The Idler

Idle Idols: Alfred Jarry

From Idler 17, November 1996

Mark Sanders uncovers the truth behnd the mask of the creator of Ubu Roi, one Alfred Jarry .

If to “Idle” is to refuse the everyday mundanities of life, then the Idler is a being who must struggle for his freedom. Enter Alfred Jarry, that master of the absurd, and self-obsessed anarchist of the soul. At the tender age of 23, he managed to revolutionise French theatre by slipping a literary time bomb down the pants of an unsuspecting bourgeois culture.

Primed and ready for explosion on 9th December 1896, the play in question was Ubu Roi. The place, a small playhouse; the Th?�atre de l’Ouvre in the centre of Paris. The event, the first ever introduction of the infamous and foul mouthed P?�re Ubu to a Parisian public, a character so despicable to the sensibilities of the audience that they rioted outside the auditorium on the opening night.

The first word of Ubu Roi, “Merde!”, has now become immortalised as the corner stone of all avant-garde performance. And the life of Alfred Jarry, the man behind the mask of P?�re Ubu, was as outrageous as his creation. As a raconteur who believed in action as the only means of true freedom, his uncompromising stance became a guiding force to future generations. He was venerated by the Surrealists in the Twenties and adored by Brecht throughout his life. He died aged 35.

Born in Laval, Mayenne, on the 8th of September 1873 (the year Arthur Rimbaud first published Un Saison en Enfer). Jarry was no ordinary child. His time at school was marked by insurrection. After an eventful education that sowed the seeds for his later writing, he finally arrived in Paris in 1891, renouncing the world of the classroom for that of the literary soir?�es of the Symbolist underground. Having dedicated himself to the dismantling of the everyday in favour of the sweet excesses of the absurd, he set about transforming his waking hours into a series of interventions, designed to upset the mundanity of being and tip it over into the stream of what he termed “the eternal dream”.

Resulting from personal theories on Pataphysics, which Jarry used as both an onieric and rhetorical philosophy, his life became a hyperbolic version of existence: at once a deformation and an exaggeration of reality. “Action and Life…” howled Jarry, “are more beautiful than Thought. Thus, let us Live and by so doing we shall be Masters.” His outlook on life was calculated to distort accepted “reality” and thereby trigger catastrophic changes, creating imaginary hypotheses that could replace the known or the probable. As such, each person was the master of his own contradictions. It was only by virtue of his will power that the individual could directly transform his environment away from the rational confines of bourgeois culture and so escape the suburbia of the soul.

Alfred Jarry undoubtedly was absurd, especially in appearance. Dubbed “The Indian” by friends (because of the ridiculous gaucho pants that he insisted on wearing everwhere) his outlandish attire went through various manifestations during his short life. Jarry used his clothes as a sign of his own internal transgression; he wore full cycling regalia (the 19th century equivalent of donning an astronaut suit in public); an incredibly tall stovepipe hat and hooded cape; and once nothing but a paper shirt with a black tie painted on it for an evening at the opera. The same outlandishness also applied to his lodgings. These developed from his early digs opposite a mental hospital at number 78 Boulevard de Port Royal (which were decked out with skeletons and human skulls, even a stone phallus with a violet skull cap to entertain the Ladies) to a ramshackle construction called The Tripod, which he had built on the edge of the Seine so he could fish through a trap door in the floorboards.

But however strange his living quarters appeared, it was his madness in public that brought him notoriety. Each day brought more excess, and it was not unusual for Jarry to step outside into the street and within seconds cause a minor scandal. His life long friend Rachilde recalls how Jarry’s fascination with a revolver, which he carried with him at all times, caused more than one or two innocent bystanders to fear for their lives. On one occasion an unsuspecting passer-by, having lost his way at night, stopped Jarry to ask him directions. He was ordered back six paces at gun-point and then charmingly given the information. Life itself was of no consequence to Jarry, only the joke was serious.

An inveterate drinker and lover of opium-induced visions, he used alcohol and drugs to blur the confines of reality and his own despair. Rachilde describes Jarry’s phenomenal daily intake of alcohol; “Jarry begins the day by imbibing two litres of white wine, three absinthes spaced between 10am and noon; then, at lunch, he washes down his fish or steak with red or white wine, alternating with more absinthes. In the afternoon, a few cups of coffee fortified with brandy or spirits of which I forget the names; then at dinner, after, of course, other apertifs, he could still tolerate at least two bottles of any vintage, of good or bad quality.”

But even with all that swilling inside him, he still maintained his sense of vitriolic humour. His reply to a campaign to ban alcohol from the streets was as follows: “Do not attack alcoholism! When will it be no longer necessary to recall that anti-alcoholics are sick people who have fallen pray to that poison water, so solvent and corrosive that it has been chosen out of all substances for cleansing and washing, and that one drop poured into a pure liquid, absinthe for example, muddies it.”

Often in a drunken haze, Jarry would play eating games in public to spice things up a bit. When food was available (his money situation was far from predictable and fluctuated from great wealth to poverty) he would gorge himself until he was ill. As gastronomic etiquette played such an important role in 19th century France, Jarry would take every opportunity to upset what he referred to as the common herd. His activities would range from entering a restaurant, sitting down and ordering a meal entirely in reverse, beginning with the brandy and ending with the soup, to challenging his friends to eat nothing but gherkins soaked in absinthe until the first one changed colour and was sick.

In the post-Haussmann Paris of caf?�s and wide boulevards, Jarry was provided with a perfect setting for subverting the spectacle from within by creating an even greater spectacle of himself as a statement and celebration of the absurd. Arnaud, whose father Franc-Nohain was a companion of Jarry’s, recalled that one evening at least, Jarry had a taste of his own medicine. “Alfred Jarry decided to paint hmself entirely green - face, hands, neck, wrists, in order to witness the amazement of the customers when he entered the caf?�. My father heard of the joke. In haste he informed all his friends, customers and waiters. When Jarry strolled in, green, green like a green exotic parrot - no one batted an eyelid. They went on talking, drinking and reading. After a while, Jarry quite taken aback, asked my father, ‘Don’t you notice anything?’ ‘No, nothing at all. Should I?’ It took Jarry hours to get rid of the green. It stuck behind his ears for days.”

It would be easy to fill an entire book with the tales of Alfred Jarry as the master prankster of the Parisian underground. But beyond the frontiers of his jokes lay a serious attmept to breach the dictates of society and debunk its in-built codes of control. How appropriate then, that the man whose creation, P?�re Ubu caused such consternation to bourgeois sensibilities, the man who spent long periods trying to invent a time machine, should live up to his reputation even on his death bed. His last words - “Bring me a tooth pick” display a healthy disregard for the Catholic religion and even the boredom of death itself. Alfred Jarry, we salute you!