JARRY, Alfred. Par la Taille.

Paris: E. Sansot, 1906.

12mo gathered in sixes, (160 x 97mm). Short, skilfully repaired tear to final leaf not touching text, very short marginal tear to one other leaf, a little light marginal age-discolouration. Upper cover slightly faded as usual, one or two creases to lower corners. A very good, fresh copy.

Scarce first edition of one of Jarry’s last published works, one of 600 copies (this one of 400 on “papier ordinaire”). A one-act comic morality play featuring a giant, a hunchback, a young lady and a normal man, this play was the second volume in a projected series of six, the other four never published due to Jarry’s untimely death.
The series was intended by its publisher Edward Sansot to be a delicate object – with their small size and distinctive green covers printed in red - contrasting with the mass-produced books on the contemporary market. The architectural frame enclosing the title (and repeated on the cover) is taken form the 1593 (first) edition of Rabelais’ Pantagruel. Distinctive green and red covers, small size.

Jarry, however, was not impressed by the diminutive nature of the books, and called them (in a letter to Rachilde) “des pipes en sucre” (a delicious foretaste of Magritte’s more famous play with the pipe as object).

Jarry was an extraordinary character of the Symbolist movement, a precocious talent with an extremely sharp eye for the absurd, and later a strong and destructive addiction to absinthe (once even painting himself green and cycling through Paris in celebration of his ‘Green Goddess’). Jarry, living in a tiny flat which the landlord hat cut in two horizontally and in which his guests had to crouch to fit, and took to carrying a loaded pistol. He was a long-term and close friend of the writer Rachilde (whose gender-bending Madame de Sade is well ahead of its time), as well as an intimate of Bonnard, Mallarmé, Gaugin and the young Picasso was (who bought and wore Jarry’s pistol and many of his literary manuscripts); for Marinetti and Apollinaire, Jarry was ‘the creator of modern theatre’ and a supremely important influence on the modernisms that followed. Jarry died in 1907 of tuberculosis aggravated by his poverty and drinking: his last request was for a toothpick.

Jarry was the inventor of ‘Pataphysics’, a sort of alternative organisational structure to the Universe, which deals with “the laws which govern exceptions and will explain the universe supplementary to this one”. The Surrealists also admired Jarry, for his Surreal style (see for example the Exploits and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, Pataphysician) and Dora Maar’s disturbing photographic ‘portrait’ of ‘Pere Ubu’, conjuring up as an image, an urform which makes the viewer feel slightly uncomfortable, a feeling Freud called ‘unheimlich’, and which the Surrealists courted as a freeing-up of the subconscious.

Édition originale d’un des dernier piéces de Jarry, dans un trés bon état de conservation, peu commun.