him; and need think no more of the earth, so far as his measurement of space is concerned". Kelvin goes on to describe the resourcefulness of this "cosmic traveller" in fashioning provisional tools of measurement to recover his centimeter, meter measure, and mean solar second, by which he measures space and time. Jarry interprets this hypothetical deprivation of terrestrial implements as death, the absolute deprivation of all that is terrestrial.

Thus Faustroll communicates: "La mort n'est que pour les médiocres. Il est constant néanmoins que je ne suis plus sur la terre." At first, Faustroll cannot guess his location, except that he is "ailleurs que sur la terre" having "quitté le temps et l'espace" (VIII, xxxxvii). Although he no longer inhabits his earthbound body which supported his clothing and thus the pockets in which he habitually carried his instruments, he felicitously recalls Lord Kelvin's lessons. It suffices to let one paragraph of Jarry's text speak for itself in order to understand how his teleological system transcodes copious data:

Etant donc simplement NULLE PART OU QUELQUEPART, ce qui est égal, j'ai trouvé de quoi fabriquer un morceau de verre, ayant rencontré divers démons, dont le Distributeur de Maxwell, qui a groupé des modes particuliers de mouvement dans un liquide continu répandu partout (ce que vous appelez des petits solides élastiques ou des molécules), au gré de mon désir, en figure de silicate d'alumine. J'ai tracé les traits, allumé les deux chandelles, le tout avec un peu de temps et de persévérance, ayant dû fabriquer sans même l'aide d'instruments en silex. J'ai vu les deux rangées de spectres, et le spectre jaune m'a rendu mon centimètre par vertu du chiffre 5,892 × 10⁵.

The number comes straight from Kelvin, who explains that

by the theory of diffraction, he has the proportion: as the distance from the grating to the candles, is to the distance between the candles, so is the distance from centre to centre of the divisions on the glass, to the wavelength of yellow light. This he remembers is 5.892 × 10⁵ of a centimeter, and thus he finds the value in centimeters of his provisional unit.

Faustroll proceedes to transmit his posthumous impressions of his new abode, "l'éternel infini". Equipped with his spectrum, which separates yellow light, he perceives that substance so propitious to the pataphysician, ether:

L'éther lumineux et toutes les particules de la matière, que je distingue parfaitement, mon corps astral ayant de bons yeux pataphysiques, a la forme, à première vue, d'un système de tringles rigides articulées et de volants animés d'un rapide mouvement de rotation, portés par quelques unes de ces tringles. Il répond ainsi exactement aux conditions mathématiques idéales posées par Navier, Poisson et Cauchy. De plus, il constitue un solide élastique capable de déterminer la rotation magnétique du plan de polarisation de la lumière, découverte par Faraday. . . . L'éther m'a paru au toucher élastique comme la gelée et cédant à la pression comme la poix des cordonniers d'Ecosse.

In his lecture on "The Wave Theory of Light", referring to his experiments with ether, Kelvin offered the comparison of its texture to "Scottish shoemaker's wax or Burgundy pitch. . . . It is heavier than water, and absolutely answers my purpose. . . . What we know of the luminiferous ether is that it has the rigidity of a solid and gradually yields". His detailed discussion of Faraday's theory of plane-polarized light states that

the plane of polarization is defined as a plane perpendicular to the line of vibration. Thus, light produced by a molecule vibrating up and down, as this red globe in the jelly before you, is polarized in a horizontal plane because the vibrations are vertical.

Faustroll's description of ether as a system of fly-wheels constituting an elastic solid, the mathematicians' ideal, and his further elaboration of gyrostatic-model springbalances condense portions of Kelvin's address on "A Kinetic Theory of Matter". Faustroll's assurance of his perfect ocular perception, having "de bons yeux pataphysiques", transposes (to other ends) Kelvin's description of Faraday's "magneto-optic rotation of the plane of polarized light".

Conscious pataphysical perception always requires the attainment of such a degree of detachment from things we normally assume to be quite ordinary that we perceive them in their so-called usual configuration but simultaneously in other possible ways. Witness Jarry's classic example of objects described according to their "virtual lineaments": "Pourquoi chacun affirme-t-il que la forme d'une montre est ronde, ce qui est manifestement faux, puisqu'on lui voit de profil une figure rectangulaire étroite, elliptique de trois quarts, et pourquoi diable n'a-t-on noté sa forme qu'au moment où l'on regarde l'heure?" Similarly, Jarry's imperturbable distance from ordinary phenomena allows him to literally engage in cosmogony. In Faustroll's second letter the latest discoveries of solar physics constitute the point of embarkation for his own astral journey. Telepathically reiterating Kelvin's own investigations, but in an assimilated and reorganized network, Faustroll assumes as fact Kelvin's heuristic statement that the sun is a "cold, solid, and homogeneous globe". Once again, Jarry transmits his own transcoded version of Kelvin's texts, including "The Six Gateways of Knowledge", "The Size of Atoms", and obviously, "On the Age of the Sun's Heat", but with the effect of a boomerang, Jarry's gloss having gained in velocity and force by virtue of its trajectory. He then integrates this "pressurized" language into the context of Faustroll's original dilemma: how to recover his mean solar second in order to orient himself in ethernity, whereas Kelvin's discussion of the sun's cooling was in no way tangential to his lecture on units of measurement. The thrust of the physicist's experiment is as follows:

To form some idea of the amount of the heat which is being continually carried up to the sun's surface and radiated out into space, and of the dynamical relations between it and the solar gravitation .. . keep the ideal vat and paddles and fluid, but place the vat on the surface of a cool, solid, homogeneous globe of the same size (697,000 km radius) as the sun. . . . Now let the whole mass of the sun be divided into long inverted pyramids or pointed rods, each 697,000 km long, with their points meeting at the centre. Let each be mounted on a screw . . . and let the paddles at the top end of each screw-shaft revolve in a fluid, now not confined to a vat, but covering the whole surface of the sun. . . . Arrange the viscosity of the fluid and the size of each paddle so as to let the paddle turn just so fast as to allow the top end of each pointed rod to descend at the rate of thirty-five meters per year. .. . If the fluid be a few thousand meters deep over the paddles, it would be impossible by any of the appliances of solar physics, to see the difference between our model mechanical sun and the true sun.

Our pataphysician begins by stating as fact, "le soleil est un globe froid, solide et homogène". He specifies that the points of the inverted pyramids of its surface are one kilometer from the center and that therefore each pyramid is 696,999 kilometers long, compared to Kelvin's 697,000. Having used the physicist's information to his advantage, he rejects the experiment, so intense is the pataphysical distress at not being equipped to explore ethernity.

Chacune [des pyramides] est montée sur un écrou et sa tendance au centre entraînerait, si j'avais le temps, la rotation d'une palette, fixée à sa partie supériure, dans quelques mètres de liquide visqueux dont est vernie toute la surface ... Je m'intéressais peu à ce mécanique spectacle, n'ayant point retrouvé ma seconde de temps solaire moyen et m'affligeant de la perte de mon diapason.

It goes without saying that although physics served as raw material, Pataphysics proves omnipotent, capable of (re)solving all problems. Indeed, Faustroll's penultimate remark to his mentor affirms that he is in the process of initiating himself into the science of all things—Pataphysics, naturally—"ayant reconquis toute perception, qui est la durée et la grandeur". His final adieu, "j'entrevois déjà, perpendiculairement au soleil, la croix au centre bleu, les houppes rouges vers le nadir et le zénith, et l'or horizontal des queues de renard," which a casual reader of Faustroll might easily conjecture issues from Jarry's surrealistic depths—this too comes from that most imaginative scientist, William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, but by being decontextualized and intercalated into Faustroll's epic adventures exceeds the limits of scientific description.

Like his provisional instruments, Faustroll's vehicle of transport also reflects the most advanced scientific investigations of Jarry's day. The chapter dedicated to Charles Vernon Boys, entitled "Du bateau du Docteur, qui est un crible" (I, vi), details the construction of Faustroll's skiff, meticulously following the directions in Boys' work Soap Bubbles, their colours and the Forces which Mould them.

Faustroll/Jarry faithfully studied the laws of surface tension, weightless membranes, surfaces of no curvature, and the elastic skin of water, to fabricate not only his ever-dry floating sieve, but a handsome shirt as well. Boys also sought to perfect the radio-micrometer, a device requiring a special type of suspension wire that would be resistant and yet not permanently effect its ability to twist. To that end he developed a quartz fiber which served to weave Faustroll's boat and shirt. Boys reenacts his experiments on water's elastic skin:

I have a small sieve made of wire gauze sufficiently coarse to allow a common pin to be put through any of the holes. There are moreover about eleven thousand of these holes in the bottom of the sieve. . . . Dip the sieve in hot paraffin, shake to knock out of the holes. . . . Water goes through only if forced . . . therefore, it has an elastic skin which requires force to stretch. If now I shake the water off the sieve I can set it to float on water, because its weight is not sufficient to stretch the skin of the water through all the holes. You see that it is quite possible to go to sea in a sieve—that is, if the sieve is large enough and the water is not too rough.

How this passage must have enthused Jarry! He interpreted the hypothesis to the letter: Faustroll's craft stays afloat thanks to water's elastic skin. He does not fear capsizing since "la convexité de [sa] quille ronde n'offre aucun angle saillant, et le choc de l'eau dans les débordages, sauts de barrages, etc., est brisé par une coque extérieure non paraffinée, à mailles beaucoup plus amples".

A propos of another experiment, explaining the action of liquid cylinders, Boys demonstrated with a man-made web identical to a spider's web: "I shall now show you a web that I have made by stroking a quartz fiber with a straw dipped in castor oil". Needless to say, the composition of Faustroll's vessel fulfills the same recipe:

J'ai aussi un plus bel as, poursuivit le docteur, en fil de quartz étiré à l'arbalète; mais actuellement j'y ai disposé à l'aide d'un brin de paille 250.000 gouttes d'huile de castor, à l'imitation des gouttelettes des araignées, et alternativement grosses et petites, les vibrations par seconde de celles-là étant à celles de celles-ci selon le rapport 64 000 / 1/2 000 000 sous la simple force de la membrane élastique du liquide. Cet as a toutes les apparences d'une grande toile d'araignée véritable, et prend les mouches avec la même facilité.

Nor are we surprised when Faustroll announces "je suis d'autant mieux persuadé de l'excellence de mes calculs et son insubmersibilité, que, selon mon habitude invariable, nous ne naviguerons point sur l'eau, mais sur la terre ferme". Jarry—that proficient brandisher of paradox—pushed the seeming absurdity of the laws of science one step further, and so doing acceded to the domain of the absolute.

In another chapter, "Du jet musical", Jarry again borrows from Boys' lecture on liquid cylinders. He creates a delirious symphony based on Boys' experiment with the vibrations of water striking a rubber sheet. In his lecture "A Water Telephone" Boys elaborates,

to begin with I have a very small jet of water forced through the nozzle at great pressure. ... If I allow this stream of water to fall upon an india-rubber sheet, stretched over the end of a tube .. . the vibration is magnified. A faint echo gradually gets louder and louder, until at last it is more like a hammer striking an anvil than the tick of a watch. . . . The jet breaks up at certain rates more easily than at others, or . . . will respond to certain sounds in preference to others.

Jarry exploits this discovery as a spring-board to personify the sounds of water drops striking a rubber sheet and attributes various musical notations (such as Piano, quatretemps, pédale, mi-sol-so-mi, etc.) to young women's voices arising in song to glorify a certain bishop. Of this bishop Jarry sardonically writes, "les reins de l'évêque sécrétèrent le jet très inconsciemment musical dont il perçut les vibrations amplifiées, au moment de prendre congé de sa lecture". Irrepressibly pataphysical, Jarry transposed Boys' experiment to a situation where the physicist would least expect to discover his data.

Any analysis of Faustroll that avoids consideration of Jarry's art as a product of social reality and scientific research of the era is necessarily reductive. It is impossible to bracket the extra-textual systems in which his world evolved. Jarry's brilliant success is the creation of a literary mask of those forces, a mask which, like all others, abstracts and condenses, concentrates power, amuses and distresses, conjures up energies lurking behind reality, so to speak, awaiting only the agile mind of a visionary Jarry to transform them into his conceptual child: Pataphysics. At the center of Faustroll's pataphysical megacosm, Jarry recast a gamut of scientific documents into literature. As scores of anecdotes recounting Jarry's eccentricities reveal, his modus vivendi (which would appeal so much to his Dadaist and Surrealist successors) systematically erased the borders between life and art. So too, his aesthetic programme. Pataphysics effectively equates and condenses life and art, equal and/because opposite, forging a literature in which fancy erupts amidst fact, and presumed fantasy merely transposes segments of reality.