Noël Arnaud and Henri Bordillon had just created the association of friends of Alfred Jarry. Immediately, they obtained to program a colloquium at Cerisy, during the summer of 1983. They obtained the collaboration of all those who had spoken out, in one way or another, on Alfred Jarry, beyond the Collège de Pataphysique. Unfortunately, N. Arnaud fell seriously ill and had to undergo surgery, which left Henri Bordillon as the sole director of the decade and the publication that followed. For my part, I particularly appreciated José Pierre's intervention, and, reciprocally. I then made his acquaintance and forged lasting ties, while, I have always said and written, I did not adhere to surrealism.

DIRECTION: Noël ARNAUD, Henri BORDILLON ARGUMENT: Alfred Jarry, famous for a work whose paternity was, quite wrongly, contested (Ubu), remains for his perhaps essential writings, still unknown. For too long, Ubu has occulted the rest, immense, of the Jarryesque work. And yet, besides the fact that his dramaturgy has influenced contemporary theater for more than half a century, his poetry and this "novel" that is Faustroll, place him among the greatest poets of Symbolism which he served magnificently and at the same time made explode into myriads of stars that still illuminate our century. With Days and Nights, he invents the writing of true hallucination; with Absolute Love, he uses first the work of the French psychiatric school on hysteria and the splitting of personality, and senses and describes perfectly the Freudian Oedipus. As an art critic, he exalted everything that deserved to be in his time and showed himself thereby a herald of the 20th century. His modernity is therefore brilliant; this colloquium tends to measure its causes and consequences and to give new impetus to Jarryesque research today well engaged.

http://www.ccic-cerisy.asso.fr/jarryTM85.html ALFRED JARRY Direction: Henri Bordillon Publisher: Editions Pierre Belfond (website) ISBN: 2-7144-1745-0 Year of publication: 1985 Year of colloquium: 1981 Presentation of colloquium: click here

MATTERS The Jarryesque letter: from biography to text, by Henri BORDILLON Ontogeny or the underlying metasemiotics, by Michel ARRIVÉ Every minute counts or how we misread The Minutes of Memorial Sand, by Yves-Alain FAVRE Ubu schoolmaster, by Jean-José IRIARTE, Alain LE GOFF & Jean-François MASSOL The man with the axe, by Daniel COMPÈRE Villiers de l'Isle-Adam and Jarry: The Future Eve and The Supermale, by Christophe DOMINO The problems of Faustroll, by Paul GAYOT Alfred Jarry, André Breton and painting, by José PIERRE Ubu in Australia, by Anne C. MURCH The writing of dream in Days and Nights, by Henri BÉHAR Alfred Jarry, witness of his time, by François CARADEC Point of Babel, by Patrick BESNIER The phoenix of the text, by Brunella ERULI The steam pedal and the sex of tits, by Jean-Pierre VIDAL The metatheater of delirium, by Linda KLIEGER STILLMAN Had Alfred Jarry read Freud?, by Anne CLANCIER The memorial explosion, by Charles GRIVEL Death and theatricality, by Catherine STEHLIN Descendit ad Inferos, by Sylvain-Christian DAVID

Read: Digital Days and Nights
as well as the critical edition established by me in the edition of the Complete Works of Alfred Jarry, at Classiques Garnier Complete Works. Volume II - Days and Nights

Extensions: La Licorne, n° 80, "Jarry, monsters and wonders", studies collected and presented by Patrick Besnier, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2007, 132 p. It was logical that La Licorne, this fabulous animal with a horse's head equipped with a single horn in the middle of the forehead, this marvelous monster, to say the least, should one day be interested in the monsters and wonders produced in abundance by Alfred Jarry in his literatures. We remember having published, in our youth, a Jarry, the monster and the puppet1, where, of course, Ubu held the central place. Author of an excellent biography of Jarry (2), Patrick Besnier took the initiative to gather six studies on the subject, which he presents so compendiously and with so much relevance that nothing could be added to it, except to recommend reading it. To avoid repetition, I am forced to consider each contribution without seeking to classify it in one of the two aesthetic categories of monstrous vs marvelous. In fact, the contributions appear divided into two groups of three, according to their length, in studies on the one hand, research on the other. Taking up the analysis of César Antechrist on new grounds, Julien Schuh demonstrates very learnedly that this play was conceived in an intertextual perspective in order to make it accepted by the Symbolists. Hence the recourse to occultist literature, from Eliphas Levi to Stanislas de Guaïta and even to Sâr Péladan. The demonstration is convincing as "occult philosophy allows to link each act, to give a global meaning to the whole". Another inventive young researcher, Matthieu Gosztola returns to the relations maintained by these two contemporaries that were Jarry and Valéry to analyze their common desire for method, opposing triumphant positivism. And to summon the new science, notably Lobatchevski's non-Euclidean geometry and Cantor's mathematics, the inventor of set theory, to convince us, by applying them to the writings of these two authors. He carries conviction when he attacks one of Jarry's most obscure texts, or rather Dr Faustroll's, his calculation of the surface of God. For his part, Jean-Luc Steinmetz, who has nothing more to learn, postulates a new type of commentary attacking the difficulties of the Jarryesque text, of talmudic order, he says, which he applies to the reading of the novel Days and Nights. The study (talmud, in Hebrew), very subtle, would carry conviction if the critic accepted to clearly deliver the modalities of analysis borrowed from the reference methodology, and especially if he did not make light of the tradition (Hebrew gabbalah) under the form of the (rare) analyses of his predecessors (3).
Follow three "researches", much shorter, which, each in its own way, attempt to elucidate an obscure point of Jarryesque creation. Jacques Jouet examines the 17 regular sonnets scattered in his work. after having formally described them and shown their great internal variety, he notes the co-presence, in these poems, of Mallarmé and the mirliton, which is why he advances the notion of "mallarmirliton". Attacking the two unknown artists of the journal L'Ymagier, Alain Jans and Richard Gheym, whose initials refer, respectively, to Alfred Jarry and to Remy de Gourmont, Jill Fell explains, convincingly, the choice of these pseudonyms and their meaning in the pictorial tradition.
Finally, Ben Fisher, author of a work on the library of the pataphysician Dr Faustroll, brings here some clarifications on Jarry's imprecisions, sign of a game, of a connivance with the author designated for each of the "even books". On the occasion of the centenary of Alfred Jarry's death, here is therefore a collection that pays him a beautiful tribute, intended for his too rare readers.
Henri Béhar

Read the text The Writing of Dream in Days and Nights

1. Henri Béhar, Jarry, the monster and the puppet, Larousse, 1973, coll. Themes and texts (out of print).
2. Fayard, 2005, 724 p. 3. This text will be compared to my own study: "The Writing of Dream in Days and Nights", in H. Bordillon, Alfred Jarry, Cerisy colloquium, Belfond, 1985.