For lovers of Alfred Jarry, the fifth volume of the Collected Works edited by Henri Béhar offers a real treasure-trove. Faithful to chronological order, we move between 1901 and 1905. By a mathematical coincidence that would have pleased Jarry, just half of the hefty volume is taken up by prose: Messaline, The Supermale and a translation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Olalla, a novella first published in 1885 and later collected in The Merry Men and Other Tales and Fables (1887). If we compare this corpus with the second volume of the Oeuvres complètes, published in the Pléiade collection and edited by Michel Arrivé and Henri Bordillon, with the collaboration of Patrick Besnier and Bernard Le Doze (1972–88), one verifies that a lot of new ground has been covered by Béhar and collaborators.

Previous editors did not have access to the notes taken by Jarry when preparing his historical novel Messaline. Here, instead, the volume reproduces the passages that Jarry condensed from Juvenal, Dion Cassius, Petronius, Seneca, Suetonius, Tacitus and a few others, along with the chapters in which they were used, including doodles or drawings of places and objects like the famous spinning top (149–98). Indeed, as Julien Schuh writes, this novel was composed differently from the others, for Jarry took great pains to be accurate. He worked like Flaubert drafting Salammbô (1862). Jarry confessed to his friend and mentor Rachilde that he was working “comme un simple Zola” [like a simple Zola] (15). However, the complex texture of Messaline shows that the point was not just to recreate ancient Rome in all its flavor and exotic details; here like elsewhere, Jarry aimed at appropriating and rewriting previous sources so as to create a network of layered and overdetermined relationships that work at different levels by harmonically echoing one another. Messaline is composed like a poem by Mallarmé, a sort of prose Hérodiade (begun in 1864 and revised until Mallarmé’s death in 1898). A principle of reversibility is key: ROMA is always the double of AMOR. Most contemporary readers perceived that the emperor Claudius was a Mallarméan figure, and he is presented as always working on a Book of Dice. It makes sense to read reviews penned by contemporaries, beginning with Rachilde’s praise in the Mercure de France of February 1901, which closes with the following remarks:

> Moi[,] qui ne sais ni latin ni grec, je garde l’impression d’avoir lu un manuscrit qui aurait été entièrement écrit à l’époque de crimes ingénus et de barbares fantaisies où vivait Claude lui-même, bon traducteur du si curieux livre des dés, et durant la course de l’impératrice le long des jardins de Priape, “durant qu’elle accroche son manteau à griffes d’or sur les vases murrhins”, j’ai vu vraiment, non sans un frisson d’effroi, se dresser Mnester, la pâle et vivante énigme, le sphinx qui dansait quelquefois dans la nuit d’une éclipse.

> [I, who know neither Latin nor Greek, keep the impression of having read a manuscript that would have been entirely written at the time of ingenuous crimes and barbarous fantasies when Claudius himself was alive, the good translator of the curious Book of Dice, during the empress’ flight along the gardens of Priapus, “catching her mantle of gold talons on the murrhine vases”, I have seen really, and not without a shiver of fear, Mnester rise, the pale and living enigma, the sphinx who at times would dance in the night of eclipses.]

> (51)

It is no less fascinating to read the draft of Jarry’s review of his own book (198–99). One guesses that the main idea that he wanted to expose was that he was evoking a pre-Christian world, a time when “le nom de Christ ou Chrest n’est […] qu’un surnom banal des esclaves” [the name of Christ or Chrest was only […] the common name of slaves] (200), also when a more terrifying divinity possessed the protagonists: Priapus. A subsequently crossed out sentence defined the kind of writing with bold assurance: “Ce livre est écrit dans une forme nette et absolue définitive” [This book is written in a form that is clean and absolute definitive] (199, sic). Jarry was aware that he was inventing a new way of writing prose.

If Jarry was an excellent Latinist who had trained (always in vain, alas) for the entrance examination of the École Normale Supérieure, his English was not at the level expected from a translator. Nevertheless, his misreadings or mistakes when rendering Stevenson’s lush prose are suggestive. Thus, when Olalla and the narrator cross their gazes, Jarry renders “embraced” as “s’embrasèrent” [caught fire] (in “nos regards une fois de plus se rencontrèrent et s’embrasèrent”; 261), which somehow improves the original. Admittedly, such felicitous metamorphoses are rare; indeed, often Jarry muddles or weakens Stevenson’s text. Why did he decide to translate this novella? He must have taken to this Gothic tale with a faint suggestion of a vampire story (when the half-crazy mother of the girl, instead of helping the narrator who has cut his arm, bites his bleeding arm). Another draw may have come from the fact that the Scottish soldier who narrates is repeatedly presented as a “non-Christian” lover of a young woman. She, on the other hand, resists him and convinces him to leave by invoking the picture and the name of Jesus.

Olalla provides a neat transition to Le Surmâle, a novel whose program derives from a few words, culled in Juvenal’s sixth satire, which describe Messalina’s sexual habits: “Tamen ultima cellam / Clausit, adhuc ardens RIGIDAE tentigine vulvae” (347). Indeed, The Supermale is not only the first “modern” but also the first “modernist” novel, shot through as it is with speculations about a futurist intermixing of men and machines. Marcueil is fascinated by the fact that Messalina’s sexuality is so extreme that she suffers less from nymphomania than from a feminine form of ithyphallicism, priapism or satyriasis. Marcueil wants to be the male equivalent of a Messalina in a state of perpetual erection. Jarry conveys the vertigo he feels facing by numbers related to sexuality and machines. His hero wants to exceed the limits of human strength and reach a numerical infinity, or immortality accessible through sexual excess. Marcueil’s fantasy of making love indefinitely explains the idea of a “supermale” who combines the rigidity of a phallus and the productivity of an engine. Henri Béhar is right to see the plot ultimately predicated upon the philosophical principle of the identity of the contraries (292), a medieval conceit that Jarry grafts onto his mixture of Nietzscheism and Bergsonism.

The plays and opera Pieter de Delft, Jeff, Le bon roi Dagobert, Le manoir enchanté and L’amour maladroit show that Jarry was groping for a new theatrical vein after the success of the cycle of Ubu, but failed to find it. If here and there a few gems shine in rare or funny rhymes, in verbal echoes of advertisements or geographical phrases, most of these texts sound laborious, the jokes dated and the boulevardier humour forced. They were mostly products of collaborations with friends. Jarry was not successful in hitting upon a lighter note, as if he did not know how to write comedies without being sarcastic or dark. In Jeff, he alternates different accents, with marked clichés and obvious stereotypes of British, Marseillais and Belgian intonations; all the speeches conclude with exclamation marks. Jarry hoped that some of these attempts would be musicalized — that would have been one way of saving them.

However, the “last poems” gathered in this volume show real promise. They announce a poetic departure cut short by Jarry’s untimely demise. They are annotated in precise detail by Alain Chevrier. “Bardes et cordes” announces the project of writing under constraint that will become the trademark of the Oulipo group half a century later. The poem is generated by the false rhyme of hallebarde and miséricorde, a rhyme that had become proverbial. Its echoes create the scene of the death of Louis XVI, an evocation combining historical details with an impressive degree of semantic opacity predicated on inner rhymes and vibrant assonances. I agree with Chevrier when he rejects the gloss of the Pléiade editors: on the strength of the poem’s topic, they assert that Jarry had become a reactionary royalist in 1903, mistaking elaborate verbal games for serious ideological affiliation. The cumulative effect is not far from the classical poems retranslated into a French devoid of “-e” in Georges Perec’s La Disparition (1969):

> Aux barrières du Louvre elle dormait, la garde:Les palais sont de grands ports où la mort aborde;Corse, kamoulcke, kurde, iroquoise et lombarde,Le catafalque est ceint de la jobarde horde.Sa veille n’eût point fait camuse la camarde:Il faut qu’un rictus torde et qu’une bouche morde.

> (806)

“Madrigal” remains Jarry’s poetic masterpiece, with its imagistic evocation of a prostitute who calls up Messalina. She allows the speaker to discover not only a sublime peace but also glimpse the “absolute”. Its last lines condense all of Baudelaire along with the gist of Messalina in just eight lines:

> Comment s’unit la double destinée?Tant que je n’eus point pris votre trottoirVous étiez vierge et vous n’étiez point née,Comme un passé se noie en un miroir.La boue à peine a baisé la chaussureDe votre pied infinitésimal,Et c’est d’avoir mordu dans tout le malQui vous a fait une bouche si pure.

> (792)

Let me attempt a poor translation of this superb song, which is often recited by performers:

> How is double destiny tight-lipped?As long as I avoided your sidewalkYou were a virgin, you had not been born,Like a past drowning in a mirror.Mud hardly kissed the shoeOf your infinitesimal foot,It was from having bitten into all evilThat your mouth was made so pure.

Jarry’s unique genius shines in so many of these necessary pages that one can only rejoy when discovering that the contents are available in a cheaper paperback edition.