Introduction

Alfred Henri Jarry (1873-1907)

Jarry was born and brought up in the provinces, but went to Paris at eighteen to study philosophy. (His professor was the famous Henri Bergson.) Already comic writing was his passion. From the age of twelve onwards he had composed verse, playlets, and nonsense-stories parodying the fiction of the time: typical titles areThe Umbrella-Syringe of Doctor Death, Roupias Tsunami-head andFishing Overture. At the same age, in company with two school friends, he had also amused himself by writing satirical sketches about his schoolteachers, and one of these,The Poles, was later reworked asKing Ubu (Ubu roi), first play in the Ubu cycle.

The extraordinary energy of the three Ubu plays, and their cult status in European drama, have all but eclipsed everything else Jarry wrote or did. From student days onwards he supported himself as a writer, producing everything from reviews and satirical essays to music-hall songs, from mock philosophy to fiction. His ‘novels’The Supermale andThe Exploits and Opinions of Doctor Faustroll, Pataphysician are absurd masterpieces, anticipating the stories of Jorge Luis Borges or Italo Calvino on the one hand, and the satires of Stephen Leacock, James Thurber and Flann O’Brien on the other. The more people laughed, the more seriously he set his face, pretending that he was a genuine philosophical visionary and developing the spoof system of pataphysics. This, he said, was a ‘science of imaginary solutions, which symbolically attributes the properties of objects, described by their virtuality, to their lineaments’ – that is, one in which appearance is reality, and vice versa. (Its origins are the infants’ game of ‘No means Yes’, and its implications are worked out before our eyes inSlave Ubu.)

In daily life, Jarry was eccentric in the gentle, melancholic vein also favoured by his contemporary, the composer Erik Satie. He was just under five feet tall and slight, dressed always in black and sported long black hair and a pointed beard which made him look like a miniature Mephistopheles. With a group of like-minded friends, he cultivated the art of living, as he put it, for the ‘exquisite moment’, of taking very seriously the business of taking nothing seriously at all. He rode a bicycle excitedly and energetically, as if it were a charger, sometimes into bars and houses as well as in the street. In admiration of Buffalo Bill, one of his heroes, he shot lighted cigarettes from people’s mouths – with a popgun. He alternated between dandyism and never washing.

Jarry loved to play the part of Pa Ubu in real life, swaggering like a foul-mouthed little boy in a playground, indulging in orgies of food and, most especially, drink. He was an exponent of street theatre, happy to stand up and lecture passersby on insects, pataphysics, God, ‘shikt’ or any other subject that came into his head. He drank enormous quantities of absinthe, and took ether – experiments, he said, designed to lift his soul into a state of transcendental perception. When these practices destroyed his health and he fell mortally ill, he refused treatment on the grounds that he preferred illness to the mercies of ‘merdecin’. On his sickbed, he had himself photographed as a corpse and sent his friends the photos as souvenirs.

What Happens in the Plays

InKing Ubu, Pa Ubu is a cowardly toady, one of the hangers-on of Good King Wenceslas of Baloney. Nagged by his fearsome wife Ma Ubu, he gathers a band of Barmpots, led by the obnoxious Dogpile, assassinates Wenceslas and seizes the throne. He and the Barmpots fight Wenceslas’s army, led by Princes Willy, Silly and Billikins, and defeat them. Billikins escapes to the hills, where the ghosts of his ancestors give him a great big sword and order him to organise resistance.

Ubu starts his reign by crawling to the people, but soon turns into a tyrant, debraining anyone who disagrees with him, murdering all the aristocrats and middle classes and extorting triple taxes from the peasants. The peasants revolt and go over to Billikins – and Dogpile, whom Ubu has rashly insulted, defects to Tsar Alexis of All the Russkies and leads him and his army to attack Baloney and restore Billikins to the throne. Ma Ubu steals the Balonian state treasure and a handsome Balonian soldier, and flees into exile.

Defeated in battle, Pa Ubu holes up in a c