Life & Wisdom Quote by Alfred Jarry

Normal taste has always policed its borders by naming whatever it can’t classify a “monster.” Jarry’s provocation is to take that lazy alarm bell and flip it into an aesthetic compliment. He starts by mimicking the museum-label voice of authority - “It is conventional to call…” - then refuses the convention with a flat, almost childish counterclaim: “I call…” That blunt pivot is the whole strategy. He’s not arguing within the rules; he’s changing the rules.

The subtext is a jab at the gatekeepers of late-19th-century French culture: academies, critics, moralists, the whole apparatus that equated harmony with virtue and dissonance with disease. “Blending of dissonant elements” sounds like the language of biology and degeneration theory, the era’s pseudo-scientific anxiety about impurity. Jarry treats that fear as a tell. If your first response to the new is to reach for the freak-show vocabulary, you’re confessing your dependence on inherited categories.

Calling the monster “every original inexhaustible beauty” doesn’t just romanticize ugliness; it celebrates the kind of work that can’t be used up by a single reading, the art that keeps mutating as you look at it. That’s Jarry in embryo: the writer who would soon give us Ubu Roi, a play that weaponized vulgarity, nonsense, and political caricature to expose bourgeois seriousness as a costume. Here, “monster” becomes a rallying word for modernism before modernism had a name: originality as a composite creature, stitched from contradictions, stubbornly alive because it refuses to resolve.