At the very outset of her book Jill Fell expresses her impatience for Jarry scholarship that dares not venture to the extra-ubic realms of his oeuvre. In order to explore the underappreciated aspects of the work of the forerunner of French avant-garde theatre, Fell begins by stepping back from Ubu, both thematically and historically, and delving into the short and extraordinarily rich period of Jarrys life that immediately precedes the opening night of Ubu Roi at the Theatre de LOeuvre in December 1896. Refreshingly, Fell hardly mentions the event. Instead, she indirectly throws light on it by investing Jarrys early poetry and art criticism, his coeditorship with Remy de Gourmont of the Journal LYmagier and his short-lived magazine Perinderion. In all of these activities she discovers the strong presence of image, whether it is an actual picture, as with his woodcuts, or the metaphorical imagery of his writing. Refusing to subscribe to disciplinary constraints of literary criticism or art history, Fell engages in an archeological excavation of Jarrys imagery. As a result, she does not present him as a writer who also made woodprints, edited literary journals, or fiddled with puppetsall of that when not scribbling, ordering his meals backwards or pulling his gun in public. Instead, she makes her first task the pursuit of Jarrys ideas, regardless of the medium in which they were materialized. "I have followed Jarrys lead," writes Fell in the introduction of her book (16). Many critics say that about their subjects, and very few of them live up to the claim. Fell belongs to the minority who do, and in quite a momentous way.
From an in-depth investigation of Jarrys use of patterns in his graphic works and his encounters with (and contributions to) the emerging aesthetics of primitivism in visual arts, she effortlessly moves to the close reading of his poem "Le Sablier" (The Hourglass) from the collection Les Minutes de Sable Mmoriel. It turns out that strikingly similar principles guide Jarrys poetry and visual art. But that is only a modest introduction to what is yet to come. We soon learn, for example, that Jarrys interest in marionette theatre was not limited to his early, adolescent work and his late, financially pressed period, but that concept of the puppet give gestures to the characters of his novels, and even more, that it outlines the movement of his writing.
In a tour de force of scholarly rigor and imagination, Fell points back to Jarrys early novel Days and Nights, and the (probably autobiographic) episode of the protagonists walk in the woods with his friend. Describing his state as the moment of perfect happiness, the novels hero declares that he experienced his body as purely material, while "something liquid"his "astral body"hovered above, and something even more etherealthe "soul"soared even higher. He was afraid that, if touched, the thread between his body and other aspects of his self would be torn, and that he would die. Fell establishes a quick series of connections, from marionette strings to the fishing rod of Jarrys favorite pastime tangled in a decomposing body that floats down the river, to the invisible thread that, like the string of a kite, ties together his body and spirit. The cord attached to the head of a crudely made marionette, in the end, is both a technical device of puppet theatre and the line of thought that drives Jarrys imagination. This kind of reading of Jarry culminates in Fells discussion of dance in Jarrys work: a subject untouched even by the College de Pataphysique, a hermetic group of writers and artists, founded in 1948 and dedicated to continuation and exegesis of Jarrys work. She demonstrates convincingly that Jarry stands at a turning point in the attitudes towards dance in French literature and the arts in general. With Alfred Jarry: An Imagination in Revolt, Jarry scholarship in English finally makes a significant contribution to the general knowledge about this author.
Jill Fells book is a model of rigorous and uncalculating scholarship. It is committed and deeply personal. She is deeply aware of her position as a female scholar writing about a notoriously misogynistic author. The extraordinary vigor of this scholarly prose comes from a dynamic negotiation between Fell and Jarry that underlies the entire work. Throughout, there is a sense that the author whose line of thought she is trying to discern might turn against her. She writes that, if the walking companion touches the narrator of Days and Nights, " the possibility of keeping the bond intact will vanish just as surely as Orpheuss hold on Eurydice when he turned to look at her" (161). Had we not been warned that Fell would follow Jarrys lead, we would have missed the point of this sudden appearance of the Orpheus theme, and the possibility of the reversal of the relationship between the scholar and her subject. What, indeed, would happen if our companion, whose lead we have chosen to follow, turned and looked us straight in the eye? In the last analysis, Fell makes the point that surpasses even her invaluable contribution to Jarry scholarship. She reminds us that what ties the best scholars to their work is not interest (in both senses of that word) but the double bind of love and death.
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