Against the tragic negativity of his personal life, though, Jarry almost to the end practiced every sort of positive artistic creativity. He had a great influence on slightly younger writers such as Apollinaire, André Salmon, and Max Jacob, and also on Picasso, who collected some of his manuscripts. The Cubists felt an affinity with him, and André Breton recognized him as a precursor of Surrealism. Among Jarry’s other talents were painting, drawing, and engraving. He also translated works that he particularly admired: Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner; Scherz, Satire, Ironie und tiefere Bedeutung from the German of that other poète maudit, Christian-Dietrich Crabbe; and Pope Joan, from the Greek of Emmanuel Rhoïdes. At least twenty items of original writing are to be found in his bibliography, among which perhaps the most important is Les Gestes et opinions du Docteur Faustroll, pataphysicien. This “neo-scientific novel” was not published in its entirety in French until some years after Jarry’s death. It appears in an English translation by Simon Watson Taylor in The Selected Works of Alfred Jarry,1 jointly edited by Watson Taylor and Roger Shattuck, the American Jarry scholar. Shattuck writes:

“Faustroll reveals its enigmatic qualities most clearly in contrast to Ubu Roi, Ubu Enchaîné, and Ubu Cocu. In the nineties Ubu’s freewheeling and adolescent nihilism was received with a raucous mixture of hoots and cheers in the auditorium as in the press. Yet it was received. Faustroll, even though a few fragments appeared in the Mercure de France in May 1895, encountered only silence and uneasy rejection by the two editors most devoted to Jarry’s work. This time he appeared to have attempted too much. In a grotesque symmetry, Faustroll moves in the opposite direction from the Ubu plays and forms their complement. Beneath the highly congested surface, and in spite of its desultory structure, one senses in Faustroll the search for a new reality, a stupendous effort to create out of the ruins Ubu had left behind a new system of values – the world of Pataphysics. Beneath the double talk and ellipsis, its formal definition seems to mean that the virtual or imaginary nature of things as glimpsed by the heightened vision of poetry or science or love can be seized as real. This is the ultimate form of ‘authentic enactment.’”

It was in Faustroll that Jarry elaborated his “science” of Pataphysics, the science that lies behind all his thinking: Among other “formal definitions” of Pataphysics, we have:

Pataphysics is the science of the realm beyond metaphysics; or, Pataphysics lies as far beyond metaphysics as metaphysics lies beyond physics – in one direction or another.

Pataphysics is the science of the particular, of laws governing exceptions.

Pataphysics is the science of imaginary solutions.

For Pataphysics, all things are equal.