Picked-Up Pieces by John Updike

Author:John Updike [Updike, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-679-64586-3
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2013-01-15T05:00:00+00:00

These quotations convey the eerie mechanical quality of Jarry’s personality, or, more precisely, its insane immersion in mechanism. Virtually a midget, he insisted that the theatre appropriate the rigid ultra-reality of the marionette theatre, and lived the last years of his life in a half-floor apartment where normal-sized visitors had to crouch. Fascinated by bicycles, hydrology, physical experiments, and machinery of all sorts, he fuelled himself on alcohol and ether and did not so much die as break down; friends knocked on the door of his cupboard and he could not answer because his legs no longer worked. His last request was for a tiny tool, a toothpick. The nickname given him by a hostile critic—“La Tête de Mort”—was earned. Jarry himself had christened his first apartment, a cell at the foot of a dead-end alley, “Dead Man’s Calvary.”

Certainly there is little life in Jarry’s writings. “I imitate nothing,” he once said, and his works more resemble graffiti, cartoons, technical treatises, and verbal games than novels and plays seeking to portray human life in action. He achieved fame in 1896 with Ubu Roi, which was derived from schoolboy skits perpetrated against an incompetent science teacher in the lycée at Rennes. Its first word is a modified obscenity, and its hurly-burly of schoolboy cruelty and Shakespeare parody (a monstrously simplified Falstaff murderously ascends to the throne of a nonexistent Poland) does not make very good reading now, especially since New Directions has seen fit to publish the play in a scribbly novelty format. Ubu Roi—whose first performance occasioned a riot in the audience and left a young spectator from Ireland, William Butler Yeats, to conclude momentously in his journal, “After us the Savage God”—now in its bare text wears the sadness of a faded program, a testament to vanished fireworks. Selected Works of Alfred Jarry begins with several sequels to Ubu Roi, in which Jarry exercises a more mature wit and allegorizes his instinctive anarchism with scenes such as Ubu flushing his conscience down the toilet. But the outrageousness of such farce does not liberate; rather, one feels suffocated by a stunted sensibility and an arbitrary cruelty. As with the currently admired school of neo-pornography (e.g., Last Exit to Brooklyn), the author’s participation appears suspiciously enthusiastic. Jarry seems to be having most of the fun in passages like (from Ubu Cocu):

There’s nothing to be done with him. We’ll have to make do with twisting the nose and nears [sic], with removal of the tongue and extraction of the teeth, laceration of the posterior, hacking to pieces of the spinal marrow and the partial or total spaghettification of the brain through the heels. He shall first be impaled, then beheaded, then finally drawn and quartered. After which the gentleman will be free, through our great clemency, to go and get himself hanged anywhere he chooses.

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