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Caesar Antichrist
Drama, tr Antony Melville
140 pages, Paperback
First published November 7, 1992
1 person is currently reading
213 people want to read
About the author
Alfred Jarry
249 books264 followersAlfred 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
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
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
May 20, 2010
This might've been the bk that converted me to total Jarry enthusiasm. It has the uncompromising severity of someone young enuf & audacious enuf to not give 2 shits whether ANYONE understands it at all. Jarry's famous characters Mere & Pere Ubu appear but not necessarily as the main characters. Take these 1st 3 scenes of Act IV as examples:
"ACT IV
SCENE I
In the blackness where the sky once was, Ubu, Pile and Cottice disappear in a meteor-like ascension.
CAESER ANTICHRIST:
(Lowering a bull into a pit with two ropes. The horns can still be seen.) Pinnacled head descend alive into the hole I've dug for you. Nature, love of nature, one-time minister to all my terrrestrial affairs, let the beast converse with the earth like a little pig hung by his haunches under a table. If I wanted to, I'd see it still, beyond its hermetic lid...
SCENE II
The stairway.
THE PRIESTS:
Et facti sumus tanquam immundus nos...et cecidimus quasi folium universi.
SCENE III
The Yew Trees as they grow along the pilgrimages in the form of the seven-branched candelabras of Jerusalem. To the right and left of them are two large olive trees - Enoch and Elijah. The road where Caeser Antichrist will pass appears as the only white horizontal path in the shadows. Sable, a fess argent oscillated with yew trees.
ELIJAH:
Hi sunt duae olivae et duo candelabra, in conspectu Domini terrae stantes.
THE YEW TREES:
Et si quis voluerit eis nocere, ignis exiet de ore corum, et devorabit inimicos eorum.
ENOCH:
Et is quis voluerit eos laedere, sic oportet eum occidi."
Right. Characters that ascend like meteors (in reverse), a bull being lowered into a pit, trees that quote the bible in Latin. You're not likely to see this play performed!
"ACT IV
SCENE I
In the blackness where the sky once was, Ubu, Pile and Cottice disappear in a meteor-like ascension.
CAESER ANTICHRIST:
(Lowering a bull into a pit with two ropes. The horns can still be seen.) Pinnacled head descend alive into the hole I've dug for you. Nature, love of nature, one-time minister to all my terrrestrial affairs, let the beast converse with the earth like a little pig hung by his haunches under a table. If I wanted to, I'd see it still, beyond its hermetic lid...
SCENE II
The stairway.
THE PRIESTS:
Et facti sumus tanquam immundus nos...et cecidimus quasi folium universi.
SCENE III
The Yew Trees as they grow along the pilgrimages in the form of the seven-branched candelabras of Jerusalem. To the right and left of them are two large olive trees - Enoch and Elijah. The road where Caeser Antichrist will pass appears as the only white horizontal path in the shadows. Sable, a fess argent oscillated with yew trees.
ELIJAH:
Hi sunt duae olivae et duo candelabra, in conspectu Domini terrae stantes.
THE YEW TREES:
Et si quis voluerit eis nocere, ignis exiet de ore corum, et devorabit inimicos eorum.
ENOCH:
Et is quis voluerit eos laedere, sic oportet eum occidi."
Right. Characters that ascend like meteors (in reverse), a bull being lowered into a pit, trees that quote the bible in Latin. You're not likely to see this play performed!
October 21, 2007
The Greatest Bicycle Race ever recorded.
June 19, 2025
Nearly indecipherable gobbledygook of the hermetic Christian variety, but nevertheless worthwhile as literature for a number of reasons.
It is ostensibly an apocalypse narrative, and though expressed in the obscurest terms possible, it is a vehicle for some legitimately jaw-dropping moments of poetic invention: "Caryatid of the fossilized giant mandrake, dried by light, which is thunder, and by the burden of the golden ingot, which nuzzles my shoulder like a gravedigger's shovel," (p.49) says someone or something called Orle in the third scene of the second act. This is Jarry in an unabashed, poetic mode, and it is thrilling, full of vinegar and expansive of vocabulary, ancient in tone and carrying a trace of the psychosexual.
The play's most immediate pleasure, and Jarry's most transparent disclosure of the game he's playing, is its genre-bending third (or "Earthly" act), in which he unleashes his beloved Ubu into the proceedings. Ubu, who has sometimes felt to me like a single joke repeated ad nauseam, is served well by this text, as his very earthly violence and vulgarity is contextualized and made meaningful by the networks of divine majesty around him. Though he says and does much of what we're already accustomed to him saying and doing, he sometimes lapses into a high-Symbolist tongue which wonderfully melds both of the play's worlds, both the classical-antique and the juvenile-rebellious:
I have sometimes heard this play referred to as Jarry's most symbolist work, i.e., the one most aligned to the quiet, sober, and classical school of fin-de-siècle poetry lead by Mallarmé, and it both is and isn't. Caesar Antichrist's reference pool is decidedly pre-modern, and its composition seems as meticulous and intentional as the greatest masterpieces of symbolism, but the degree to which Jarry is participating in his poetic moment or merely parodying it perhaps cannot be known. That is often true of Jarry, and of the best artists.
Scholar (and Atlas honcho) Alastair Brotchie is present in the footnotes of nearly every page to walk us through the tangled forest of Jarry's dense, personal cosmology, though even he seems stumped on occasion and is only able to offer a guess: a chaotic Jarry pen drawing reproduced in the back of the book is "apparently his plan relating the various elements of the book to one another," according to Brotchie.
This is a somewhat difficult book to find in physical form, though it is easily accessible in a copiously-illustrated edition on Archive.org, and I hope Jarry fans will avail themselves of the opportunity. Between its woodcut lithographs of religious iconography, its suggestions of such clanking and mysterious instruments as the Debraining Machine and the Pompe Rouget (a kind of shit-pump), its legitimate poetic beauty and its flashes of delirious scatology, Caesar Antichrist is no minor work.
It is ostensibly an apocalypse narrative, and though expressed in the obscurest terms possible, it is a vehicle for some legitimately jaw-dropping moments of poetic invention: "Caryatid of the fossilized giant mandrake, dried by light, which is thunder, and by the burden of the golden ingot, which nuzzles my shoulder like a gravedigger's shovel," (p.49) says someone or something called Orle in the third scene of the second act. This is Jarry in an unabashed, poetic mode, and it is thrilling, full of vinegar and expansive of vocabulary, ancient in tone and carrying a trace of the psychosexual.
The play's most immediate pleasure, and Jarry's most transparent disclosure of the game he's playing, is its genre-bending third (or "Earthly" act), in which he unleashes his beloved Ubu into the proceedings. Ubu, who has sometimes felt to me like a single joke repeated ad nauseam, is served well by this text, as his very earthly violence and vulgarity is contextualized and made meaningful by the networks of divine majesty around him. Though he says and does much of what we're already accustomed to him saying and doing, he sometimes lapses into a high-Symbolist tongue which wonderfully melds both of the play's worlds, both the classical-antique and the juvenile-rebellious:
Like skinned specimens or drawings of veinous and arterial blood, they had holes with revenue bile oozing out, which slithered into gold or copper varicoceles. They were numbered as well and I lead them out to fight by halters hung with funeral weights. Women happily aborted at the sight of them, for their babies would have been borne with their semblance. And shit-eating swine vomited in horror. (p.92)
I have sometimes heard this play referred to as Jarry's most symbolist work, i.e., the one most aligned to the quiet, sober, and classical school of fin-de-siècle poetry lead by Mallarmé, and it both is and isn't. Caesar Antichrist's reference pool is decidedly pre-modern, and its composition seems as meticulous and intentional as the greatest masterpieces of symbolism, but the degree to which Jarry is participating in his poetic moment or merely parodying it perhaps cannot be known. That is often true of Jarry, and of the best artists.
Scholar (and Atlas honcho) Alastair Brotchie is present in the footnotes of nearly every page to walk us through the tangled forest of Jarry's dense, personal cosmology, though even he seems stumped on occasion and is only able to offer a guess: a chaotic Jarry pen drawing reproduced in the back of the book is "apparently his plan relating the various elements of the book to one another," according to Brotchie.
This is a somewhat difficult book to find in physical form, though it is easily accessible in a copiously-illustrated edition on Archive.org, and I hope Jarry fans will avail themselves of the opportunity. Between its woodcut lithographs of religious iconography, its suggestions of such clanking and mysterious instruments as the Debraining Machine and the Pompe Rouget (a kind of shit-pump), its legitimate poetic beauty and its flashes of delirious scatology, Caesar Antichrist is no minor work.
July 23, 2023
One of the deepest mazes of symbols I've ever plunged into, hard to make much sense of it?
I enjoyed the woodcuts of this Atlas Press edition, which has been doing the rounds for about $15 on websites lately, snap up a copy if you can! Although it's a slender volume I typically see it for $50 or more.
Intrigued by the nod to Mallarme's Sonnet on X, where X is used in the mathematical sense of an unknown. Mallarme was 31 years older than the author - is this 22 year old Jarry rebelling against his breakthroughs in symbolism or is he appropriating them? I can't tell.
I'm seriously considering taking up French so I can not only read Jarry (and Rabelais) in the original, but so I can read more Jarry criticism.
Will return after visiting some of his other works, maybe a reread of Shattuck's The Banquet Years and further acquaintance with the Book of Revelation.
I enjoyed the woodcuts of this Atlas Press edition, which has been doing the rounds for about $15 on websites lately, snap up a copy if you can! Although it's a slender volume I typically see it for $50 or more.
Intrigued by the nod to Mallarme's Sonnet on X, where X is used in the mathematical sense of an unknown. Mallarme was 31 years older than the author - is this 22 year old Jarry rebelling against his breakthroughs in symbolism or is he appropriating them? I can't tell.
I'm seriously considering taking up French so I can not only read Jarry (and Rabelais) in the original, but so I can read more Jarry criticism.
Will return after visiting some of his other works, maybe a reread of Shattuck's The Banquet Years and further acquaintance with the Book of Revelation.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews