by John Updike
Among other delusory projects, Alain had thought of opening a shop in Paris or New York to sell all those dated, ugly, or absurd objects which industry, hovering between the popular and the vulgar, has produced in the last fifty years.
And the lean and sketchy style of the novel itself belongs to the Franco-American world of Hammett/Simenon detective novels and Bogart/Gabin movies and their Existentially fortified nouvelle-vague descendants; these things are thin with the thinness that implies a background of immense loss. Drieu La Rochelle is not as cool as his material—hence his erratic imprecations, his disturbing efforts to steer his tale toward an unsighted morality. But this roughness of tone touches the narrative from a source outside itself and recalls a context beyond the mechanical and mocked world Alain haunts, a context in which his extinction can be felt, momentarily, as a waste:
For him, the world was a handful of human beings. He had never thought there could be anything more to it. He had never felt involved with anything larger than himself. He knew nothing of plants, of the stars: he knew only a few faces, and he was dying, far from those faces.
A character in The Fire Within is described as “admiring spontaneously only the eccentrics of the past, from Byron to Jarry.” In Alfred Jarry we encounter, at the beginning of the century, a personality and an art more radical than the regretful nihilism of Drieu. The art was a copious but incidental emanation of the personality, and Roger Shattuck’s chapters on Jarry himself, in The Banquet Years, are more readable than the Selected Works of Alfred Jarry, which Mr. Shattuck and Simon Watson Taylor have edited. Descriptions of Jarry’s bizarre person abound. André Gide remembered him as he was around 1895:
This plaster-faced Kobold, gotten up like a circus clown and acting a fantastic, strenuously contrived role which showed no human characteristic, exercised a remarkable fascination at the Mercure. Almost everyone there attempted, some more successfully than others, to imitate him, to adopt his humor; and above all his bizarre implacable accent—no inflection or nuance and equal stress on every syllable, even the silent ones. A nutcracker, if it could talk, would do no differently.
A schoolmate, C. G. Gens-d’Armes, wrote:
When he opened the valve of his wit, he seemed to follow after the stream of his words without any control over them. It was no longer a person speaking but a machine driven by some demon. His jerky voice, metallic and nasal, his abrupt puppetlike gestures, his fixed expression, his torrential and incoherent flow of language, his grotesque or brilliant images, this synchronism which today we should compare to the movies or the phonograph—all this astonished me, amused me, irritated me, and ended by upsetting me.… His originality was too much like some mental anomaly.
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.
And this repellent note of inhumanity, of frenzy, runs through Jarry’s fiction as uncontrolled hyperbole. The novel Messalina is not meant to be absurd, but at the height of applause in a great stadium we are told that “the sound of Messalina smacking her lips dominated the uproar.” While she is being impaled on a sword, a bystander behaves most strangely:
“But it is a sword blade, carrion,” slavered the freedman, “it is not a …”
But it was he who then sobbed out aloud and prostrated himself as though struck down by a god; and he buried his face in the ground, biting at the flowers whose perfume throbbed with his cry:
“But I love her! I love her!”
Purple is too pale a word for such passages. Jarry’s non-fiction is better controlled: his remarks on dramaturgical science, calling for a theatre of “man-sized marionettes,” are, though irascible in tone, cogent. His scientific and blasphemous essays show demonic ingenuity and humor. After reading H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine, Jarry, with a relentless wealth of engineering detail, set down plans for one, consisting of an ebony bicycle frame mounted on three gyroscopes aligned with the three planes of Euclidean space. In “The Passion Considered as an Uphill Bicycle Race,” the Cross becomes a bicycle “constructed of two tubes soldered together at right angles”—“and it is worth mentioning in this connection that Jesus rode lying flat on his back in order to reduce his air resistance.” Jarry’s mad hyperbolism veers close to profundity. Refuting the notion that a bicycle rider should pedal slowly to contemplate the view, he argues:
He should … make use of this gear-equipped machine to scoop up forms and colors as rapidly as possible while whizzing along roadway and bicycle track; for fueling one’s mind with crushed, confused fragments relieves the memory’s secret dungeons of their destructive work, and after such an assimilation the mind can more readily recreate entirely original forms and colors. We do not know how to create out of nothingness but we are capable of doing so out of chaos.
His faith in unconscious (and therefore natural) processes is serious; he describes what must have resembled his own method of composition:
Sengle constructed his curiously and precisely equilibrated literary works by sleeping a solid fifteen hours, after eating and drinking, and then ejaculating the result in an odd half hour’s scribbling.… Some professors of philosophy rhapsodize that this resemblance to natural processes partakes of the ultimate Masterpiece.
Although Selected Works of Alfred Jarry contains only a few chapters of what Professor Shattuck elsewhere calls “the best of his novels,” Les Jours et Les Nuits,
and omits entirely “the most difficult and personal of all his texts,” L’Amour Absolu, it includes in toto his exasperating “neo-scientific novel” entitled Exploits and Opinions of Doctor Faustroll, Pataphysician. ’Pataphysics, a concept present in Jarry’s earliest work, is “the science of that which is superinduced upon metaphysics,” or more fully:
’Pataphysics is the science of imaginary solutions, which symbolically attributes the properties of objects, described by their virtuality, to their lineaments.
Faustroll grew from Jarry’s planned treatise on ’pataphysics, which was modified by a desire to “create a cast of characters to incarnate, practice, and expound the new science.” Professor Shattuck’s description of the inchoate hybrid that resulted is usefully succinct: “Jarry’s good doctor is born full-grown at the age of sixty-three, navigates unendingly across dry land in a sieve, and travels everywhere with a summons server who is trying to collect some hundred thousand francs of back rent from him.” In addition to Panmuphle, the summons server, there is Bosse-de-Nage, a dogfaced baboon whose only utterance is an intermittent “Ha ha.” Beginning with a replica of the summons and ending with a geometrical discourse on the “surface of God,” the book follows the adventurers through several hydrological experiments, visits to many islands, each inhabited by an artistic acquaintance of Jarry’s, a banquet ending in a holocaust, a succession of prose poems, Faustroll’s death through drowning, and his resurrection, or unravelling, into the happy condition of Ethernity. Such a summary makes it sound more entertaining than it is. Though it contains some good metaphors and jokes, the tale is top-heavy with personal allusions and pseudo-science, clotted with obscurities, and darkened by Jarry’s infantile cruelty. Here is a specimen:
The isle of Cyril first appeared to us as the red fire of a volcano, or as the punch bowl full of blood spattered out by the fall of shooting stars. Then we saw that it was mobile, armored, and quadrangular, with a helix at the four corners, shaped like the four demi-diagonals of separate arms able to advance in any direction. We realized that we had approached within gun range when a bullet tore off Bosse-de-Nage’s right ear and four of his teeth.
“Ha ha!” stammered the papio; but the impact of a steel cylindrocone against his left zygomatic apophysis made short work of his third word.
How can one judge Jarry? Apollinaire expressed the hope that his weird works “will be the foundation of a new realism which will perhaps not be inferior to that so poetic and learned realism of ancient Greece.” Gabriel Brunet explained him by saying, “Every man is capable of showing his contempt for the cruelty and stupidity of the universe by making his own life a poem of incoherence and absurdity.” I think the second estimate more plausible; Jarry’s life, as a defiant gesture, matters more than his works, which are largely pranks and propaganda of a rarefied sort. Compared to Jarry, most of today’s so-called Black Humorists seem merely ex-admen working off their grudges in sloppy travesties of a society whose tame creatures they remain still. Though we cannot grant him the comprehensive sanity and the reverent submission to reality that produce lasting art, we must admire his soldier’s courage and his fanatic’s will. He made himself into a Death’s Head. When Drieu’s hero Alain looks into the mirror, he sees evidence of the “terrible emaciations that a year or two before had begun to carve a death mask out of the living substance.” Time acts upon him; Jarry assaults time. Alain felt himself sinking in a spiritless and mechanical world, while Jarry, skimming along on his bicycle, turned himself into a machine, with a machine’s hectic ferocity and—though, unlike Ubu and Faustroll, he proved destructible—a machine’s self-disregard.
Albertine Disparue
THE RUNAWAY, by Albertine Sarrazin, translated from the French by Charles Lam Markmann. 480 pp. Grove Press, 1967.
ASTRAGAL, by Albertine Sarrazin, translated from the French by Patsy Southgate. 172 pp. Grove Press, 1967.
Most men are potential desperadoes; but the concept of the female criminal seems paradoxical. Laws enforce a stability whose ultimate domestic unit is the woman herself; her physiology and psychology turn on the cultivation of inner space, while the man’s role calls for the conquest of outer space, for thrust and adventure, for arrowing forms of outward assertion as various as rape and theology, as admirable as scientific exploration and as deplorable as war. The most common form of female criminality—prostitution—is, however masked in toughness, an act of submission, and keeps the peace. True, the insect world (not to mention the world of literary criticism) offers striking instances of female enlargement and predation, but the unhappy history of the male praying mantis confirms that the seminal contribution to the generative process, though not negligible, is momentary and helps account for the primordial willingness of men to undergo risk. Granted that among the highest of the primates sexual instincts androgenously overlap, enough polarity remains so that we approach two autobiographical novels by a repeatedly jailed woman, billed on the dust jackets as “a female Genet,” with the expectation of something monstrous, delicious, and revelatory.
Albertine Sarrazin appears in her photograph as a curly-haired, big-eyed street Arab with a wry tuck of intelligence in the corner of her mouth. The bleak jacket notes state that she was born in Algiers in 1937, and that she was an orphan. She ran away from her foster home at the age of fifteen, was placed in reform school, escaped to Paris, “drifted into a life of theft and prostitution,” and spent the next nine years either in jail or in hiding. In prison she wrote two novels, La Cavale and L’Astragale, whose publication in Paris in 1965 made her famous and secured her parole. For two years she “lived quietly with her husband Julien in the south of France,” and then died, after a kidney operation, a week before her thirtieth birthday. A female Genet she was not. These two novels, published simultaneously by Grove Press as The Runaway and Astragal, are not in Genet’s class, either as literary creation or as self-proclamation. Though she refers to her prison guards as “angels” and invokes “St. Duty” and “St. Java,” Mme. Sarrazin shows none of Genet’s myth-making power or the Satanic philosophy that conceives of prison as an inverted Heaven where seraphim swirl in violent rhythms controlled by the Deity-like onanist fantasizing in his cell. This order of originality is well beyond the very young woman who has, she tells us, “only my ball-point to pull me out of the shit and the despair.” Whereas Genet celebrates the brutal, homosexual microcosm of prison as his chosen universe, Mme. Sarrazin describes nothing but daily dreariness and dreams only of escape.
The Runaway is a very long piece of scarcely disguised autobiography. Its English title inadequately translates the complex associations of cavale, a literary word for “mare,” from which has been derived the slang verb cavaler, meaning “to run, to decamp, to take a powder.” The translator, Mr. Markmann, confronted with a slangy and idiomatic text, has responded with sprinklings of faintly obsolete and off-key terms like “yack” (for “talk”) and “mitts” (for “hands”) and “nut” and “noodle” (for “head”) and with impossible medleys like “What vision froze the guy in his tracks?” and gauche metonymy like “I Colgate the pearly whites,” to signify tooth-brushing. In fairness, nothing deteriorates quicker in passage than slang, and there is little to suggest that the original French text is very finely nuanced. The first four hundred pages are really quite dull: the housekeeping details of prison cells, a lot of tape-recorder dialogue, a hope to escape and mount the cavale that never comes to anything, a succession of cellmates indistinguishable except that some smell worse than others. There are patches of vivid description:
Sometimes I like to squat on the laundry steps, where the rivulets of soap and dirty water gather in a moldy coldness; motionless, slightly bent over, my head leaning toward my shoulder, I open my mouth a little and feel the breeze vibrating through my cheeks, like a cool breath of air through a harmonica; and, a little higher up, the sun explodes lightly on my eyelids and roots me in the earth, through the rotting stones and the bubbles of laundry water; sudden
joy pours out of the sky and swirls round my legs, while without changing position I move forward, with a slight effort, as against a tide.
The details of note-smuggling (in candy, via vagina, from mouth to mouth during kisses) are surprising, and there are some interesting psychological touches, as when Anick, the fastidious and reclusive heroine, takes it upon herself to delouse a senile fellow-inmate. But it all comes upon the reader haphazard, worse organized than even a sociologist would do it—the objectified diary of a precocious girl who detests jail yet is unable to stay out of it, whose self-perception is barely emerged from the chaos of self-pity, whose principal activities are stamp-cadging and daydreaming, whose days ebb by amid conversations like:
“What kind of soap do you think we’ll get this week? Cadum? Palmolive?”
“I wonder what view of Paris there’ll be in the biscuit boxes.”
To be sure, this unstinted dreariness has a mimetic effect of sorts; we become as eager to escape the book as its narrator is to escape prison.
Anick begins her story well after the middle; she is a hardened jailbird when we meet her. The turning point of her life—her falling in love with a man called Zizi during an interval of freedom, and her concomitant conversion from lesbianism—is past, and it figures in the present tense of this novel as a constant pining for him and a futile scheming to rejoin him in the life of burglary they once led. He is in another part of the prison. On his initiative, they get married, winning the privilege of meeting once a week, with glass between them. They can kiss only in the police wagon taking them to and from the interrogations preparatory to their trial. Their final sentence is severe. Zizi is more cautious than Anick, and discourages her hopes of escape. The end of the book, if I understand it, shows her joining him in resignation—“another stroke through the calendar is not so bad. Slowly the mercury is getting down to zero, and from zero you make a fresh start.” Her cavale, her “runaway mare,” has become transformed into the interior escape of imagination. The secret action of this book is the act of its own writing; what Mme. Sarrazin has described, with steadily growing conscious intent, is the process of what we on the outside would call her “rehabilitation.” In the last hundred pages, the writing grows cleaner, the imagery more complex, the plot more active. Her lawyer emerges from the shadows and becomes a character. And she herself gains access to the defiant child she once was: “I try to recapture the basic savor that I found in the hole [the isolation cell] during my adolescence.… I had my shoulder to the wheel of hardships, I made frightening bets against myself; I fasted, I burned myself, I pricked myself.… The hole was a vice, as much a vice as being tattooed or masturbating, a vice that I wanted to savor while I had the chance, and, if possible, to learn to like.” She tells her lawyer, “I’ve been asocial ever since I was born.” Earlier in the book she has tersely referred to her “mother,” in puzzling variance with the dust jacket’s claim that she is an orphan; now she cries out, “I’m a bastard, no one’s child.” Though at times she prays “Let my fury never abate. Let me always keep intact my wrong, my hurtful ways,” an essential perspective has been gained, and an essential peace. “Zi, my love, one day the cycle of days and nights will stop torturing us and turn kind to us again.… The hateful blanket in which I roll myself up will vanish like the cold, and I will gorge myself on sun.” The monotonous texture of the bulk of the book yields to heartfelt exclamations, glimpses of the past, a poetry of “this golden coma of prison where nothing makes a mark.” The process of rehabilitation merges with the process of learning how to write.
