Alfred Jarry

Alfred Jarry (Laval, 1873 - Paris, 1907) was a French writer whose work sits at the edge of Symbolism and the avant-garde. He is best known for the play Ubu Roi, which is often cited as a forerunner of Dada, Surrealism and, later, the theatre of the absurd. He wrote in French and moved freely between forms: novels, prose poems, comic operas and absurdist essays.

He was born in Laval to a family of merchants. After his father's cloth business failed, his mother moved the children to Brittany, first to Saint-Brieuc and then to Rennes, where Jarry attended secondary school. As a teenager there he wrote an early version of what became Ubu Roi, mocking a clumsy physics teacher whom he and his classmates found ridiculous. In Paris he moved among Symbolist circles and worked with Remy de Gourmont on the lavish art review Ymagier. Ubu Roi opened at the Théâtre de l'Œuvre in 1896 and caused a scandal that people talked about for years. Its cowardly, tyrannical hero was a grotesque parody of power, and the play mixed echoes of Macbeth with deliberately nonsensical language.

Jarry gradually adopted the character as a way of life. He spoke in Ubu's clipped, pompous manner, rode a bicycle around Paris and carried a revolver, which he is said to have fired on several occasions. His inheritance ran out quickly, and he had to move to smaller and smaller flats. His health declined, and with debts piling up he withdrew in 1906 to his sister's house in Laval. In these years he wrote The Supermale, a satire partly aimed at the Symbolist ideal of self-transcendence, and collaborated with Claude Terrasse on the comic opera Pantagruel.

He died in Paris in 1907, aged thirty-four, of tuberculous meningitis, aggravated by drink. His most unusual book, Exploits and Opinions of Dr Faustroll, Pataphysician, appeared after his death. In it he sets out pataphysics, a science of imaginary solutions that studies exceptions rather than rules. That idea inspired the founding of the Collège de 'Pataphysique in 1948, whose members included Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst and Joan Miró. His legacy lies in black humour, the absurd, and the notion that theatre can be a deliberate provocation.