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The Truth About The Coming Insurrection Or, the Misadventures of a 'Pataphysical Hoax by The Indigestible

Who's Your Daddy? (click to enlarge)

 

Who Has the Hottest Half? (click to enlarge)
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Obviously, the other great design that I pursued against the blandness of contemporary 'Pataphysicians was to renew a less reserved conception of Operational 'Pataphysics . . . which otherwise seems to want to retreat into the innocent games of a confidential journal (Viridis Candela),[2] which is only read by slipper-wearing 'Pataphysicians. To my mind, it is quite regrettable that we have lost the gesture of Jarry, who never hesitated to breathe the life of 'Pataphysical wind into more visible journals and revues . . . . Thus, a little wearied by our current group of fake trolls (who actually only know how to troll each other), I have undertaken to revive the flame of La Chandelle verte,[3] to revivify this audacious, "situological"[4] vein of the College, [which is] that of the false Rimbaud in which Baudrillard participated; that of the forms of the pseudo-Torma, the pseudo-Lubin. . . .[5]

A sign of the times, my book's power of grotesque fire has, finally, not been revealed by a few sagacious minds. My little opus, with its salutary apocalyptic buffoonery, its tightrope-number upon the wire of parodic turnarounds, was certainly more than a revolutionary fire ship, but also something other than a simple farce: a parody that carefully mimed the tics, tics and tics of militant [mobilisateur] discourse by distilling in it a powerful intravenous satire, there is of course [some] edification in its aims. I have in fact conceived of this text as a vaccine that resorts to aesthetics -- Grade-Z kitsch, as it turns out: the rather suspect "Invisible Committee," the latent content of which my signature will reveal to all the adepts of crypto-Lacanism, had to arouse suspicion, it seems to me -- so as to prevent any fascination with small-group armed struggle, modern-day Robin Hoods, or Blanquis in the robes of Rael. You can see the height of the irony. Some people, rather uneducated, have gone as far as comparing me to Breton and Debord, which constitutes the best validation of the Marxist axiom that history only repeats itself as farce. And they say that I aspired to this form of superior realism, which itself authorizes laughter ('Pataphysical research as scientific explication of the world),

...

The intestinal creativity of Pere Ubu was certainly unlimited, and his spiral was sufficiently large enough to welcome the greatest world, including that which seemed a priori to be the least integrable: our dissident 'Pataphysician (?) has remembered the magic, just like Hassan-i-Sabbah's "Nothing is true, everything is permitted."

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Ubu Roi's Belly Revisited

Ubu Roi. A play by Alfred Jarry, 1896.

...if I did not feel that their benevolence had found Ubu's belly big with more satirical symbols than we can possibly pump up tonight. The Swedenborgian philosopher Mésès has excellently compared rudimentary creations with the most perfect, and embryonic beings with the most complete, in that the former lack all irregularities, protuberances and qualities, which leaves them in more or less spherical form, like the ovum and M. Ubu, while the latter have added so many personal details that they remain equally spherical, following the axiom that the most polished object is that which presents the greatest number of sharp corners. That is why you are free to see in M. Ubu however many allusions you care to, or else a simple puppet — a schoolboy's caricature of one of his professors who personified for him all the ugliness in the world. - Alfred Jarry, opening speech.

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"The central character is notorious for his infantile engagement with his world," wrote Jane Taylor. "Ubu inhabits a domain of greedy self-gratification." Jarry's metaphor for the modern man, he is an antihero — fat, ugly, vulgar, gluttonous, grandiose, dishonest, stupid, jejune, voracious, cruel, cowardly and evil...

Jarry satirises European philosophies and their absurd practices — in particular the propensity of the complacent bourgeois to abuse the authority engendered by success.

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 Max Ernst, Ubu Imperator, 1923

..Père Ubu, the grotesque symbol of authority invented by Alfred Jarry, is given visual shape in playful derision. What is more, in this guise there reappears the childhood of Max Ernst, a vision of "half-slumber", as he himself described it, in which all the prestige of paternal authority and likewise of artistic creation is de-sacralised. Behind the buffoonery of power alluded to by Ubu as a spinning top, the whole traditional aesthetic of rational construction and geometric perspective is also ridiculed.

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For Jarry, Pataphysics is the anti-scientific realm beyond metaphysics that examines the laws which preside over exceptions - an attempt to elucidate an imaginary cosmos. Jarry specifically defined Pataphysics as the “science of imaginary solutions, which symbolically attributes the properties of objects, described by their virtuality, to their lineaments”. (*4)

So we recognize here some rhizomatic roots that may have nurtured Baudrillard's hyperbolic and jaded view of an incongruous virtual-reality drenched world. In Jarry we already relish an artificial Baudrillardian simulated world created by an hallucinatory social structure where shimmering objects decree in odd ways what people can and cannot do within the vast void of virtuality. Indeed, like Jarry, Baudrillard mostly arrives at this social examination without demonstrating any sustained systematic analysis. Poof! Voila: a gaseous bon délire: an airy imaginary solution. But in Pataphysics, every occurrence in the universe is established to be an extraordinary event. No simulation possible.

Of course this aim of creating an inorganic world ex nihilo and luxuriating in its rarefied artificiality was not unique to Jarry. Indeed it was perfectly articulated in 1884 with the publication of Joris-Karl Huysmans's décadent novel A Rebours (Against Nature), a story of a recluse art worshiper who yearns for new sensations and perverse pleasures within a transcendental artificial ideal.

Book Review of Jean Baudrillard’s Pataphysics

http://post.thing.net/node/1349

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This is what Baudrillard meant by a total revolution: a strategy geared to escalate the system and push it to its breaking point. Then, giving up on every pretence of rationality, it would start revolving and achieve in the process a circularity of its own:” We know the potential of tautology when it reinforces the system’s claim to perfect sphericity (Ubu Roi’s belly)” (SE, p.4). Coming back full circle to his early pataphysical roots, Baudrillard was taunting capital to emulate Jarry’s absurdism—and share in Ubu’s grotesque fate. After all, wasn’t capitalism itself a pataphysical proposition? It was endlessly cutting the branch on which it sits, devastating the planet and endangering the human species while claiming to improve its lot. Capital didn’t care a fig for the fate of humanity. The real wasn’t its business. It had canceled the principle of reality and substituted a codification of a higher order, a hyper-reality that made the real obsolete. Its dirge-like flows were self-referential, leaving everything else in a state of self-induced simulation. The flows of capital were posthumous, post-human. In their nihilistic energy, they carried the seeds of their own destruction. Only Ubu, Jarry’s truculent hero, the coward king cannibalizing his own entourage, and himself in the process, could account for such a bullish cynicism. The society of the spectacle was turning into a soft version of the theater of cruelty, a burlesque of death with the globe as its stage. Life was being exchanged for nothing, for a handful of glittering toys, work absorbed time like a sponge and left no traces. Baudrillard wasn’t the exterminator, but the system itself. Yet no one was paying attention.

Les Célébrations du Centenaire de la Mort d'Alfred Jarry

Le 1er Novembre, 2007 est le 100th anniversaire de la mort d'Alfred Jarry.
(Septembre 8, 1873 - Novembre 1, 1907)

Mais l'énorme notoriété du Père Ubu ne doit pas occulter les autres facettes de la bibliographie de son génial inventeur.

A l'image du premier livre qu'il publia, les "Minutes de sable mémorial", assemblage composite de proses, de poèmes versifiés et de fragments dramatiques, où le grotesque et le sublime se mêlent, l'œuvre de Jarry se caractérise d'abord par sa singulière diversité : bigarrure de romans classiques et de fictions expérimentales, de critiques littéraires ou artistiques, de textes pour les formes de théâtre les plus inattendues, de chroniques, de traductions – et des almanachs, et une opérette, et un opéra bouffe.

A sa mort, le premier novembre 1907, Alfred Jarry est misérable, isolé, oublié.

Qui parmi les rares compagnons qui l'accompagnèrent jusqu'au bout, qui dans le cercle étroit de ses lecteurs, aurait alors pu imaginer l'éblouissante postérité qui lui était promise ? Les surréalistes, André Breton en tête, le salueront dès les années 30 comme un grand maître de l'humour noir.

Il avait jeté dans son roman posthume, "Gestes et opinions du Docteur Faustroll, pataphysicien", les bases d'une science fantaisiste et paradoxale. Cette philosophie non conformiste - inventée par le Père Ubu en personne ! – lui survivra à travers un très solennel Collège de Pataphysique, institué en 1948 par un cercle d'artistes et d'intellectuels.

Un siècle a passé, et Jarry n'a pas fini de se rappeler à notre souvenir.

Le Père Ubu n'est pas près de retirer son nez pointu des petites et grandes affaires de ce monde.

Faustroll va continuer ad libitum sa navigation circulaire au milieu d'archipels sur lesquels le temps n'a pas prise.

Alfred Jarry a pour toujours vingt-trois ans, scandaleux dandy outrageant le tout-Paris des lettres, il a pour toujours trente-quatre ans, feu follet épuisé rendant son dernier souffle à l'Hôpital de la Charité, il est pour toujours l'enfant de cinq ans qui confie ses rêveries au fil paisible de la Mayenne passant sous le Vieux Pont de Laval.

Tandis que toujours résonnent, renvoyés des angles les moins prévisibles de notre littérature, des échos de sa voix unique.

• Les célébrations du Centenaire de la mort d'Alfred Jarry
• La Société des Amis d'Alfred Jarry
• Ubu roi (sur Gallica)
• Poèmes d’Alfred Jarry
• Gestes et opinions...
• Ubu’s Almanac: Alfred Jarry and the Graphic Arts, Spencer Museum of Art. Reproductions des œuvres graphiques de Jarry et des recueils qu’il a édités.
• E-book Ubu roi d'Alfred Jarry au format pdf
• Collège de ’Pataphysique

Alfred Jarry en vélo