This volume questions the relevance of the concept of heterogeneity in the study of Francophone literature. The word “heterogeneous” is understood here as revealing a dynamic relationship with what language and society institute as homogeneous. The author thus shows how the literary text participates in a critical thought that challenges dominant discourses, both in terms of social representations and aesthetic forms, and in doing so interrogates our own analytical tools.

Publication date: November 1, 2015
Paperback – format: 15.5 x 24 cm • 296 pages
ISBN: 978-2-343-07386-6
EAN13: 9782343073866
EAN PDF: 9782336395036

Faustroll or the Hetero Nuisance¹
Regarding the heterogeneous in literature, one immediately thinks of Jarry as much as Bataille, and consequently of Helga Finter’s paper on “Ubu the Heterologue” delivered at the international TNP conference in May 1985. Unfortunately, the article presenting her ideas remains little known, as it was published in a rather obscure volume, the Cahiers of the Association of Friends of Alfred Jarry². Its subtitle, “remarks on literature and evil,” signaled from the outset its grounding in Georges Bataille’s thought, since it regarded Ubu Roi as marking the return of the repressed childhood. Ubu is the heterogeneous, or in other words, excrement; the one who simultaneously claims to spread and to eliminate it. However, in my view, the characters actually name the “merdRe,” a phantasmatic production, not the excrement itself, which invalidates a large part of the argument. I will not discuss this here, but focus rather on a work explicitly claimed by Alfred Jarry and which perfectly fits the objectives of this volume.

It seems to me, indeed, that the heterogeneous manifests even more violently, brilliantly, and with less ambiguity in Les Gestes et opinions du Dr Faustroll, pataphysicien, by the same author. To clarify, Ubu and Faustroll are confrères, both doctors of ’pataphysics. Moreover, the authorship of this “neo-scientific” novel is fully recognized and assumed, but deferred since, written and completed in 1898, the volume was not published during Jarry’s lifetime by his sovereign decision and full will.

I therefore propose to show how this obviously complex text is heterogeneous on at least three levels: spatial-temporal; narrative; and cultural. This complexity, and the reader’s incapacity to master it, explains the relative neglect in which it has remained since its first edition in 1911 by Fasquelle.

A Layered Space
I have already mentioned this somewhat rare fact in literary production: that the volume appeared posthumously because the author, perhaps displeased by two successive refusals from his publishers, deferred it until after his death, as shown by the final note he appended to the manuscript sold to Louis Lormel in 1898: “This book will be published in full only when the author has acquired enough experience to savor all its beauties.”³ The adverb “in full” refers to the fact that some chapters appeared in journals before his death. One might object with the example of Kafka, ten years younger than Jarry, whose almost entire oeuvre is posthumous. But there is a great difference between requesting, in a will, total destruction of one’s manuscripts (even if the executor did not comply) and postponing a publication until after death!

Let us therefore take the work as it has come down to us. From the title page onwards, it presents itself as a hapax, a unique case in French literature by its generic qualification, never again used. What defining traits can one give to a genre of which there is only a single example? At roughly the same time, the scientific novel, promoted by publisher Hetzel, was known, but not the “neo” variety. Here, imagination takes flight.

Indeed, every word in the title poses a problem. If one assumes the meaning of “gestes” (gestures) or the noun “opinions,” the compound “Gestes et opinions” itself constitutes a hapax, recounting the actions and thoughts of a character named Dr Faustroll, whose own name is a compound of Dr Faust + Troll—that is, two legendary beings, before the latter’s hijacking by the Internet! Moreover, we learn that the hero was born and died on the same date, since it is said at the end of chapter XXXV: “Thus Dr Faustroll made the gesture of dying, at the age of sixty-three.” This implies that the act of dying is also a gesture determined by one’s own will!

To understand the specialty of this doctor, one must open the book and look for the definitions of this science, or recall that Ubu had already qualified himself in the same way in an earlier Jarry work: “M. Ubu. — You may say that, sir, but you are speaking to a great pataphysician.” (Ubu Intime, L’Autoclète, 1893).

Were one to study, in the manner of M. Bakhtin, the chronotope of the work⁴, which I do not have the space to do here, one would soon note another strangeness: the space is not merely discontinuous, layered like a book, but it opens immediately on a third dimension (volume); indeed, I would say it tends toward the fourth dimension, space-time, which is precisely the definition of the chronotope in the mind of the Russian critic. I quote:

Through the layered space of the twenty-seven peers, Faustroll evoked toward the third dimension:
Of Baudelaire, the Silence of Edgar Poe, taking care to retranscribe in Greek Baudelaire’s translation.
Of Bergerac, the precious tree into which, in the Land of the Sun, the nightingale-king and his subjects metamorphosed.
Of Luke, the Slanderer who bore Christ to an elevated place… (chap. VII)

Through a discreet sampling of past texts, Faustroll revives the beauties of the individual imagination of his predecessors, constituting, in a way, a bouquet of those citations that help one live and fully occupy space-time. One would still have to know each of the books that constitute the Doctor’s library!

A mere glance at the volume’s title page and a brief plunge into the text reveal the difficulties of comprehension, so heterogeneous is it. It is time to enter the story and, once again, mark its strangeness.

II. A Hetero-Textual Narrative
The actions and thoughts announced at the book’s threshold are narrated by a narrator and in an exceptional form, since it is an official act drawn up by a bailiff, that is, according to Littré, “an act prepared and served by a bailiff to summon, notify, or seize.” Hence the creation of René-Isidore Panmuphle, bailiff near the Civil Tribunal of the Seine. His surname suggests he embodies the Mufle⁵, that is, the Bourgeois in his entirety. It is indeed his official report that we are given to read, first on stamped paper (Jarry took care to draw the stamp by hand on his manuscript), then on plain paper, to avoid, he writes, the excessive costs entailed by such legal writings, containing many enumerations and lists. The report ends at the end of Book VII; the rest of the novel consists of reproduced letters and fragments, presumably found in Faustroll’s room.

Another particularity that distances the hero from the great literary voyages, from the Odyssey to Pantagruel, is that the voyage Faustroll undertakes with the bailiff and the baboon Bosse-de-nage is strictly immobile:

The ace is not only propelled by oars but by suction cups at the end of lever springs. And its keel rolls on three steel rollers on the same plane. I am all the more convinced of the excellence of my calculations and its unsinkability, since, as is my unchanging habit, we will not sail on water but on solid land.

The islands they land on are books, such as, in chapter XII, titled: “OF THE HABUNDA SEA, THE OLFACTORY LIGHTHOUSE, AND THE ISLAND OF BRAN WHERE WE DID NOT DRINK,” which clearly indicates its scatological content. A scholarly reading will highlight the name of the dedicatee, taken here as a target since it is explicitly stated that it “is not only an island but a man.” The following chapter, and thus the next stopover, is the “LAND OF LACES,” a literary transposition of Aubrey Beardsley’s art, whom Jarry enthusiastically admired, delighting to evoke the engravings with words such as “the paradox of minor key rose up from Ali Baba screaming in the ruthless oil and opacity of the jar.”

In so doing, we have, at least implicitly, touched on Jarry’s fascination with images and his practice of art transposition or, more precisely, ekphrasis—a practice which, in itself, is hardly original, beginning with the shield of Achilles in Homer; yet here it takes on an incongruous character, coming from the mouth of a bailiff. The excessive use of it borders on strangeness: we are well beyond symbolism at this point. Such is the case with the map entrusted by the inhabitant of one of the islands visited, which depicted, reproduced as a tapestry, the forest set behind a triangular square: the incarnadine foliage above a uniform azure grass, and the groups of women, each wave of women with its crest of white caps, breaking quietly on the ground, in an eccentric circle tinted with the dawn’s shadow (chap. XIV). It is easy to understand that this is a painting by Émile Bernard at Pont-Aven, representing the Bois d’Amour, which is given as the chapter’s title. One could go on with the other chapters, which do not limit themselves to visual transposition but also take up sounds and scents. And I cannot resist quoting the following passage, where everyone will recognize the Gauguin of the Marquesas:

Out of the tangle of young breasts and hips, sibyls recite the double formula for happiness: Be in love, and Be mysterious. (chap. XVII)

In this way, we enter a thoroughly Baudelairean universe—except that here, Nature has become the Book! One might wonder whether the ’Pataphysics claimed by Dr Faustroll is not simply the product of prolonged reverie before a work of art.

The statement found in Book II, apparently from the author himself, suggests as much:

DEFINITION: Pataphysics is the science of imaginary solutions, which symbolically attributes to lineaments the properties of objects described by their virtuality. (chap. VIII)

And further on in the same chapter:

pataphysics will above all be the science of the particular, although people say there is only science of the general.

Although there is much to be said on this topic, my aim here is not to explain (as best as one might) this schoolboy-born science that overtook the theatre thanks to Père Ubu⁶, but rather to highlight a pataphysics in action (or in gestures, if you like), such as this detail of Faustroll noted by his appointed bailiff:

That morning, he took his daily sponge bath, which consisted of wallpaper in two tones by Maurice Denis, trains crawling along spirals; he had long since replaced water with a tapestry of the season, of fashion or caprice. (chap. II)

Here it is clear that the art-loving Doctor is quite satisfied with Maurice Denis’s two-tone wallpaper!

In the same spirit, I would mention one of the many collages—a literary technique derived from pictorial manipulation—consisting of inserting a textual fragment into one's work to appropriate it and bestow upon it whatever virtues one wishes. Here is an example, among many, which brings in a letter by Pierre Loti, whom Jarry detested:

is it the last time that Aunt Claire's regret will manifest in me with such intensity and in that special form that brings tears, since all things subside, since everything becomes custom, is forgotten, and there is a veil, … Loti, The Book of Pity… that the regret of the Obscure Latency will manifest in me with such intensity and in that special form that brings tears, since all things subside, since everything becomes custom, is forgotten and there is a veil… Jarry, Faustroll, XXX. Perhaps now it is time to return to the first part of the novel and present the portrait of the character as drawn by his legal scribe:

At that age, which he kept his entire life, Dr Faustroll was a man of medium height, that is, to be strictly accurate, (8 x 10^10 + 10^9 + 4 x 10^8 + 5 x 10^6) atomic diameters in stature; his skin golden yellow, his face clean-shaven except for sea-green moustaches like those worn by King Saleh; his hair alternating, strand by strand, between ash blonde and jet black, a shifting auburn ambiguity that changed with the hour of the sun; his eyes, two capsules of plain writing ink, prepared like Danzig brandy, with golden spermatozoa inside. (chap. II)

If one wished this fragment to be understood by a contemporary reader, the commentator would have to explain each of these at least heterogeneous features. For instance, Faustroll is born an adult, like the P.H. (the model for Père Ubu), but dies the very year of his birth. In fact, he comes into the world with his creation in the book. His stature, calculated from the diameter of an isotope atom, is estimated at 1.1 x 10^-10 m; this can be compared to the size of his bed, “twelve meters long” (chap. IV). Other commentators infer that he would have Jarry’s own height, i.e. 1.61 m. As a trace of legal usage, the bailiff indeed writes “some moustaches,” with the plural indefinite article customary in classical French when referring to pairs. He sports a moustache in the style of the King of the Sea from the Thousand and One Nights (531st and 549th nights). As for “auburn ambiguity,” it refers not to hair color but to the alternating strands, reminiscent of the penal regime of the same name, alternating between collective labor and solitary confinement. Finally, plain writing ink is distinct from India ink and printing inks; the capsules obtained from the druggist are like Danzig brandy, made by “infusing lemon rinds and mace in ordinary brandy, with the addition of gold leaf,” according to Pierre Larousse—but certainly not with spermatozoa!

Yet, as I suggested in my Cultures de Jarry (PUF, 1984), it is far from certain that explaining each unusual, rare, or difficult word could truly convey the strangeness of this portrait, which blends scientific language, legal technical vocabulary, and poetic fantasy in a web of multiple associations—simply to say that Faustroll is an ordinary man fixed at the age of 63 by the pen of his memorialist. Thus, the narrative’s heterogeneity, the variety of narrative voices, which ought to lend it a diamond’s glitter, results in a kind of incomprehension, making the “hetero” always a nuisance.

In short, I maintain that to savor the full flavor of this highly elaborate work, which takes the quest for symbolist originality to its utmost, one must not only absorb the contemporary works, acquaint oneself with the scientific and intellectual context of its writing, but also know how to let all these levels of culture interact.

III. A Hetero-Cultural Ensemble This cultural approach to the texts is all the more complicated here because the reader is confronted with a great number of cultures interwoven in such a way that identifying them proves difficult.

For the sake of clarity, I will distinguish, in order, a level of popular culture—if not traditional, at least such as a certain category of intellectuals sought to promote and revalue at the end of the nineteenth century; then what pertains to the humanities, what was taught at the same time and formed the cultural baggage of educated men in any discipline; and finally what belongs to science, understood in its broadest sense.

The first category includes, for example, the image d’Épinal, or its equivalent, recorded by the bailiff enumerating the illustrations seized from Faustroll’s room: “an old image, which seemed worthless to us, Saint Cado, from the Oberthür printing house of Rennes” (chap. IV). This naïve and popular image was particularly interesting to Jarry because it bore a Breton legend in its margins, according to which the saint honored here tricked the devil to build a bridge connecting the island to the mainland.¹ Some years ago, I hypothesized that the “Thirteen Images” or Clinamen, a series of frescoes produced by the Painting Machine managed by the Customs Officer Rousseau, came from a collection of images d’Épinal not yet identified, illustrating passages from the Holy History: “Nebuchadnezzar turned into a beast,” “The Jester,” “Leaving his bliss, God creates the worlds,” etc. (Clinamen chap. XXXIV). One can also think of a medieval Bible historique, as well as paintings by Paolo Uccello or Lucas Cranach for such sequences, or when “God forbids Adam and Eve to touch the tree of good and evil.” Admittedly, the artists in question are hardly popular, but their works, copied and reproduced ad nauseam, have come to be regarded as popular art. (Recently, some have proposed interpreting them as echoes of silent films newly made by Georges Méliès.)

This is why I include in the same category the lying sea bishop: “His mitre was made of scales and his crozier like the corymb of a bent tentacle; his chasuble, which I touched, all encrusted with abyssal stones, lifted easily front and back but only modestly adhered by the skin below the knee” (chap. XXV). He comes straight out of the Renaissance naturalist Ulysses Aldrovandi’s book on fish, whose plates aroused collective admiration (Bologna, 1613), just as the Sea Beast is taken from the Cosmographia of Sebastian Münster (1544), from which Jarry also took the hippopotamus reproduced in Perhinderion.

Although these Renaissance naturalists are not part of popular culture proper, some parts of their works have been widely disseminated since, through pamphlets and almanacs, to the extent that they have become integral to popular beliefs. More complex, though directly deriving from popular culture, is the work of Rabelais, which belongs to the same category, although it was already part of the school curriculum in Jarry’s time. Rabelais supplies his epigraphs for chapters XVI: “Inquiring which learned men resided at that time in the city, and what wine they drank.” (Gargantua) and XXXI: “What is your name? – Maschemerde,” replied Panurge, Pantagruel, book III. Wine on the one hand, scatology on the other—are these not common motifs in popular culture?

The form alone, and the great temporal distance between Rabelais’s publications and their use by Jarry, relegates them more to secondary education, what was broadly called the “humanities,” in other words, the literary classes.

It was during high school that Jarry acquired the excellent habit of referring directly to encyclopedic dictionaries—and even incorporating their content into his own text. Thus, one of the meanings of “ha ha” borrowed from Piron’s Métromanie, cited by Pierre Larousse’s Grand Dictionnaire Universel, including this continuation:

“It is deliberately that we omitted to say, these meanings being well known, that ha ha is an opening in a wall at the level of a garden alley, a wolf’s hole or military pit designed to collapse chromium-plated steel bridges, and that AA can still be read on medals struck in Metz. If Faustroll’s ace had a bowsprit, ha ha would denote the special sail placed under the jib boom.” (chap. X)

The scholastic practice complicates when the narrator arranges a series of forty-two Greek quotations taken from Plato, all supporting the discourse, such as “Surely! But also,” etc.

This form of learned culture, of scholastic origin, permeates the entire work, whatever voice is speaking. It is complemented by scientific elements, those learned in mathematics and physics-chemistry classes, with Jarry focusing on curiosities and entertaining experiments. For example, the formula for invisible ink with which Faustroll’s manuscript is supposedly written:

“Panmuphle, bailiff, began to read the manuscript of Faustroll in profound darkness, evoking invisible quinine sulfate ink with invisible infrared rays of a spectrum contained in an opaque box with respect to its other colors.” (chap. VII)

Here we do not have a school memory but a borrowing from Lord Kelvin, who writes exactly this:

“The phenomenon occurs beautifully with quinine sulfate. An interesting experiment consists in writing on a white paper screen with a finger or brush dipped in a quinine sulfate solution. The strokes are completely invisible in ordinary light; but if a spectrum whose invisible ultraviolet covers the region written on with quinine sulfate is projected onto the screen, the characters appear, emitting a bluish light, the surrounding area remaining dark.”²

Clearly attracted by what might be called “amusing physics,” which is nonetheless very serious and the source of many discoveries, Jarry is also interested in the research of an unusual scientist on capillarity phenomena:

“It is likely that you have no notion, Panmuphle, bailiff delivering documents, of capillarity, surface tension, nor of weightless membranes, equilateral hyperbolas, zero-curvature surfaces, nor generally of the elastic film that is the epidermis of water.” (chap. VI)

This Charles Vernon Boys (1855-1944), dedicatee of the mentioned chapter, had published his lectures translated into French³ with the same scientific publisher as Kelvin, Henry Gautier-Villars, who happened to be connected to Jarry and supplied him with attractive books.

Such scholarly sources may escape the reader, who nonetheless perceives Jarry’s application of them to original textual inventions. The truth is that commentators have always been put on the trail of the trigger element by Jarry himself, who places a clue in his text, a kind of encoding indicating what must be sought, for instance the scientist’s name as chapter dedicatee. But the reader unfamiliar with such practices remains disoriented, being unable to distinguish pure invention from genuine scientific reasoning.

To conclude, it is necessary to point out a pervasive element in Faustroll, strongly contributing to the text’s heterogeneity, which does not belong to any particular culture and yet encompasses them all. I mean eroticism—which brings us closer to Bataille—that pervades the entire narrative, and which Jarry magnificently summarizes in a supposed fragment borrowed from Ibicrate the geometer under the formula:

“Eros being the son of Aphrodite, his hereditary weapons were the ostentations of woman. And contradictorily Egypt erected its steles and obelisks perpendicular to the cruciferous horizon, distinguished by the Plus sign, which is male.” (chap. XXXIX)

He implicitly refers to one of his first works, published by Jarry, César-Antechrist, “where the only practical demonstration, by the mechanical device called physics baton, of the identity of opposites” is found—the feminine and masculine, the signs − and +, being only symbolic representations of said unity. The last chapter of Faustroll asserts the principle of equivalence dear to Hermes Trismegistus and the alchemists (before it became a fundamental dogma of Surrealism) whereby opposites identify and merge with each other. Then follows—and this is precisely what Jarry’s entire demonstration tended toward—and mine consequently—a learned calculation of the surface of God, preemptively (pataphysically, one might say) responding to Bataille’s metaphysical anxieties, with the following definition: “God is the shortest path from zero to infinity.”

See a full colour reproduction in Jarry en Images, Paris, Le Promeneur, 2012, p. 35.

See William Thompson (Lord Kelvin), Scientific Lectures and Addresses, Paris, Gauthier-Villars, 1893, no. 1, p. 136.

Soap Bubbles, four lectures on capillarity delivered to a young audience, translated by Ch. Ed. Guillaume, Paris, Gauthier-Villars, 1892, 144 p.

For the Gafsa conference, April 5, 2012, I presented and commented under the same title a set of about forty slides organised using PowerPoint. Reproducing them here was out of the question, hence this text-based transcription faithful to my original argument.

Helga Finter, “Ubu heterologue: remarks on literature and evil,” L’Étoile Absinthe, proceedings of the TNP conference collected by Henri Béhar and Brunella Eruli, Tournées no. 25–28, 1985, p. 31–41.

Handwritten autograph note on Ms L (Lormel). We subsequently refer to the digital edition kindly provided by us at faustroll

See Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, Gallimard 1978.

See Henri Béhar, “Of the Mufle and Algolism in Jarry,” Romantisme, 1977, no. 17-18, The Bourgeois, p. 185-201.

I have done so elsewhere in my Jarry dramaturge, Paris, Nizet, 1980, revised and expanded edition as La Dramaturgie d’Alfred Jarry, Paris, Honoré Champion, 2004.