War and Peace and Ubu: Colonialism, the Exception, and Jarry's Legacy

Abstract

Ubu Catulle Mendes wrote in Le Journal day after Ubu Rods storied, riot-inducing premiere in 1896. Compounded by Pulcinella and Polichinelle, of Punch and Judy ... of Monsieur Thiers and Catholic Torquemada and Jew Deutz, of a Surete policeman and anarchist Vaillant, an enormous parody of Macbeth and Napoleon, a flunky become king ... he will nevertheless become a popular legend of base instincts, rapacious and violent.1 Mendes instantly recognized a link between Ubu's slapstick violence and violence of revolutionary street warfare (Adolph Thiers was president during Bloody Week that ended Paris Commune), inquisitional torture, venal treason (Simon Deutz infamously sold out Duchess de Berry), police oppression, and terrorism. Since then, a multitude of Ubu plays from around globe have borne out Mendes assertion, addressing themselves to equally infamous contemporary acts of terror. Pere Ubu still exists, a dark caricature not only of a ruling class at war with its own subjects but also of revolutionaries who are quick to hide their own guilt behind idealistic cant. Ubu and his abusive deployment of'pataphysics, protosurrealist science of the laws governing exceptions2 introduced by Alfred Jarry, furnishes contemporary theater-makers with a critical funhouse reflection of real-world state's abuse of its assumed sovereign right of exception. Moreover, contemporary adaptations explicitly identify Ubu-esque brutality and antireason as exception that makes so-called enlightened Western liberal rule possible.The focus here will be on Jarry's own work, including collaboratively created Almanachs du Pere Ubu (1898 and 1901), and on two contemporary Ubu plays from sub-Saharan Africa: Jane Taylor and Handspring Puppet Company's Ubu and Truth Commission (1997) and Wole Soyinka's King Baabu (a play in manner-roughly-of Alfred Jarry) (2002). Both Ubu and Truth Commission and King Baabu appeared in aftermaths of triumphant political struggles for liberation, but both plays evoke feeling, shared by their creators, that performative declarations of victory, amnesty, and peace made by their new governments might not have been entirely felicitous. Implicitly, Handspring and especially Soyinka present amnesty processes and purported transitions to independence and democracy as also dependent on exceptions, exclusions, and erasures, on giving a partially fictive sense of an ending to periods of national suffering. To question what peace and victory mean, or to propose that pronouncements of peace may be premature or even empty utterances, is to suggest that liberal republicanism's perpetually deferred promise of a restored or redeemed Law is its enabling illusion-an illusion that masks both violence of politics as usual and extent to which revolutions and reforms leave systemic problems unsolved.Sub-Saharan Africa is by no means only part of world in which Ubu character has been used in this manner. Director Silviu Purcarete's Romanian Ubu Roi (1991), which identified Pere and Mere Ubu with Ceausescus; Piotr Szulkin's Polish film Ubu Tirol (2003); and British playwright Simon Stephens's The Trial of Ubu (2012), a satire on International War Crimes Tribunal at Hague, are just a few examples of how Ubu story has been used as a vehicle for depicting past and present political corruption in Central and Eastern Europe (and, in Stephens's case, hypocritical moralizing that attends Western efforts to judge Eastern tyrants). In 1988 and 1990, Cairo-based company Al-Warsha produced Arabic Ubus that blended Jarry with Egyptian shadow puppetry to comment on contemporary political events. Outside theater, Puerto Rican author Giannina Braschi employed motifs from Jarry in satirizing Latin American leaders such as Hugo Chavez, Lula de Silva, and Christina Kirchner in her drama/novel hybrid The United States of Banana (2011). …