Modern Narrative Techniques: Jarry, the Pre-Text

Abstract

Alfred Jarry's influence on successive generations of writers is both explicit, in the sense of direct recognition by his heirs, and implicit, in the sense of creating a climate propitious for textual experimentation and for changes in conceptual foundations. Much critical attention has been devoted to Jarry's role in avant-garde theater, and specifically to his fathering of the Theater of the Absurd.I Ubu's legacy traces its iconoclastic path through Dadaism, Futurism, Surrealism, and Artaud's Theater of Cruelty, to the Theater of the Absurd, which, generally speaking, is metaphysical, irrational, provocative, and given to black humor.2 The Dadaists perceived a kindred spirit in Jarry owing to his treatment of language, his desire to shock, and his grotesque allegories of social conditioning. They continued his demystification of morality, patriotism, religion, and logical thought. The Futurists sympathized with Jarry's passion for machines and scientific discoveries. For the Surrealists, he was an unknowing champion of the unconscious. Artaud founded the Thidtre AlfredJarry in honor of a man whose aesthetic programme explored the agony and dark laughter elicited by the encounter with one's doubles. Finally, the Theater of the Absurd developed the brand of tragi-comedy characteristic ofJarry's plays: man, forced to confront his schizoid world, his fears and alienation, his uncertain identity, and his revolting corporeality, finds release in uneasy laughter. The decor was nonmimetic, synecdochical, suggestive. But ifJarry's role in the theater and his intuition of Freudian psychology have been amply attended to,3 no recognition has been granted his remarkable prescience in the writing of prose fiction.4 Narrotology has ignored Jarry in all probability because, of those few readers who know him to be a novelist, it seems most have not read the novels, content to write him off as an eccentric playwright. A major portion of his work has been occultated by biographical anecdotes and the scandal of Ubu Roi. This has not been helped by the crafty ways of the Collkge de Pataphysique, which, while publishing invaluable mate-