Alfred Jarry (1873–1907) was a French writer best known for his play Ubu Roi (1896) and for coining the philosophical concept of “pataphysics” (“the science of imaginary solutions”). Jarry is usually classified as a Symbolist but also cited as a prominent proto—as his works can be considered proto-Dada, proto-Surrealist, and proto-futurist (all movements of the 1920s or 1930s). In this regard, he shares affinities with the German writer and artist Paul Scheerbart, not least because Jarry also wrote in a variety of hybrid genres and styles. His play Ubu Roi was considered scandalous at the time of its performance for its savage humor and baffling absurdity, and caused an actual riot. Despite their outré nature and Jarry’s early death (of tubercular meningitis complicated by alcoholism), these works influenced many other writers and constituted a major influence on the Theater of the Absurd. Many critics today consider Jarry as important as Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud before him.
“Elements of Pataphysics,” presented here in a new, definitive translation, the first since the 1960s (when Evergreen Review devoted an entire issue to Jarry’s pataphysics), is an excerpt from Jarry’s other famous work, published posthumously in 1911, Exploits and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, Pataphysician. This almost-novel is about a man who, born at age sixty-three, travels through a hallucinatory Paris and subscribes to the tenets of Jarry’s own system of “pataphysics,” itself a celebration of bizarre logic or even antilogic.
Perhaps editor Judith Merril described the novel best in her introduction to an excerpt appearing in The Year’s Best S-F (1967): “To call Faustroll a novel is rather like referring to a Mariner space probe as a flying machine. Faustroll is a novel, and a rather old-fashioned one, as far as plot is concerned: The learned doctor, dunned for debts, escapes prison by luring the drink-loving bailiff, Panmuphle, into a Marvelous Invention (a copper-mesh skiff—perhaps the first amphibious vessel), in which, with the added company of the doctor’s friend (or familiar), the talking baboon Bosse-de-Nage, a Wonderful Voyage is conducted.”
In a sense, “Elements of Pataphysics” is an absurdist jazz riff on the conte philosophique that, a continent away and in a totally different context, Hossain had used in 1905 to advance social justice. What Jarry was advancing instead, influenced by both Wells and Verne, was a contrarian view of human nature, wrapped in the seeming pseudoscience of an experimental philosophy. Cosmological, physical, and metaphysical arguments are advanced in the context of replies to or parodies of the very real Lord Kelvin’s essays and addresses. Certain elements in the novel come right from Kelvin: measuring rods, the watch, the tuning fork, the “luminiferous ether,” rotating flywheels, and “linked gyrostats.”
In the interests of documenting the overlap between science fiction and science fact, it must be noted that Jarry kept readers guessing by appearing in public in a long black cape, in a cyclist’s uniform, or wearing a paper shirt with a painted-on tie (set on fire for dramatic effect).