Alfred Jarry: An Imagination in RevoltJill Fell
Book Reviews
At the very outset of her book Jill Fell expresses her impatience for Jarry scholarship that dares not venture to the extra-ubic realms of his oeuvre. In order to explore the underappreciated aspects of the work of the forerunner of French avant-garde theatre, Fell begins by stepping back from Ubu, both thematically and historically, and delving into the short and extraordinarily rich period of Jarry’s life that immediately precedes the opening night of Ubu Roi at the Theatre de L’Oeuvre in December 1896. Refreshingly, Fell hardly mentions the event. Instead, she indirectly throws light on it by investing Jarry’s early poetry and art criticism, his coeditorship with Remy de Gourmont of the Journal L’Ymagier and his short-lived magazine Perinderion. In all of these activities she discovers the strong presence of image, whether it is an actual picture, as with his woodcuts, or the metaphorical imagery of his writing. Refusing to subscribe to disciplinary constraints of literary criticism or art history, Fell engages in an archeological excavation of Jarry’s imagery. As a result, she does not present him as a writer who also made woodprints, edited literary journals, or fiddled with puppets—all of that when not scribbling, ordering his meals backwards or pulling his gun in public. Instead, she makes her first task the pursuit of Jarry’s ideas, regardless of the medium in which they were materialized. “I have followed Jarry’s lead,” writes Fell in the introduction of her book (16). Many critics say that about their subjects, and very few of them live up to the claim. Fell belongs to the minority who do, and in quite a momentous way. From an in-depth investigation of Jarry’s use of patterns in his graphic works and his encounters with (and contributions to) the emerging aesthetics of primitivism in visual arts, she effortlessly moves to the close reading of his poem “Le Sablier” (The Hourglass) from the collection Les Minutes de Sable Mémoriel. It turns out that strikingly similar principles guide Jarry’s poetry and visual art. But that is only a modest introduction to what is yet to come. We soon learn, for example, that Jarry’s interest in marionette theatre was not limited to his early, adolescent work and his late, financially pressed period, but that concept of the puppet give gestures to the characters of his novels, and even more, that it outlines the movement of his writing. In a tour de force of scholarly rigor and imagination, Fell points back to Jarry’s early novel Days and Nights, and the (probably autobiographic) episode of the protagonist’s walk in the woods with his friend. Describing his state as the moment of perfect happiness, the novel’s hero declares that he experienced his body as purely material, while “something liquid”—his “astral body”—hovered above, and something even more ethereal—the “soul”—soared even higher. He was afraid that, if touched, the thread between his body and other aspects of his self would be torn, and that he would die. Fell establishes a quick series of connections, from marionette strings to the fishing rod of Jarry’s favorite pastime tangled in a decomposing body that floats down the river, to the invisible thread that, like the string of a kite, ties together his body and spirit. The cord attached to the head of a crudely made marionette, in the end, is both a technical device of puppet theatre and the line of thought that drives Jarry’s imagination. This kind of reading of Jarry culminates in Fell’s discussion of dance in Jarry’s work: a subject untouched even by the College de Pataphysique, a hermetic group of writers and artists, founded in 1948 and dedicated to continuation and exegesis of Jarry’s work. She demonstrates convincingly that Jarry stands at a turning point in the attitudes towards dance in French literature and the arts in general. With Alfred Jarry: An Imagination in Revolt, Jarry scholarship in English finally makes a significant contribution to the general knowledge about this author. Jill Fell’s book is a model of rigorous and uncalculating scholarship. It is committed and deeply personal. She is deeply aware of her position as a female scholar writing about a notoriously misogynistic author. The extraordinary vigor of this scholarly prose comes from a dynamic negotiation between Fell and Jarry that underlies the entire work. Throughout, there is a sense that the author whose line of thought she is trying to discern might turn against her. She writes that, if the walking companion touches the narrator of Days and Nights, “ the possibility of keeping the bond intact will vanish just as surely as Orpheus’s hold on Eurydice when he turned to look at her” (161). Had we not been warned that Fell would follow Jarry’s lead, we would have missed the point of this sudden appearance of the Orpheus theme, and the possibility of the reversal of the relationship between the scholar and her subject. What, indeed, would happen if our companion, whose lead we have chosen to follow, turned and looked us straight in the eye? In the last analysis, Fell makes the point that surpasses even her invaluable contribution to Jarry scholarship. She reminds us that what ties the best scholars to their work is not interest (in both senses of that word) but the double bind of love and death. Branislav Jakovljevic, The Drama Review, 51:3, Fall 2007 Ever since André Breton conferred canonic status on his work, Jarry (1873-1907) has been considered a pivotal transitional figure in France. An important protosurrealist figure, the creator of pataphysics, and one of the first systematic practitioners of Humour noir, Jarry made many contributions to the aesthetics of modernism. Fell’s thoughtful, comprehensive, well-illustrated study encompasses the many facets of Jarry’s oeuvre – his literary output, of course, but also his graphic work, his contributions to cabaret chanson, and his work in dance. Best known for his subversive, marionette-inspired play Ubi Roi (1896), Jarry had unusually diverse interests that reflected his irreverence for bourgeois conformity and received values, the ludic, parodic, and often transgressive quality of his imagination, and his penchant for experimentation. In six chapters that are interrelated but could equally well stand alone, Fell investigates Jarry’s visual language; his confrontational treatment of science, poetry, and mysticism; his innovations in illustrating books; his flouting of artistic orthodoxy; the use of puppetry in the making of Ubu; and the sexual underpinnings of dance and writing in his novel Messaline. Scholars interested in 19th- and 20th-century French literature and the arts will want this book. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Graduate students and above.
--J.-P. Cauvin, University of Texas at Austin
Alfred Jarry (1873-1907) is a notoriously difficult author to approach, and not only because it is easy to be diverted by the Ubu plays, which were only a minor port of his output. His own statements of position or artistic sympathy tend to be at best indirect, and are often masked by his complex, inventive language, and by the blurred distinction between the ‘univer supplémentaire’ of la pataphysique and our own. Add this to the eccentric, self-destructive persona he adopted for most of his career, and any new critical approach to Jarry becomes all the more welcome. Fortunately, Jill Fell has found on, or rather a group of them.
This handsomely produced and profusely illustrated volume is not a straightforward investigation of Jarry’s texts; it studies him as a writer who was also an artist, an art critic, and a performer, and in so doing allows illuminated new readings of various parts of his work. The main beneficiary is Jarry’s first published volume, Les Minutes de sable memorial (1894), and eclectic collection of verse, prose, and dramatic poetry, illustrated by the author, which has often been seen as a mix of post-juvenilia and an attempt to take the Symbolist cult of difficulty to excessive new heights. Fell presents it more as a product of the period when Jarry, yet to adopt the mask of Ubu, was subject to a broad range of artistic influences that were as much visual as literary, and more importantly, where no firm boundaries were accepted. Thus concepts emerge of the written word as a unit of image and pattern, and not merely of sound or meaning, and of a radial rather than linear text, which give this collection a fresh and worthy place in a lineage running between Mallarmé and Apollinaire. These concepts are also capably identified within Jarry’s own enigmatic statements about his purpose and technique.
Fell provides a richer, more personalized account of Jarry’s links with artists than any previous critic. The connections with the Nabis, the School of Pont-Aven, and Henri Rousseau are well known, but this book pursues them at a pictorial as well as textual level in a most productive manner, and the author also continues her previous quest for Beardsley’s ‘lost portrait’ of Jarry and/or his creation Dr Faustroll. Jarry’s own talent for woodcuts is shown as providing a link to his previously little-acknowledged innovations in the art of the book, prominent in but not confined to his collaboration with Remy de Gourmont on the review L’Ymagier, and his own short-lived Perhinderion.
Père Ubu also finds a place, both as a visual construct influenced by primitive ethnic arts and as a puppet; the sections on the marionette aesthetic in Symbolism and the puppet theatres of the time have an interest stretching well beyond Jarry, as well as exploring his own skills as a puppeteer. Similarly, discussion of Jarry’s references to dance represents quite fresh ground, and also manages to stir interest in Messaline, perhaps Jarry’s most straightforward—and hence least memorable—novel.
This does not set out to be a general study of Jarry, or indeed to pursue a single thesis. Nevertheless, it succeeds admirably in rounding out his portrait as an active, diverse member of the lively artistic culture of the belle époque, and in reminding us that Jarry was an entertainer as well as a visionary. The work is rigorous and scrupulously referenced, with an erudite and very readable style, and is warmly recommended not only to readers of Jarry, but also to anyone with an interest in the literature or art of the period.
Ben Fisher, University of Wales, Bangor
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Photograph courtesy of Louise Dell-Bene Stahl © 2001