Even more French books, mostly appropriate for children

Since I could read, I read.  I studied French in the winter and spring mostly by reading French, lots of it, in many forms, constrained only by the sense that I should stay near my collège reading level, which was barely a constraint.  Don’t get stupid and jump to Rabelais or Proust.  Plenty to read right here.

I could assemble, for example, a little Theater of the Absurd unit: Jean Anouilh, Jean Cocteau, Jean Tardieu, and Eugène Ionesco, ending with a trip back to Alfred Jarry.  Ubu Roi is strictly speaking assigned at the lycée, the secondary school, level, but once in a while I would push the boundary.

Or in preparation for the Quais du Polar, I could read crime novels, mysteries – books that were on the collège reading lists since, as part of what ought to be a basic literary education, the French teach literary history, including the histories of specific genres.  Thus my annotated edition of Thierry Jonquet’s La Vie de ma mère! (The life of my mother!, 1994) included essays on the history of the mystery from Poe onwards, with an emphasis on the French contribution, which is heavy on the anti-hero, like  the gentleman burglar who stars in Arsène Lupin gentleman cambrioleur gentleman (1907).  There is a student edition of this collection of crime stories, as well as one for Gaston Leroux’s locked room mystery La mystère de la chambre jaune (The Mystery of the Yellow Room, 1907).  The editions exist, but how often are these books actually assigned?  A mystery of its own, how the potential curriculum relates to the actual one.

I was on a guided tour of the chateau of the Duke de Uzès, the tourists being the middle-aged French people one might expect.  The guide at one point said (I translate) “I now propose to you a visit to” (arches eyebrows) “the Yellow Room,” and everyone laughed.  Everyone got and enjoyed, more than I did, the reference to the century-old Leroux mystery, or perhaps one of it film adaptations.

A curious feature of both the Leroux novel and Maurice Leblanc’s Arsène Lupin stories is that they are both explicitly competing with Sherlock Holmes.  The thief or detective cannot just be ingenious, but has to defeat his English competition.  They both have explicit Holmes characters.  Leblanc’s is named Herlock Sholmès, which is a great gag, but Leroux’s use of Holmes is even more outrageous.

Speaking of outrageous, it is outrageous that that Thierry Jonquet novel is not available in English.  It is of high ethical interest.  A Parisian schoolkid, a Serbian immigrant, is torn between his criminal friends and a more normal French life.  But he does not know that he is torn.  How would he know, he is twelve.  It is a battle between innocence and experience.  Experience, at the end of this bleak novel, is destructive, at least for someone that young.

This book was a productive mistake for me, and not the only one I made.  The language was extremely difficult, with a lot of slang including the subset where the protagonist takes the “tromé” to the mall and then listens to some “zicmu.”  It’s like a word game.  Between the language, the violence, and the sexual content (things the character observes), I thought, this is for junior high kids?  But collège extends to 9th or 10th grade, which is a long ways from 6th or 7th.  I made this mistake several times, trying a book that was not too hard for me but was very hard.  The mistake was so valuable that now I do it deliberately.

I could keep going.  I have not written about J. M. G. Le Clézio, or Marguerite Yourcenar, or Joseph Kessel, all collège level, or Annie Ernaux or Raymond Queneau, successful lycée-level experiments.  At some point, I do want to read Proust and Montaigne in French, that seems achievable, but I am patient.

Oh, but it’s like this, look you, what on earth is that? - Ubu ended

Well, Anything Ubu has been a fine bloggish experiential endeavor.  I have learned plenty from other people and have, I suppose, done my best.   In my defense, I do not understand a word Jarry wrote.

For example, let’s end with an ending, the grand finale of Ubu Cuckolded.   Pa Ubu has just retrieved his Conscience from the toilet, where he had stuffed it, and he is joined by Achras who is a mathematician, and a breeder of polyhedra.  Why not.

With a noise like an engine-whistle THE CROCODILE crosses the stage.

SCENE FOUR

ACHRAS, PA UBU, his CONSCIENCE, THE CROCODILE.

ACHRAS. Oh, but it’s like this, look you, what on earth is that?

PA UBU. It’s a boidie.

CONSCIENCE. It’s a most characteristic reptile and moreover (touching it) its hands possess all the properties of a snake’s.

PA UBU. Then it must be a whale, for the whale is the most inflated boidie in existence and this animal seems thoroughly distended.

CONSCIENCE. I tell you it’s a snake.

PA UBU. That should prove to Mister Conscience his stupidity and absurdity.  We had come to the same conclusion long before he said so: in fact it is a snake!  A rattler into the bargain.

ACHRAS (smelling it). Ouf!  One thing’s quite certain, look you, it ain’t no polyhedron.

And curtain, or houselights on, or turn the hose on the audience, or whatever your theater does when the play ends.  Curtain calls, everybody!  Stamp your feet and clap your hands for the puppeteer!

I see the form of actual play writing here.  Characterization, for example, like Pa Ubu’s utter ignorance and endless confidence in his immediate declaration that a crocodile is a bird, or the pedantic empiricist Conscience identifying a crocodile as a snake through examination of its hands, just the thing a snake does not have, although neither does a crocodile, come to think of it.  The last line of Achras links back to the first line of the play (”I’ve no grounds to be dissatisfied with my polyhedra”), but in a meaningless manner.

Jarry is parodying good practice.  That crocodile appears nowhere else in the play, but is dragged on stage for the play’s last two minutes.  It does relate to some earlier Egyptian nonsense, and may well be stolen from someone else’s play.  I fear the entire ending is a parody of a play that does not actually exist.  Efficient, I must admit.

Thanks to all of the Ubu readalongists.  To anyone who read a line of Ubu, or an entire play, and decided against writing about it: I do not blame you.   Boy, I do not.

So next week, after the July 4 holiday, I leap ahead, past the signed toilets and twelve-tone music and anti-novels and anarchic cartoon rabbits and onstage rhinoceri to an actual contemporary novel or three, the first volume of Your Face Tomorrow by Javier Marías, a spy novel, or so it pretends.  Actually, it is itself a kind of anti-novel.   And then I beat my retreat to the gentle comforts of Victorian literature, to The Loves and Adventures of Francis Newbold Gresham the younger by Anthony Trollope, although anyone who finds this novel too comforting is not reading it well.

Slavery is the only true freedom! - Jarry makes an argument, or so I do not argue

What I should do is make an argument about the Ubu plays. I should interpret them. I have read two different versions of the three plays, plus an additional volume of Jarry’s writing, plus a certain amount of background reading on Alfred Jarry and his world. I should be brimming with interpretive fervor.

I don’t know. Let’s see.

At first, before reading Ubu Roi, and maybe even after, I had thought that Jarry was a particularly imaginative and forceful example of the French bourgeoisie shocker. Not that these creatures do not exist, but I should have learned my lesson by now. Charles Baudelaire, Gustave Flaubert, Arthur Rimbaud – like Alfred Jarry, these writers could not have cared less about the so-called bourgeoisie, or they quickly found more interesting things to do with their talents, or both.

I do believe that Jarry was interested in shock, but his target was the avant garde, French Bohemia. He wanted to shake up, or provoke, or perhaps merely amuse, his own world, his own friends, his own audience of painters and poets and theatrical thrill-seekers and weirdos. He succeeded, I think; he stands right at the head of the explosion of conceptual art that was about to wash over Paris and the new century.

Whether his work was really at all a cause of the conceptual revolution, providing useful models or ideas, or merely a colorful early example of the rapidly changing, formally inventive art and anti-art created soon after by Stravinsky, Picasso, Tzara, and so on, who knows. Apollinaire was openly influenced by Jarry, and Duchamp has to have been, right? Otherwise, I have some doubts. I find it helpful to remind myself that the most openly outrageous Ubu play, the one I find the most shocking, at least, the toilet-obsessed Ubu Cuckolded was neither performed nor published until 1944.

The Ubu plays make a complicated and possibly contradictory argument for some sort of radical freedom. Jarry demonstrates his argument less in the content of the play than in its form. Thus, the puns and obscenities and nonsense, but thus, also, the move to a more controlled and coherent work in the third play, Ubu Enchained, the one where Pa Ubu repeatedly refuses freedom and demands slavery and imprisonment. As a result, he inspires the supremely free citizens of France to choose slavery of their own free will:

PISSWEET: Forward, comrades! Hurrah for freedom!... We are free to do what we want, even to obey. We are free to go anywhere we choose, even to prison! Slavery is the only true freedom!

ALL: Hurrah for Pissweet!

PISSWEET: In response to your pleas, I agree to take over command. Forward! Let’s break into the prisons and abolish freedom! (V.1., tr. Taylor)

Ubu Enslaved is full of scenes like this, many of them openly structured like gags. So this is the argument I would make if I had the energy to make an argument, that in the Ubu plays, Jarry was deliberately demonstrating different kinds of radical artistic freedom – freedom to be chaotic, freedom to use form, freedom to offend, freedom to reform. That Pa Ubu is not always working to the same purpose as his author shows how far Jarry was willing to push the idea.

Ooh! Ow! Help, rescue! - the great Père Ubu

Père Ubu is a monstrous inversion of Hello Kitty, bibliographing nicole boldly declares, and how can I not agree?  The character of Pa Ubu is Alfred Jarry’s greatest creation.  If Ubu is not as ubu-iqitous as Don Quixote or Faust or Falstaff, to pick some precedents, characters who escaped their creators, it is because the 20th century avant garde has so ruthlessly cannibalized him.

Pa Ubu is a titanic comic monster, a braggart and coward like Falstaff but somehow simultaneously an unstoppable, invulnerable murderer.  He massacres his enemies but also poisons his allies:

He holds an unmentionable brush in his hand and hurls it at the gathering.

PA UBU.  Try a taste of that. (Several taste and collapse poisoned.)  Now pass me the spare ribs of Polish bison, Mother, and I’ll dish them out.

[snip]

PA UBU.  You’re still here?  By my green candle, I’ll do you in with bison ribs.
He begins to throw them.

ALL.  Ooh!  Ow!  Help, rescue!  Let’s stick up for ourselves!  Curses!  He’s done for me.  (Ubu Roi, I.3., Connolly and Taylor)

Then Pa complains that he has “had a lousy meal”!

I should ask the other Ubu readers – how often is Pa Ubu terrifying?  Plenty of times, says I.  The massacres of the nobles in Ubu Roi, for example, scene III.2., when what begins as lust for money and power turns into or reveals itself as something more horrifying, more empty.  “Isn’t injustice just as good as justice?” Ubu asks in the preceding scene, and he means it, as much as he means anything.  When, in Ubu Cocu, Ubu stuffs his conscience and anyone else he can get his hands down the toilet, I thought not “How horrible” but “Of course.”

Despite the loudness of his brutality, Pa Ubu frequently reminded me of the silent Harpo Marx.  Both characters are agents of chaos.  So are Groucho and Chico, but they are restrained by intelligence and stupidity, respectively.  Harpo is the one who is not quite human.  Harpo is the troll.

Rise links Ubu Roi to the dictator novel.  As you can see, I read the Ubu plays and think of Duck Soup.  Thinking of Idi Amin is too frightening.

I suppose if I have been disappointed by Jarry, it is that he created only one great character.  Ma Ubu has her moments – she starts strong, for example, as a sort of idiotic Lady Macbeth – but is undefined compared to Pa Ubu.  A thoughtful reader might point me to – or, even better, write – a feminist counter to Jarry, Hedda Gabler crossed with Lady Macbeth strained through Brecht’s, or Grimmelshausen’s, Mother Courage.  Winnie, in Beckett’s Happy Days, might be a useful reference.  All I seem to be able to do is list other works and characters.

I only discussed Ubu Roi with you because it has the advantage of being the sort of play that most of the public will appreciate.

“Plays are meant to be seen!”  How often have I come across some variant of this sentiment, on book blogs or elsewhere, a bromide I uncharitably interpret as “I do not know how to read plays.”  But of course, I do see the plays I read, while I read them.  I use my imagination.

For the reader who wants the assistance, Jarry and others left behind a substantial amount of documentation about the performance of Ubu Roi – the other Ubu plays were not performed during or anywhere near Jarry’s lifetime.  The Selected Works of Alfred Jarry (1965), ed. Roger Shattuck, tr. by many hands,  is packed with all sorts of wonderful nonsense on the theater.  Pa Ubu, for example, really should look like Jarry’s drawing on the left, with the spiral on his enormous belly and the strange, long-nosed mask destroying any ordinary notion of acting.  Through much of the play, he should be carrying a toilet brush, and when mounted, he wears a cardboard horse head.

Jarry stands at the head of what is now a long French tradition of anti-acting.  If I remember correctly, the director Robert Bresson even avoided the word, calling the people appearing in his films “models.”  Jarry not only wanted to obscure the face of the actors, but to destroy their voices and form:

And it is better for them not to move, and that the whole play should be spoken in a monotone.

And we have also said that the actor must take on the body appropriate to the part. (Selected Works, 74)

The imagined voice is crucial, and the delivery.  Ubu Roi is a comedy, I guess.  Some readings are funnier than others.  So I read lines aloud, try out different registers.  I have convinced myself that Jarry’s advice is not quite right – the nightmarish Pa and Ma Ubu should certainly bellow their idiotic lines, like George Costanza’s parents on Seinfeld, the couple that knows each other so well they simply skip to the screaming at the first hint of conflict – more efficient, don’t you know.  But the effect is funnier if other characters  act as if they are in a Shakespeare or Racine play or, I don’t know, Long Day’s Journey into Night, as if they are method actors squeezing every drop of meaning out of their lines.

But then none of this works if the actors are replaced by puppets.  Kenneth McLeish’s version of The Ubu Plays (1997) includes “Ubu sur la butte,” or “Up Ubu,” Jarry’s compressed adaptation of Ubu Roi for marionettes.  Frankly, when I was imagining my way through Ubu, I was mostly thinking of marionettes.   Screeching, flailing, insane puppets, tearing each other to shreds.  Somehow the appearance of bears and crocodiles, and the impalings and ghosts and characters falling in the toilet all made more sense.*

The backdrop at the premiere was painted by Bonnard and Toulouse-Lautrec, among others, and included “a bed, and at the foot of the bed a bare tree and snow falling,” as well as palm trees and a dangling skeleton.  Scene changes were signified by a sign hung from a nail, the responsibility of “[a] venerable gentleman in evening dress.”  All of this from Arthur Symons's description of the first night, pp. 256-7 of Martin Esslin’s The Theatre of the Absurd (1961).

None of this is remotely necessary to read Jarry.  Let fly.  After all, if you “simplify it somewhat… we would have something which could not fail to be funny,” since, Jarry writes, Ubu Roi is “the sort of play that most of the public will appreciate” (Selected Works, 67-8).

* Not that Jarry’s special effects are that special.  Nothing that, for example, the 18^th century Italian stage could not handle.  See Carlo Gozzi’s The King Stag (1762), as found in Eric Bentley’s The Servant of Two Masters and Other Italian Classics (1986).

Ooh! What a nasty word. Pa Ubu, you’re a dirty old man. - the first word of Ubu

Act One, Scene One

PA UBU, MA UBU

PA UBU.  Merdre.*

Now, what would have happened one hundred and fifteen years ago, at the 1896 première of Alfred Jarry’s  Ubu Roi, after this utterance of the play’s first word, is a fifteen minute theater riot.  In the context of the pandemonium at the 1830 debut of  Victor Hugo’s 1830 Hernani, caused by his violation of French Classical prosody, such as misplacing the caesura in the opening line, or the fooforaw over Stravinsky and Diaghilev’s The Rite of Spring in 1913, I am not convinced that fifteen minutes is particularly long for a French theatrical riot.

Still, some patrons fled, others whistled, and still more punched each other.  The avant-gardists drowned out the philistines (decide for yourself who is which).  The Ubuistes in attendance included Stéphane Mallarmé, Edmond Rostand (the slightly more conventional Cyrano de Bergerac would debut the next year), and, most amusingly to me, William Butler Yeats, who did not understand French well but enthusiastically “shouted for the play,” but later, in his hotel room, mourned the death of literature – “what more is possible?  After us the Savage God.”**

All of this fuss is adorable.  Am I right?  Screaming and hooting over a single scatological crumb, a speck of not-quite-profanity, a malformed cousin of “Shoot” and “Sugar” and “Wednesday.”***  I have seen, or perhaps, since I can’t remember any details, only heard about movies where the first ten or twenty words are profane, a gesture that I suppose is meant to shock an audience numbed by Quentin Tarantino and David Mamet.  Does it ever actually work?  Maybe on television, where I still occasionally feel that jolt – you can say that on broadcast TV now?  But on screen or stage, please.  So the genuine outrage and horror of century-past French theater-goers – ones who specifically chose to attend an avant garde play – delights me.

Only a few years later, Dadaist theaters had to distribute rotten fruit to their patrons, had to demand that they be outraged, had to actively facilitate their anger.  Yeats was right  - Jarry’s jape had changed the world, just a little bit.

That’s the first word of Ubu Roi.  Tomorrow, the second word.  That’s a joke.  Here are versions of the second and third lines:

MA UBU.  Ooh! What a nasty word.  Pa Ubu, you’re a dirty old man.

PA UBU.  Watch out I don’t bash yer nut in, Ma Ubu!  (tr. Connolly and Taylor)

McLeish has Ma Ubu simply say “Pa Ubu, language,” which is a better gag for an actual performance, if “better” has any meaning in Ubu-world.

What has bibliographing nicole been writing?  Oh, she’s going after the first word as well.  It’s irresistible, as a part of theater history, too important to ignore.  As literature, eh, thin stuff.  Nicole presents a passage that suggests there is more to Jarry than shocking the bourgeoisie.  Oh, there is, there is.

Update: Look at what In Lieu of a Field Guide does with the first word - now that's a good pummeling - and then it just keeps going.

* “Pschitt!” as translated by Cyril Connolly and Simon Watson Taylor, and note their unnecessarily punchy exclamation point; “Shikt.” per Kenneth McLeish.  Translating Ubu Roi is fun, fun, fun.

**  I am pilfering Roger Shattuck’s The Banquet Years (1955), particularly pages 161-4.  The quotations from Yeats, and his entire paragraph on the performance, are on p. 163, and can also be found in the second volume of his Autobiography, the 1922 The Trembling of the Veil.

***  “Miercoles” in Spanish, a polite, and hilarious, substitute for “merde.”

A vacation, and a book blogging question

I will be wandering the prairie for a few days.  Back, let's say, Tuesday.

Do not forget to contemplate the possibility of reading Anything Ubu.  If you are wondering what goes on in Ubu Roi, Jarry's cover from the program for the first performance should help.

Let's see, that's Papa Ubu on the right, and I think the little fellows on the left are Polish princes.  And then there's a box on wheels, and a burning building, and the moon, and, yes, I have no idea.  No idea at all.

My question:  Has anyone come across theater blogs that are like book blogs, or book blogs that concentrate on plays - meaning, that are not just responding to current performances but are also reading plays, really writing about plays?  Anyone reading through Ionesco or Pinter or Calderón de la Barca or whomever?  If so, please direct me thither.  Thanks.

Hey! Have you heard? Throngs of dwarfs and trolls swarm on the hills.

Anybody else out there carrying around the idea that Henrik Ibsen introduced something called “realism” to the stage?  Plays were, for a long time, not realistic, and then Ibsen produced – I’m not sure which ones – A Doll’s House and The Wild Duck, let’s say, and then Shaw and Chekhov and other playwrights of a similar temperament took notice and thus was melodrama and nonsense banished from the legitimate theater, replaced by somber realism.

I think there is some truth to what I just wrote.  Shaw and company really were inspired, partly, by Ibsen to do whatever it was they did.  I do not know Ibsen well, and had not read any of his plays before last year; when I did, I could see the path the realists followed.  The puzzle was: how did the realists escape all of the trolls hiding along the path?  Ibsen’s plays, it turns out, are full of trolls.

Hey! Have you heard?
The priest’s flown away.
And now the throngs
of dwarfs and trolls,
all swart and spry
swarm on the hills.
The spiteful things,
they scratched my eyes,
look!  with their claws. (near the end of Act 3)

The speaker here is Gerd, herself half-troll, the visionary madwoman of Ibsen’s Brand (1866).  The title character is the priest, a uncompromising hellfire preacher who destroys all who come near him as part of his service to, or his mortal struggle with, God.  I believe there is room for interpretation here.  The novel – I mean play, or poem - ends with Gerd discovering that Brand, purged of all earthly remnants, is in fact Jesus Christ, with the unsettling consequences one might expect.  Brand is some sort of anti-troll, all too attuned to the world’s trollishness.

I’m not sure what a troll is.  I have not even read D’Aulaires’ Book of Trolls.  They are easy to recognize, though.  They are the characters who appear to be human but are not – Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights, for example, or Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, destructive and chaotic, creatures whose presence in in the human world appears to be some sort of error.  They make good villains, even if they are somehow too primitive to be genuinely evil (evil is a human quality).  Quilp, from The Old Curiosity Shop, is a troll.

I am actually reading Brand and Peer Gynt (1867) because of Jarry, because of Ubu.  Alfred Jarry translated Peer Gynt and actively tried to get it performed.  Père Ubu, Jarry’s great creation, is himself something of a troll, as is the protagonist of his Rabelaisian anti-philosophical novel, The Exploits & Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, Pataphysician.  Not that any of this matters much, except that there seem to be other paths leading away from Ibsen that have nothing whatsoever to do with “realism.”

The Geoffrey Hill adaptation of Brand that I am reading is, as an aside, spectacularly good.

The Anything Ubu Readalong Opportunity

1.  bibliographing nicole, host of last year’s historic, blog-shattering Clarel readalong has thrown down a metaphorical gauntlet, demanding a Challenge!

2.  Roberto Bolaño obsessives have circulated lists of his favorite books, for example this list, where Bolaño expresses his affection for “Anything Ubu by Jarry,” which may well have been a translator’s misunderstanding.  Bolaño might be referring to an actual book, Tout Ubu, a French omnibus of Ubu.

3.  This step is extremely important, but I have forgotten what it is.  I will consult my notes, which are unfortunately poorly organized, and insert the missing information later.

4. The result:

All are invited to consult their consciences and read Anything Ubu, or carried away by their newly awakened and insatiable appetite, Everything Ubu.

What is Ubu?  The first great character of the 20th century.  The destruction of literature.  The beginning of Modernism.  A travesty.  A nightmare.  A moderately amusing jape.  Two authentic portraits of Papa Ubu have been ensconced at the head of Wuthering Expectations.  A sample, Act 4, Scene 5 of Ubu Cocu, complete:

The same, MEMNON showing his head.

MEMNON’S HEAD:  It’s not functioning at all, it’s broken down.  What a dirty business, like your braining machine.  I’m not afraid of that.  It all proves my point – there’s nothing like a sewage barrel.  In falling in and popping out again you’ve done more than half the work for me.

PA UBU:  By my green candle, I’ll gouge your eyes out – barrel, pumpkin, refuse of humanity! (He shove him back, then shuts himself in the lavatory recess with The Palcontents.)

“It all proves my point” – that is my new motto.  Expect me to deploy it in your comments soon.  Cyril Connolly is the “translator” here.  Many translations and adaptation of the Ubu plays exist.  The plays are:

Ubu Roi, or King Ubu, or whatever you want to call it.  Written and performed, actually performed in an actual Paris theater, by human actors, in 1896.

Ubu Cocu, or Ubu Cuckolded.  Published in 1943.  Jarry was long dead.

Ubu Enchaîné, or Ubu Enslaved, published in 1900, I think.  Who cares.

In some sense, this is the proper order of the plays, and a proper reader would want to start with Ubu Roi.  The proper reader would also end with Ubu Roi, probably before he gets to the bottom of the first page, and “sense” is really the wrong word to use in the context of Ubu, so forget all of that.

These three plays make up The Ubu Cycle but are not the end of Ubu.  I have only alluded to the fact that these plays have an author, Alfred Jarry, who is visible, in Picasso’s portrait, peeping over the Challenged! button up above.  Jarry’s writings outside of the plays are suffused with Ubu, soaked in Ubu, dripping with Ubu.  Jarry, in what for the sake of argument I will call “real life,” actually became Ubu.  For legal and ethical reasons, I urge participants in the Anything Ubu Readalong Opportunity not to actually become Ubu.

Nicole and I invite one and all to defile their blogs by sampling Anything Ubu.  We think we will begin the disembraining (or, to use an antiquated technical term, “discussion”) in the last week of June.  Bolañistos and Bolañistas are nuts not to join in.  Other readers – see you in July!  Or August – the Ubu stink may be gone by then.