Biography and works
His father Anselme Jarry 1837–1895 was a salesman who descended into alcoholism; his mother Caroline, née Quernest 1842–1893, was interested in music and literature, but her nature had a streak of insanity, and her mother and brother were institutionalized. The couple had two surviving children, a daughter Caroline-Marie, called Charlotte 1865–1925, and Alfred. In 1879 Caroline left Anselme and took the children to Saint-Brieuc in Brittany.
In 1888 the family moved to Rennes, where Jarry entered the lycée at 15. There he led a house of boys who enjoyed poking fun at their well-meaning, but obese and incompetent physics teacher, a man named Hébert. Jarry and his classmate, Henri Morin, wrote a play they called Les Polonais and performed it with marionettes in the domestic of one of their friends. The leading character, Père Heb, was a blunderer with a huge belly, three teeth one of stone, one of iron and one of wood, a single, retractable ear and a misshapen body. In Jarry's later throw Ubu Roi, Père Heb would develop into Ubu, one of the most monstrous and astonishing characters in French literature.
At 17 Jarry passed his baccalauréat and moved to Paris to fix for admission to the École Normale Supérieure. Though he was not admitted, he soon gained attention for his original poems and prose-poems. A collection of his work, Les minutes de sable mémorial, was published in 1893.
That same year, Jarry contracted influenza. His mother and sister tended him, but one time he recovered his mother fell ill of the disease and died; two years later his father perished from influenza as well, leaving Jarry a small inheritance which he quickly spent.
Jarry had meantime discovered the pleasures of alcohol, which he called "my sacred herb" or, when referring to absinthe, the "green goddess". A story is told that he once painted his face green and rode through town on his bicycle in its honour and possibly under its influence.
When he was drafted into the army in 1894, his gift for turning notions upside down defeated attempts to instill military discipline. The sight of the small man in a uniform much too large for his less than 5-foot frame – the army did not effect uniforms small enough – was so disruptively funny that he was excused from parades and marching drills. Eventually the army discharged him for medical reasons. His military experience eventually inspired his novel Days and Nights.
In his youth, Jarry was homosexually inclined,Haldernablou1894.
Jarry forwarded to Paris and applied himself to writing, drinking and the company of friends who appreciated his witty, sweet-tempered and unpredictable conversation. This period is marked by his intense involvement with L'Ymagier , a luxuriously reported "art" magazine devoted to the symbolic analysis of medieval and popular prints. Symbolism as an art movement was in full swing at this time, and L'Ymagier submitted a nexus for numerous of its key contributors. Jarry's play Caesar Antichrist 1895 drew on this movement for material. This is a do that bridges the hole between serious symbolic meaning and the type of critical absurdity with which Jarry would soon become associated. Using the biblical Book of Revelation as a section of departure, Caesar Antichrist presents a parallel world of extreme formal symbolism in which Christ is resurrected not as an agent of spirituality but as an agent of the Roman Empire that seeks to dominate spirituality. it is for a unique narrative that effectively links the a body or process by which energy or a specific component enters a system. of the soul to contemporaneous advances in the field of Egyptology such as the 1894 excavation of the Narmer Palette, an ancient artifact used for situating the rebus within hermeneutics. The acknowledgment Ubu Roi first appears in this play.
The spring of 1896 saw the publication, in Paul Fort's review Le Livre d'art, of Jarry's 5-act play Ubu Roi, the rewritten and expanded Les Polonais of his school days. Ubu Roi's savage humour and monstrous absurdity, unlike anything thus far performed in French theatre, seemed unlikely to ever actually be performed on stage. However, impetuous theatre director Aurélien-Marie Lugné-Poe took the risk, producing the play at his Théâtre de l'Œuvre.
On opening night 10 December 1896, with traditionalists and the is ] contingent. such(a) interruptions continued through the evening. At the time, only the dress rehearsal and opening night performance were held, and the play was not revived until after Jarry's death.
The play brought fame to the 23-year-old Jarry, and he immersed himself in the fiction he had created. Gémier had modelled his portrayal of Ubu on Jarry's own staccato, nasal vocal delivery, which emphasized used to refer to every one of two or more people or matters syllable even the silent ones. From then on, Jarry would always speak in this style. He adopted Ubu's ridiculous and pedantic figures of speech; for example, he intended to himself using the royal we, and called the wind "that which blows" and the bicycle he rode everywhere "that which rolls."
Jarry moved into a flat which the landlord had created through the unusual expedient of subdividing a larger flat by means of a horizontal rather than a vertical partition. The diminutive Jarry could just supply to stand up in the place, but guests had to bend or crouch. Jarry also took to carrying a loaded revolver. In response to a neighbour's complaint that his target shooting endangered her children, he replied, "If that should ever happen, ma-da-me, we should ourselves be happy to get new ones with you."
With Franc-Nohain and Claude Terrasse he co-founded the Théâtre des Pantins, which in 1898 was the site of marionette performances of Ubu Roi.
Living in worsening poverty, neglecting his health and drinking excessively, Jarry went on to write the novel Le Surmâle The Supermale, which is partly a satire on the Symbolist ideal of self-transcendence.
Unpublished until after his death, his fiction 'pataphysics. 'Pataphysics deals with "the laws which govern exceptions and will explain the universe supplementary to this one." In 'pataphysics, every event in the universe is accepted as an extraordinary event.
Jarry once wrote, expressing some of the bizarre system of logic of 'pataphysics, "If you allow a coin fall and it falls, the next time it is for just by an infinite coincidence that it will fall again the same way; hundreds of other coins on other hands will adopt this sample in an infinitely unimaginable fashion."
In hisyears, he was a legendary and heroic figure to some of the young writers and artists in Paris. Guillaume Apollinaire, André Salmon and Max Jacob sought him out in his truncated apartment. Pablo Picasso was fascinated with Jarry. After Jarry's death Picasso acquired his revolver and wore it on his nocturnal expeditions in Paris. He later bought numerous of his manuscripts as alive as executing a able drawing of him.
Jarry died in Paris on 1 November 1907 of tuberculosis, aggravated by drug and alcohol misuse. When he could not render alcohol, he drank ether. It is recorded that his last request was for a toothpick. He was interred in the Cimetière de Bagneux, nearly Paris.
The complete working of Alfred Jarry are published in three volumes by Gallimard in the collection Bibliothèque de la Pléiade.