Re: the ubuesque

from Marcel Raymond's _From Baudelaire to Surrealism_:

"Of this spirit of mystification and occult irony, the author
of _Ubu Roi_ was the most typical representative during hte
period extending from symbolism to contemporary neo-symbolism.
Indeed, he always played the part of Ubu: the sententious,
grandiloquent pedantry of each of hs words was like that of
his hero. The phrase that he repeated on every occasion:
"It was as beautiful as literature, wasn't it?" shows
sufficiently that in his eyes all the events of his life
were situated on the same intermediate plane between
reality and unreality as his literary reminiscences. Moreover,
the very tasks of 'pataphysics,' the pompous science
invented by another of his characters, Dr. Faustroll, is to
investigate 'the laws that govern exceptions and to explain the
universe that supplements this one'; stated in less ambitious
terms, it describes a universe which can be seen and which
perhaps should be seen instead of the traditional universe
. . . "Once again, the mystification is instructive; the
task that is always to escape from the traditional vision
of things and to take up our residence in that region of
the mind, where they strike us as strange and incongruous.
But Jarry's own life, unfolding as it did outside all
social contexts, was itself an inexhaustible source of
the fantastic and the grotesque, from which Salmon, Jacob,
and Apollinaire drew abundantly." (225)read/new

This may be more than one wants on the subject of Jarry?
Tom Dillingham

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