Selected Works of Alfred Jarry

by Alfred Jarry

The poems are in French and English, the prose selections in English translation.

Dynix#: 469064
NNBR#: 700291824
LCCN#: 63017002

Genres: Poetry, Fiction, France, Plays, Literature, Drama, Theatre

280 pages, paperback

First published January 1, 1965

About the author

Alfred Jarry was a French writer born in Laval, Mayenne, France, not far from the border of Brittany; he was of Breton descent on his mother's side.
Best known for his play Ubu Roi (1896), which is often cited as a forerunner to the surrealist theatre of the 1920s and 1930s, Jarry wrote in a variety of genres and styles. He wrote plays, novels, poetry, essays and speculative journalism. His texts present some pioneering work in the field of absurdist literature. Sometimes grotesque or misunderstood (i.e. the opening line in his play Ubu Roi, "Merdre!", has been translated into English as "Pshit!", "Shitteth!", "Shittr!", "Shikt!", "Shrit!" and "Pschitt!"), he invented a pseudoscience called 'Pataphysics.

From Wikipedia

Reviews

[Daniel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Alfred Jarry is an acquired taste, most certainly.
If you are familiar with the works of playwrights such as Eugene Ionesco, Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, or the novels of Andre Breton, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, or Stanley Elkin or Harlan Ellison, then reading Jarry will be a treat. The works of Alfred Jarry are considered precursors to the surrealist, dada, and absurdist movements.
I'd read very little Jarry before this, but I was most impressed with his plays. The 'Ubu' plays are outrageously funny and much more cohesive than I expected (I was anticipating something more akin to Ionesco's "The Bald Soprano"). Ubu is a childish despot. He is greedy and vain and a delicious poke at power, greed, and politics. For the plays alone it is worth reading.
The writings on theatre are also a delight. How fun to read his own take on the theatre of his time.
His essays tend to show his off-beat sense of the world and where his Ubu plays are coming from (see..."How to Construct a Time Machine").
The fiction is a little more difficult to read (for me), mainly because of the style and era from which it was written. A bit dry and confusing. Even so, to read more of his pataphysics (his invented science) is a delight.

[Randy Wilson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Roger Shattuck wrote a great book about the French avant-garde featuring Alfred Jarry with a focus on Ubu Roi. This play is a key document in the explosion of 20th modernism because it’s nearly nonsense and what isn’t gibberish is scatalogical. I saw a reference to Shattuck having edited this translated selection of Jarry’s work so I decided to give it a go.

This is collection that covers Jarry’s theatrical work, poetry and short pieces. His style is uniformly irreverent and nonsensical, subjects are mostly about wealthy or royal pompous nitwits being ridiculous. I can’t say I enjoy his writing but I do appreciate that he made so much writing that I admire possible.

[Ben Winch · Rating 3 out of 5]

Jarry! He's almost more important for what he represents - anarchy, the absurd, life as art - than for his writing. To pay him homage is a sly wink in itself, and plenty of noteworthy 'geniuses' have slyly winked thus. Me, I'll take Ubu Roi (his first play, written while he was in high school, infamous in Paris upon its first performances) over the rest of his oeuvre any day. It's an out-and-out classic: you could substitute Ubu for any half-witted would-be dictator throughout history (my pick is Australia's John Howard) and the play would work just as well. You cut out a little geeky-looking Howard face and put it on a stick puppet and animate the thing - beautiful! As for the rest, it's all as much gesture as it is literature. Pataphysics (the 'science of imaginary solutions'), the list of arcane books on Dr Faustroll's shelves, the fact that Faustroll travels in a sieve that floats on water, the whole idea of the sexed-up 'supermale' - it's all ridiculously brilliant, but alas, not much fun to read at times. Still, just for what he stands for, Jarry - like Johnny Rotten, like Jim Stark, like Tristan Tzara - is an all-time legend, an agitator without an agenda.

[Tentatively, Convenience · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is probably in my top 10 favorite bks. Esp b/c of "Exploits and Opinions of Doctor Faustroll Pataphysician - a Neo Scientific Novel" wch was, by far, one of the most original & bizarre novels that I'd read at the time. I often imagine that I'm Jarry reincarnated. Either that or I'm a reincarnation of the sun as "a cool, solid, and homogeneous globe." It depends on wch psychic makes me regress to my past lives. The cheaper ones have me being Jarry's rat-gnawed bike tire but I only partially believe that.

[Donald Armfield · Rating 4 out of 5]

A bicycle ride with one pedal, a taste of what Alfred Jarry is capable of. I need to get some of these collected poems, and fiction by this man...
DADA DADA!!

[Amy · Rating 5 out of 5]

sooooooo, I have the ability to check out books from Naropa's Allen Ginsberg Library for...years at a time...and I just can't seem to give this book back. I will give it back, once it is finished having its way with me. Jarry's translator, Simon Watson Taylor, gave this book to Naropa and writes in swirly blue ink:

...for the Naropa Institute Library,
from Simon Watson Taylor,
Boulder, Colo.
May Full Moon, 1981

[Fulani Fulani · Rating 4 out of 5]

Early surrealism. An acquired taste but great fun, often with underlying critiques of politics and religion. It does feel dated these days, but it's a an icon of a particularly fevered and experimental movement in late 19th/early 20th century literature.

[S · Rating 4 out of 5]

√√ Days and Nights, Journal of a Deserter

[Eric Phetteplace · Rating 3 out of 5]

Amusing but not amazing. The Ubu plays were pretty weak, the poems worthless, but the prose in the 2nd half--Dr. Faustroll in particular--was pretty great.

[Hari Collins · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although there are longeurs, moments of post-Symbolist excess or ‘neo-scientific’ gags which fall a little flat - and although there is an ugly, conventional strand of misogyny here too - often Jarry has a purity unlike anyone else, a this-is-how-it-isn’t sense that creates the most blissfully Utopian passages. Dr Faustroll, or even some passages of Messalina selected here, are Heaven in the same way that Ubu Roi is pure hell - possibly due to the same disdain for consequences, sense of ‘pataphysical exception from them, in both. That disdain is carried to the level of the sentence - he is not thinking of your reactions (even though, in real life, he always was. But then he created not a claque but a counter-claque at the performance of Ubu).