SOURCE: "Modern Narrative Technique: Jarry, the Pretext," in Sub-Stance, No. 36, 1982, pp. 72-81.

[In the following essay, Stillman asserts that Jarry's short novels "illustrate many modernist theories and techniques. "]

Alfred Jarry's influence on successive generations of writers is both explicit, in the sense of direct recognition by his heirs, and implicit, in the sense of creating a climate propitious for textual experimentation and for changes in conceptual foundations.

Much critical attention has been devoted to Jarry's role in avant-garde theater, and specifically to his fathering of the Theater of the Absurd. Ubu's legacy traces its iconoclastic path through Dadaism, Futurism, Surrealism, and Artaud's Theater of Cruelty, to the Theater of the Absurd, which, generally speaking, is metaphysical, irrational, provocative, and given to "black humor." The Dadaists perceived a kindred spirit in Jarry owing to his treatment of language, his desire to shock, and his grotesque allegories of social conditioning. They continued his demystification of morality, patriotism, religion, and logical thought. The Futurists sympathized with Jarry's passion for machines and scientific discoveries. For the Surrealists, he was an unknowing champion of the unconscious. Artaud founded the Théâtre Alfred Jarry in honor of a man whose aesthetic programme explored the agony and dark laughter elicited by the encounter with one's doubles. Finally, the Theater of the Absurd developed the brand of tragi-comedy characteristic of Jarry's plays: man, forced to confront his schizoid world, his fears and alienation, his uncertain identity, and his revolting corporeality, finds release in uneasy laughter. The décor was nonmimetic, synecdochical, suggestive.

But if Jarry's role in the theater and his intuition of Freudian psychology have been amply attended to, no recognition has been granted his remarkable prescience in the writing of prose fiction. Narrotology has ignored Jarry in all probability because, of those few readers who know him to be a novelist, it seems most have not read the novels, content to write him off as an eccentric playwright. A major portion of his work has been occultated by biographical anecdotes and the "scandal" of Ubu Roi. This has not been helped by the crafty ways of the Collège de Pataphysique, which, while publishing invaluable material on Jarry's works, has occultated itself until the year 2000. In fact, from Days and Nights (Les Jours et les Nuits) in 1897 to The She-Dragoon (La Dragonne), unfinished at his death ten years later, Jarry wrote a total of seven novels. Exploits and Opinions of Doctor Faustroll, pataphysician (Gestes et opinions du Docteur Faustrolt), published posthumously, was completed in 1898, the same year that saw the publication of the acerbic, slapstick, esoteric Love Goes Visiting (L'Amour en visites). The following year, a hallucinatory and Orestian Absolute Love (L'Amour absolu) appeared in print. Messaline (1900) and The Supermale (Le Surmâle) (1902) make Woody Allen's "orgasmatron" look old-fashioned.

These texts are written in the interstices of a subverted doxa. They consciously and self-consciously machinate the marginal, the parallel, the tangential, and perpetually project their own machinery. The "telling how" of subversive textual production occurs simultaneously with the enactment of textual productivity, creating the text as an oblique rebus. At the same time titillating and insulting the doxa, Jarry's novels are traps, tempting to disengage but dangerously grating nonetheless, like the gaping and biting jaws that predominate in the novel's metaphors.

By the turn of the century, Jarry had developed aspects of narrative technique today considered ultra-modern. What, then, are his credits as a forerunner of writers of modern fiction? "Modern" describes, logically, phenomena marked by twentieth-century developments such as Einstein's theory of relativity, Freud's theories on dreams and the unconscious, the mathematical concept of the closed field, cinematographic montage, and a variety of cameras (such as the "time-lapse") and lenses (such as the "zoom"). The touchstones of "modernism"—system, relation, and relativity—apply to fields of knowledge as seemingly diverse as linguistics, painting, physics, sociology, psychoanalysis, and literature. Rather than seeking to represent the familiar or, at least, the recognizable, modern narrative focuses on the relations among textual elements, on a system of underlying functions, and on the effects of combinatory processes such as juxtaposition. The interrelation between desire and violence, for example, would interest the modernist—as it did Jarry—more than a portrayal of an historically believable courtship or job hunt.

In her 1968 The Novel of the Future, Anais Nin urged prose fiction to take its cue from film: "In films we accepted the abrupt transitions, jump cutting, fadeouts, flashbacks, fluid dream sequences, superimposition of images." Experience with films convinced her that the "novelist of the future, like the modern physicist, knows that a new psychological reality can be explored only under new conditions of atmospheric pressure, temperature, and speed, as well as in terms of new time and space dimensions for which the old forms and conventions of the novel are completely inadequate." New forms manipulate opacity, nihilism, primitivism, dislocation of conventional syntax, and polysemy. While Jarry did not, of course, construct his novels exclusively in a "modern" way, he did illustrate many modernist theories and techniques with pertinent examples and use narrative structures to comment on such potential developments.

Non-linearity, discontinuity, lability, and fragmentation organize novels which represent the epistemological profile of modern fiction. Modern novelistic heroes (who embody a subjectivity that, paradoxically, often takes the form of a cult of objects) transpose the problematical nature of the modern assumption of closure's abeyance. Their plight becomes the very disintegration and scattering perceived by the modernist's world view, or, more exactly, the chagrin of enduring consciousness itself. The hero's quest propels him toward neither satisfaction nor integration: it promises only deferment, repetition, or death (this last finite only in terms of the absolute unavailability of totality, and in Jarry's novels infinitely creative). Therefore, the novel's "meaning" can only be an exploration of models of information or forms of intelligibility where sense is produced. "Truth" can be only relative, partial, and ambiguous.

Appropriately, the pseudo-conclusion of Exploits and Opinions of Doctor Faustroll inscribes a cryptic phrase ending in three suspense-filled dots ("Pataphysics is the science . . . "). There follows a complete line of dots, beneath which is printed the ironic and deceptive word FIN. This novel does not close, that is, it does not answer all the questions posed by the novel nor does it reveal all the secrets the reader yearns to unravel. It leaves the reader, finally, at the helm of Faustroll's metaphorical skiff. Whereas Faustroll, neo-scientific novel forces the reader's complicity and requires his navigational skills by not FINishing, The Supermale, modern novel boasts a double ending and thereby sets another sort of trap for the reader. The first dénouement recounts a tragic death: "The Supermale lay there dead, twisted with the iron." The second strikes a melodramatic note, beginning, "Ellen Elson has recovered and married" (Surmâle). This "superfemaleturns-sensible" ending is an unmistakable parody: Ellen has had the pearl of her engagement ring replaced by one of the Supermale's solid tears. The novel's refusal or avoidance of closure again, as it does in Faustroll, has recourse to a line of dots, but here, unlike in Faustroll, a second fall of the curtain is appended. The "bourgeois-novel" ending is thus clearly marked as discontinuous (rather than sequential) from the "main" text which narrates an extraordinarily touching story of an impossible love.

The highly sophisticated play of duplicity, irony, and parody of novelistic stereotypes relates intimately to narrative time. Specifically, in The Supermale the past tense of the story preceding the dotted line shifts to the present tense of a narrative supposedly contemporaneous with the telling. Another variation of this model of dissimulation forms the elliptical and disquieting finish to Days and Nights, novel of a deserter. Thestory ends with an unfinished case history of the hero's mental illness: again, a last sentence left in suspension, but this time the whole is deceptively enclosed within the (case) history's end quotation mark, as follows, "as our investigation proved. . . ." Then, after three lines of blank space, the narrative ends, inconclusively, by quoting itself, but the quotation is only partial. The concluding words reiterate a two-sentence paragraph appearing in a chapter which definitively destroys all standards of time ("Other Day," Days and Nights). But of that original paragraph, there remains only the first part of the first sentence joined to the last part of the second by . . . an ellipsis. The final verb is an unsettling, open-ended conditional. Fugacity and indeterminacy, symptomatic of modernism, thus contribute to the formal as well as thematic elements of a new realism. In addition to constituting a philosophical critique of metaphysics, this corresponds to the modernist's obsession with the quandry of time perceived as unreliable, precarious, and enigmatic. As Jarry made clear, pataphysics "goes beyond" metaphysics. According to his definition, pataphysics is "the science of that which can be added to metaphysics, either in-itself or for-itself, extending as far beyond it as metaphysics extends above and beyond physics." The pataphysical universe is a supplementary one, in which time—warped, stopped, stretched, superimposed, reversed, disjointed—undergoes the effects and the rigors of (its) textualization.

Jarry's novels reject chronological sequence along with environmental and psychological verisimilitude, motivation for characters and action, characters recognizable in terms of history or geography—in short, all aspects of realism and logic typical of his century's "traditional" novels. Of chief importance, however, is his spatialization of time. In modern physics time becomes a function of space understood as dynamic. This means that space exists relative to a mobile point of view, and is no longer conceived in a flat or linear perspective. Jarry's comments on the shape of a watchface (an object that literally represents time by means of spatial relations) demonstrate his grasp of this phenomenon: "Why does everyone claim that the shape of a watch is round, which is manifestly false, since in profile one perceives a narrow rectangular form, elliptical from a three-quarter view, and why the devil has its shape been noticed only when we look at the time?" Here he foreshadows the modern denial of the authenticity of an absolute vantage point, and he uses the same irony, plural and uncertain points of view, and other indications of a fragmented subject which sabotage the modern narrator's authority. In The Supermale, for example, the momentous scene of the Indian is narrated from three viewpoints that are literally translated into three sites of observation. Furthermore, the omniscient narrator not only disappears but points out his imminent effacement. No longer clearly defined, the narrator contributes to the instability and the resistance of the fiction.

Equally important in subverting linearity, and therefore traditional narration, is the use of juxtaposition, characteristic of post-Freudian exploration and interpretation of dreams, and of post-Eisensteinian montage technique which joins frames of "colliding" perspectives. The great Russian cinematographer Sergei Eisenstein believed film and literature to be intimately related: shots and words combine similarly to produce a concept, dynamically surpassing the elements of the original dialectic. By eliminating logical transitions and one-directional action moving from beginning to middle to end, novelists create prose collages, thus communicating temporal and spatial simultaneity in much the same way as the film-maker or the dreamer. Resemblance (as the term is used by Foucault) and contiguity, not sequentiality or causality, typify modern thought and sensibility. In fiction, juxtaposition translates multiple and complementary or conflicting points of reference.

Jarry's characters represent a simultaneous projection of his own multiple, dynamic personality and themselves project numerous intratextual doubles who appear and disappear, even metamorphose into one another, without the slightest respect for logic or finite sequence. Even his juvenilia place special emphasis on "polyhedra": multifaceted solids which can never be totally perceived from any one viewing point. One must imagine the simultaneity of all perspectives to comprehend or apprehend the whole. Jarry called words "polyhedral ideas." The polyhedra symbolize not only the sum of the author's fictionalized personae and multifaceted reality itself, but also—in their role of solidified concepts—herald the modern penchant for objectification of the subjective. As Freud wrote in 1908, one year after Jarry's death, the modern novelist tends to shatter his Self by auto-observation, and his "partial" selves are personified by diverse heroes representing conflicting currents in his psychic life.

Jarry wielded with agility this unorthodox concept of characterization. For example, Marcueil (the Supermale) is a champion at changing identities, from weakling dinner host to strongman to monk-like bachelor to cycle racer to superhuman love-maker to pitiful victim. In Days and Nights, Sengle's ruse is to conjure his past in the form of a fraternal double who eventually—objectified in a plaster mask—drinks Sengle's soul in retribution for violating the taboo prohibiting union with the double. Just like this objectified memory taking the form of another character, a locale too can metaphorize a mental state. In Faustroll, the Doctor, as he journeys "forward" through memory, visits a fantastic archipelago that formalizes literality, a notion equally central to psychoanalysis and a pet device of modern narrative technique. Each island recasts in a spatial décor literature, music, and plastic arts experienced by Jarry who abstracts elements of the originals and recombines them into designs pertinent to his own literary and philosophical systems and to his own anxieties.

This strategy of intertextuality is extremely complex and has numerous functions. The text, proposes Kristeva, "is a permutation of texts, an intertextuality: in the space of a given text, several utterances, taken from other texts intersect and neutralize one another." Because intertextuality presupposes intersection, "any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another." The problem of intertextuality coincides with that of "intertextual dialogue" [Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language]. It may be said that transtextual mimesis enters into all literary production. However, the relay between texts—that is, the permeability or openness between one text and another or all others—becomes self-conscious and constitutive of the production of the narrative itself. Be it a question of "sources" (anterior or synchronic), allusions, or even direct quotation—the literalization of intertextuality—Jarry's mimesis never aims at reproduction. There exists at all times a will toward displacement: the intersection and neutralization are, in a sense, paratextual. Here, the "transplant" serves ironically to emphasize its own presence. Jarry also composes transtextual collages which finally pose such questions as "What is a masterpiece?," "What is literature?," "What is a literary text?," "Who is the author of a text?" Roland Barthes's A Lover's Discourse (1978) epitomizes this type of narrative structure. Barthes questions the statute of the text, acknowledges the role of the intertext, and notes his references in the margins; Jarry chose chapter dedications, letters, texts that quote themselves, and book lists in which the "bad," the "unknown," and the "non literary" stand on equal footing with the "great." Contact with the texts of others and his other texts explicitly informs each of his own: his novels, and especially Faustroll, objectify subjective temporal experiences ("the notion of intertextuality replaces that of intersubjectivity," Desire in Language). As Faustroll explores them (he travels from Paris to Paris in a sieve), the text surpasses its own obliquity, becoming a transversal rebus.

Spatialization also occupies Emmanuel God, hero of Absolute Love, but in a slightly altered way. Anticipating modern narrators, he himself projects characters in his fictional universe who give substance to his desires. Miriam, one of his female counterparts, "records the Truth he improvises. ( . . . ) She is, at his will, absolute Truth. Human Truth is what man wants: a desire. The Truth of God, what he creates. When one is neither one nor the other—Emmanuel—his Truth, is the creation of his desire" (Jarry's emphasis). Sartre, in a 1947 discussion of Mauriac's novels, announced the celebrated demise of the "privileged observer" in the novel and compared the novelistic world to Einstein's. This means that the "true" modern novel houses apparently autonomous characters capable of creating their own desires, whose inner lives unfold only through what they say or do, rather than via an omniscient narrator. Ultimately, according to this line of thought, there would be ontological equality between the author and his autonomous character; Jarry had already created Ubu, and then, in a dazzling sleight of hand, cited him in Faustroll as the author of César-Antechrist, one of Jarry's own plays. Emmanuel God, by creating his desire and the object of his desire, reveals his sexuality, typically, as an autonomous symbolic formation. Messalina, heroine of a novel of the same name, suffers from the unending displacement of such a symbolically formed object. Incapable of halting desire, she cannot put an end to its object's flight. Sexual activity is, in Jarry's anticipatory texts, coextensive with the dynamics of desire and death. For love and sex, in these works, always harbor an ironic nihilism, that is, a type of irony which does not devalue love or sex per se, but rather examines the functioning of the sentiment called love or of the activity called "making" love. The erotics of modernism combines an affirmation of sensuality (but not necessarily triumphant virility) with the genre of negation Breton named "black humor." This virulent alliance of love and humor generates what might be termed the corrosiveness of modern narrative: at once ferocious, accurate (in the sense of marksmanship), and acidic.

Jarry's characters people texts which privilege their autonomy as well as the juxtaposition of images, of events, and of theories. Modern too on the level of expression and typography, the novels display many conflicting modes and styles of writing, including scientific jargon, philosophical essays, dialogue, musical and mathematical notation, seals, epigraphs, dedications, isolated words and letters, lists and documents. Jarry makes effective use of italics, blank spaces, and capital letters. He also integrates his masterful woodcuts into his prose. Typically, Faustroll opens with an official order to pay the rent written in "legalese." Sengle receives his Lieutenant's "prose piece" and a letter requesting that he submit this story to a magazine. This technique aims, with caustic humor, at helping the reader "believe" (while deceiving him all the while) and offers yet another point of view. Modern novelists do not—as they sometimes seem to—create or reproduce chaos, but insist on presenting contradictory, complementary, and fragmented elements of reality, be they irrational or bizarre, horrifying or ambiguous, and the novel's interpretation derives from the rapport or collision among them. Playing with the type and layout of the text adds to its complexity and obscurity, increasing textual difficulty. This has become a hallmark of modernist narrative.

"Difficult," when applied to the modern novel, is often synonymous with "unreadable." "Unreadable" means not simply "difficult to read" or "incomprehensible" but, again, "corrosive" vis-à-vis institutionalized (authoritarian) values, whether aesthetic, religious, or political. Although modernity has liberated this theatrical, heraldic mode of discourse, the "liberation" is controversial and politically charged: it has not been met with public jubilation. Anti-aristotelian and blasphemous, spatial and schizoform, the modern novel, or more exactly the modernist novel (for example those of Sade, Roussel, Joyce, or Sollers)—spectacular, spectral, and specular—is the enactment of its own haunting alienation, the proverbial terrifyingly hilarious fun-house mirror. Textual difficulty subverts and confuses (disorients and mixes). Outlaw and juggler, modern narrative frightens and intrigues us because it contradicts hierarchy and finite polarities. Like the hieroglyph it creates an unreadable space of corrosion (from cor-roder: to gnaw away).

Sequence and progression may be further subverted by stressing the exceptional, the unexpected, or the easily ignored features of the hero's world. Foregrounding the notion of the arbitrary, as opposed to logical necessity, emphasizes the dominance of subjectivity rather than of objectivity. Indeed, Jarry's definition of pataphysics announces the study of the specific, the accidental, and laws governing exceptions. In "Clinamen," a chapter in Faustroll, he places the science of pataphysics under the aegis of an ancient theory of matter—clinamen—which accounts for the creation of life by a fortuitous chance collision of atoms, deviating from the line of their vertical fall, at an undetermined place and moment. There is a close relationship between atomism and infinitesimal calculus. "Clinamen" is the smallest condition conceivable for the formation of a vortex, or of turbulence, at random in space and time. (It is interesting to note that Ubu's emblem is the spiral.) More recently, in 1927, the concept resurfaced in the field of quantum mechanics as Werner Heisenberg's principle of uncertainty or indeterminacy. It calls for the substitution of a probability for a fixed orbit of a particle. This is because simultaneous measurement of the position and momentum of a particle disturbs the system, so that there is always an uncertainty in the results. In other words, perception or observation alters so-called objective reality.

The study of laws governing exceptions (the enterprise of pataphysics) effectively exploits the camera's close-up shot in the scene where Faustroll, miniaturized, strolls on a greatly enlarged cabbage leaf covered with water droplets that appear to be large globes. Not only does this afford an unusual perspective, but also suspends time. In Jarry's novels, viewing the exceptional frequently takes the form of a timeless gaze into the subject's eyes. Faustroll explicitly invokes photography to explain this spatialized "gap" in time: "A good watch ( . . . ) would have cost me an excessive sum, and then, I do not engage in secular experience, I do not take continuity seriously, and I judge it more aesthetic to keep Time itself in a pocket, or the temporal unit, which is the snapshot."

Suspending time in favor of space creates an expansive, continuous present, epitomized by Sengle's simultaneous states of sleeping and waking, and by his projection into a double who is his younger self. The "Commentary to Help in the Practical Construction of the Time-Machine" hypothesizes: "Duration is the transformation of succession into a reversal. That is to say: THE BECOMING OF A MEMORY" (Jarry's emphasis). Because of this same kind of destruction of linear time and because of the theoretically mobile structure of juxtaposition, certain modern novels (such as Gertrude Stein's The Making of Americans, Michel Leiris' Aurore, John Dos Passos' USA, or Anais Nin's Cities of the interior) give the impression of circular motion. Faustroll's journey from Paris to Paris and his repeatedly mentioned circular flow of blood offer overt representations of such movement. Faustroll describes luminiferous ether (the medium through which he travels after his death) as "circular, mobile, and perishable" (Jarry's emphasis). Most striking, however, is the gyroscope used to navigate the Time-Machine, which has been adopted by a considerable number of modern novelists as a structural model.

Jarry's most important modern novelistic model organizes space into binary relations. The laws of the pataphysician's "supplementary universe" also anticipate the concept of "antimatter" which presumes that for every particle of ordinary matter, there exists an equal-but-opposite particle, such as the antiproton or the positron. The negative and the positive, given mathematical form in the play César-Antechrist, parallel the doubles who people the novels, the dominant spatial configurations, and the repeated images (such as heads detached from bodies). Corresponding to these algebraic and geometric models, the principal psychological contour of Jarry's texts schematizes the primitive splitting of pathological narcissism: a truly remarkable prediction of twentieth-century psychological malaise and malfunctioning. The novels construct a dialectical scaffolding though only to raze it by denying the existence of opposites. From another perspective, the narrative incorporates narcissistic fantasms into its very functioning. In terms of Greimasian actantial distribution, this means that the Opponent—who presents an obstacle to the Subject's ongoing project—is identical to the Subject/protagonist himself. For this reason too, the narrative may be said to be "corrosive." The outcome is at once mordant and disastrous: the Subject's death, at the level of deep structure, enacts a suicide. This is especially poignant in The Supermale.

Jarry selects a deliberately limited system in which images and signs are constantly recombined: that system is Pataphysics. Its tenets are utterly arbitrary but once set in motion it builds a complex and coherent edifice. This approximates the operation of the "closed field" in mathematics. A mathematical field contains a set of elements and a set of combinatory laws. Field theory permits the invention of mathematical systems which, as long as they are internally consistent, need not correspond to the familiar world. The concept of the field in mathematical number theory is recognized as an instrument for making discoveries: despite its finite number of elements and fixed rules of combination, the closed field is a stratagem of possibilities rather than of closure. Within Jarry's "closed field" there exists no sign of claustral fantasy. For just as scientists discovered that disintegrated matter yields energy and is not, in fact, unchangeable, Jarry, by decomposing his psyche and by applying the concepts of relativity, system, and superimposition to his narrative constructs, displays in his novels a great release of energy, what Nin described as "the intense activity of an inner drama" (The Novel of the Future).

Jarry's narration of that drama evolved from his intuition of modern consciousness. His insistence on simultaneity and incongruity, on cyclic reciprocity and polyvalence resonates throughout twentieth-century narrative, along with his significant legacy of a defiant, "unreadable" language: self-reflexive, delirious, literal, erotic, analogical, disconcerting. Jarry wrote at a critical moment in the history of what we now call the "modern age," intuiting and establishing a new perspective and a new discourse. The seeds of modernity were sown not only in Le Père Ubu's conscious iconoclasm, but in Alfred Jarry's self-conscious, semioclastic prose.