Alfred Jarry Biography and List of Works

French writer known mainly as the creator of UBU ROI (1896), a kind of parody of Shakespeare's Macbeth. Jarry was a forerunner of the Theatre of the Absurd (see Beckett, Ionesco, Pirandello, Genet and others), employing a Surrealistic style, and inventing a logic of the absurd, which he called pataphysique. Jarry's other works include stories, novels, and poems.

"Laughter is born out of the discovery of the contradictory."

Jarry was born in Laval, Mayenne, the son of a wealthy farmer and craftsmen. He moved at the age of 18 to Paris to live on a small family inheritance. Ubu roi was first written when he was 15 years old. The play was originally presented with marionettes, and used one of Jarry's teachers as a model. In 1896 Aurélien Lugné-Poë produced it in Paris, where the performance caused a riot.

In Paris Jarry frequented the literary salons and began to write, producing two sequels to Ubu, UBU ENCHAÎNE (1900), and UBU COCU, published posthumously in 1944. H.G. Wells's novel The Time Machine inspired Jarry to write the speculative essay 'How to Construct a Time Machine' (1900). LE SURÂLE (1902) was a comic fantasy featuring a superman who, nourished on super food, wins an extraordinary bicycle race against a six-man team and performs astonishing feats of erotic endurance before perishing in the passionate embrace of an amorous machine.

His fortune was soon spent, and Jarry lapsed into a chaotic, Bohemian lifestyle. Though a midget, his presence was huge. Jarry had a taste for absinthe; he lived in a bizarre apartment where each storey had been cut horizontally in half to make double the original number of floors. André Gide put Jarry into an episode of his novel The Counterfeiters. Until his death at the age of thirty-four, Jarry was a familiar figure stalking the streets of Paris with his green umbrella, symbol in King Ubu of middle-class power, wearing cyclist's garb and carrying two pistols. Jarry died of alcoholism and tuberculosis in Paris, on November 1, 1907.

Alfred Jarry's influence on modern science fiction is seen is J.G. Ballard's The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy as a Downhill Motor Race (1967), which echoes Jarry's themes from his essay Commentair pour servir à la construction pratique de la machine à explorer le temps.

Ubu roi - first presented on December 10, 1896 at the Théâtre de l'Oeuvre. - Cowardly Père Ubu is egged on by his wife to murder the royal family. He becomes the king of Poland and establishes a reign of terror before being defeated by the Tsar and forced into exile in France with Mother Ubu. The events take place in a crazy never-never land, the tempo is rapid, and the principal characters move through the story like some monstrous puppets, in an attack on existing moral and aesthetic values. - In addition to satirizing bourgeois values, Jarry sneers at traditional drama; a scene in which Mère and Père Ubu plot to assassinate the King of Poland for instance, apes Shakespeare's Macbeth.

"Yet it is high time we perceive the remarkably clear line that connects the impish figure of Alfred Jarry in 1896, calmly saying merde (shit) to bourgeois culture, with Albert Camus, the impassioned humanist who wanted to bring all the black sheep back into the fold."
(Mayrice Nadeau in The History of Surrealism, 1968)

For further reading: Alfred Jarry, Nihilism and the Theater of the Absurd by M.M. LaBelle (1980); Sous le masque d'Alfred Jarry? Les sources d'Ubu roi by C.Chasse (1921); D'Ubu roi au douanier Rosseau by C. Chasse (1947) - See also: Guillaume Apollinaire, Samuel Beckett, Eugéne Ionesco - Pataphysics: 'formally defined' as the science of imaginary solutions, which symbolically attributes the properties of objects, described by their virtuality to their lineaments. The 'science' was later taken up and developed by other French novelists such as Boris Vian, George Perec and Raymond Queneau.

LES MINUTES DE SABLE MÉMORIAL, (1894)