The Antichrist Ubu

The Antichrist Ubu James H. Bierman And I will show wonders in the heaven above and signs on the earth beneath, blood, and fire and vapor of smoke; the sun shall be turned into darkness and the moon into blood, before the day of the Lord comes, the great and manifest day. -Acts of the Apostles, 2.19-20 Alfred Jarry 's Ubu Roi has received considerable recognition and acclaim in recent years for its role as a parent play to twen­ tieth-century avant-garde drama. Its appearance in Barbara Wright's translation, in George Wellwarth and Michael Bene­ dikt's Modern French Drama, and in several more recent anthol­ ogies has augmented an interest created by Roger Shattuck's extraordinary portrait of Jarry in The Banquet Years and Martin Esslin's praise of the play as "a landmark and a forerunn er." Coupled with the ongoing efforts of the College de 'Pataphy­ sique, Jarry enthusiasts have become acquainted with the re­ markable diversity of his work, which includes art criticism, mystical and occult writings, pornography, and science fiction as well as drama and poetry. The aim of this study is twofold and it is thus divided into two corresponding sections. The first con­ tends with notions such as Michael Benedikt's that Ubu Roi was a maverick work with no consistent development behind it. It explores the play within the context of 1arry's earlier epic drama Caesar Antichristl and presents a wealth of formerly unexposed material which can contribute enormously to our understanding of Ubu Roi and of the author's intentions in writing it. The sec­ ond part deals with the obvious gulf between the intentions of the Ubu drama within the context of Caesar Antichrist and the reality of the separated Ubu Roi. In understanding that gulf, 226 James H. Bierman 227 one becomes aware of the fact that Jarry had a clear vision of an abstract theatre and that he consciously worked to implement that vision in his dramaturgy. I Caesar Antichrist is an epic portrayal of the Antichrist uni­ verse in the form of a four-act play. Its symbols are crowded into an amazingly dense complex of images, and its stylistic diversity would seem unbelievable to one who knew Jarry only though the later Ubu cycle. It has all the imagistic complexity of a James Joyce novel and all the open fantasy of Marvel comic books. In the work, the Antichrist universe is divided up into four levels that correspond to the mirror reversals of the celestial, astral, terrestrial, and transitional realms. The play takes the reader from a Christian world through the Antichrist cycle, start­ ing with the birth of the Antichrist by a process of inverse resur­ rection, then following his development into a terrestrial form, and finally through the transition by crucifixion back to the Christian world. ·During that period, the Antichrist universe is characterized by a complete reversal, both literal and .figurative, of the Christian universe and its values. Thus there is continual reference to upside down creatures such as the antipode or the sciapode, .and characters such as the Saint Peter Humanity of the .first act are depicted upright despite the fact that Saint Peter was commonly held to have been crucified upside down. In com­ parison, Christ and the thieves on Calvary are upside down in that act. Throughout the play, there are endless reversed images which support the pataphysical process by which Jarry takes a statement such as the life of Christ, and reverses one of the terms by substituting Antichrist, and then carri es that statement to its conclusion, leaving us with a radically new statement to consider. One of the most obviously relevant aspects of the new state­ ments comes from the presence of the third act, which drama­ tizes the monumental blunderings of the Antichrist incarnate in the form of King Ubu as he stumbles through his earthly existence. That third act became Ubu Roi. It is not all of what eventually became Ubu Roi, but it does include Act I, scenes vi and vii ; Act II, scenes i, ii, and iv; Act ID, scenes i through viii ; and Act IV, scene...