Essay, Biography or Paragraph on “Alfred Jarry” great author complete biography for Class 10, Class 12 and Graduation and other classes.

Alfred Jarry

( 1873 – 1907)

Alfred Jarry was born in Laval, Mayenne, into a well-to-do farmer and craftsman family From his mother’s side he received a legacy of eccentrity but also a strain of insanity. He was educated in the schools of Saint-Brieuc and Rennes. At the age of 18 he moved to Paris to live on a small family inheritance, and pursued his studies at the Lycec Henri IV. At the age of 15 he had written Ubu roi in collaboration with a classmate at the Lycee of Rennes, to ridicule a pompous mathematics teacher. The play was originally presented with marionettes. In 1896 Aurelien Lugne-Poe produced it in Paris, where the performance caused a riot. The coarseness of the language and anarchistic tones were too much for the audience. It shocked even W.B. Yeats, who attended its opening night. Jarry also wrote sequels to Ubu which was acted for the first time at the Paris Exposition of 1937, and Ubu Cocu, published posthumously in 1944.

After military service Jarry devoted himself to literature. He fre-quented the literary salons and began to write. His early works include Les Minutes De Sable Memorial (1894), a collection of prose and verse. Henri Rousseau, a minor inspector in the toll service and the first of the so-called naive painters, painted Jarrv’s portrait, which was hung in the Salon des Independants. L’amour Absolu (1899) was a novel, more obscure than anything he had written. H.G. Wells’s novel The Time Machine inspired Jarry to write the speculative essay How to Construct a Time Machine (1900). Le Surdle (1902) was Jarry’s last novel, a comic fantasy featuring a superman who, nourished on superfood.

Until his death at the age of thirty-four, Jarry was a familiar figure stalking the streets of Paris with his green umbrella, symbol in King Ubu of middle-class power, and wearing the cyclist’s garb and carrying two pistols. From Ubu he also adopted the gestures of his creation, spoke in high falsetto like Ubu, and always employed the royal “we.” Jarry health was undermined by poverty and alcohol. He died in alcoholism and tuberculosis in Paris, on November 1, 1907. In 1911 appeared a volume of Jarry’s essays but it was not until the 1920s, when the value of his work was widely recognized. Jarry’s absurd humour appealed to Andre Breton (1896-1966) and his influence on modern science fiction is seen is J.G. Ballard’s The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy as a Downhill Motor Race (1967), which echoes Jarry’s themes from his essay Commentair pour servir a la construction pratique de la machine a explorer le temps.