Exploits

Something to listen to while you read...Little Dragon - Never Never (2009)

Right now I'm reading Alfred Jarry. Most noted for the avant-garde black comedy Ubu plays (Ubu Roi, Ubu Enchaine, & Ubu Cocu), however, Exploits & Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, Pataphysician is a much more sublime endeavor. 'Pataphysics revolves about the truth of contradictions & exceptions. When writing Faustroll, Jarry suggested that he was writing over everyone's head, including his own & would have to experience death in order to catch up with himself.

In Dr. Faustroll, the good Doctor is hounded for back rent of 372,000 francs 27 centimes for the past 11 quarters by Rene-Isidore Panmuphle, bailiff attached to the Civil Court of First Instance of the Department of Seine in session at Paris, who inventories & then seizes Faustroll's library of the twenty-seven most excellent volumes, as follows:

1. Baudelaire, a volume of E.A. Poe translations;
2. Bergerac, Works, Volume II, containing The History of the States & Empires of the Sun, & The History of Birds;
3. The Gospel According to St. Luke, in Greek;
4. Bloy, The Ungrateful Beggar;
5. Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner;
6. Darien, The Thief;
7. Desbordes-Valmore, The Oath of the Little Men;
8. Elskamp, Illuminated Designs;
9. An odd volume of The Plays of Florian;
10. An odd volume of The Thousand & One Nights, in the Galland translation;
11. Grabbe, Scherz, Satire, Ironie & tiefere Bedeutung comedy in three acts;
12. Kahn, The Tale of Gold & of Silence;
13. Lautreamont, The Lays of Maldoror;
14. Maeterlinck, Aglavaine & Selysette;
15. Mallarme, Verse & Prose;
16. Mendes, Gog;
17 The Odyssey, Teubner's edition;
18. Peladan, Babylon;
19. Rabelias
20. Jean de Chilra, The Sexual Hour;
21. Henri de Regnier, The Jasper Cane;
22. Rimbaud, The Illuminations;
23. Schwob, The Children's Crusade;
24. Ubu Roi;
25. Verlaine, Wisdom;
26. Verhaeren, The Hallucinated Landscapes;
27. Verne, Voyage to the Center of the Earth.

Faustroll manages to take Panmuphle prisoner & escapes in a skiff that travels on both water & land, with the bailiff tamed by drink & chained to his seat, along with the "twenty-seven equivalent books" & a hydrochephalous baboon, Bosse-de-Nage (bottom-face) who speaks only the two syllables 'Ha ha!'.

from "Concerning the Forest of Love" (chapter 14):

"Like a tree frog out of water, the skiff edged forward, drawn by its suction disks along a smooth descending road.

In this district of Paris no omnibus had ever passed, nor railway, nor tramway, nor bicycle, nor probably any openwork boat with a copper skin, moving upon three rollers...Here, instead of street lamps we could see ancient monuments of carved stone, green statues crouching down in robes folded in the shape of hearts; heterosexual ring-dancers blowing into unmentionable flageolets; finally, a seaweed-green calvary in which the eyes of the women were like nuts cloven horizontally by the suture line of their shells.

'Ha ha!' said Bosse-de-Nage, without further commentary.

Thus I remained in charge of the skiff with the baboon cabin boy, who passed the time by jumping on my shoulders & pissing down my back; but I beat him back with blows from a bundle of writs & observed with curiosity...the demeanor of the gaily dressed...

They were seated beneath a great archway, behind which was a second, & behind these there blazed the greenness & fatness of a historiated field of cabbages. Between the arches were tables & pitchers & benches set out in a barn & on a threshing floor, crowded with people dressed in sapphire-blue velvet, with diamond shaped faces & down-colored hair, the furry surface of the earth & of the people's necks being both like cows' hair. Men were wrestling in a blue & yellow meadow, disturbing sand-gray toads whose frightened croaks reached me in the boat; couples danced gavottes; & the bagpipes, from on top of the freshly drained barrels, droned out the flight of ribbons of white tinsel & violet silk.

Each of the two thousand dancers in the barn offered to Faustroll a girdlecake, hard cube-shaped milk, & different liqueurs in glasses as thick as a Bishop's amethyst is wide & holding less than a thimbleful. The doctor drank from them all. Each person threw a pebble into the sea, stinging the blisters on my hands, novice oarsman that I was, as I held them up to protect myself...stinging the multicolored cheeks of Bosse-de-Nage.

'Ha ha!' he growled, to express his fury...

The doctor returned to the sound of bells, with two big maps of the country...one representing realistically, worked in tapestry, the forest surrounding the triangular space: the rose-red foliage rising above the blue mass of the grass, & the groups of women, the wave of each group with its crest of white bonnets breaking gently against the ground, in an eccentric circle of dawn shadow.

& on it was written: The Forest of Love.

On the second map were enumerated all the products of this happy land, men at the market with their plump yellow pigs, themselves plump & blue, stuffed into their clothes like sausages. They were all as blown up as the cheeks of a bagpiper, as full of wind as a bagpipe or a stomach.

We rubbed the adipose cheeks of the hydrocephalous baboon against the slide rails of the felt seat; & when I had taken up the oars once more, & Faustroll had taken the tiller's silken guide ropes, I crouched & stretched out once again in the alternating movement of the oarsman, over the conjoined waves of the dry land."

After much travel through strange lands like that above, Faustroll starts a holocaust & Bosse-de-Nage dies, giving rise to an in-depth analysis of his cryptic "Ha ha!" After this, Faustroll sets Henri Rousseau in charge of a 'painting machine' to embellish the works of art in the Luxembourg Museum. The painting machine, named Clinamen, spazzes in an orgy of creative violence & produces thirteen paintings.

Adrift in a sea of this artifice, Faustroll must avoid collision with the creations & maneuvers the skiff into an 'aqueduct six hundred meters wide' & 'along with the canal barges were vomited into the river' where at the age of sixty-three, he makes the 'gesture of dying'. His body unrolls like a tight-wound scroll, revealing the future & a treatise on 'pataphysics.

" 'Ha ha!', he says succinctly; & he did not lose himself in further considerations."