How do you write a conventional lecture about a play that had

its origin in the playwright and his school friends making fun of

their teacher?

Just the other day, I overheard a student doing an impression of

me that was disturbingly similar to Alfred Jarry’s impressions of

his physics teacher, Monsieur Hebért, which became the basis

for the Ubu character.

She mocked my American accent and performed an

exaggerated rendition of how I wave my hands around when I

talk. It’s hard to blame her—rendering authority figures

laughable has been a comic staple since Aristophanes.

Really, the artists of the historical avant-garde, including Jarry,

would want all of you to wonder why you passively consent to

sitting here and listening to me at all.

(That is, those of you who don’t already seem to think that it’s

cool to get up and walk out while I’m talking, like I’m an on-

demand video that you can pause and minimize into your

taskbar whenever you want to turn your attention to something

else)

This is a selfie that my mother took after her last eye

operation.

On the midterm I’ll ask you what color shirt she’s

wearing in this photo.

How many of you actually just recorded blue in your

lecture notes?

The course lecture is a performance genre that trains you to

expect a certain content and to respond to that content in

specific ways.

All of the trappings of the performance occasion, including the

University’s institutional endorsement of me, make you feel

safe in trusting that I know what I’m talking about.

Kind of like how people will perceive something as art simply

because it is on display in a museum

Or perceive it as non-art because the police call it vandalism.

But I could abuse your trust at any time, if I wanted to.

Would you even know if I had?

You might think

“Well, I’m not naïve;

I know that a play is a

story, not real life.”

BUT does Realism seem

“true” and “relatable” to

you because it reflects

actual experience,

or

is it possible that you

have it backwards—

that 150 years

of Realism have

structured how you think

and feel

about your own

everyday life? {If you can invent a lie so powerful that it carries the

same force as reality, then what does that say about

reality?}

Consider

that something could be

unfamiliar,

un-relatable,

not at all in the shape that it is

“supposed” to come in,

and yet still be true

and urgently important

If this is so, then someone who is intellectually curious and interested

in personal growth needs to run toward what is alienating and

confusing, not away from it.

If you make that leap, then the

art that alienates you now may

start to make sense.

―Real artistic courage

is not the courage that allows you to weather the judgment of others

{any fool can learn how to ignore critics}

It is the courage that lets you open yourself every day

to the possibility that you have always been wrong

about everything‖

-Me, just now

Okay, are we all uncomfortable now?

Good. Let’s get on with the Proper Lecture.

The idea of an avant-

garde

The idea of an avant-

garde

Art, the expression of society, manifests, in its highest soaring, the most

advanced social tendencies: it is the forerunner and the revealer.

Therefore, to know whether art worthily fulfills its proper mission as

initiator, whether the artist is truly of the avant-garde, one must know

where humanity is going, know what the destiny of the human race

is.…Along with the hymn to happiness, the dolorous and despairing

ode…To lay bare with a brutal brush all the brutalities, all the filth,

which are at the base of society.

-Gabriel-Desíré Laverdant, 1845

The Paris Commune (1871):

idealism takes a direct hit

Decadence and the poète

maudit

• Symbolist and Decadent art develop in France in the mid-late 19th Century, but precursors include earlier writers such as William Blake, Charles Baudelaire, Edgar Allan Poe, and Christina Rossetti.

• Decadent art follows the premise that art should explore and glorify all forms of sensuous experience, including ugliness, banality, shock, and immoral or indecent forms of pleasure. A great artist must place himself ―beyond good and evil,‖ as Nietzsche would say, becoming what Paul Verlaine would later call poètesmaudits.

• Symbolism, which fully develops closer to the end of the century, after Naturalism, follows the premise that the most important aspects of human experience cannot be communicated through simple ―realist‖ mimesis of the world’s visible surface. Rather, sensory details are treated as symbols of memories, dreams, or spiritual experiences that cannot be described directly through words.

Nature is a temple in which living pillars

Sometimes give voice to confused words;

Man passes there through forests of symbols

Which look at him with understanding eyes.

Like prolonged echoes mingling in the distance

In a deep and tenebrous unity,

Vast as the dark of night and as the light of day,

Perfumes, sounds, and colors correspond.

There are perfumes as cool as the flesh of children,

Sweet as oboes, green as meadows

— And others are corrupt, and rich, triumphant,

With power to expand into infinity,

Like amber and incense, musk, benzoin,

That sing the ecstasy of the soul and senses.

Charles Baudelaire, ―Correspondences,‖ 1857

―At the present time, I steep myself in debauchery as thoroughly as I can. Why? I want to be a poet, and I am working on becoming a seer; you will not understand me at all, and I am not sure I could quite explain. The point is to reach the unknown through theunsettling of all the senses.‖

Arthur Rimbaud, from a letter to his former schoolteacher George Izambard, May 1871.

Cabaret Culture

Toulouse-Lautric, At the Moulin

Rouge, 1890

Cabaret culture

Alfred Jarry arrives on the

scene

Jarry and print culture

“After us, the Savage God”

―You will see doors open on fields of snow under blue skies, fireplaces furnished with clocks and swinging wide to serve as doors, and palm trees growing at the foot of a bed so that little elephants standing on bookshelves can browse on them.

As to the orchestra, there is none. Only its volume and timbre will be missed, for various pianos and percussion will execute Ubuesque themes from backstage. The action, which is about to begin, takes place in Poland, that is to say: Nowhere.‖

—from Jarry’s prologue, spoken before the curtain

―The players are supposed to be dolls, toys, marionettes, and now they are all hopping like wooden frogs, and I can see for myself that the chief personage, who is some kind of King, carries for Sceptre a brush of the kind that we use to clean a closet.‖

–William Butler Yeats

`Pataphysics

An ―anti-science‖ invented by Jarry to satirize official academic institutions and philosophical rhetoric.

Defined by Jarry in his book The Exploits and Opinions of Doctor Faustroll, Pataphysician (published posthumously in 1911) as "the science of imaginary solutions, which symbolically attributes the properties of objects, described by their virtuality, to their lineaments.” Defined elsewhere as a science devoted to the study of ―exceptions‖ (in contrast to other sciences, which study rules).

In 1948, a College of Pataphysics was founded in Paris. Members have included Eugene Ionesco, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Jean Baudrillard, and the Marx Brothers.

{`Pataphysics anticipated—and in some cases—influenced) the core ideas of Dada, Surrealism, the Situationists, and postmodern conceptual art.

And, for those of you who don’t care about any of that stuff, it also influenced the Beatles.}