SIGNS and MEANINGS: Pataphallics: Jarry’s Novels and Ityphallicism

• Authors: Jean-Michel Rabaté
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

This article discusses Alfred Jarry as a precursor of French modernism. With a particular focus on Messaline, Roman de l’ancienne Rome (1901) and Le Surmâle, Roman moderne (1902), I analyse the subtle ways in which the past and the future are intertwined and Jarry’s philosophy of sexual excess. In both novels, the main characters seek a paroxysmal erotic pleasure from which they die after reaching world records in sex-making. Read together, the novels work to create a lemniscate, the symbol of infinity symbolically represented, in modernism, by the speeding bicycle. In both novels, sexual excess leads to a superhuman transformation of women and men into a rigid phallus, underlying which is the fantasy of bisexualism.

Keywords

EN

Alfred Jarry; Modernism; Ityphallicism; Sexual excess; Lemniscate

• Publisher: Sciendo
• Journal: Human and Social Studies
• Year: 2014
• Volume: 3
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 80-89

Dates

published

2014-06-01

online

2015-02-06

Contributors

author

Jean-Michel Rabaté

• University of Pennsylvania

References

• Deleuze, G. 1997. “An unrecognized precursor to Heidegger: Alfred Jarry”. Essays Critical and Clinical. trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco. Minneapolis: University of Minessota Press. 91-98.
• Dubbelboer, M. The Subversive Poetics of Alfred Jarry: Abusing Culture in the Almanachs du Père Ubu. London: Legenda, 2012.
• Jarry, A. OEuvres Complètes. I. Ed. Michel Arrivé. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, Paris: Gallimard, 1972.
• Jarry, A. OEuvres Complètes II. Ed. Henri Bordillon, Patrick Besnier, Bernard Le Doze and Michel Arrivé. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, Paris: Gallimard, 1987.
• Jarry, A. OEuvres Complètes III. Ed. Henri Bordillon, Patrick Besnier, Bernard Le Doze and Michel Arrivé. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, Paris: Gallimard, 1988.
• Jarry, A. The Supermale, translated by Ralph Gladstone and Barbara Wright. Cambridge: Exact Change, 1999.
• Juvenal. “Satire VI. Don’t Marry”. Satires. Translated by A. S. Kline, © 2011, http://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Latin/Juvenalhome.htm, accessed on 04.04.2014.

Identifiers

DOI

10.2478/hssr-2013-0030