Past Productions: My Ubu, Myself

The Singular Hallucination of Alfred Jarry

by Todd London

The famous first word of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi–the French “Merdre!” (“Shite!”)–erupted naturally from the fat lips of Jarry’s compellingly repulsive antihero, Pa Ubu, as did all the obscene, scatological perversities that followed. This “shite!” heard round the world was fired from the pen of a 19th-century playwright who, in the absurd violence of his dramatic creation, seemed to anticipate the century to come. Grotesque, gluttonous, amoral, and ridiculous in the extreme, Ubu has been variously described as a walking Id, the Santa Claus of the atomic age, and, as Jarry’s hallucinated “Other” made flesh. First night audiences, whether they loved or hated this fin-de-siecle Falstaff, knew they were in the presence of something shatteringly new. The poet William Butler Yeats voiced spirited support at the premiere, but afterwards found himself sad and confused. The world appeared to be plunging towards the end of creative possibilities and the beginning of only destructive ones. “What more is possible?” he asked that night in his hotel. “After us the Savage God.”

Ninety-nine years later, at the close of a century that has witnessed the fulfillment of Yeats’ prophecy, the American Repertory Theater will attempt to capture the shocking and riotous excitement of Jarry’s vision with a new musical reinvention of the original: Ubu Rock, the product of the wildly imaginative team of director/writer Andrei Belgrader, writer Shelley Berc, and composer Rusty Magee.

Ubu Roi started life as a schoolboy lampoon, a caricature of one of Jarry’s teachers, Felix Hebert. Hebert withstood generations of classroom abuse–verbal and projectile–for a range of crimes: He was boring, bourgeois, pompous, and hopelessly know-nothing about the physics he called “my science.” Face to the chalkboard he looked like a grotesque insect; face out he was pig-ugly, his gut a garantuan mound. Here was the perfect target for a potache, the kind of brilliant, smart-ass schoolboy that Jarry typified. Hebert had already inspired a literature of his own, rewritten in evolving student epics as Pere Hebert, PH, Pere Heb, Eb, Ebe, Ebouille, and Ebou, before Jarry arrived at the Rennes lycee in 1888 to give the world a final incarnation: Ubu.

At a time when less than three percent of France’s 11 to 17-year-old boys attended secondary school, Jarry’s presence at the lycee was a testament to his mother’s ambitions. Born to a family whose ancestry included both nobility and insanity (Alfred’s grandmother and uncle had both been institutionalized), Caroline Jarry (nee Quernest) abandoned her alcoholic, wool-merchant husband to his floundering business fortunes before Alfred was six. In time, she spirited her daughter and pampered son off to Rennes to enroll the boy in school. Jarry described his mother as “short and sturdy, wilfull and full of whimsy,” and, in truth, she was highly eccentric. She valued music and books in a way that seemed improper to her pious Catholic neighbors and regularly made a public spectacle of herself, badgering her beleaguered husband in the street or going out in what Alfred later remembered as Spanish torreador clothes.

As Roger Shattuck concludes in The Banquet Years, the 1955 classic responsible for reviving interest in Jarry in America, Alfred inherited the best and worst of both parents, despite his contention that his “worthless joker,” “good ol’ boy” father had had no impact on him. From his mother, he learned about art, instability, and the spectacle of self. From his father, he inherited a predilection for hard work, dire poverty, and the drink that would help kill him.

Monsieur Hebert’s new nemesis cut a figure as bizarre as the bulbous professor himself. Barely five feet tall, Jarry was thought of as a midget, a fact he later accentuated by means of outlandish dress. He had, in the words of one classmate, “a forehead like a rock,” a chronic hacking cough that contorted his face, and bowlegs that made him look like a “fat bird walking.” In school they called him “Quasimodo.”

More than a match for Hebert in eccentric appearance, Jarry was brilliant in a way that terrified his teacher (and others) and made a name for him among uneasy parents and townspeople. According to Shattuck, Jarry and his friend Henri Morin walked the streets disguised as monks and, imitating courtiers, chased townspeople with sabers. In Alfred Jarry: The Man with an Axe, Nigey Lennon uses the French word farouche to capture Jarry’s combination of “wildness, fierceness, sullenness, and shyness.” Another classmate described his strange behavior:

“When he opened the valve of his wit . . . it was no longer a person speaking but a machine driven by a demon. His jerky voice, metallic and nasal, his abrupt puppet-like gestures, his fixed expression, his torrential and incoherent flow of language, his grotesque or brilliant images. . . all astonished me, amused me, irritated me, and ended by upsetting me.”

In the kind of contradiction he loved, as Jarry’s badboy antics became legendary; he was honored with scholastic prizes in French, Latin, English, German, Greek, and–Hebert’s own field–physics.

Ubu became Jarry’s obsession. Beginning with Les Polonais (The Poles), his 1888 extracurricular collaboration with Morin, and continuing until his death in 1907 at the age of 34, this incarnation of the bloated Hebert possessed him, not just as a character but as an alternative self. Jarry and Morin restaged The Poles, the ur-Ubu, as a marionette play several times. After entering the Paris literary world in 1891 “like a wild animal entering the ring,” according to novelist Madame Rachilde, who would become his devoted friend, Jarry published a story entitled “Guignol”–after the slapstick, Punch and Judy puppet shows–featuring a vile, murderous Ubu. Early versions of Ubu Roi and Ubu Cocu were written and read among friends in the years that followed, culminating in ’96 at Aurelien Lugne-Poe’s Theatre d’Art in two history-making performances of Ubu Roi. The years leading up to Jarry’s death saw the third Ubu play, Ubu Unchained, published, as well as two issues of a chronicle, Almanach Illustre du Pere Ubu, illustrated by his friend and sometime-marionette-maker, Pierre Bonnard. A two-act version of Ubu Roi–with songs–designed for marionettes, under the name Ubu sur la Butte, appeared in print in 1906, the same year that Jarry suffered a stroke and nearly died of malnutrition exacerbated by a deterioration caused by excessive drinking, ether-inhaling, and, some say, opium use.

In Ubu himself, the object of Jarry’s ongoing inventions, appetite, and aggression run unchecked. This bestial, anarchic heap of a man steals, kills, and plunders when he feels like it, runs and hides when he’s threatened, and stuffs his piggy face with food and drink through it all. His polymorphous perversity served Jarry’s purposes in various ways. Ubu’s greed, ambition, tyrannical behavior, and sheer stupidity allowed Jarry to satirize the bourgeois life he abhorred. Ubu’s freedom from the restraints of good and evil was, in Jarry’s hands, the artistic equivalent of an anarchist’s bomb. The sick glee with which the “king” experiences his own baseness was the eternally juvenile Jarry’s glee: the joy of the deranged child both hoaxing and wreaking havoc in the adult world.

Moreover, Ubu’s clipped speech and robotic manner, derived from the puppets that fascinated his creator, furthered Jarry’s attack on theatrical realism, what he called “the stupid concern of our modern theatre with verisimilitude.” In fact, claiming that his intention was “to write a puppet play,” Jarry requested that Ubu be played masked and that “a cardboard horse’s head . . . would hang round his neck . . . for the only two equestrian scenes.” Similarly, he asked that descriptive placards replace illusionistic scenery, “the notoriously hideous and incomprehensible objects [that] clutter up the stage.” A single actor would stand in for a parade of soldiers, and forty life-size, wicker mannequins would represent the nobles arrayed against Ubu. This frontal assault on theatrical convention, on all forms of stage representation current at the time, was also intended to bludgeon a blockhead public: “It is because the public are a mass–inert, obtuse, and passive–that they need to be shaken up from time to time so that we can tell from their bear-like grunts where they are–and also where they stand.”

As intended, this theatricality proved almost as shocking as the play’s opening (and ongoing) vulgarities. Firmin Gemier, the actor playing Ubu, recalled one moment of staging-inspired fury:

You remember that Pa Ubu goes to see Captain Macnure, whom he is keeping prisoner. In place of the prison door, an actor stood on stage and held out his left arm. I put the key in his hand as if into a lock. I made the noise of the bolt turning, “creeeeak,” and turned my arm as if I was opening the door. At that moment, the audience, doubtless finding the joke had gone on long enough, began to shout and storm: shouts broke out on every side, together with insults and volleys of booing. It surpassed everything in my experience.

Gemier wasn’t alone. This aggressive theatricality, founded in confrontation, set a new standard for experiment and provocation, and, so, influenced nearly every anti-realist 20th-century artistic movement. The Dadaists were inspired by Jarry’s colorful chaos; the Symbolists by Jarry’s emphasis on image over action and by the rough, contradictory beauty of these images. Think, for example, of Jarry’s description of the Ubu set: “You will see doors open on fields of snow under blue skies, fireplaces furnished with clocks and swinging wide to serve as doors, and palm trees growing at the foot of a bed so that little elephants standing on bookshelves can browse on them.” The Surrealists admired Jarry’s unwillingness to distinguish art from life, especially as he came more and more to embody his creation–Pa Ubu–in society. As Andre Breton explained, “Beginning with Jarry . . . the differentiation long considered necessary between art and life has been challenged, to wind up annihilated as a principle.”

Similarly, Pablo Picasso imitated Jarry’s gun-toting (the playwright regularly packed sidearm pistols and sometimes wore a carbine slung over his shoulder) and acknowledged Jarry’s influence on Cubism. Antonin Artaud’s vision of a “Theatre of Cruelty” stemmed from Jarry’s work, an ancestry made concrete in 1926 when he co-founded the Theatre Alfred Jarry. By dramatizing the unutterable horror existing outside and under the life of everyday, Jarry presaged the work of so-called “Absurdists” of the mid-20th-century, especially Samuel Beckett and Eugene Ionesco, who, until his death, held the exalted title of Frand Satrap in the College de `Pataphysique, established in 1949 in honor of Jarry. Pataphysics, a pseudo-science invented by Jarry, is “the science of imaginary solutions,” which examines “the laws governing exceptions, and will explain the universe supplementary to this one. . . . ” Postmodern art also owes a debt to Jarry, as it fuses art and theater and–in work as diverse as the autobiographical monologues of Spalding Gray, the costumed self-portraits of Cindy Sherman, and the chameleon-like self-promotions of Madonna–explores the idea that what we call the “self” is, in fact, a performance or series of performances.

This performance of self may be Jarry’s most haunting legacy, especially given the circumstances of his own life and death. More than just writing the continuing adventures of Ubu, Jarry began to live them, until the man himself was obscured by the character he’d created. First, he costumed himself: he alternated his usual get-up, a bicycle racer’s outfit with a long hooded cape and tall silk hat. He often wore women’s blouses and, on one occasion, attended the opera in a canvas suit and paper shirt illustrated, in ink, with a tie. His surroundings, most notably the archetypically bohemian garret where he lived, likewise became stage sets. “Our Grand Chasublerie,” as he called his half-story-high apartment, affecting Ubu’s royal “We,” was best described by surrealist playwright Guillaume Apollinaire: “This half-floor room was the reduction of an apartment in which its occupant was quite comfortable standing up. But being taller than he, I had to stoop. The bed was the reduction of a bed; that is to say, a mere pallet. The writing table was the reduction of a table, for Jarry wrote flat on his stomach on the floors. The furniture was the reduction of furniture–there was only a bed. . . . On the mantel stood a large stone phallus . . . considerably larger than life size, always covered with a violet skullcap of velvet. . . .” The statue was also, according to Jarry, “a reduction.”

Jarry’s behavior, always odd, became more extreme. He fished for his neighbors’ chickens from a tree and tyrannized waiters in restaurants by gorging on meals ordered, and eaten backwards, dessert first. His speech was Ubu’s. He referred to himself as “We” and to the world around him by description; for example, the wind was “that which blows,” his bicycle “that which rolls.” Novelist Andr Gide writes that the fascinating Jarry showed no human characteristics, especially in “his bizarre implacable accent–no inflection or nuance and equal stress on every syllable, even the silent ones. A nutcracker, if it could talk, would do no differently. He asserted himself without the least reticence and in perfect disdain of good manners.”

Creating Ubu, Jarry progressively became Ubu, until the life and the work of art became continuous. In time, the writer was known to both friends and strangers as Pa Ubu. Shattuck regards this living creation as Jarry’s attempt to abandon himself totally to “the hallucinatory world of dreams,” and end he abused alcohol to achieve. His intake was almost superhuman: two liters of white wine upon waking, three shots of absinthe before noon, wine and absinthe at lunch, brandy with coffee before dinner, and aperitifs and more bottles of wine during dinner. Alcohol was his “holy water,” “my sacred herb.” Water, on the other hand, he considered “poison, so solvent and corrosive that out of all substances it has been chosen for washing and scourings.” “So it was that through drink and hallucination,” Shattuck argues, “Jarry converted himself into a new person physically and mentally devoted to an artistic goal–a person in whom Jarry, the man, spent the rest of his days dying. . . . Thereafter it was as if, like Jonah, he could communicate only from inside the whale. He had found his Other, the flesh of his hallucination.”

On his deathbed Jarry/Ubu made a last request. He asked for a toothpick. It was a final gesture–small, absurd, and fastidious, in stark contrast to the unruly tuberculosis that wracked him–from a man who’d made an art of the contradictory gesture. Diminutive, sensitive, and loyal by nature, Jarry had created out of himself a monstrous giant, without sensitivities or loyalties, for whom the only creative acts were acts of destruction. This low creature, Ubu, as the poet Stephane Mallarm wrote to Jarry, “enters the repertoire of high taste and haunts me; thank you.” Likewise, Pa Ubu has haunted the century he ushered in.

“Was Jarry serious?” his friend Felicien Fagus asked and answered. “Absolutely so. As serious as a child or an academic can be serious, who similarly live with absolute values. He carried logic to its natural consequence: the absurd . . . Was he serious? Not at all, since he was as indifferent to the world as . . . the policeman who, witnessing a particularly atrocious butchery, concludes calmly, ‘That’s what I call a beautiful crime.”’

Todd London was Acting Literary Director of the American Repertory Theater in spring, 1995.