Alfred Jarry’s Neo-Science:
Liquidizing Paris and
Debunking Verne
Ben Fisher
Abstract: In his Gestes et opinions du docteur Faustroll, pataphysicien:
roman néo-scientifique, Alfred Jarry combines scientific exposition
and avant-garde artistic experiment. The novel inverts and perverts
the physical and metaphysical universes in the course of an imagined
voyage around Paris. This chapter maintains that, far from this being
a simple artistic conceit, Jarry’s work engages in a close and ingenious reading of contemporary science, including the earth sciences,
offering in the process an avant-garde challenge to Verne’s portrayal
of geo-physical and geological phenomena.
The themes proposed for examination in the conference “Histoires de
la Terre” included “Tourism and the exploration of sublime landscapes”, and “Creation or disappearance of islands”. This essay discusses a text which exemplifies both headings, but in a most unusual
manner; its landscapes are a set of islands created for the purpose of
its tourism, and their creation is an artistic one, directly inspired, in
turn, by the artistic creation of the figures who are represented as the
lords and kings of their own extraordinary and utterly individual
lands. While this Parisian voyage almost falls into the category of
“travelling without moving”, it also approaches and tests the limits of
the boundaries between physical and conceptual universes. It has further relevance in that the novel in question includes an enigmatic critique of received ideas by the end of the nineteenth century about not