Ubu Roi and the Charm of Artlessness

 

 

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Program from the premiere of Ubu Roi

 

      Jarry does not turn up here for a few pages. His critic has perhaps the obligation to diddle his readers a bit.

     On the wall of my dining room is a sampler saying “Home, Sweet, Home.”  My motive for acquiring it at the Salvation Army and then displaying it differs from that of the work’s maker, who presumably wished to express a simple affection (and an implied wish with perhaps a nudge of sympathetic magic) for a harmonious household.  Anyone in my culture might guess that, to me, that straightforward sentiment would be outworn and unattractive, were it not that it may be conceived ironically.  Educated people are more likely to regard the piece in a self-conscious way.  “How countrified!  How naïve, yet how charming that life once seemed so simple!”  Standing in this way at one remove from the object of contemplation, the technical merits of the needlework become revalued.  Like the paintings of Grandma Moses, the work’s very failures are made into advantages: how homey, how rustic, how authentic!  If the needlework is coarse or the brushstrokes clumsy, they affirm instead of undermining the image.

     I have as well figures of Shiva dancing and Rama fluting and a nightlight of Jesus Christ, though I remain an unbeliever in them all, finding such images only symbolically true.  Indeed, the adoption of exotic symbols for their own sake is far from confined to the oversophisticated.  A person getting a tattoo of Chinese characters without a clear view of their meaning is similar.  This sort of meta-aesthetic thinking is characteristic of the new territories marked off for aesthetic value during the twentieth century.

     This mode of appreciation became itself self-reflective following Susan Sontag’s seminal essay on “Notes on Camp” (in the Partisan Review 1964).  Apart from the sensibility she defines which is associated with homosexual culture, similar approaches have been adapted to kitsch and hip reception. These have in common that each adopts a meta-aesthetic.  Images with little interest or merit in themselves gain significance with aesthetic attention.  Values are subject to transvaluation with the viewer's gaze.

     The adoption of mass symbols by artists like Warhol’s soup cans or Liechtenstein's romance comic panels arises from a similar impulse, but the technique is quite a different matter.  The distancing, having been done already by the artist, cannot be repeated by the viewer.  While such images had, at first, expressed a certain brashness, the artists’ versions are already mediated, and the gallery-goer appreciates the professionalism of, for instance, the elegantly shiny surfaces of Koons’ balloon animals.

    Ironic appropriation is also unrelated to the concealment of craft, recommended by the formula “ars est celare artem” [1].  In this case the artist has intentionally created a representation of apparently artless art, but the analytic critic can reveal the strategies by which that impression is constructed.  Thus the admirer appreciates the maker’s skill while acknowledging that a good part of its appeal in in its inconspicuousness.

     One variety, perhaps the purest and most unlikely, of this second-level appeal is the enjoyment and valorization of incompetence itself.  Among imaginable instances one might include admiration of the stick figures in a preschooler’s drawing, the picturesque charm of an off-tune community marching band in Chulula, or condescending praise of Onitsha market literature for its “cute”  illiterate usages.  In these cases the critic is looking down on the work while enjoying it for its very failings.  Yet accomplished artists in movements such as Dada, Situationism, and punk music have ignored their own skills to present work which invites ironic reception.  Non-professionalism can be an intentional strategy in performances such as it was in the shows of the Cockettes whose de facto leader Hibiscus insisted that ability to sing or dance was no qualification for participation.

     Among the most celebrated works that exemplify this anti-aesthetic aesthetic is Jarry’s notorious Ubu Roi.  When one reads of the scandal that attended the work’s premiere, one can feel only nostalgia for the days when a theater audience could still be surprised and even sometimes shocked.  This work, the original appearance of which at Aurélien Lugné-Poe's Théâtre de l'Œuvre in 1896 caused a riotous reaction followed by a ban, has now a secure place in dramatic history. 

     In his total rejection of verisimilitude, Jarry anticipates such later developments as Brecht’s Epic Theater, Artaud’s Theater of Cruelty and the later Theater of the Absurd.  The characters he places on stage and the setting in which they operate have little direct relation to lived experience.  Notoriously, the language is transgressive from the opening “merdre” (itself a deformation).  It is also inventive, featuring neologisms like “phynance.”  Far from respecting the classical norms of unity, symmetry, and accepted forms of beauty, Jarry’s play is free-wheeling and unstable, as suggested by his lifelong attempts to complete it. 

     With its formless narrative, its anarchic lexicon and delight in transgressing, with its roots in rebellious adolescent hijinks, Ubu Roi conveys a mood but little in the way of real theme.  Ubu himself is a monster of devouring energy – hence the parallels with Rabelais – and a certain carnivalesque spirit, at once gleeful and terrible, prevails.  Père Ubu confines even his familiarities with his wife for the most part to threats and warnings; his relations with his subjects are confined to collecting money; he is a naked raging ego without variation or refinement.

     Yet thus very disorganization is what uncontrolled freedom looks like.  Were the author’s professionalism discernable, he would seem a slave rather than a flouter of convention. As with Rimbaud, that other enfant terrible, his faults serve as the seal of authenticity of his radicalism.  Indeed, Jarry was far from alone in his rejection of the norms of the day, indeed, of all norms.  One example is Jules Lévy’s Incoherents, whose 1883 exhibition in the Galerie Vivienne promised “drawings by those who cannot draw” [3].

     In his essay “Questions of the Theatre,” Jarry notes that “various little Ubists” have found wit and purpose in Père Ubu’s pronouncements which in fact were simply “stupid” as Mère Ubu keeps saying.  Such critics assume that a work they like must surely be artfully designed because they are blind to the source of the play’s charm in its very artlessness.  Ubu Roi is pleasing, even to many beautiful, because of its slapdash outrageousness.  The play’s passionate rejection of social proprieties, not exempting artistic expectations constitutes the one emphatic theme.  Some viewers might find the counter-cultural reflex aging before their eyes, itself becoming a predictable and meaningless revolt, bit Jarry never tired of poking fun at his old schoolmaster, long after his classmates had lost interest.

     He not only kept extending and reconsidering the Ubu material, he found it so seductive and volatile that Jarry began himself to enact the role of Père Ubu, using the same staccato, flat intonation in his everyday life and, what is more, he seemed so stylish in doing so that he inspired a vogue of others acting in the same odd manner.  Readers might find this the less surprising since we, too, continue to turn to the play, occasionally even performing it, for we have all encountered our own Ubus and have felt, whatever our chronological level of maturity, like cocking a snoot at them. 

 

 

 

 

1.  The phrase is attributed to Ovid Ars. am. 2.313, also closely paralleled in Metamorphoses 10.252.   The same principle is mandated in Quintilian 9.3.102 and mentioned in Steele, The Tatler 191 and in Wilde’s preface to Dorian Gray inter alia.  It resembles the quality of sprezzatura recommended by Castiglione.

2.  Cf. also the Hydropathes and the Fumistes.

3.  The exhibit accepted all submissions “that were neither obscene nor serious,” including an Paul Bilhaud’s all-black canvas titled “Negroes Fighting in a Tunnel,” Bataille’s “Mona Lisa Smoking a Pipe.”  The show was a success, attracting twenty thousand visitors, and proceeds were donated to charity.