César antéchrist

Paris: Éditions du Mercure de France, 1895. First edition. 146, [8] pp. Original wrappers, stamped in gilt on the front cover. Slightly chipped at the head and tail of the spine. First leaf toned from old newspaper clipping laid in (listing Jarry's bibliography). A near fine copy of a fragile book.

Jarry's very rare second book. One of 197 copies on carré vergé à la cuve, of a total edition of 206 copies. Woodcut illustrations by Jarry printed in orange and black. The astonishingly modern cryptogrammatic typography of the title and dedication pages, designed by Jarry, anticipate the experiments of the Italian Futurists and Russian Constructivists, (truncated) not to mention the Dadaists. "Using a stupefying mixture of symbols from personal, mathematical, iconographic, and religious sources, Jarry constructed a universe of meanings that led: where eventually?" (Brotchie) And Roger Shattuck writes, "Aptly enough, Jarry constructed his two earliest books on a cyclic scheme: they contain all his styles. 'Minutes de sable mémorial' begins and ends with the refinements of symbolism, yet it holds some of Ubu's coarsest escapades. Even more patently, the four acts of 'César-Antéchrist,' Jarry's second volume, display a circular development. The drama recounts the collapse of the divine realm ('God is sleepy') into the second 'Heraldic Act,' during which Antichrist rules, descends further into the third 'Terrestrial Act,' where Père Ubu, the ubiquitous, dominates the scene with his oaths and his outrages, and then rises again in final judgment of it all. In this short play, Jarry carries us literally from the sublime to the ridiculous. Better than any statement of values or elaborate cosmology, it expresses his concept of how the universe is arranged. He presents Ubu as the representative of primitive earthly conduct, unrelieved by any insight into his own monstrosity, uncontrollable as an elephant on the rampage, earnest in his blundering.... Creating in Ubu a one-man demolition squad twenty years before Dada, he incorporated this figure into works that go on to broach transcendental values." OCLC locates thirteen copies in America.

References: Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years, p. 175. Alastair Brotchie. Alfred Jarry: A Pataphysical Life, p. 104. (Inventory #: 2440)