SIGNS and MEANINGS: Pataphallics: Jarry’s Novels and Ityphallicism

This article discusses Alfred Jarry as a precursor of French modernism. With a particular focus on Messaline, Roman de l’ancienne Rome (1901) and Le Surmâle, Roman moderne (1902), I analyse the subtle ways in which the past and the future are intertwined and Jarry’s philosophy of sexual excess. In both novels, the main characters seek a paroxysmal erotic pleasure from which they die after reaching world records in sex-making. Read together, the novels work to create a lemniscate, the symbol of infinity symbolically represented, in modernism, by the speeding bicycle. In both novels, sexual excess leads to a superhuman transformation of women and men into a rigid phallus, underlying which is the fantasy of bisexualism.