Read-along – The Counterfeiters (5 of 6)
Part Three, Chapters 7-13 – and Alfred Jarry
Dear Counterfeiters,
We’ve read Part Three, Chapters 7-13 of The Counterfeiters – what did you make of them? Please do share your thoughts in a comment below. Here are mine:
In chapter 8, at the Argonauts’ dinner, Gide introduces us to ‘a strange kind of clown, with a befloured face, a black beady eye, and hair plastered down on his head like a skull-cap’. Passavant says:
It’s Alfred Jarry, the author of Ubu Roi. The Argonauts have dubbed him a genius because the public have just damned his play. All the same, it’s the most interesting thing that’s been put on the stage for a long time.
Alfred Jarry was a real writer who wrote eccentric plays, novels and poems, which are said to have anticipated the dream-like absurdities of dadaism, surrealism and futurism. He also invented the term ’pataphysics, which has developed a significant following over the last 100 years. (You can enrol at the Collège de ’Pataphysique here.)
Jarry’s play Ubu Roi was first performed on 10 December 1896. It’s a parody of Macbeth, Hamlet and King Lear, written with impenetrable wordplay, in which the childish tyrant ‘King Ubu’ uses the body of a dead bear to escape the Russians and flee to France.
The first word of the play is ‘merdre’ – ‘merde’ (‘shit’) with an extra ‘r’ – which was greeted by a quarter of an hour of booing from the audience.
W. B. Yeats was at the premiere and recalled the experience in his memoir, The Trembling of the Veil (1922):
I go to the first performance of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi, at the Théatre de L’Oeuvre, with the Rhymer who had been so attractive to the girl in the bicycling costume. The audience shake their fists at one another, and the Rhymer whispers to me, ‘There are often duels after these performances,’ and he explains to me what is happening on the stage. The players are supposed to be dolls, toys, marionettes, and now they are all hopping like wooden frogs, and I can see for myself that the chief personage, who is some kind of King, carries for Sceptre a brush of the kind that we use to clean a closet. Feeling bound to support the most spirited party, we have shouted for the play, but that night at the Hotel Corneille I am very sad, for comedy, objectivity, has displayed its growing power once more. I say, ‘After Stephane Mallarmé, after Paul Verlaine, after Gustave Moreau, after Puvis de Chavannes, after our own verse, after all our subtle colour and nervous rhythm, after the faint mixed tints of Conder, what more is possible? After us the Savage God.’
The actor playing Ubu modelled his performance on Jarry’s own nasal voice — and from then on Jarry adopted Ubu’s repertoire of bizarre speech habits. Gide describes his ‘mechanical voice . . . snapping out . . . syllables, inventing odd words and oddly mangling others . . . It was only Jarry who could succeed in producing that toneless voice of his – a voice without warmth or intonation, or accent or emphasis.’
This week we’re reading Part Three, Chapters 14-20 and finishing the novel! I look forward to discussing the final section with you next Friday 13th June.
Here are links to our previous The Counterfeiters posts:
The Schedule (11 April)
André Gide (21 April)
0. Le Jardin du Luxembourg (2 May)
2. Part One, Chapters 10-18 – and Cocteau’s reviews (16 May)
3. Part Two, Chapters 1-7 – and Edouard’s Theory of the Novel (23 May)
4. Part Three, Chapters 1-6 – and the Butterfly of Parnassus (30 May)
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