Alfred Jarry’s Nietzschean
Modernism
Jean-Michel Rabaté
The most visible experimenter in French modernism was Alfred Jarry, one of the first exuberant avant-gardists who had been touched by the spirit of Nietzsche. Jarry’s main invention was to transform Nietzsche’s ethical energies in the sexual domain, rewriting Zarathustra’s Superman as a phallic Supermale. Nietzsche’s rhetoric of violence also inspired Jarry’s plays. In the artistic domain, Jarry grafted late symbolism onto a specific variation of cultural anarchism. The novel The Supermale contains the seeds of a French modernism that took off with Guillaume Apollinaire before being relayed and transformed by André Breton and his post-Dadaist friends.
Jarry had been extremely lucky with his teachers, to the point that he never forgot any of them, beginning with the unfortunate ‘Père Hébert’, the ridiculous and rotund science teacher in his Rennes high school who was satirised and monumentalised in the savage parody of Père Ubu. Later in Paris it was in 1893 that Henri Bergson himself introduced Jarry to his philosophy of time and intuition.
While still a lycéen in Rennes, Jarry was introduced to the works of Nietzsche in 1889 by his philosophy teacher, Benjamin Bourdon. Bourdon had just come back from Germany where he had participated in Wilhelm Wundt’s research on experimental psychology. Bourdon was soon to complete a dissertation entitled The Expression of Emotions and Tendencies in Language.1 Bourdon followed Wundt in linking Darwinian expressive universals visible in animals and humans, and a ‘popular psychology’ stressing features of simplicity, intensity, stylisation and emotional empathy.2 Wundt’s psychology insisted on the pregnancy of formulaic creation when discussing gestures: gestures could be constructed as formulaic expressions of basic emotions. Wundt’s ‘formula’ applied to the psychology of gesture helped Aby Warburg coin his favourite expression, Pathosformel (formula of pathos). Warburg not only coined the expression Pathosformel but also systematised a theory of thinking via images and symbols. The ‘formula of pathos’ combines the expressivity of strong or violent affects and a systematic comparison of universal forms. The essay in which the term was introduced dates from 1905 and was devoted to Dürer’s classical models, especially his early modern rendering of the ‘Death of Orpheus’ topos. The language used by Warburg implies that ‘pathos’ is not reducible to ‘emotion’, no more than Formel can mean ‘form’ or ‘formalism’. Formel corresponds to a series of formulaic expressions developing matrices of encoded sequences in specific visual languages. Dürer adapted a formal vocabulary of expressive forms and thus initiated a process of intensification that culminated with the Baroque. Jarry accelerated this process until it exploded in parody and caricature.
Jarry’s creation of Ubu as a terrifying puppet, a schoolboy’s bogey condensing the laughable power of adults, their omnipotence experienced as random and pathetic displays of violent sadism by children, owes a lot to Wundt and Bourdon’s psychology of emotions. The barely caricatured figure of Bourdon appears as Ubu’s ‘Conscience’ – easily identifiable because of his mannerism, the regular interjection of ‘et ainsi de suite’ in all his sentences – in Ubu Cocu. It is astonishing to think that Bourdon introduced French high-school students to untranslated works of Nietzsche eleven years before the philosopher’s demise. Bourdon would ‘explain’ Nietzsche, as Jarry writes in memories of his youth.3 In 1893, the future poet Léon-Paul Fargue, Jarry’s close friend, one-time lover and soon bitter enemy, wrote to Jarry from Germany, confessing that he wished that Bergson could talk more about Nietzsche; if he did, his lectures would truly be beyond good and evil!4 Soon, Jarry blended Nietzsche’s self-proclaimed persona of the ‘Anti-Christ’ with Bergson’s theory of Intuition in his ‘pataphysical’ or ‘anarchist’ version of ‘César-Antechrist’. And indeed, King Ubu appears for the first time in César-Antechrist, a long prose text published in several instalments in 1984.5
Besides being a cultural anarchist tending to nihilism and a gifted literary provocateur, Jarry was a fervent disciple of Mallarmé. Mallarmé had congratulated him on the success of Ubu Roi, and after that wrote to the young writer several times. When Mallarmé died in 1898, Jarry attended the funeral. His obituary evoked the ‘island of Ptyx’ in a warm and moving homage to the most esoteric and obscure sonnet of the master’s production, the famous ‘Sonnet in X’.6 Jarry was a living bridge between late symbolism and early Futurism. Marinetti, a futurist who is rarely linked with symbolism, had been impressed by the Ubu cycle of plays. He met Jarry several times; in 1906, we see Jarry thanking Marinetti, who had sent him Roi Bombance, a proto-futurist play inspired by the Ubu cycle.7
I will concentrate on two novels by Jarry: Messaline, Roman de l’ancienne Rome (1901) and Le Surmâle, Roman moderne (1902). While the former novel takes imperial Rome as its setting, the latter is situated in the future of 1902, for it takes place, by a neat inversion, in 1920. Given the deliberate manner in which the future and the past are intertwined, the conditions are gathered for the creation of a specific French modernism. This is confirmed by a term not translated in the English version, the subtitle of the second novel: The Supermale: A Modern Novel.8 Indeed, this novel flaunts its modernity by heaping up real and fantastic machines, bicycles, locomotives, fast cars, phonographs and dynamos. At the end, a terrifying machine-to-inspire-love explodes and kills the hero. The Supermale’s plot is similar to that of Messalina: in both novels, a character seeks a paroxystic sexual pleasure and dies after having beaten world records in love-making. The feminine half of the diptych is situated in the histories of the debaucheries of the Roman emperors, whose vignettes had been narrated by Suetonius and Tacitus. The future of 1920 is marked by mostly American inventions and delirious machines. Jarry’s conceit presupposes an almost total identification of technology and sexuality. In both novels, sexual excess leads to new wisdom, but it flirts so much with the Absolute that it leads to an explosive and apocalyptic demise.
Jarry’s modernism was constituted by the splicing of the ‘modern’ text of The Supermale with Messalina, a historical novel evoking Flaubert’s Salammbô. Both novels display narrative techniques that are daringly innovative, which is more visible with The Supermale. The two main ‘events’ of the plot – a bicycle race of ten thousand miles won by the hero, André Marcueil, against a racing locomotive and a team of five cyclists fuelled by ‘perpetual-motion-food’, and the sexual contest in which Marcueil, disguised as an Indian, has sex for a whole day before reaching the sum of eighty-two orgasms – are narrated by several filters like the voice of a journalistic report, the account provided by a doctor records the sexual prowess while speculating on God and ‘pataphysics’, the pseudo-science invented by Faustroll, another character of Jarry’s. The Supermale is a modernist novel because it splices the present and the past seamlessly. Even though it is shot through with science-fiction speculations about a futurist intermixing of men and machines, it keeps harking back to the past. Marcueil’s wish to make love indefinitely is based upon his reading of a Latin poem. His curiosity is roused when he reads about Messalina in Juvenal’s satire that describes how when the Emperor Claudius was asleep, Messalina, disguised, would go to a brothel and sell herself to the clients; she would be the last to leave reluctantly, and with ‘her taut sex still burning, inflamed with lust’, she would return to the Emperor’s bed.9
Marcueil is a super-athlete and a fine Latinist. The point of departure for his sexual fantasies is the word rigidae used by Juvenal to depict the Empress Messalina’s insatiable appetite (TS, 30):
adhuc ardens rigidae tentigine vulvae,
Et lassata viris nec dum satiate recessit.10
The epigraph for Messalina11 is not translated – those who do not know Latin need to follow Marcueil’s gloss in the third chapter of The Supermale (TS, 29–31). Marcueil explains to the doctor and the general that lines 128–30 of Juvenal’s sixth satire present us with a woman ‘still ardent’, but he refuses to translate more. A Latinist can reconstruct the sense. Messalina leaves her ‘cell’ in the ‘House of Happiness’, her brothel in Suburra, feeling ‘still ardent with the tension of her rigid vulva, and tired of men but not satiated yet’. The events evoked in the first chapter of Messalina become the object of a heated discussion in The Supermale.
The doctor reduces Messalina to a pathological case of nymphomania, to which he adds hysteria, priapism and satyriasis (TS, 32). Defending her, Marcueil states, ‘The only real women are Messalinas’ (TS, 30), and assures his listeners that her case proves that women can also experience what men happen to experience, that is, a case of ithyphallicism: ‘There is no reason why there should not be produced in men, once a certain figure is reached, the very same physiological phenomenon as in Messalina’ (TS, 31). In short, men and women are entitled to experience shattering, absolute and overwhelming paroxysms of sexual jouissance. When the doctor expresses scepticism in the face of this literalist interpretation of rigidi tentigo veretri’ (the rigid tension of the penis), Marcueil complicates his position by asserting that the line was an interpolation that he retranslates: ‘still ardent or kept ardent by the tension of her rigid vulva’ (TS, 30).
The sexual vertigo experienced by Marcueil hinges around infinite series: he is as fascinated by the fact that women carry all their ova in their organs (eighteen million) as by the fact that repeated sexual congress can induce a state of sexual ‘rigidity’ for a woman like Messalina. This condition can then be repeated endlessly, for it ‘becomes permanent, and even more pronounced, as one moves beyond the limits of human strength toward numerical infinity; and that it is consequently advantageous to pass beyond as rapidly as is possible, or if you prefer, as is conceivable’ (TS, 31). This states the main ithyphallic fantasy of the novel – by playing on infinite numbers, immortality is at hand, or at least a variation on the eternal return of the same. Marcueil asserts: ‘[I]t is possible that a man capable of making love indefinitely might experience no difficulty in doing anything else indefinitely’ (TS, 34). The boast transforming a ‘Supermale’ into a ‘Spermale’ will trigger the ire of the doctor. Marcueil is accused of not being scientific, of wallowing ‘in the department of the impossible’ (TS, 34) when he claims that sexual excess leads to a superhuman transformation of women and men into rigid, turgid, ever-ready phalluses. Jarry did not wallow in the department of the Impossible, and appears here as a predecessor of Georges Bataille.
The futurist fantasy is the counterpart of Messalina’s quest. Messalina’s deepest wish is to be united with Phales, the god of erect phalluses. Phales, she thinks, has fled her brothel, to her despair. She then keeps invoking the god of phalluses, Pan, Priapus, Phallus, Phales, Love – the various names of her multifaceted god. A passage describes its emblem in a way that would have attracted Freud’s attention, precisely because he was writing about the ‘Thing’ (das Ding) in his ‘Project for a Scientific Psychology’. Freud attempted to pinpoint the irreducible exteriority or intractable otherness of libidinal objects that cannot be processed by consciousness.12 In the novel, the phallus is similarly called the ‘Thing’ (Chose):
But the Thing is more monstrous, strange and enticing, for it has meaning.
This divine emblem, the great Phallus carved from a fig-tree, is nailed to the lintel like a night-owl to a barn-door, or a god to the pediment of a temple. (MNIR, 10)
If one could only catch and keep the priapic ‘Thing’, one would feel an endless immersion in love. This outpouring of jouissance is compared to the union of the Emperor and his whore: ‘A man is the husband of Messalina during the moment of love, and then for as long as he is able to live an uninterrupted series of such moments’ (MNIR, 10–11). This sentence generates the entire narrative and the first sentence of The Supermale: ‘The act of love is of no importance, since it can be performed indefinitely’ (TS, 3). In the end, what happens is the reverse: the act of love is of supreme importance because it can be performed indefinitely.
Why this parallel debasement and exaltation? Messalina provides a clue to what is at stake by showing that one of the rare positive characters is Claudius. Although he is weak, a cuckold and a stutterer, he keeps on writing poetry and playing with dice, with repeated allusions to Mallarmé’s ‘ancient master’ losing himself in abstruse calculations in Un coup de dés . . . Indeed, when by a curious bigamy Messalina marries her lover, the virile Silius, a Roman consul, the only obstacle to their sexual bliss comes when he discovers one of Claudius’s dice in the bed where they have just had sex: ‘Silius searched, fumbled feverishly [. . .] and captured what was it that was causing his discomfort – had an insect bitten him? Livid, angular, crystalline, sharp, senile, obscene, naked to the bone. A die’ (MNIR, 56–7). The diminutive die is ‘that thing’ (MNIR, 57) preventing Messalina from loving him ‘absolutely’. Because of this obstacle, Silius will never possess the phallic ‘Thing’. When he grasps this, he screams all of a sudden, quite surprisingly: ‘MESSALINA IS VIRGIN!’ (MNIR, 57). How can this be, given her record of more than twenty-five lovers per night? It all becomes clearer if we see Messalina as a Mallarméan heroine like Hérodiade, who in Igitur stands for Salome, a name evoking castration or beheading. However, the Christian Virgin lurks behind her.
Hérodiade obtained the decapitation of the prophet John in the same way as Messalina manipulates Claudius who forces Asiaticus to commit suicide, whereas he is innocent. The impure Messalina announces the Christian Saint Messalina mentioned in the fanciful almanac of Père Ubu for the month of January 1901. Next to ‘Décervelage’ (‘Debraining’, the punishment meted out for the nobles under King Ubu’s despotic rule), given for 1 January, we find ‘Saint Messalina’ as the patron saint for 23 January (JOCI, 575). The Christian meaning of ‘real presence’ refers to the Eucharist, a symbol endowed with the reality of divine presence, in Roman Catholic rituals at least. In conformity with the logic elaborated at the end of L’Amour Absolu, and the Mallarméan logic of abolition, the divine absolute kills whoever experiences it. The only chance of an encounter with excessive jouissance will have to be mediated through art.
The outcome of Messalina’s relentless quest for the ‘real presence’ of a phallic god will, of course, cause her death, which comes at the end, once Claudius has seen her for what she is. While he reluctantly condemns her to death, she welcomes the centurion’s sword, for in her delirium she mistakes it for an ivory phallus. She wants to be penetrated by it. She falls in front of the soldier. When he plunges the weapon into her naked breast, she exclaims: ‘O how you are a god, PHALES! Phalès, I knew nothing of love; I knew all men but you are the first Immortal I have loved! Phalès, at last, and so late!’ (MNIR, 69). The centurion has to assert that his sword is a blade, not his penis. She keeps asking Phalès to take her away, and thus dies – of love. As she dies, the god Phalès vanishes for good: the great Pan of phallicism has gone.
In this fin-de-siècle fantasy of Liebe und Tod, the ithyphallicism sought by Messalina and Marcueil betrays a hyperbolic fantasy of bisexual enjoyment. Jarry’s pataphysics depicts men and women as having the possibility of attaining a superhuman energy and sexual bliss, even if their ultimate erection always spells death. At the last minute, Messalina gazes at her own reflection in the sword that will dispatch her. The phallus is a mirror but also a sharp stake, such as those used for impalement. By a loaded Latin pun, the phallus turns into palus, an association made explicit in César-Antichrist:
The Templar:Uprooted phallus, do not bounce around so much.
Fasce:Tail or head [Jarry puns on ‘Pile ou face’ (‘heads or tails’)], reflection of my master, in you I gaze at my reflection. [. . .] Phallus perpendicular to the smile of the Ithyphallic in your laterality. (JOCI, 289)
Jarry’s own ithyphallicism was not devoid of humour. When Apollinaire visited the small apartment in which Jarry lived (the rooms had been cut in two, and only a small man like Jarry could stand upright in it), he saw a huge stone phallus made in Japan, a gift of the painter Félicien Rops. As all the objects in the room looked diminutive, Jarry retorted to a visiting lady who had asked playfully whether the object was a plaster cast of his organ: ‘No, this is a reduction.’13
Jarry’s mixture of laughter and tragedy, of heresy and saintliness, tapped an old doctrine that Joyce would apply to Finnegans Wake, the doctrine of the unity of the opposites. Joy and Sadness combine to heighten each other. Fasce continues:
Axiom and principle of identical contraries, the pataphysician, clinging to your ears and retractable wings, flying fish, is the dwarf climax of the giant, beyond all metaphysics; thanks to you, it is the Antichrist and God too, horse of the Spirit, Less-in-More, Less-that-is-More, cinematics of the zero remaining in the eyes, infinite polyhedron. [. . .] You are the owl, Sex and Spirit, hermaphrodite, you create and destroy. (JOCI, 289–90)
A similar pun on a lethal phallus underpins several scenes in Messalina. At one point, Messalina wonders why she cannot find any ‘lingam or ithyphallus silhouetting its tall pale’ (MNIR, 32) when she visits the stately garden of Asiaticus. The recurrent phallicisation of the objects of desire derives from an obvious wish to compensate for the wobbly nature of emotions. Feminine sexuality is bounded with a hard and rigid pole. It is from such a vantage point that one can then jump into infinity, as we see at the end of Absolute Love, when we are introduced to ‘The right to lie’. The sex or gender of lies is feminine, we learn (JOCI, 949). Truth is to be found in a masculine God; however, God would prostitute Himself if He gave access to the truth He embodies. The way out of this contradiction is to affirm human desire above all.
Jarry would have agreed with Freud’s contention that libido, all libido, is male; if a feminine pole is necessary for the transmutation into an infinite power to affect, this pole will be firmly controlled. The love scenes between Marcueil and the young passionaria Ellen in The Supermale are curiously fraught with tension, marked by aggression. After Marcueil’s exertions make Ellen reach the impressive number of eighty-two orgasms, she feels mostly hostile to Marcueil and comments dryly: ‘That wasn’t the least bit funny.’ Then, instead of being thankful, she tries to blind him with her hatpin, so that he has to hypnotise her to prevent this (TS, 104–5). When he believes (wrongly, it turns out) that Ellen, exhausted, has died, suddenly Marcueil expresses an immense tenderness. It is conveyed in a love poem that he recites over her inert body, concluding with ‘I adore her.’ In fact, she has just passed out and we discover that this surprising and highly lyrical profession of love had in fact been generated by a ‘love machine’. In the end, this love machine goes too fast in super-drive mode, which makes it explode and kill Marcueil. With these anarchic and self-destructive machines, we enter the world of futurist modernism. Jarry singlehandedly invented both Italian Futurism and the desiring (and bachelor) machines popularised by Deleuze and Guattari.
It is no coincidence that the best essay on Jarry’s philosophy was written by Gilles Deleuze, who understood the links between Jarry’s anarchism and Heidegger’s meditation on the disappearance of Being and the domination of technology. Technology is the modern danger, but a form of salvation can come from it:
The bicycle is not a simple machine, but the simplest model of a Machine appropriate to the times. [. . .] The Bicycle, with its chains and its gears, is the essence of technology: it envelops and develops, it brings about the great Turning of the earth. The bicycle is the frame, like Heidegger’s ‘fourfold’.14
What Deleuze did not say, because he was reluctant to use Freudian terms, is that Jarry’s textual and allegorical Bicycle connects desiring subjects with the ontology of the drive. Jarry calls up the specific Freudian term of Trieb, a term that should not be confused with ‘instinct’ even under its form of ‘death drive’. Freud saw in the drive a general force accounting for the upsurge of erotic energy in human beings. He defined it in 1915 according to its force, source, object and aim. Jarry anticipated Freud’s later invention of the ‘death drive’ as Thanatos, an ultimate allegory in which Lacan saw the model for the structure of all drives. Jarry’s particular hardness, intensity and eccentricity derive from his intimate familiarity with a death drive whose increased speed he was hoping to harness and that he magnified until it reached infinity.
The same symbol of infinity is hidden in the speeding bicycle drafted by Marcel Duchamp in 1914. His mysteriously titled ‘Having the apprentice in the sun’ (‘Avoir l’apprenti dans le soleil’) represents a man pedalling up a slope towards the sun, sketched on yellowing music paper. Inverting the common expression of ‘Avoir le soleil dans l’oeil’ (‘To be blinded by the sun’), Duchamp evokes Jarry’s cyclist, Marcueil. His title puns on ‘à voir: l’empreinte dans le sol’ and ‘avoir la pente dans le soleil’ (‘to be seen: the imprint in the ground’ and ‘to have the slope in the sun’). A speeding ‘apprentice’, a learner sublimely fighting against a sun blinding him: this is Duchamp’s homage to Jarry who was known as a notoriously fierce cyclist. We can learn in our apprentissage by toiling upwards and fighting against a paternal and domineering sun.
Like the wheels of a bicycle, Jarry’s novels form a diptych of sexual excess. The ‘novel of ancient Rome’ and the ‘modern novel’ combine like two wheels spinning together; by reading, re-reading and pedalling, readers create a lemniscate, the symbol of infinity; if sexual excess leads to a superhuman transformation of women and men into rigid phalluses, textual excess ushers in the pathos of the new. The frantic ithyphallicism sought by Messalina and Marcueil recycles Nietzsche’s religious parody in Zarathustra while pointing to the future, heralding Bataille’s orgiastic and lethal ‘accursed share’, a dark drive that would exceed even modernism.
NOTES
1.Benjamin B. Bourdon, L’Expression des emotions et des tendances dans le langage, Paris: Felix Alcan, 1892.
2.Wilhelm Wundt, Elements of Folk Psychology (1900), trans. Edward Leroy Schaub, Project Gutenberg, 2013, pp. 59–64.
3.Alfred Jarry, Oeuvres complètes, vol. III, ed. Henri Bordillon, Patrick Besnier, Bernard Le Doze and Michel Arrivé, Paris: Gallimard, Pléiade, 1988, p. 531.
4.Léon-Paul Fargue à Alfred Jarry, 5 mai 1893, from Coburg, available at <http://www.alfredjarry.wordpress.com/1893/05/> (last accessed 15 December 2016).
5.See ‘César-Antechrist’, in Alfred Jarry, Oeuvres complètes, vol. I, ed. Michel Arrivé, Paris: Pléiade, 1972, pp. 271–332. Hereafter in the text abbreviated as JOCI, followed by page number. César-Antechrist says: ‘I am the infinite Intuition . . .’ (Jarry, Oeuvres complètes, vol. I, p. 330).
6.‘Gestes et opinions du docteur Faustroll, pataphysicien’, in Jarry, Oeuvres complètes, vol. I, pp. 685–6. See also Marieke Dubbelboer, The Subversive Poetics of Alfred Jarry: Abusing Culture in the Almanachs du Pere Ubu, London: Legenda, 2012, pp. 35–7.
7.See their exchange in Jarry, Oeuvres complètes, vol. III, pp. 635–6.
8.Alfred Jarry, The Supermale, trans. Ralph Gladstone and Barbara Wright, Cambridge: Exact Change, 1999. Hereafter in the text abbreviated as TS, followed by page number.
9.Juvenal, Satire VI – ‘Don’t Marry’, in The Satires, trans. A. S. Kline, 2011, available at <http://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Latin/JuvenalSatires6.htm> (last accessed 15 December 2016).
10.See Alfred Jarry, ‘Messaline, roman de l’ancienne Rome’, in Oeuvres complètes, vol. II, ed. Henri Bordillon, Patrick Besnier and Bernard Le Doze, Paris: Gallimard, Pléiade, 1987, p. 75.
11.Alfred Jarry, Messalina: A Novel of Imperial Rome, trans. John Harman, London: Atlas Press, 1985, p. 9. Hereafter in the text abbreviated as MNIR, followed by page number.
12.Sigmund Freud, ‘Project for a Scientific Psychology’ (1895), in The Invention of Psychoanalysis: Letters to Wilhelm Fliess, trans. Eric Mosbacher and James Strachey, New York: Basic Books, 1977, p. 441.
13.Guillaume Apollinaire, ‘Feu Jarry’ (1909), in Oeuvres en prose complètes, vol. II, ed. Pierre Caizergues and Michel Décaudin, Paris: Gallimard, Pléiade, 1991, p. 1040.
14.Gilles Deleuze, ‘An Unrecognized Precursor to Heidegger: Alfred Jarry’, in Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. D. W. Smith and M. A. Greco, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997, p. 93.