In December 1948 an assorted group of professors and intellectuals, who considered Jarry to be one of the most neglected of great French writers, founded in Reims the College of Pataphysics. (An account of the college, as well as many reflections on Pataphysics, can be found in Evergreen Review, No. 13, May/June 1960.) The college has produced a series of scholarly magazines and publications centered upon Jarry and his ideas, and has published many of his hitherto unknown works. At the same time it has continued his spirit of humorous and erudite mystification and his cold, clear analysis of received ideas, in whatever quarter they may be found. It has upset quite a few members of the present-day French establishment, who never know whether to take the college seriously or not. It has adopted (and adapted) Jarry’s Almanach du Père Ubu as its own perpetual calendar: Jarry’s birth date, September 8, 1873, is the first of the month of Absolu; we are now in the one hundred and fourth year of the Pataphysical era and I am writing this, believe it or hot, on the second day of Pédale, 104, the fête of S. André Marcueil, ascète cycliste. The college has also created its own hierarchy, which includes not a few of those upon whom the “vulgar” world has also thrust greatness, as for instance Ionesco, Jacques Prévert, René Clair, Marcel Duchamp, Dubuffet, Michel Leiris, and Raymond Queneau. Roger Shattuck is the Proveditor-General Propagator for the Islands and the Americas, Regent (by Transseant Susception) of the Chair of Applied Mateology, GMOGG. Even I am a regent: as a reward for my translation of Ubu Roi, I was made Regent of Shakespearian Zozology.

The Supermale does not talk in so many words about Pataphysics, but the whole book is imbued with that science. The key word in the first definition of Pataphysics that I quoted is “beyond,” and the essence of the Supermale is that he goes beyond everything hitherto imaginable. He is also very much the “particular,” the “exception” and as for an “imaginary solution”. . . The book was published in 1902, but Jarry set it in 1920, a date very much in the future for him – so much in the future, in fact, that he didn’t live to see it. The Supermale, like Faustroll, brings together most of the elements of Jarry’s manifold talents and interests: poetry, classical learning, science, fantasy, imagination, comedy, and humor. It even reflects his hobbies – Elson’s skill with a revolver, and the very idea of a bicycle as an inanimate hero – but more importantly, as with Faustroll, The Supermale is obsessed with the potentialities of man and what he considers to be his limitations; with the idea of extending frontiers, pushing the possible to the limits of the imaginable, discovering what might be done by will power to liberate and control the energy of the universe.