Alfred Jarry: The Carnival of Being

"The subversive works and personality of the French writer Alfred Jarry (1873–1907) played a crucial role in the transition from the nineteenth-century avant-garde to the emergent modernist movements of the early twentieth century. An inspiration for Dada and Surrealism and a touchstone for the Theatre of the Absurd, Jarry is most renowned for his play Ubu roi and the legend of its sensational premiere in 1896. To his contemporaries, however—figures such as Paul Gauguin, Henri Rousseau, Oscar Wilde, and Guillaume Apollinaire—Jarry’s prestige extended beyond theater. He applied his genius to poetry, the novel, and operettas; he was a graphic artist, an actor, a puppeteer, a critic, and the inventor of an imaginary science called pataphysics. For Jarry, engagements with technology, popular imagery, and the performance of everyday life could constitute works of art. ..."
The Morgan Library & Museum
Alfred Jarry: The Carnival of Being
The Paris Review: Playwright, Puppeteer, Artist, Cyclist

Les minutes de sable mémorial (Paris: Mercure de France, 1894).

2011 April: The Insolent Eye: Jarry in Art, 2013 August: The Banquet Years of Apollinaire, Alfred Jarry, Henri Rousseau, and Erik Satie - Roger Shattuck, 2015 September: An Inglorious Slop-pail of a Play, 2019 November: Merrrrdrrrre!: Alfred Jarry and Père Ubu