Also Translated by Barbara Wright

Ubu Roi (Alfred Jarry)

The Bark Tree (Raymond Queneau)
The Flight of Icarus (Raymond Queneau)
The Sunday of Life (Raymond Queneau)

Translated from the French by Ralph Gladstone and Barbara Wright,
with an introduction by Barbara Wright.

A NEW DIRECTIONS BOOK

Copyright© 1964, 1977 by New Directions Publishing Corporation

All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, or television review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.

Extracts from Roger Shattuck’s “Introduction” to the Selected Works of Alfred Jarry (Copyright © 1965 by Roger Shattuck and Simon Watson Taylor) are reprinted by permission of Grove Press, Inc.

Manufactured in the United States of America

An earlier version of this translation appeared in New Directions in Prose and Poetry 18 (1964). The present edition was first published clothbound and as New Directions Paperbook 426 in 1977

Published simultaneously in Canada by McClelland & Stewart, Ltd.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Jarry, Alfred, 1873-1907.

The supermale = (Le surmâle).

(A New Directions Book)

I. Title.

PZ3.J297SU7 [PQ2619.A65] 843.8 76-45646

ISBN 0-8112-0632-7

ISBN 0-8112-0633-5 pbk.

New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin

by New Directions Publishing Corporation,

333 Sixth Avenue, New York 10014

CONTENTS

Introduction by Barbara Wright

The Supermale

The Highest Bidder

His Heart Was Neither on the Right nor on the Left

It’s a Female, but a Very Strong One

A Little Slip of a Girl

The Ten-Thousand-Mile Race

The Alibi

Ladies Only

The Ovum

The Indian So Celebrated by Theophrastus

Who Art Thou, Human Creature?

And More

O Sweetest Nightingale

The Discovery of Woman

The Love Machine

Introduction by Barbara Wright

INTRODUCTION

Alfred Jarry is still, outside France, mainly known as the author of the “scandalous” play Ubu Roi, which was probably the first example of the “Theater of the Absurd.” It was indeed Ubu that shot Jarry, at the age of twenty-three, into instant notoriety in the fin-de-siecle “belle époque” Paris of 1896, but Ubu represents only one aspect of his multifarious talents.

Born in Laval, which is near enough to Brittany for him to have boasted of being a Breton, Jarry was a brilliant student at the lycées of Laval and Rennes, and went to Paris in 1891 to study at the lycée Henri IV in order to prepare entry to the prestigious college Ecole Normale Supérieure. Though he did well at Henri IV, where he studied philosophy (with Bergson), Latin, Greek, history, French, mathematics, cosmography, and modern languages, he failed in three successive years to get a place at the Ecole Normale (which, it must be said, only had room for twenty-four new students each year from the whole of France). With characteristic obstinacy Jarry put his name down for a fourth attempt, but he withdrew his candidature at the last moment, for by now – 1894 – he was already a well-known figure in the world of avant-garde literature. He had written poems, stories and criticism for little reviews; he had three times won competitions organized by the Echo de Paris; he was already a contributor to the influential Revue Blanche and, more importantly, to the symbolist review Le Mercure de France, whose director, Alfred Vallette, and his wife, the novelist Rachilde, were to become his lifelong friends and supporters.

It is interesting to discover that Jarry, who throughout his short life (he died when he was thirty-four) was notorious for his consciously provocative and outrageous behavior, had during his early student days at Henri IV earned a reputation with at least some of his contemporaries for being shy, well behaved, conscientious, and studious. He was soon to shed the first three characteristics, but studious he was to remain for the rest of his life. Already while following the grueling Henri IV program he was reading widely on a tremendous variety of other subjects at the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève; he was interested in all branches of science (and at one time actually considered following a scientific career), but at the same time he was attracted to Rosicrucianism and other esoteric arts then popular. He was also fascinated by heraldry. Nor did he disdain sports: he was a passionate and skillful fisherman and oarsman, a good fencer, and an ardent cyclist. In 1896 he acquired a “Clément luxe” bicycle, the latest, fastest, and most elegant model. (It cost the fabulous sum of 525 francs, of which the unfortunate dealer was never paid more than a few derisory installments.)

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.

Ubu, with his cupidity, stupidity, ferocity, and cowardice, symbolized Jarry’s revolt against the accepted values of the time. Jarry did not make Ubu the embodiment of “vice” in order to present a “vile” character but, on the contrary, in order to show up all the establishment figures around him – kings, nobles, generals, magistrates; Ubu’s very presence strips them of their false pretentions and sentiments. The only commoners in the Ubu plays are peasants, whom Ubu robs as everyone else has always robbed them, but he does it in a more open and dynamic way, and totally without hypocrisy. Jarry’s methods were mystification, surprising associations, gross exaggeration, and a wild humor which, as a method, remains humor even when it is no longer funny and has even perhaps become tragic; his is a sophisticated kind of satire which appears deceptively simple. The audience at the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre, who were representative of the literary and other élites, naturally had no wish to be confronted on the stage with what Jarry called their “ignoble other-self,” and they and most critics greeted the play with horror and uproar. Catulle Mendès was one of the few critics who was prepared to see clearly: “A new type has emerged,” he wrote. “Père Ubu exists. . . He will become a popular legend of base instincts, rapacious and violent; and Monsieur Jarry, who I hope is destined for a more worthy celebrity, will have created an infamous mask.”

Jarry now had only eleven more years to live. After the sensation of Ubu Roi his life style became more and more eccentric, and his “self-inflicted nightmare” began in earnest. He identified himself with Ubu to the extent of actually referring to himself as “le Père Ubu” and using the royal “we”; he amused himself by insulting and terrorizing the bourgeoisie he so despised (often with a loaded revolver; he was an excellent shot). And though he always retained the affection and esteem of such friends as the Vallettes, he was already on the downward path toward self-destruction. If there was no difference between life and literature, if nothing was sacred and everything was absurd and meaningless, the logical conclusion was self-annihilation.

He dissipated the small personal fortune that had come to him on the death of his parents, and lived for the last ten years of his life in a squalid room that was just high enough to allow him – he was only a little over five feet tall – to stand up. (A rapacious landlord had divided one small apartment into four, vertically and horizontally. History doesn’t seem to relate who lived in the other three midget dwellings.) He neglected himself, didn’t eat, drowned himself in absinthe, and later became addicted to ether (which was cheaper). He died at thirty-four, his last request being for a toothpick.

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.

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.

André Marcueil is one of a long line of Jarry’s heroes with whom he identified himself – supermen so superior to ordinary mortals that they become God. In Faustroll (“Jarry’s spiritual autobiography”) Dr. Faustroll is a man-god who survives his own death. In the Amour Absolu, whose hero is called Emmanuel Dieu, “Jarry makes himself God”; in César Antéchrist he asserts that one has to be God in order to be a man, and in the Amour en Visites he writes: “man must amuse himself in the image of his creator. God has amused himself savagely ever since he has been God, only he isn’t going to amuse himself much longer, because I am here. A good God always dethrones another God.”

A god, perhaps, in his imagination, (which he continually asserted was “real” life), but in what to other people is the real life of the here and now, Jarry was something less than godlike. And such were the contradictions of his character that when, after a complete physical breakdown in 1906, he thought he was dying, in spite of all his braggadocio and blasphemy, he not only received extreme unction, like any good Catholic, but also wrote to his friends to tell them of it. His megalomania was a mask for a great deal of misery, but his works have already guaranteed him that “worthy celebrity” that Catulle Mendes predicted for him eighty years ago.

BARBARA WRIGHT

The Supermale

The Highest Bidder

THE HIGHEST BIDDER

“The act of love is of no importance, since it can be performed indefinitely.”

All eyes were turned upon the perpetrator of this absurdity.

The conversation of André Marcueil’s guests at the Château de Lurance that evening had come round to the subject of love as being, by common consent, the most appropriate, seeing that there were ladies present, and as being also the subject most likely, even in that September of 1920, to avoid tedious discussion about the Dreyfus Affair.

Among those present were the celebrated American chemist William Elson, a widower, with his daughter Ellen; the millionaire engineer, electrical expert, and manufacturer of automobiles and aircraft, Arthur Gough, with his wife; General Sider; Senator de Saint-Jurieu with his baroness, Pusice-Euprépie de Saint-Jurieu; Cardinal Romuald; the actress Henriette Cyne, and Doctor Bathybius.

These diverse and notable figures could easily have reinvigorated the commonplace, pushing it effortlessly toward paradox, merely by each expressing his own original thoughts, but their good manners soon reduced the remarks of these celebrated wits to the polished insignificance of society conversation.

And so this unexpected statement had much the same effect as that, which even to this day has been insufficiently analyzed, of a stone cast into a frog pond; momentary turmoil, followed by universal interest.

It might very likely have produced a different result: smiles, but by mischance it had been uttered by the host.

André Marcueil’s face, like his aphorism, left a sort of gap in the assembly; not, however, by its singularity, but – if it is possible to couple the two words – by its characteristic insignificance. It was as pale as his starched shirt fronts, and would almost have merged into the woodwork, pale in the electric light, had it not been for the inky fringe of his collar-fashion beard, and for his longish hair which he had curled, probably to conceal incipient baldness. His eyes were most likely black, but were certainly weak, for he concealed them behind the tinted lenses of gold-rimmed pince-nez. Marcueil was thirty years old, and of medium height, though by adopting a pronounced stoop he seemed to take pleasure in making himself seem even shorter than he was. His wrists were thin, and so hairy as to resemble exactly his frail, black-silk-encased ankles. His wrists and ankles alike gave rise to the supposition that he must be remarkably weak in his entire person, to judge at least by what one could see of it. He spoke slowly and in a deep voice, as though anxious to spare his breath. Had he owned a hunting permit his description would no doubt have read: chin: round; face: oval; nose: average; mouth: average; height: average. . . In fact Marcueil embodied so absolutely the average man that his very ordinariness became extraordinary.

The remark took on a pitifully ironic significance, whispered like a breath from the mouth of this little man. He obviously did not know what he was saying. He was not known to keep a mistress, and presumably the state of his health precluded love.

A “chilled silence” fell, and someone was about to change the subject when Marcueil continued:

“I am quite serious, gentlemen.”

“I thought,” minced the no longer youthful Pusice-Euprépie de Saint-Jurieu, “that love was a sentiment.”

“Perhaps so, madam,” replied Marcueil. “All we need is to agree on. . . what we mean by. . . a sentiment.”

“It is an impression upon the soul,” the cardinal hastened to say.

“I read something of the sort in my youth, in the spiritual philosophers,” added the senator.

“An enfeebled sensation,” said Bathybius. “Praised by the English Associationists!”

“I am nearly of the same opinion as the doctor,” said Marcueil. “It is an attenuated act, most likely; that is, not quite an act; or better still, a potential act.”

“If you accept that definition,” said Saint-Jurieu, “would the completed act exclude love?”

Henriette Cyne yawned ostentatiously.

“Certainly not,” said Marcueil.

The ladies thought they ought to be preparing to blush behind their fans, or to hide behind those fans the fact that they were not blushing.

“Certainly not,” he continued, “if each completed act is followed by another act that remains. . . sentimental in this respect – that it will only be completed sometime later.”

This time several people could not prevent themselves smiling.

Their host, amused by the unfolding of his paradox, seemed to grant them full license.

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