Alfred Jarry Biography Quotes 7 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
Alfred Jarry was born in 1873 in Laval, in western France, and grew up during a period when Symbolism and experimental literature were reshaping the arts. His childhood was marked by moves within provincial France and early exposure to classical studies. As a student in Rennes he joined classmates in composing satirical sketches that lampooned a schoolmaster; the mock-epic buffoon they invented, a grotesque figure of authority and appetite, became the seed of Pere Ubu. Jarry later studied in Paris at the Lycee Henri-IV, where his reading broadened to modern poetry and theater. Already gifted at drawing and woodcut engraving, he began shaping a singular voice that fused erudition, parody, and a deliberate assault on literary decorum.

Paris, Publications, and the Symbolist Milieu
In the early 1890s Jarry entered the Parisian avant-garde. He published poems and prose in little reviews before bringing out Les minutes de sable memoire in 1894, a debut that aligned him with Symbolist experimentation. The Mercure de France, edited by Alfred Vallette with the influential writer Rachilde closely involved, became a central base for his work. There he found encouragement from Remy de Gourmont and moved among writers who took Stephane Mallarme as a tutelary spirit. This circle encouraged risk: classical pastiche, private mythologies, and the mixing of high culture with street argot. Jarry also cultivated a visual aesthetic, cutting woodblocks and designing images that accompanied his texts, and he began to imagine theater not just as literature but as a total spectacle of language, gesture, and design.

Ubu Roi and the Scandal of 1896
The idea born in a schoolboy parody reached the stage as Ubu Roi. In December 1896, Lugne-Poe, director of the Theatre de l Oeuvre, mounted the premiere. The first word shouted onstage, a deliberate profanity misspelled for comic shock, triggered an immediate uproar: hissing, laughter, bravos, and protests ricocheted through the hall. Firmin Gemier, in an exaggerated padded costume, embodied Ubu as tyrant, coward, and glutton, while scene designs and diction flattened grandeur into absurdity. The production polarized Paris. Some saw an anarchic insult to taste; others saw a new freedom for modern theater. The evening cemented Jarry s notoriety and also revealed his method: to smash rhetorical pieties, to deflate power, and to make language itself a weapon.

Pataphysics and Major Works
Out of this ferment Jarry articulated pataphysics, which he called the science of imaginary solutions, a playful yet rigorous counter-philosophy that tracks exceptions rather than laws. He elaborated its principles in Gestes et opinions du docteur Faustroll, pataphysicien, written in the late 1890s and published posthumously. The book stages a learned voyage through art and thought, guided by the cryptic Dr. Faustroll and punctuated by aphorism, parody, and conceptual jokes that anticipate later avant-gardes. Jarry extended the Ubu cycle with Ubu enchaine and other variations, turning his anti-hero from conqueror to slave and thereby inverting the logic of power. He also wrote the novel Les Jours et les Nuits, transmuting memories of military service into a feverish inner epic, and Le Surmale (The Supermale), a mordant satire of technology, sexuality, and scientific bravado, centered on endurance feats and mechanized desire. Across genres he folded science, myth, and slang into a personal idiom that insisted on the possibility of invention at every level of form.

Persona, Habits, and Artistic Practice
Jarry made his life part of his art. Small and wiry, he cultivated an elaborate deadpan, drank prodigious quantities of alcohol, and was known for bicycling at speed through Paris and for carrying pistols. He sometimes spoke in the stylized idiom of his characters, and he set up rooms with Spartan eccentricity, as if ordinary comfort were an affront to creative vigilance. Friends and collaborators in the literary world, among them Rachilde, Alfred Vallette, and Remy de Gourmont, alternately protected and worried over him as his means dwindled. He designed his own illustrations, treated typography and layout as expressive elements, and experimented with performance, readings, and stagecraft. The mix of play, provocation, and rigor he brought to everyday life strengthened the legend of Jarry as both author and character.

Networks, Reception, and Influence Among Peers
Jarry s circle extended from Symbolists to younger modernists. Lugne-Poe s commitment to new drama gave him a crucial platform, and actors like Firmin Gemier gave physical life to his grotesques. The debates around Ubu Roi drew in critics and poets; even those who hated the play recognized the audacity of its language and staging. Younger writers such as Guillaume Apollinaire took note of Jarry s daring, and within a generation Dada and Surrealist figures, including Tristan Tzara and Andre Breton, would salute his example. The notion of pataphysics, at once comic and exacting, spread as an underground password for artists seeking a license to pursue exceptions, paradoxes, and the logic of dreams.

Later Years and Death
The early 1900s brought continued productivity shadowed by illness and poverty. Jarry wrote at speed, revised little, and lived precariously, as commissions and small stipends arrived unevenly. Years of strain, coupled with heavy drinking, undermined his health. He died in Paris in 1907 after a period of serious illness, only thirty-four years old. Friends from the literary world helped manage his papers, and posthumous editions revealed the scope of work he had already prepared but not published.

Legacy
Jarry s influence far exceeded the modest circulation of his books in his lifetime. Ubu became a template for modern political satire and for theatrical forms that disturb audience expectations. Pataphysics seeded an enduring counter-tradition; decades later admirers created the College de Pataphysique to honor and extend his ideas. The conceptual audacity of Dr. Faustroll, the corrosive humor of Ubu, and the mechanized farce of Le Surmale foreshadowed the avant-gardes of the twentieth century and informed the theater of the absurd associated with writers like Eugene Ionesco and Samuel Beckett. Among his contemporaries and immediate successors, figures such as Rachilde, Alfred Vallette, Remy de Gourmont, Lugne-Poe, Firmin Gemier, and Guillaume Apollinaire form a constellation that helps define his milieu. Through them, and through later champions in Dada and Surrealism, Jarry s paradoxical science of imaginary solutions continues to animate experiments in literature, theater, and art.

Our collection contains 7 quotes who is written by Alfred, under the main topics: Wisdom - Music - Freedom - Art - Reinvention.

Other people realated to Alfred: Antonin Artaud (Dramatist), Henri Rousseau (Artist), Boris Vian (Writer)