BOO KS
'47
sibilities. But whatever its limitations, there is something grand in this
violent frivolity, this idea of art based not on empathy but action,
transforming crudity into a medium for a rediscovery of the self. For
Ubu's transformation is really our own, enacted upon him, briefly. The
experience is short, ecstatic, complete, timelessly ephemeral-"ethernal."
(This, by the way, is what Jarry means when he mentions the parody
of art in the carnal act-that other model of the timelessly ephemeral.
The play itself resembles a passive erotic object.)
All this is
dramatic,
in the most absolute sense. The notion of art
as mere object, and the viewer's response as pure (and rather wild)
action reverses the idea of action contemplated, essential, for example,
to
fiction. In
Ubu Roi,
the strident physicality of production -abandon,
blatancy, roughhousing-means that one doesn't think; the spectator
becomes-if he does not walk out-wholly engaged. On the other hand,
in
Doctor Faustroll
and Jarry's other "novels," the sense of expansive–
ness and liberation is not sought through the free play of response but,
paradoxically, through rigorous manipulation. Here the joys of 'Pata–
physics, like those of any science, proceed from discipline. Weare
directed step by step through absurd logical arguments, seduced into
solemn appraisals of the ridiculous, captivated by exquisite prose which
is promptly deflated by some 'Pataphysical rabbit punch. But perhaps
because Jarry was far more sensitive than his contemporaries to the
gulf separating prose from theater, some of his writing is astoundingly
successful
in
introducing into fiction the effect of certain dramatic
experiences. For Jarry's genius for spectacle was painfully limited by
his concept of theater as farce. Shattuck has printed some-why not
a1l?-passages from
Nights and Days
and a few chapters from Jarry's
encrusted, rather conventional and largely unsuccessful
r'oman precieux,
Messaline,
in which events take on a dramatic vibrancy without, so far
as I know, any exact precedent in fiction. Messaline's suicide, an other–
wise standard love-death demise, is surrounded by an aura of sensuality
comparable to the similar transposition of event, through music, in an
operatic aria. And with the performance of the acrobat, Mnester, Jarry
frees himself from farce and puts into fiction what he could not achieve
on the stage. This passage, one of his most brilliant, is virtually a
prophetic rendering of Artaud's Theater of Cruelty.
But whatever his method, Jarry's intention is constant: the trans–
formation of event, fact, object, reality, in order to produce an experience
not otherwise possible. It's hard to play with suffering-it hurts. Event,
even the death of a nymphomaniac empress, is rarely surrounded with
an aura. But as Jarry moves beyond fact and its pain, it is reality, rather
