Jarry's Caesar Antichrist and the Theatre of the Book

Abstract

The familiarity bred by the notoriety in its own times of Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi has been accompanied by neglect for his other work, especially that which seems of peripheral interest to the theatre practitioner. In this article, Kimberly Jannarone argues that his earlier Caesar Antichrist falls into the unusual category of ‘a piece of theatre not intended for the stage’ – apparently unstageable, yet not a closet drama since, in Jarry's scrupulous care for its published form, he created his own ‘theatre of the book’, anticipating the later modernist use of collage while also demonstrating in words and pictures his ‘pataphysical’ interest in the dialectics of opposites. Kimberly Jannarone received her MFA and DFA from the Yale School of Drama, and is currently teaching in the Department of Theater Arts at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She wrote on ‘Puppetry and Pataphysics: Populism and the Ubu Cycle’, in NTQ67 (2001).