The Futility of Art

It is with great regret that we have to inform readers that Laslo Plinge’s infamous novel The Importance of Canvas has been reprinted. Directly and indirectly responsible for a multitude of suicides, we urge the curious and the unwary to avoid this work as if it were the pox itself.

“A futile work on the futility of everything….” Wrote the critic Peregrine Phlinche-Finn shortly after reading the book – and just before he defenestrated himself from the 18^th floor.  The review which appeared in the Highbury & Islington Bugle simply read Aaaaargh! –  supposedly a verbatim transcript of Oscar Smyth’s critique as he streaked naked down the Caledonian Road, with purple painted hair,  before finally coming to rest underneath a number 38 omnibus.

Yet why has this controversial novel caused such upset? The Importance of Canvas was first published in 1948 by Ging, Gang & Gooley,  a company which specialised in works concerning outdoor pursuits and all things camp. It was bought by accident by thousands of happy campers under the mistaken belief that it was a practical guide to tents. It wasn’t. The death toll in London that year was higher than any year since the blitz. The campers were no longer happy.

The plot of the novel, such as it is, recalls the tale of Paslo LLinge – some believe this to be a heavily disguised  version of Laslo himself – and a night spent under the titular canvas. Over the course of the night – and some 468 pages –  he describes in detail, in tiny exactingly excruciating detail, every strand and fibre of canvas in his vision.

The whole work is futile, it says nothing, it reaches no denouement because as the reader discovers after struggling through the dense punctuation free prose that Plinge himself couldn’t be bothered to finish it. As a reflection on the futility of individual existence and pointlessness of struggle –because it is a bloody struggle to read – it stands un-paralleled in the history of literature.

However, amongst all the death, self-harming, protests, book burning and lamentations the book had one stalwart defender, Samuel Beckett, who said of it:

Cor, lumey that was a wizard read.

As for Plinge himself, he returned to his first love of quantity surveying  (“give me any quantity and I’ll survey it” was his catchphrase)before dying in 1973 after sleeping naked on the side of Ben Nevis having forgot The Importance of Canvas.

Yakkity Yak

It was once believed that it was language which separated us from the animals, but since the mid-twentieth century advances in both vocal-genetics and animal studies have challenged this assumption. We now know that sea mammals such as dolphins and whales communicate through a highly evolved language. On land research has shown that most mammals have forms of warnings and communications which can be termed language. Prairie Dogs have a system of visual and auditory communication whose complexity rivals that of the higher primates. However, in a recently printed study Dr Henrich Von Hoden of the Austrian Institute for Advanced Linguistics, suggests that the Yak (Bos grunniens) has the most sophisticated linguistic structure of the animal kingdom.

Dr Von Hoden’s research has demonstrated conclusively that Yaks have not just the accepted concepts of food, danger and courtship, but also have a wide range of connectives and tenses (past, present and future) and are able to engage in what we would term as conversations. Yaks communicate through a system of lowing, termed by animal linguists as the Mooing Paradigm. Dr Von Hoden has measured the frequencies of these moos and found that there are actually great variances in frequencies relating to certain concepts or words. Using his knowledge of code-breaking and language construction he was able to break the “code” of Yaks Moo and translate it into German. The result has rocked the world of animal science and has lead to a great change in how we view ourselves in the world.

In a recent documentary Dr Von Hoden was able to communicate directly with a Yak. Using a frequency modulator he was able to replicate the lowing of the Yak, and for the first time ever man was able to speak to Yak. It brought a tear to the eye of many. His latest venture is to translate works of Human literature into Yak and Ye Imp is proud to present Dr Von Hoden’s translation of Samuel Beckett’s Not I into Yak.

Moo MOOOO moo Moo …. Moo mooo mo mooo MOOO… MooMoo Moo Mooo

Moo Moo moooooooo MOo MOOO mo Mo… Mooo Mooo Moooooom MOO Moo

Moo… Mooo… Moo Moo Moo MOOOOOOO Moo Moo… Moo Mooo….

(Etc)

If the booze won’t kill you the fresh air will – Alfred Jarry and ‘Pataphysics.

It is a truism that while an Imp’s work may make little impression in their own time, the more impish the oeuvre the bigger the impact after their death and the poster boy for this axiom is Alfred Jarry Grand ‘Pataphysician. Marcel Page takes a little gander at his life and influence.

Despite selling somewhere between nothing and bog all during his own lifetime Alfred Jarry’s work and ideas have fired up successive generations of artists and theorists. It can be argued that he is (directly and indirectly) one of the greatest influences on 20^th and 21^st century art and thought. Not bad for a drunk who died a pauper of bicycle related meningitis at the age of 34.

A monstrous intellect Jarry was famous in his own time for unleashing the play Ubu Roi on the unsuspecting French public. The play caused a riot in the theatre, simply for being about seventy years too early. However, as wonderful a display of Impishness Ubu Roi is (more of which below) it is his science of ‘Pataphysics which Jarry is now most known for. A science (or philosophy, or neither of these) which evades easy explanation but has influenced the work of Duchamp, the surrealists, Artuad, Soft Machine, Gong and Foucault – not to mention too many more to mention.

Laval forms

Jarry was born in 1873 in Laval just outside of Brittany in France. His father was a middle class petit-bourgeois alcoholic who apparently took very little part in Jarry’s upbringing. His mother was of faded Brittany ancestry and was regarded as the town’s resident eccentric. After she split from her husband she took her children (Jarry had a sister Charlotte)to live in Brittany for a while, a place, with its ancient Celtic pace of life and old customs, which was to have a lasting effect on Jarry’s imagination. He also received his first bicycle.

At the age of fifteen Jarry, who had grown into a short thickset boy (he never grew to more than five foot odd in his life) was studying in the Lycée in Rennes. It was here that he was to meet the man who was to transform his life. The stories of many great artists are transformed in the crucible the great teacher, and this was no different in Jarry’s case – only in the ‘Pataphysical crucible transforming teacher was useless.

Poor Monsieur

Monsieur Hébert was the physics teacher at the Lycée, whose lessons were infamous for the sheer brutality inflicted on poor Monsieur Hébert by the boys. By the time that Jarry joined the school the boys had worked out a whole mythology for Monsieur Hébert – or Pere Héb as he was known. From being a terrible teacher Pere Héb had become the fat offspring of a Ginormant and a Mongolian witch, complete with extendable ear. Jarry and his friends the Morin brothers took this oral mythology and ran with it, writing and performing a series of marionette plays based on Pere Héb.

Poor Hébert, a provincial school teacher with a miserable working life could never imagine that he would be the inspiration for one of the most shockingly modern plays ever made. Likewise the generations of his evil minded tormentors could never imagine that their merciless bullying could give shape to and form to a character without whom the modern imaginative life would be a greyer, safer place. Pere Héb eventually became Pere Ubu, that great fart in the face of respectability.

Paris

That lay slightly in the future, as for Jarry Paris beckoned. Unlike most people Jarry could not leave his school boy enthusiasms behind and took them with him when he left for Paris. Jarry hit Paris with a bang, and soon found himself swept up in the world of literary salons, especially that which surrounded the literary publication Le Mercuré, and café society. His outrageous dress , long cape and stove pipe hat apparently, and behaviour would have soon had him noticed anyway. Moments from the legend of Jarry in this period include:

Inviting his friends around to the darkened owl filled apartment he lived in, frightening them so much that they fled opening the door by its shit covered handle.

Turning up to an opening night bare-chested with a shirt painted on.

Habitually firing revolvers in the air.

Living in an apartment that was cut horizontally in half, and was so small that even Jarry’s head brushed against the ceiling.

developing a highly idiosyncratic, a stress free staccato, automaton way of speaking.

Using the royal we to describe his own personage.

Drinking gallons of Absinthe.

Painting his face green.

Trying to shoot a fellow poet.

Attempting to light a stranger’s cigarette through the judicious use of a revolver.

Dressed habitually in cycling wear and riding everywhere – forty miles each way on the occasions he was living in a tripod suspended shack outside of Paris.

It was in Paris that Jarry was to write the bulk of his work and create – or at least refine ‘Pataphysics. Originally influenced by the symbolists and their anti-realist anti-naturist ideology of describing not the object – or thing – but the effect of the object or thing, Jarry’s work began include his own scatological humour, anti-clericalism and interest in the cutting edge science of the age.

Jarry’s work from this period becomes less Symbolic and more idiosyncratically ‘Pataphysical. His first two published books Les Minutes de sable mémorial (Black Minutes of Memorial Sand) and the unperformable semi-heraldic play César-Antichrist are both highly symbolic and personal. The play Haldernablou in Les Minutes… refers to the end of his love affair with the poet Léon-Paul Fargue They do however, point towards ‘Pataphysics with Ubu making an appearance in both tying the earthly with the heavenly. However, unlike most of symbolism Jarry’s use of imagery was deliberately crude and rough.

By 1896 Jarry is a fixture on the Parisian literary scene – both his parents have died and had left him with a reasonable inheritance which he quickly spent on funding an expensive magazine dedicated to the dying art of woodcuts called L’Ymagier. It bombed.

He had also been called up to the army, a situation he was completely unsuited for, being too short for the uniform causing his fellow recruits to fall into fits of laughter every time he went on parade. He also followed army rules to the letter, which pushed them to their illogical extremes. After feigning illness – according to Alastair Brotchie, by swallowing picric acid to induce the symptoms of gallstones Jarry was discharged and returned to Paris.

The experience in the army led directly into Jarry’s novel Les Jours et les Nuits (Days and Nights). The novel was the first real flowerings of ‘Pataphysics. In the novel Sengle is conscripted into the army and “escapes” through various dream states. This mingling of the real and the imagined, the perception of reality as a hallucination which is true, would be refined and redefined over Jarry’s lifetime to become the ‘science of imaginary solutions’. It was this science that has ensured Jarry’s lasting influence. However, by the time Les Jours et les Nuits was published Jarry had become famous. Ubu had hit the stage.

Ubu riot

The opening night of Ubu Roi has been described so many times that there really is little more to write about it. What there is to be said is that in the bastion of supposedly Avant-Garde theatre Jarry unleashed a human puppet play, whose action and language owed as much to Elizabethan drama, and mime as it did to ideas of performance not yet in vogue. To paraphrase Alastair Brotchie in his excellent biography of Jarry : A Pataphysical Life, it was as if a pop art sixties absurdist play had landed in the middle of the 19^th century theatre. It play caused much uproar and a few punch-ups between the audience. It had made Jarry a well-known name. It also caused the eccentric Jarry’s personality to be confused in the public’s mind – and to some extent, his own – with that of Ubu.

From that point on Jarry and Ubu would be inextricable. His other work ignored or misunderstood, Jarry increasingly driven into poverty would be required to play the marionette role. By the time of his death, not from over consumption of absinthe, but from tubercular meningitis brought on by his cycling in all sorts of foul weather, Jarry was largely a forgotten man. Yet while Ubu looms large over the landscape of modernist theatre it is his science of Pataphysics that has secured his lasting influence. (You finally got there you don’t half like to rabbit! Ed.)

‘Pataphysics

‘Pataphysics is the science of imaginary solutions. An idea that opposites do not just rely on each other to support their existence but are also one and the same, the properties of one being the properties of the other. Jarry demonstrated by the se of Ubu’s Phsick stick which rotates and thus encompasses both the + and the – sign. Put more technically it is the study of the epiphenomenon, or the accidental offspring of a phenomenon rather than the phenomenon itself. Or possibly the influence of the imaginary (artistic) will on reality and the conflation of the two to create a third.

Not being easily definable has meant that ‘Pataphysics has allowed each person who encounters it a great deal of personal freedom in their application of it. Jarry’s own key Pataphysical works are to be found in his speculative journalism like The Passion considered as an uphill Bicycle race, and How to Construct a Time Machine. Pieces where logic is turned on its head and pushed to illogical conclusions. In the first the stations of the cross are reimagined as a piece of sports journalism, and the in the latter the poetic description of bicycle ride is rendered as serious piece of scientific speculation – so well constructed was How to Construct a Time Machine that it was briefly taken seriously by some English scientists.

The longest exposition of ‘Pataphysics was Jarry’s own posthumously published Exploits and Opinions of Doctor Faustroll: Pataphysician. In which the titular Doctor Faustroll travels around Paris in a sieve alighting on various islands, which are infact descriptions of the Parisian literati as described by the liniments of their work. Eventually Faustroll dies and the book ends with the algebraic formula describing the surface of God. In the novel, art, science, humour and ways of seeing are all mixed together into one great melting pot.

Lasting influence

But it was not Jarry who brought ‘Pataphysics to the fore, it was the artists who followed him. Picasso and Duchamp have both acknowledged a debt to Jarry’s ideas. Duchamp’s Ready Mades are incredible ‘Pataphysical in their mixture of philopshy absurdity and generally taking the piss. Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty was influenced by Ubu, which in turn influenced Jim Morrison’s stage presence. Both the Dadaist’s and The Surrealist were attracted by Jarry’s humour and anti-realism. Yet it was a group of break-away Surrealists who have carried Jarry’s influence on through the years. The College of Pataphysics, used Pataphysics as starting point for a whole creative life based on Pataphysical ideas. The OuLiPo writers, which included Georges Perec and Raymond Queneau, used scientific and mathematical constraints to create new pieces of literary work, and were formed out of the College of Pataphysics.

In the sixties through the merging of the older Avant-Garde and growing psychedelic movement Pataphysics could be felt. Paul McCartney, a partner in the Indica bookshop had heard a version of Jarry’s Goonish play Ubu Cuckolded on the BBC. Pataphysics was soon name checked in The Beatles Maxwell’s Silver Hammer.

Darlings of the UFO and later Jazz-Rock heavyweights Soft Machine were made the official orchestra of the College of ‘Pataphysics. Since then the Pataphysical mindset has grown, Martin Craig-Martin’s An Oak Tree is a wonderful example of ‘Pataphysics at work. Sixties pop art with its conflation of high and low art, also has ‘Pataphysical resonances – the pop art world wasn’t entirely unaware of Jarry, David Hockney designed the sets for a London run of Ubu Roi featuring Max Wall.

In America the comic strip Zippy the Pinhead has many ‘Pataphysical themes, as did George Melly and Wally Fawkes Flook which was printed in The Daily Mail from 1949 to 1984 contained many ‘Pataphysical elements.

Where art and ideas are taken to their illogical conclusion is where you find ‘Pataphysics. You can be ‘Pataphysical without knowing it, for me the drone metal work of Sunn 0))) and the work of Spike Milligan owe something to the ‘Pataphysical spirit. ‘Pataphysics is now everywhere – London even has its own branch the London Institute of ‘Pataphysics – and has been the study of many books and its influence on the modern landscape is undeniable. Not a bad legacy for an obscure bike rider from just outside Brittany.

For further information on Jarry and Pataphysics I would heartedly recommend Alastair Brotchie’s Alfred Jarry a Pataphysical Life (MIT Press 2011). I would also recommend Andrew Hughill’s ‘Pataphysics : A useless guide (MIT Press 2012). Atlas Press in London also print many of Jarry’s works and pieces related to the London Institute of ‘Pataphysics.

Marcel Page likes writing things like this. We like them too.

 

A Chap named Raymond

Raymond Roussel was a French writer of peculiar novels and impossible plays. A visionary in everyway not least in the art of Caravaning. Genius, that’s why we had never heard of him. Marcel Page tells us why he matters.

 

Although most commonly associated with the British Isles the Chap is not a phenomenon of Albion’s alone. There are Chaps from every corner of the globe, and unlikely as it may seem the Old Enemy herself, France, can also lay claim to one of the most eccentric.

Raymond Roussel, (1877 – 1933) was a novelist who novels nobody liked, and a playwright who’s plays were met with derision. Being extremely wealthy he was able to publish and perform his own work at his own cost. He was also a fastidious dresser, whose expensive clothes were worn a fixed number of times, and whose idea of world travel was to never leave ones cabin.

The third child of a wealthy couple Roussel was born in Paris in 1877 he was already showing artistic tendencies when he was enrolled in the Paris Conservatoire at 15 as a pianist. But it was not to be, as after barely a year at the Paris Conservatoire Roussel’s father died leaving Roussel with a huge fortune. This tragedy was to become the making of the man as at that moment he turned his back on music, becoming instead a poet.

It was the start of a career which would see him as the critics’ darling, after all everyone has to have someone to hate. His first work was a poem called Mon Ậme, and published three years later in the newspaper Le Gaulois. A sign of things to come, the poem started with the line ‘Mon âme est une étrange usine’ (My heart is a strange factory).

Emboldened by this moderate success Roussel then embarked on creating an epic poem La Doublure. During the writing of this novel in verse form Roussel suffered an unusual crisis where by he claimed he suffered a “sensation of universal glory of extraordinary intensity.”

“I was the equal of Dante and Shakespeare… I experienced glory… Everything I wrote was surrounded in rays of light; I would close the curtains for fear the shinning rays that were emanating from my pen would escape through the smallest chink… To leave these papers lying around would have sent out rays as far as China and the desperate crowd would have flung themselves upon my house.” – Dr. Pierre Janet quoting Roussel in The Psychological Characteristics of Ecstatsy (Translated John Herman Raymond Roussel Life Death and Works Atlas Publications 1987)

Although this may have appeared to have been an auspicious omen of his forth coming success it wasn’t. The poem received two reviews, one of which said it was boring, and the other was less kind. Roussel sank into a depression so deep that he required the help of a psychiatrist, Dr. Pierre Janet, who then used him as a case study in his work on Religious Ecstasy.

This early failure and the impact it had on Roussel only deepened his reserve, from this point on he would now go it alone. He would publish himself, nobody else would touch him. But he had a mania for writing partly driven because his self-belief, but also because he needed to recapture that almost religious ecstasy he had experienced during the writing of La Doublure.

Due to his great wealth he could afford to publish his own work, and mount luxurious productions of his own plays. Undertaking such serious endeavours required discipline, and Roussel had that in spades.

His works such as Locus Solus and Impressions d’Afrique were constructed on strict logical principles. The process was to take two sentences which both sound similar, but have different meanings. One was to be the first line and second the final line, and simply construct a novel connecting these two points.

That the novels contained descriptions of impossible articles in a museum, or the bizarre trials of a group of captured Europeans in Africa, was only a reaction of the possibilities created by the beginning and closing sentences. In other words he did not have a clue as to what was going to happen until he started writing, as unhindered by the limitations of plot his mind was free to wander strange routes.

If the novels left readers bemused, the theatre adaptations caused near riots. Or as one contemporary review of Impressions d’Afrique has it:

‘The public looked on in sceptical or even rebellious mood. Three spectators of the common sort, who were sitting behind me, displayed noisy ill-will. They were doing what all discontented Frenchmen do: resolutely hurling witticisms. God preserve you, readers, from being thus caught between two fires’. – Henry Bidou, Journal des débates (translated Andrew Thompson in Raymond Roussel Life Death and Works Atlas Publications 1987)

Convinced that despite the constant failures he was creating works of “immeasurable artist value” Roussel locked himself away and wrote. To allow more time for writing he would take all his daily meals in one sitting. He would also not move for hours at a time. He undertook a world cruise, only for him to never leave his cabin. But then it was only spaces inside his own head which interested him.

He was a particular man, his collars, quite rightly, were worn only once and the rest of his clothes discarded after a fixed number of times. Yet for someone so internalised he was also surprisingly concerned with outward appearances, even going so far as to hire a Charlotte Dufrene to be his mistress of convenience so as to mask his homosexuality.

Roussel finest work was possibly his caravan. Although, to call this contraption a caravan is a complete misnomer, it was, quite simply, a house on wheels. It contained a bedroom, a study, a bathroom and servants quarters, all of which folded in on each other, allowing the interior to change its function according to the time of day. Fastidious in his clothing, he was equally fastidious about his caravan with the bodywork a creation from Lacoste and an interior carved from maple. This mobile cottage then undertook a 2000 mile round trip to Switzerland and back simply so he could have a different view outside his window everyday as he wrote.

In the end the constant failure, and the pursuit of his earlier experience of glory became too much. He had lost his fortune publishing and performing works which nobody wanted to read or see, and died of a barbiturate overdose in Palmero in 1933. A sad lonely end to an extrodinary life.

However, he did produce some fine work. Locus Solus and Impressions d’Afrique, have been rightly acclaimed as cornerstones of the avant-garde. They were hailed by the Surrealists, although Roussel didn’t understand their work at all, and are still in print to this day.

Despite it all, Roussel is now held up as one of the more important writers of the twentieth century, a French version of Lewis Carroll, possibly. But naturally, of far more importance than his writing was his upholding of the fine Chappist principles of fastidiousness, genuine eccentricity and wayward genius. An example for us all!

Marcel Page

Marcel Page is a ‘pataphysician of no known reputation, he spends all his time eating chocolate cake and drinking stout.