The 1890s saw the heyday of Symbolism; Jarry was one of its staunchest defenders, and his early writings were profoundly influenced by the movement. His first book, Les Minutes de Sable Mémorial, a gallimaufry of Symbolist poems, fragments from Ubu and from other works in progress, was published in 1894 by Alfred Vallette under the Mercure imprint. He was also a partisan of the modem painters of the time – Gauguin (with whom he stayed at Pont Aven), Van Gogh, Bonnard, Vuillard, Emile Bernard. Among the Symbolist writers and polemicists, Mallarmé, Remy de Gourmont, Henri de Régnier, and Marcel Schwob were his friends, but Jarry’s tastes were always catholic; he was, for instance, one of the first to recognize the gifts of the Douanier Rousseau. (They had been friends for some time: when Jarry was thrown out of his slum room in 1897 it was the Douanier who sheltered him in his own equally slummy room around the corner, in the Avenue du Maine.)

In 1896, though, Jarry had become the secrétaire-régisseur of the avant-garde Théâtre de l’Oeuvre, then in the forefront of the Symbolist and anarchist movements and directed by the young Lugné-Poe. This gave him the chance to persuade Lugné-Poe to stage his Ubu Roi, an event which was to be the turning point in his life. The scandal of its two first performances in December 1896 has been compared to that of the “battle” of Victor Hugo’s Hernani nearly a century earlier, which marked the beginning of the literary rebellion that was later consolidated into the Romantic movement. Ubu Roi stemmed from a corporate drama, Les Polonais, which Jarry and his fellow students at the Rennes lycée had written with the cruel aim of ridiculing their unfortunate physics professor, M. Hébert, known as Le Père Ebé. Jarry made Les Polonais his own, changed, adapted, and developed it, and later wrote the sequels Ubu Enchaîné and Ubu Cocu.