Life & Wisdom Quote by Alfred Jarry

Jarry’s line is a neat little grenade tossed into the parlor of respectable taste. “Applause” is supposed to be noise, a social reflex that turns art into an event and the artist into a minor public official. By yoking it to “silence,” he flips the customary scoreboard: the reaction that “counts” isn’t the clapping that reassures you you’ve been understood, but the hush that suggests the work has short-circuited easy response.

The intent is double-edged. On one level, it’s a provocation against bourgeois culture’s addiction to visible approval. Jarry came up as the architect of Ubu Roi, a scandal machine that treated decorum as something to be vandalized. In that world, loud applause is suspicious: it can mean you’ve entertained rather than destabilized. Silence, by contrast, can signal discomfort, contemplation, even refusal - all of which imply the work has hit a nerve deep enough that people can’t immediately translate it into polite consensus.

The subtext is also self-protective, almost ascetic. If the only applause that matters is silent, the artist is freed from chasing the room. You don’t have to win the crowd; you have to haunt them. There’s cynicism here about public acclaim as a kind of commerce, but also a sly confidence: the best art doesn’t beg for validation because its effects show up later, privately, when the audience is alone with what it’s just seen.

Jarry’s punchline is that “counts” isn’t about volume. It’s about residue.