Just as he himself said, ‘Redon: he who mysteries,’ or ‘Lautrec: he who posters,’ we should say, ‘Jarry: he who pistols.’ ‘It is,’ he wrote to Mme Rachilde in the year of his death, ‘one of the great joys of homeownership to fire a pistol in one’s own bedroom.’ One evening when he was with Guillaume Apollinaire at a performance of the Bostock Circus, he terrorized his neighbours, whom he was trying to convince of his exploits as a lion tamer, by brandishing his revolver. ‘Jarry,’ said Apollinaire, ‘made no secret of the satisfaction he had felt in horrifying the philistines, and he was still clutching his pistol when he climbed onto the upper deck of the bus that was to bring him back to Saint-Germain-des-Prés. From up there, to say goodbye, he continued to wave his bull-dog.’ Another time, in a backyard, he was amusing himself by uncorking champagne with gunshots. A few bullets strayed over the fence, prompting the irruption of the neighbour whose children were playing next door. ‘Just imagine, if they were hit!’ – ‘Ah!’ said Jarry, ‘not to worry, Madam, we’ll simply make you some more.’ Still another time, over dinner, he fired at the sculptor Manolo, guilty, he claimed, of having made a pass at him; and, to the friends who were dragging him away: ‘Wasn’t that a beautiful work of literature? … But I forgot to pay for the drinks.’ And it was flanked by two revolvers, in addition to a heavy leaded cane, that Jarry, dressed in furs and shod in slippers, would go every evening toward the end of his life to visit Dr Saltas (the same Saltas who, on the eve of Jarry’s death, having inquired what he would like most, was asked for a toothpick).
This unshakable alliance between Jarry and the pistol – much like André Marcueil, the hero of his novel The Supermale, with his ‘love-inspiring machine’ – can be taken as the final key to his thought. The pistol serves here as the paradoxical hyphen between the outer and inner worlds. In the small, parallelogrammic box called his clip sleep an infinity of readymade solutions, conciliations: ‘From the dispute between the Plus sign and the Minus sign, the Reverend Pa Ubu, of the Company of Jesus, former King of Poland, will soon write a great book entitled Caesar Antichrist, in which one will find the only practical demonstration, by means of a mechanical engine called a physics rod, of the identity of opposites.’
Literature, after Jarry, moves hazardously over mine-filled terrain. The author imposes himself in the margins of the text; the prop man, suitably exasperating, keeps walking in front of the lens while smoking a cigar. No way to rid the finished house of that workman who’s gotten it into his head to fly a black flag over the roof. We can say that after Jarry, much more than after Wilde, the distinction between art and life, long considered necessary, found itself challenged and wound up being annihilated in principle. After the premiere of Ubu Rex, we are told, Jarry tried to merge with his creation come what may – but what creation was that? We know that humour represents the revenge of the pleasure principle (attached to the superego) over the reality principle (attached to the ego). The latter being put in too uncomfortable a position, it is easy to see in the character of Ubu the magisterial incarnation of the Nietzschean-Freudian id that designates the totality of unknown, unconscious, repressed energies, of which the ego is but the sanctioned emanation, dictated by prudence. ‘The ego,’ says Freud, ‘does not completely envelop the id, but only does so to the extent to which the system Pcpt. [= perception, as opposed to Cs. = consciousness] forms its surface, more or less as the germinal disk rests upon the ovum.’ As it happens, the ovum, or egg, is none other than Ubu, triumph of the instinct and the instinctive impulse, as he himself proclaims: ‘Like an egg, a pumpkin, or a blazing meteor, I roll over this earth doing as I please. Whence are born these three animals [the pal-contents] whose nearoles are imperturbably directed northward, and whose virgin noses are like trunks that have not yet blared.’ Under the name Ubu, the id assumes the right to punish and reprimand what in fact belongs only to the superego, the psychic final appeal. Raised to supreme power, the id immediately proceeds to liquidate every noble sentiment (‘Push all the Nobles through the trap!’), every feeling of guilt (‘Down the hatch with the judges!’), every notion of social dependence (‘Down the hatch with the financiers!’). The hostility of the hypermoral superego toward the ego is thus transferred to the utterly amoral id and gives its destructive tendencies free rein. Humour, the process that allows one to brush reality aside when it gets too distressing, is exercised here almost exclusively at others’ expense. We are nonetheless, without contradiction, at the very source of that humour, as witnessed by its continual outpouring.
This is, we believe, the deep meaning of Ubu’s character, and at the same time it is the reason why he overspills any particular symbolic interpretation. As Jarry took care to point out, ‘He is not entirely M. Thiers, or the bourgeois, or the boor. Rather, he would be the perfect anarchist, except for what prevents us from ever becoming perfect anarchists: the fact that he is a man, whence cowardice, filth, etc.’ But the particular role of this creation is to overcome the most varied forms of human activity, beginning with collective forms. Starting from there, the same Ubu will renounce the personal advantage that, in Ubu Rex, constituted his sole motive for reentering the human masses, whose emotions he will now personify – emotions all the more contagious in that they are more vulgar. In counterpoint to Ubu Rex’s unbridled will to domination, Ubu Enchained will stage an unbridled will to servility. The superego has removed itself from the proceedings only to reappear in a stereotyped, rather disturbing form, in which one can see equally both the fascist and the Stalinist. We must recognize that events of the past two decades confer upon this second Ubu an immeasurable prophetic value, whether we look at the ‘Free Men’ manoeuvring on the parade ground of the Champ de Mars, brought to us by all the world’s movie screens with an unprecedentedly enthusiastic and unanimous ‘Hurrah for the Pschittanarmy!’; or at the ambience of the ‘Moscow Trials’: ‘Pa Ubu (to his Defending Counsel): Hey, you there, Sir, shut up please! You’re telling lies and preventing this assembly from hearing all about our magnificent achievements. Yes, gentlemen, try to keep your nearoles open and stop kicking up such a row; … we have massacred more persons than can be counted … we dreamed solely of bloodletting, cash extortion, flaying alive and assassination; we performed the debraining ceremony regularly every Sunday on a convenient hillock in the suburbs, surrounded by an audience of wooden horses and coconut-shy operators. Being very tidy in our habits, we have filed and disposed of these old criminal cases … For all these reasons, we command you, gentlemen, our judge and prosecutor, to sentence us to the harshest punishment you can think up between you, so that we get what we deserve for our crimes: do not condemn us to death, however … We rather fancy ourselves as a galley-slave, a fine green cap on our head, foddered at State expense and occupying our leisure hours in petty tasks.’
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Les Minutes de sable mémorial, 1894. César Antéchrist, 1895. Ubu Roi, 1896. Les Jours et les nuits, 1897. L’Amour en visites, 1898. L’Amour absolu, 1899. Ubu enchaîné, 1900. Messaline, 1901. Almanachs du Père Ubu, 1899 and 1901. Le Surmâle, 1902. Le Moutardier du Pape, 1907. La Papesse Jeanne, 1908. Gestes et opinions du Docteur Faustroll, pataphysicien and Spéculations, 1911. La Dragonne, 1943. Oeuvres poétiques complètes, 1945. L’autre Alceste, 1947, etc.
BIBLIOGRAPHY IN ENGLISH: The Ubu Plays (Ubu Rex, Ubu Cuckolded, Ubu Enchained). Days and Nights: Journal of a Deserter. Messalina. The Supermale. The Other Alcestis. Selected Works of Alfred Jarry (includes Exploits and Opinions of Doctor Faustroll, Pataphysician and Speculations).
In the triangular forest, after dusk.
Its voice, at first almost mute, then murmuring, thundering loud and louder still.
The tall hats of the Yankees black
Confer on the forgotten sky
Three pillars of the hourglass.
The long repose of femurs crossed
In philosophic Xes light.
The squall unravels fast our beards of white.
So may the ball formed by our hoods,
Pink echo of the flowing blood,
Seek out the mummy in the golden dusk;
Once they the hourglass do upend
Sand at the top gives the condemned
One night before the wand’ring of the Jews.
The alabaster hourglass filled,
The wailing heart is ever stilled.
Our ibis feet on marsh, like him ’neath yews.
The future light will rain upon
The lead of forest windows and
Our task of Necrophori solitaire.
On the woes of mandragora
And the plaints of passiflora
The earthworm pale of burials emerges from its lair.
The chorus, which we have never seen, whitens the background in vaulted streaks with its sulphury alb. As it appears:
The earthworm pale of burials emerges from its lair.
– from Minutes of Memorial Sand
* * *
MEMNON: A cabinet-maker was I for many a long year,
Rue du Champs de Mars in All Saints’ Parish;
My dear wife was a dressmaker designing lady’s wear,
And the style in which we lived was pretty lavish.
Every blooming Sunday if it wasn’t raining,
We’d put on our best clothes and toddle down
To join the mob who came for the Debraining,
Rue de l’Echaudé, the greatest show in town.
One, two, watch the wheels go round,
Snip, snap, the brains fly all around,
My oh my the Rentier’s in a stew!
THE PALCONTENTS: Hip hip arse-over-tip! Hurrah for Old Ubu!
MEMNON: With our two beloved nippers, clutching us jammily
And waving paper dolls, as happy as can be,
Upstairs on the bus we’re a well-adjusted family
As we roll off merrily towards the Echaudé
Crowding to the barrier, risking broken bones,
Regardless of the blows, we push to the front row.
Then yours truly climbs up on a pile of stones
To protect my turn-ups when the claret starts to flow,
One, two, etc.
THE PALCONTENTS: Hip hip arse-over-tip! Hurrah for Old Ubu!
MEMNON: Soon with brains we’re plastered, the old girl and me,
Our two kids lap it up and we’re all jubilating
As we watch the Palcontent display his cutlery –
The first incision’s made and the numbered coffins waiting.
Suddenly I notice right up by the machine
The half-familiar phiz of a chap I used to know.
Hey, there! I shout to him, So much for you, old bean!
You tried to cheat me once, am I glad to see you go!
One, two, etc.
THE PALCONTENTS: Hip hip arse-over-tip! Hurrah for Old Ubu!
MEMNON: A plucking at my sleeve, it’s my spouse as I perceive.
Come on, you slob, she screeches, Take a crack!
Chuck a man-sized wad of dung at the lying bastard’s tongue,
The Palcontent’s just turned his ruddy back!
Such excellent advice won’t allow me to think twice,
I summon all my courage and let fly –
An enormous lump of pschitt meant to score the winning hit,
Got the Palcontent instead full in the eye.
THE PALCONTENTS and MEMNON: One, two, etc.
MEMNON: Toppled from my heap of stone, on the barrier I’m thrown,
As the Palcontent turns round to see who nicked him:
Down the hole of no return, pulped like butter in a churn,
And The People’s justice claims another victim.
So that is what you cop for a little Sunday hop,
Rue de l’Echaudé where necks are craning –
You set out like a lord and they return you on a board,
Just because you fancied a debraining.
THE PALCONTENTS and MEMNON: One, two, see the wheels go round,
Snip, snap, the brains fly all around,
My oh my the Rentier’s in a stew!
Hip hip arse-over-tip! Hurrah for Old Ubu!
– from Ubu Cuckolded
(translated by Cyril Connolly)
* * *
The Parade Ground. The THREE FREE MEN, their CORPORAL.
THREE FREE MEN: We are the Free Men and this is our Corporal. – Three cheers for freedom, rah, rah, rah! We are free. – Let’s not forget, it’s our duty to be free. Hey! not so fast, or we might arrive on time. Freedom means never arriving on time – never, never! – for our freedom drills. Let’s disobey together … No! not together: one, two, three! the first will disobey on the count of one, the second on two, the third on three. That makes all the difference. Let’s each march out of step with the other two, however exhausting it may be to keep it up. Let’s disobey individually – here comes the corporal of the Free Men!
CORPORAL: Fall in!
They fall out.
You, Free Man number three, you get two days’ detention for being in line with number two. The training manual lays down quite clearly that you must be free! – Individual drills in disobedience … Blind and unwavering indiscipline at all times constitutes the real strength of all Free Men. – Slope … arms!
THREE FREE MEN: Let’s talk in the ranks. – Let’s disobey. – The first on the count of one, the second on the count of two, the third on the count of three. – One, two, three!
CORPORAL: As you were! Number one, you should have grounded arms; number two, surrendered your weapon; number three thrown your rifle six paces behind you and then tried to strike a libertarian attitude. Fall out! One, two! one two!
They fall in and then march off, being careful not to march in step.
– from Ubu Enchained
(translated by Simon Watson Taylor)
* * *
Sengle got two weeks’ ‘convalescence’ leave to go to Paris. And once more the little soldier boy, all clad in red and blue, he headed out across the entire city toward the station.
He crossed paths with several officers whom he neglected to salute, but who did not call him to order. And besides, to demonstrate his good intentions and military obsequiousness, six steps before and six after he lifted a regulation hand to:
Two mailmen;
Seven schoolboys in uniform;
A bank messenger;
A bus driver, who was walking in a public garden in full regalia. And as several cyclists strolled there as well, their mounts resting against a clump of trees, he went looking for the bus depot.
He saluted one of the cyclists because on his left shoulder he was wearing a horrid little club insignia, all crumpled up.
He went into the cathedral and asked for the Swiss guard, so as to honour him with a genuflection. Then, following the meanderings of his path, he prostrated himself before:
The zinc flag of a wash house;
A pulchinello on a junk shop sign;
Several delivery boys, because of their badges;
A kitchen boy, who might have been using the similarity between the military uniform and his work garb to conceal the fact that he was really an officer;
And when night fell and his opportunities for saluting became less honourable, he headed toward the lights of the train station.
In the street, he noticed a group of enlisted men contorted in strange postures. They were not drunkards, who, having toasted to the sign of infinity, wandered from one stream to the next, precisely following in their zigzags the laws of refraction. These soldiers felt their way along the walls, sometimes bumping painfully into a passer-by, or lurching into each other at a drop in the sidewalk. They seemed like the blind leading each other into a ditch: Brueghel with uniforms.
Sengle, overhearing scraps of their conversation, pieced together their problem:
‘We’ll never find the hospital. That’s the third time we’ve been around this city. The hospital must have collapsed. Like last year, when the major went for his evening inspection and found only the walls standing, since he’d neglected to tell the engineers. The roof caved in on the typhoid cases, whom they evacuated to the corridors of a midwives’ clinic. It’s a fact that one patient immediately got better. So does a hospital collapse in this town every year because of some major’s negligence?’
And off they headed, groping their way toward a fourth lap around the city.
Sengle understood their hallucination when he read their regimental number. At a small nearby garrison on the hill, cases of night blindness were on the rise because of the altitude. The major, on his morning visit, had ordered those affected to the emergency hospital; but first they waited until they had enough to make a convoy, which was not formed until after the evening meal, then sent off without a guide. Having reached the city at sunset, and unable to penetrate the artificial lighting, the poor devils stumbled about in absolute darkness. People were used to it. That was why the officers had not thought twice about Sengle’s lapse of military etiquette.
May this chapter make the throng – that great nyctalope which knows how to see only familiar lights – understand that others might consider it a morbid exception, and calculate the right ascensions and declinations of a starless night for itself; may this chapter make that throng forgive this book for what it deems sacrilegious toward its idols – for in short, we declare the following: that it is not a daily occurrence for military hospitals to collapse because of a medical officer’s negligence; that the event might in fact be quite rare; that such a thing has not happened in several years; that even then it was perhaps an isolated case; that, despite its authenticity (see certain newspaper accounts from the summer of ’89), we have been indulgent enough to describe it as an hallucination …
Sengle, mindful of the Scriptures, at first thought of asking where one might find a deep hole or shop’s display window, so that the temporary blind men might topple into it. But afraid of missing his train, he instead contented himself with telling them:
‘This is the general speaking. Next time, try to act more like soldiers.’
– from Days and Nights
* * *
‘Look, I’m going to kill the beast,’ said Marcueil, very calmly.
‘What beast? You’re drunk, old man … my young friend,’ said the general.
‘The beast,’ said Marcueil.
In front of them, compact in the moonlight, an iron thing was squatting, with things that looked like elbows on its knees, and armoured shoulders without a head.
‘The dynamometer!’ exclaimed the general gleefully.
‘I’m going to kill it,’ repeated Marcueil obstinately.
‘My young friend,’ said the general, ‘when I was your age, and even younger, when I was reading for the Ecole Polytechnique, I often unhooked shop signs, unscrewed street urinals, stole milk bottles and locked drunks in hallways. But I haven’t yet burgled a slot machine. You needn’t deny it, you think it’s a slot machine! Well, anyway, he’s drunk … But be careful, there’s nothing in it for you, my young friend!’
‘It’s full, it’s full of strength, and full of numbers,’ André Marcueil was saying to himself.
‘Well,’ the general condescended, ‘I don’t mind helping you break the thing, but how? With our feet, with our fists? You don’t want me to lend you my sword, do you, to cut it in half?’
‘Break it? Oh, no,’ said Marcueil. ‘I want to kill it.’
‘Look out for the law, then, for defacing a public monument!’ said the general.
‘Kill … with a permit,’ said Marcueil. And he fumbled in his waistcoat pocket and pulled out a French ten centime piece.
The dynamometer’s slot glistened vertically.
‘It’s a female,’ said Marcueil gravely, ‘… but a very strong one.’ The coin went in with a click; it was as if the massive machine were cunningly putting itself on guard.
André Marcueil seized the sort of iron armchair by both its arms and, with no apparent effort, pulled:
‘Come, madame,’ he said.
His phrase ended in a terrible crashing of twisted steel, the broken springs writhed on the ground as if they were the beast’s entrails; the dial grimaced and its needle raced madly around two or three times like a hunted creature looking for a way of escape.
‘Let’s move along,’ said the general. ‘The dog! Just to impress me he picked a worn-out instrument.’
They were both very lucid now, although Marcueil had not thought to drop the two handles, which were like burnished cestus. They went out of the enclosure and up the avenue, toward the coupé.
Dawn was breaking, like the light from another world.
(translated by Ralph Gladstone and Barbara Wright)
* * *
Barabbas, slated to race, was scratched.
Pilate, the starter, pulling out his clepsydra or water clock, an operation which wet his hands unless he had merely spit on them – Pilate gave the send-off.
Jesus got away to a good start.
In those days, according to the excellent sports commentator St Matthew, it was customary to flagellate the sprinters at the start the way a coachman whips his horses. The whip both stimulates and gives a hygienic massage. Jesus, then, got off in good form, but he had a flat right away. A bed of thorns punctured the whole circumference of his front tire.
Today in the shop windows of bicycle dealers you can see a reproduction of this veritable crown of thorns as an ad for puncture-proof tires. But Jesus’s was an ordinary single-tube racing tire.
The two thieves, obviously in cahoots and therefore ‘thick as thieves,’ took the lead.
It is not true that there were any nails. The three objects usually shown in the ads belong to a rapid-change tire tool called the ‘Jiffy.’
We had better begin by telling about the spills; but before that the machine itself must be described.
The bicycle frame in use today is of relatively recent invention. It appeared around 1890. Previous to that time the body of the machine was constructed of two tubes soldered together at right angles. It was generally called the right-angle or cross bicycle. Jesus, after his puncture, climbed the slope on foot, carrying on his shoulder the bike frame, or, if you will, the cross.
Contemporary engravings reproduce this scene from photographs. But it appears that the sport of cycling, as a result of the well known accident which put a grievous end to the Passion race and which was brought up to date almost on its anniversary by the similar accident of Count Zborowski on the Turbie slope – the sport of cycling was for a time prohibited by state ordinance. That explains why the illustrated magazines, in reproducing this celebrated scene, show bicycles of a rather imaginary design. They confuse the machine’s cross frame with that other cross, the straight handlebar. They represent Jesus with his hands spread on the handlebars, and it is worth mentioning in this connection that Jesus rode lying flat on his back in order to reduce his air resistance.
Note also that the frame or cross was made of wood, just as wheels are to this day.
A few people have insinuated falsely that Jesus’s machine was a draisienne, an unlikely mount for a hill-climbing contest. According to the old cyclophile hagiographers, St Briget, St Gregory of Tours, and St Irene, the cross was equipped with a device which they name suppedaneum. There is no need to be a great scholar to translate this as ‘pedal.’
Lipsius, Justinian, Bosius, and Erycius Puteanus describe another accessory which one still finds, according to Cornelius Curtius in 1643, on Japanese crosses: a protuberance of leather or wood on the shaft which the rider sits astride – manifestly the seat or saddle.
This general description, furthermore, suits the definition of a bicycle current among the Chinese: ‘A little mule which is led by the ears and urged along by showering it with kicks.’
We shall abridge the story of the race itself, for it has been narrated in detail by specialized works and illustrated by sculpture and painting visible in monuments built to house such art.
There are fourteen turns in the difficult Golgotha course. Jesus took his first spill at the third turn. His mother, who was in the stands, became alarmed.
His excellent trainer, Simon the Cyrenian, who but for the thorn accident would have been riding out in front to cut the wind, carried the machine.
Jesus, though carrying nothing, perspired heavily. It is not certain whether a female spectator wiped his brow, but we know that Veronica, a girl reporter, got a good shot of him with her Kodak.
The second spill came at the seventh turn on some slippery pavement. Jesus went down for the third time at the eleventh turn, skidding on a rail.
The Israelite demimondaines waved their handkerchiefs at the eighth.
The deplorable accident familiar to us all took place at the twelfth turn. Jesus was in a dead heat at the time with the thieves. We know that he continued the race airborne – but that is another story.
(translated by Roger Shattuck)