Alfred Jarry: Review of Rachilde's "Contes et nouvelles, suivi de Théâtre"


 Introduction

Alfred Jarry (1873-1907) was an eccentric writer, best-known for his series of plays centered on the character of Ubu, with the first play, Ubu Roi (1896), being his most famous work.  He wrote much else as well: novels, poems, essays, many relating to his concept of 'pataphysics.  (The leading apostrophe is part of the spelling.)  Like most writers, he also wrote many occasional bits, articles and reviews and the like, in order to actually keep food on the table.  

The review translated here—first published n La Revue blanche, No. 180 (December 1, 1900)—discusses the 1900 collection Contes et nouvells, suivi de Théâtre (Stories and Tales, Followed by Plays) by Rachilde, the pen name of Marguerite Vallette-Eymery (1860-1953).  Though a woman, she typically described her literary persona as masculine: "Rachilde, man of letters"; so Jarry uses masculine pronouns to refer to her here, though he knew her fairly well and corresponded with her.  

In the review, Jarry makes particular mention of Rachilde's story, "Seller of the Sun" (Vendeur de soleil), as well as her three-act play Madame Death (Madame la Mort), first performed March 20, 1891, whose program was illustrated by a charcoal sketch by Paul Gauguin.  Near the end, Jarry also quotes from the 1730 volume Theater of the Greeks (La Théâtre des Grecs) by Pierre Brumoy (1688-1742), a Jesuit priest and humanist; the volume contained translations of seven ancient Greek plays (otherwise unavailable to the French reading public), along with analytical essays.  One might also note that the phrase oval host reappears in Jarry's collection La Chandelle verte.


Review of Rachilde, Contes et nouvelles, suivis du Théâtre (Mercure de France)

When an author has twenty novels behind him; when, among these twenty, there are a good half, one of which would suffice for the glory of an honest man of letters, after which, to sleep off said glory, he would keep quiet; that this author has given us the habit, nearly every year, of a new book, often a better book, always another book—he could do nothing better, while waiting to write another novel, than to gather up this volume of plays and stories.

To write a novel...the novelist’s brain is the rabbit of this stew; and, although he puts the whole of it in there, in the interval between one work and another, it pops back up at him, all fresh, but he does not lay it down on the same side each time.

Because of this, it is good to read many novels from one writer, in order to match up all his aspects.  The short story, that condensed novel and that sonnet of prosaists, has the advantage of offering hurried people twelve volumes in a collection of a dozen stories.

The whole world, I believe, is found in Rachilde’s short stories.  Let’s count: a dog, priests, shadows, an emperor, a god, a moon, the plague, roses, blood, frogs, mirrors, a château, a Jew, a mountain, a cursed man, wine, Sodom, a prostitute, a zombie, a panther, the sun, and love.

It’s a kind of danse macabre, where, as in every danse macabre, a bit of mocking joy worms its way in, like a button in a poor-box; and the transition is all naturally made to the theater, where this swarm of figures is poured out to embroider the veil of Death, standing on a base of sun or blood, which is just about the same thing.  But there is more than the World in these stories, since it is someone who knows how to see it that presents the World to us, with the same gesture as his peddler who sells us the sun!  A world which has not served, and about which one wants to have the illusion that it was made expressly for us: an oval host.

There is at least one masterpiece in this book that is made of many books; and, as it is found at the end, the preceding reading has, however, the right to be difficult: it is the second act of Madame Death.  P. Brumoy wrote, in his Theater of the Greeks: “This personage is masculine in Greek...I believed it was better to give him a natural signification, although the French name of mort is feminine.  This doesn’t change the plot or the quality of the personage…”  Good P. Brumoy!  There was only one tragic woman who could comprehend and express that Death, behind that veil that masks her from us, is a woman, and that there would never have been suicides if they were not crimes of love: to kill oneself is, for some, the best means in their power of perpetuating the human species.


Source: Alfred Jarry, Œuvres complètes, Tome II, ed. Henri Bordillon with Patrick Besnier and Bernard le Doze (Paris: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1987), 595-596.  For the introduction, I also heavily utilized the notes to this text on pp. 953-954 of the same volume.

Translation ©2024 B.P. Otto.  Licensed via CC BY-NC.  Feel free to redistribute non-commercially, as long as credit is given to the translator.

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