Alfred jarry

Alfred Jarry (Laval, September 8, 1873 - Paris, November 1, 1907) was a French playwright, novelist, and poet, known for his hilarious plays and lifestyle. dissolute and eccentric.

Biography

He was born in Laval, the son of Anselme Jarry, a well-to-do cloth merchant, and Caroline Quernest. After the commercial failure of his father's company, his mother goes to live with her two children in Saint-Brieuc and then in Rennes, in Brittany, where Alfred Jarry is studying high school. He receives a careful education. In October 1891 he arrives in Paris to study at the Henri IV Institute where he will be a student of Henri Bergson together with the poet Léon-Paul Fargue; After high school, he entered the École Normale Supérieure entrance exam three times, but failed. He then entered the Sorbonne to study literature but failed to graduate. He soon achieved literary success with his verse poems and his original prose. At twenty he published his first work. Shortly after his mother died; and at the age of two, his father, who left him a large inheritance, which, added to the early success of his works, allowed her to lead a carefree existence for a good part of his life.

He meets Marcel Schwob, Alfred Vallette (director of Mercure de France) and his wife Rachilde. In the couple's house, in 1894 he gave the first representation of King Ubu . He wrote articles for Mercure de France and La Revue Blanche , where the most prestigious writers and artists of the time collaborated.

From 1894 to 1895, together with Remy de Gourmont, he directed the luxurious art magazine Ymagier. At odds with de Gourmont, he decided to found his own print magazine, Perhindérion , of which only two issues would be published. In 1896 he began working for the director Lugné-Poe who entrusted him with the programming of the season of the Théâtre de l'Ouvre, in Paris, where the premiere of Ubu rey takes place on 10 December 1896.

The work is part of a cycle of several works, the first version of which he wrote at the age of 15, inspired by one of his high school teachers in Rennes, who according to Jarry embodied "everything grotesque in the world& #3. 4;. After the first performances at the Théâtre de l'Oeuvre, the work was staged at the Théâtre des Pantins puppet theater in Paris, with puppets created by his friend, the painter Pierre Bonnard.

Ubú rey is considered a direct predecessor of the theater of the absurd. With it Jarry gets the applause of the great Paris. Its premiere was interrupted several times by the boos of the offended and the cheers of the avant-garde. At the time it was performed only twice. It is a satirical comedy in which references to Macbeth are mixed with the excesses of a monarch as tyrannical as he is cowardly, and whose plot gives rise to situations taken to the point of absurdity. It is also a corrosive criticism against the authority that the author carries out through the rise to power of the grotesque Father Ubú, who together with his wife embody corruption and despotism, almost a paradigm of the dictators of the century XX. William Yeats, who witnessed the premiere despite his bad French, wrote in his autobiography about that night & # 34; After us, The Wild God & # 34;.

Alfred Jarry by bike.

Starting with King Ubo, Jarry began to identify with his own character, prioritizing pleasure over reality. He adopted his syncopated and pedantic speech and personality from him. He always walked around Paris with a revolver in his belt (which he would shoot several times under the influence of alcohol), he rode a bicycle and drank absinthe.

In 1897, Jarry had already exhausted his inheritance and had to successively leave his luxurious apartment at 162 Boulevard Saint-Germain, then that of Boulevard de Port-Royal, to accommodate himself in a modest apartment at 7 rue de la Cassette, in the sixth arrondissement of Paris. He will alternate several residences in the country houses of his friends, and he buys a boat to go fishing, the Ace , which will make history alongside his fictional character, Faustroll. He lived for a short period of time in the house of his friend the painter Henri Rousseau, to whom he gave the nickname "the customs officer".

In 1900, he published the Almanach illustré du Père Ubu, with drawings by Pierre Bonnard and music by Claude Terrasse, who would be the composer of most of his operettas. In 1901, he performed at the Cabaret artistique des 4-z'arts, in Paris, Ubu sur la butte , published in 1906.

In 1902, he published his novel Le Surmâle. The same year he begins a brief collaboration with Prince Bibescu's magazine, La Renaissance Latine . In 1903, he began a series of articles that would be published in the magazine Le Canard Sauvage that would exist from March 1903 to October 1903, at the same time that he began a constant collaboration with the magazine The Plume. In 1903 he began to publish the first chapters of La Dragonne . He resides for a while at the house of the composer Claude Terrasse, near Grenoble, with whom he works on his comic opera Pantagruel .

Your economy is deteriorating at the same time as your health. Despite his success, he found himself ruined and persecuted by his creditors, so from 1906 he lived in Laval, at the home of his sister Charlotte, with some brief stays in Paris. He died in Paris on November 1, 1907 of tubercular meningitis, at the Hospital de la Carité, at the age of thirty-four. Before he died, when his friends asked him what his last wish was, he asked for a toothpick. He was buried in the Bagneux Cemetery in Paris.

To Jarry we owe the invention of the pseudoscience called Pataphysics. Described in his posthumous work, & # 34; Deeds and opinions of Doctor Faustroll, pataphysician & # 34; ("Gestes et opinions du Docteur Faustroll, pataphysicien") as "the science of what is added to metaphysics, whether in itself or outside of it, extending beyond it as much as it itself extends beyond the physical. Pataphysics is the science of imaginary solutions that symbolically accords to the guidelines of objects their properties described by their virtuality." The work describes the teachings of Faustroll, born at the age of 63 and a pioneer in this science, in which every event in the universe is an exception. It is from here when, in 1948, a group of intellectuals decided to found the Collège de Pataphysique (Pataphysics College), which had illustrious members including Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, René Clair or Joan Miró among others..

Jarry lived surrounded by many friends and in his later years had a good number of young followers, including Max Jacob, Apollinaire, André Salmon, Enrico Baj and Picasso, who acquired his revolver and used to carry it around Paris.

Works

• The minutes of Arena Memorial (1894)
• César-Anticristo (1895)
• Ubú Rey (1896)
• Days and nights, novel of a deserter 1897)
• Love in visits (1898)
• Almanaque of Father Ubu
  • Absolute Love (1899)
• Ubu chained (1900)
• illustrated Almanaque of Father Ubu
  • Mesalina, novel by ancient Rome (1901)
• New Soul of Father Ubu
  • The supermacho, modern novel (1902)
• By the waist
  • Ubu on the hill (1906)
• Albert Samain, Memories (1907)
• La Papisa Juana, medieval novel (1908)
• Pantagruel, operates bufa in five acts and six paintings
  • Gestas and opinions of Dr. Faustroll, a papaphysicist, a neo-scientific novel followed by Especulaciones (1911)
• Gestas, followed by Paralymuses of Ubu (1921)
• The Silenos
  • Poems (1926)
• La Dragona, novel (1943)
• Ubú cornudo (1944)
• Full poetic works (1945)
• Directions for the construction of the time machine, by Dr. Faustroll (1950)

Works in Spanish about Alfred Jarry

• vvaa., 'Pataphysics. Texts by Christian Ferrer, Barón Mollet, Ruy Launoir, Regent of Helicology, Luisa Valenzuela, Margarita Martínez, Juan Esteban Fasio, Roger Shattuck, José Manuel Rojo, Asger Jorn together with the Speculations of Alfred Jarry. Pepitas de Calabaza, Logroño, 2003. ISBN 978-84-96044-09-2
• Alfred Jarry, Siloquios, superloquios, soliloquios and interloquios de ́patafísica”, Pepitas de Calabaza, Logroño, 2003.ISBN 978-84-96044-25-4
• Enrico Baj, What is the 'pataphysics', Pepitas de Calabaza, Logroño, 2007. Prologue and epilogue of José Manuel Rojo. ISBN 978-84-935704-0-8