Heroic deeds and views of Doctor Faustroll
Heroic deeds and views of Doctor Faustroll, Pataphysicist is a neoscientific novel by the French writer and bohemian Alfred Jarry (1873–1907), which is shaped by the lust for madness and paradox , which appeared in fragments between 1898 and 1903 in various literary periodicals. The first complete edition was not published until 1911, four years after the author's untimely death.
The novel, which in the French edition of Pléiade has just 96 pages, is divided into eight books with consecutive chapter numbers. The total of 41 text sections are often no longer than a page, are more like sketches or narrative miniatures. The work depicts the adventurous journey of the 'pataphysicist Dr. Faustroll in his boat As zu Wasser from Paris to Paris accompanied by the bailiff Panmuffel, who acts as a narrator or eyewitness in many places, and the baboon's back hump.
people
As in his other works, “heroic deeds and views of Dr. Faustroll ”Jarry's characters are characterized by a depersonalization and depersonalization that has become more typical. They can be fully characterized by a small set of features, their actions are shaped by irrationality and acausality, they are incapable of change and learning.
Doctor Faustroll, 'Pataphysicist
Doctor Faustroll is the title character of the novel and is considered by his followers to be the founder of 'pataphysics . In the second chapter of the book ( Of Habits and Measures of Doctor Faustroll ) it is reported that the doctor was born in 1898, when the XX. Century (−2) years old, was born in Circassia at the age of 63, an age that he maintained throughout his life. In stature he is a man of average height, that is, to be completely truthful, of 8 * 10 10 + 10 9 + 4 * 10 8 + 5 * 10 6 atomic diameters.
Panmuffel
René-Isidor Panmuphle [Panmuffel in the German translation] accompanies Dr. Faustroll on his adventurous journey. By profession a bailiff in the field, he is (made) the narrator himself in the course of the "plot" and acts as a representative of the ignorant, scientifically uneducated listener. Torn from his world of rules and protocols, he becomes the rower of the boat on which the tour company is without being asked.
Cheek hump
Backenbuckel, originally Bosse-de-Nage , is the dog-headed baboon Faustrolls, with whose presence the boat's crew completes itself. Backenbuckel's function in the novel is primarily to comment on all significant events in the text in the same way; by adding the only two words he is able to speak in French: Ha and Ha. This is particularly funny in the consistency of the implementation:
- HAHA, said Hunchback, but this time he didn't add anything to it.
- HAHA said humpback, then covered himself in stubborn silence.
- He said HAHA in summary and he did not get lost in more detailed considerations.
A separate chapter is devoted to HAHA ( Chapter 29: Of some more obvious meanings of the word HAHA ), in which it is transferred to a problem of identity. HAHA has the habit of becoming AA in French, a tautology in Jarry's definition, where A is not equal to A but corresponds to A. Since this duality lacks the third dimension, Jarry continues, Backenbuckel was "inaccessible to the idea of progress that the image of the spiral carries." Bosse-de-Nage also sees himself as a satirization of the Belgian writer Christian , whom Jarry disliked Beck, whose pseudonym was Bossi.
27 quintessences
On board the As are the three figures and the 27 quintessences of the 27 books from Faustroll's possession - the most important from almost 2,700 years of literature - including the 28th book, which wrote the unfinished manuscript of 'Pataphysik, von Faustroll, itself is what Panmuffel reads in the course of the plot. The 27 works include the Gospel of Luke as well as Homer's Odyssey . The eye of Prince Calendar III travels from the Thousand and One Nights . from Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth two and a half miles from the crust of the earth, and from Ubu Roi , Jarry's grotesquely comic drama, the premiere of which in 1896 had become one of the most famous scandals in French theater history , the fifth letter of the first word of the first act (the “r” in the deformed vulgarism “Merdre”).
The 27 books represent a kind of literary pluriverse of the text. Quotes, incidents and names are distilled, extracted and further used from them at will in a fist roll. With such a loud intertextual voice, it is nevertheless difficult for the reader to decipher this literary cosmos again in the text: the literature that has been negotiated and transformed is too diverse, too comprehensive.
content
The prelude to the novel is the printed payment order in accordance with Article 819 of the Code of Civil Procedure, including the official stamp of the bailiff Panmuffel, who stipulates the attachment of Faustroll's property due to rent debts. Faustroll's journey begins with the transformation of his bed into a sieve that is both a boat and a vehicle. The imaginary island worlds that the traveling party encounters chapter by chapter originate from literary fictions by other authors, artists (e.g. Paul Gauguin ) and musicians, who sometimes appear as kings of the islands. The journey is like a literary odyssey through presurrealistic head and dream worlds. At the linguistic level, too, it is sometimes difficult to capture contexts of meaning. The model of the ancient, traveling wanderer Odysseus is of course omnipresent. In the end, the ace is sunk by self-dismantling (Faustroll destroys his ship and with it himself), and its occupants, including quintessences and ideas, are left to drown ( Book 7, Chapter 36 ). What follows are telepathic letters from Faustroll from his new state of being, which end with the chapter "From the surface of God" ( Chapter 41 ) and the calculation of God, the classical philosophical proof of God, which is mathematically carried out here.
An appendix added in 1899 closes with “useful explanations on the proper construction of a machine for researching time”.
The theory of 'pataphysics in the second book ( chapters 8-9 ) is placed next to, before and overriding this main part ( chapters 11-36 ). The trip is followed by considerations and calculations, some of which go back to excerpts from mathematical-scientific treatises of the time, such as Chapter 37 “The meter, the clock and the tuning fork” or Chapter 38 “The sun as a cold body”. The journey in the middle section is thus firmly gripped by fictionalized science.
Founding document of 'Pataphysik
General
Her followers are interested in the novel - here less the heroic deeds than the views of Dr. Faustrolls - as the founding document of " 'Pataphysics ", the science of imaginary solutions. Despite its grotesque and partly surrealistic features, the text is characterized by its inner closed logic. It is subject to an imagined logic and thus written in prose, as it were, 'pataphysics, proof of the compatibility of the incompatible. In the eighth chapter of the second book there is the definition of the 'Pataphysics of Dr. Faustroll:
An epiphenomenon is what is added to a phenomenon. Pataphysics, [...] whose real orthography must be 'Pataphysics, preceded by an apostrophe, in order to avoid a cheap pun, is the science of what is added to metaphysics, be it within it, be it outside it, or the rises just as far above these as that above physics. Ec: since the epiphenomenon is often accidental, pataphysics is supposed to be above all the science of the particular, even if one asserts that there can only be a science of the general. Its purpose is to examine the laws by which the exceptions are determined and to explain this beyond our universe; or, more modestly, it is meant to describe a universe that can be seen, and which perhaps should be seen instead of the traditional, because the laws of the traditional universe that one believes to have discovered are interrelationships between exceptions, albeit fairly frequent, for everyone But fall between accidental facts that do not even have the charm of uniqueness because they are limited to a few exceptional exceptions.
In short: 'Pataphysics is the science of imaginary solutions, which symbolically assigns the properties of objects as they are described by their effect to the basic patterns.
It also says in the same chapter:
Current science is based on the principle of induction: most people have seen one phenomenon precede or follow another often enough to conclude that it must always be so. Now this only applies most of the time, depends on the point of view and is subject to the law of convenience - and yet! Instead of formulating the law of the free fall of the bodies towards a center, one should rather prefer the thesis of the ascent of the void towards a periphery, considering the void as a unit of non-density, a hypothesis that is much less arbitrary is as the definition of the concrete, positive unit of density water? […] Why does everyone claim that the shape of a clock is round, which is obviously wrong because in profile it offers a rectangular, narrow, three-quarters elliptical image, and why the hell do you only notice its shape the moment you read the time of day?
The spiral as a leitmotif
The spiral, which was already of decisive importance in Ubu Roi , is also the structuring principle of the entire work in the neoscientific novel. It is the leitmotif of the respective sections and is constantly present in the text as a metaphor for 'pataphysics'. For his part, Faustroll is wrapped in a spiral shape in a two-tone wallpaper printed with spiraling trains, in which he bathes every morning. Rolled out by forensic experts after drowning, in its metaphysical state it unfolds its knowledge in ever wider circles until it finally comes to the answer to the crucial question .
This question was of course already asked in Chapter 14 ( Vom Liebeswald ). Here a suntanned man in a brightly colored smock asks in the middle of a small triangular town of Faustroll, whose name is as obvious as it is significant with the hero of Goethe : “Are you a Christian?” “Like M. Arouet , M. Renan and M. Charbonnel “Explains Panmuffel. “'I am God,' said Faust- roll. "HAHA," said Backenbuckel, without further comment. "
From the surface of God
Faustroll knows: God is not dead, but he is mathematically calculable. In a detailed equation he shows that God is the tangent point between zero and the amount of infinity and that, according to its structure, it is a double triangle in Aethernitas .
He does extensive calculations and comes to the conclusion:
"DIEU EST LE POINT TANGENT DE ZÉRO ET DE L'INFINI."
and:
" La Pataphysique est la science ... "
The novel closes with this unfinished sentence, which deliberately remains a fragment. "Pataphysics is science ..." It is up to the attentive reader to finish this sentence on his own or not to do it. 'Pataphysics is the science ... which means the dissolution of every reality into possibility. It makes it clear that anything imaginable is possible that can be imagined. But what is the meaning of the novel as this insight? What's the moral of the story? Jarry owes the answer and leaves it open whether the "heroic deeds and views of Doctor Faustroll, 'pataphysicist" are parodies as an end in themselves, provocation, food for thought, perpetuated joke or all rolled into one.
Work title
The title of the work “Heroic Deeds and Views of Doctor Faustroll” can be used as an allusion to the work title Life and Views of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman , on Goethe's work Faust. A tragedy. and the person on which it is based, Johann Georg Faust, and the Scandinavian mythical creature Troll .
Bibliography
- Alfred Jarry: Gestes et opinions du docteur Faustroll (original French text online)
- All German quotations from: Alfred Jarry: Heroic deeds and teachings of Dr. Faustroll [pataphysicist] . Edited and translated by Irmgard Hartwig and Klaus Völker, Gerhardt Verlag Berlin 1968.
- Klaus Ferentschik: 'Pataphysics. Temptation of the mind. The 'Pataphysik and the Collège de' Pataphysik. Definitions, documents, illustrations , Berlin 2006.
- Thomas M. Scheerer: Fantasy solutions. Small textbook of pataphysics . With texts by Alfred Jarry, Raymond Queneau and Irénée-Louis Sandomir, Rheinbach-Merzbach 1982, ²1983.