Alfred Jarry: a pataphysical life
Alastair Brotchie
MIT, 2011
842 J37b
"Who was Alfred Jarry really? And how did this angry young man from the provinces come to invent pataphysics and to write the revolutionary drama Ubu Roi? In this, the first full-length biography of Jarry in English, Alastair Brotchie, himself a central figure in the 'Coll ège de 'Pataphysique' and scholar of the avant-garde, gives us a richly documented, beautifully illustrated, and intimate portrait of the complex personality behind the Ubu masks. I found it a real page-turner."
--Marjorie Perloff, author of The Futurist Moment and Unoriginal Genius
When Alfred Jarry died in 1907 at the age of thirty-four, he was a legendary figure in Paris--but this had more to do with his bohemian lifestyle and scandalous behavior than his literary achievements. A century later, Jarry is firmly established as one of the leading figures of the artistic avant-garde. Italo Calvino, Umberto Eco, Gilles Deleuze, Jean Baudrillard, Philip K. Dick, Paul McCartney, DJ Spooky, Peter Greenaway, and J. G. Ballard are among his many admirers. A community of scholars and artists maintain a posthumous dialogue with Jarry’s ideas through the Collège de ‘Pataphysique in Paris (named after the “science of imaginary solutions” he conceived), while a steady stream of books on twentieth-century drama pay tribute to his absurd and grotesque play, Ubu Roi.
Even so, most people today tend to think of Jarry only as the author of that play, and of his life as a string of outlandish “ubuesque” anecdotes, often recounted with wild inaccuracy. In this first full-length critical biography of Jarry in English, Alastair Brotchie reconstructs the life of a man intent on inventing (and destroying) himself, not to mention his world, and the "philosophy" that defined their relation. In short, Brotchie gives us the narrative version of what Jarry himself produced--a pataphysical life. - MIT Press
Alastair Brotchie is a founder of the London publishing house Atlas Press, a Regent of the Collège de ‘Pataphysique in Paris, and the editor of books and anthologies on Surrealism, Dada, and the Oulipo.