Pataphysics

A piece about the possible response Seneca would have made to Lucilius about the literature and discussion on some minor details of the Sherlock Holmes stories.

He probably would have wrote to Lucilius that there are some silly, and useless, discussions going on in that perimeter, and  that despite the pseudo-erudition that they can provide, his friend should avoid that type of studies.

The twentieth century has brought not only the unprecedented technical revolution
which completely changed the world over some hundred years, but also claimed for
another revolution, the artistic one, in order to overturn the traditions in visual arts,
literature, theatre and create new forms and techniques. For Europe Paris became the centre of such innovations as Symbolism, Dada, Surrealism, Theatre of the Absurd, Panic, etc. These phenomena considerably contributed to the transformation of art in its postmodern evolution. Among other significant concepts Pataphysics is less discovered yet it may be considered as a cradle of Surrealism, Dada, Absurd and Panic, furthermore the Collège de 'Pataphysique is still active nowadays. Alfred Jarry first used the term Pataphysique in his plays about King Ubu, but fundamentally  evealed this concept in the novel “Gestes et opinions du docteur Faustroll,  ataphysicien” (1898). This book is regarded as the Bible for the Collège de  Pataphysique which actually functions in several countries, including Lithuania, where Institutum Pataphysicum Vilniense was inaugurated in 2013. A French writer of Spanish origin Fernando Arrabal – Satrap of the Collège de 'Pataphysique, at present holds the right to award the chosen artists with the Order of the Grande Gidouille. This paper examines the influence of Jarry’s Pataphysics to the French literature of avant-garde and in particular to one of its representatives Fernando Arrabal.

"El cementerio de automóviles" fue escrito antes de la creación del “Grupo” Pánico y mucho antes de que Fernando Arrabal obtuviera el título de Sátrapa del Colegio 'Patafísico, no obstante, podemos intuir la inspiración ‘patafísica y el espíritu pánico en esta obra. La influencia de Alfred Jarry y sus ideas maravillosamente disparatadas en el joven en aquel entonces dramaturgo es probablemente fáctica, y con toda seguridad perceptible.

En este trabajo se propondrá una lectura de Ayer, de Juan Emar, a la luz de la Patafísica. Para ello, tras caracterizar sus ideas fundamentales, se relacionará con la poética emariana el concepto de epifenómeno. Hecho esto, se verá de qué manera esta lectura cruzada propone un nuevo punto de vista sobre la Moder-nidad. Llevar a cabo este estudio es relevante, por cuanto una lectura patafísica del texto de Emar puede arrojar nuevas luces sobre su poética y complementar algunos puntos acerca de la metafísica emariana. PPPPPPPP : Patafísica, Modernidad, Juan Emar, Alfred Jarry. ABSTRACT: This study intends to propose an interpretation of Ayer, by Juan Emar, using some ideas from Pataphysics. Through a brief description of the discipline, wetll shed some light on the links between emarian poetics and the concept of epiphenomenon. Then, we'll show how this interpretation brings to light some new points of view about Modernity. This article is relevant, since a pataphysic revision of Emar's work may shed light over his poetics and complete some ideas about the author's metaphysics.

Imaginary media are machines that mediate impossible desires. As such they can be considered impossible machines. Because of their impossibility they appear to belong to the domain of pataphysics, the realm of imaginary solutions, or the study of unlogic. ey would seem to be entirely ctional creations, objects that exist only as literary or folkloristic imaginaries. If this were so, then it would be most straightforward to deal with imaginary media as purely narrative devices. ey would then in simplest terms be regarded as stories that convey what technological media are seen to be capable of. More o en than not, the expectations contained in such imaginaries far exceed that what actual media machines are actually capable of doing. However, impossible desires are also ascribed to or projected onto actual media machines both by their designers and by the public. e transition between imaginary and actual media machines, in terms of their signi cation, can be almost seamless. us the imaginaries of imaginary media tend to weave in and out of the purely imagined and the actually realized media machineries. Because impossible desires can never be fully realized or satis ed, imaginary media exceed the domain of apparatuses (realized media machines) and their "histories." ey articulate a highly complex eld of signi cation and determination that tends to blur the boundaries between technological imagi-naries and actual technological development. e archaeology of imaginary media is an attempt to shi attention somewhat away from a history of the apparatus and to focus on the imaginaries around technological media-communication media in particular-of both realized and unrealized media machines. e archaeology of imaginary media also suggests a shi away from the utilitarian and toward the phantasmatic in "excavating"

Jean Baudrillard, a French philosopher who is widely known for his post-Marxism, post-structuralism, post-modernism, and contributions to pataphysics, began acknowledging that people would treat some objects with different levels of meaning that stretch far beyond the physical properties of the object. With further research, he found that the problem occurred at a much deeper level, where objects that were meant as mediums, such as pictures, were soon being valued for just as much, if not more, than the objects that they were meant to represent. He noted that the referential objects were known as signs and continued his research through careful observation. As his theories expanded, he realized that one country, like no other, was the center of the sign and false realities: America. Baudrillard set off on a journey, similar to that of Alexis De Tocqueville, and noted his observations of the sign within America. When put in combination with his earlier theories and work on Marx’s “kritik of kaptial”, it can be clearly seen that America’s current situation is the result of the capitalist structural change that occurred in the 1920s and have since been leading America as the epicenter of Baudrillard’s “hyperreality”.

PATAPAMM!!! Saggio artistico di filosofia della scienza, e perché no di una scienza di tutte le scienze che ha il potere sarcastico di chi non ha alcun bisogno di riconoscere la menzogna cerca la Verità della Realtà di una Libertà apparentemente apparente di un mondo fatto di apparenza ma che si distingue per una sola certezza: il ruolo delle cose, della natura e dell'uomo nella realtà, sia essa sociale, ambientale o addirittura psicologica: un'unica modalità di mondare il mondo da cima a fondo. A fronte delle frette di frotte di umani che corrono senza mai sapere dove andare, PATAPAMM!!! offre lo spunto per fermarsi e capire poi dove stiamo andando. Perdendo di vista ogni cosa, l'unica cosa che è certa sta nella sensibilità sensibile di una sensata essenza di sensazioni sentite e risentite ma mai in questo modo viste. Viaggiare in nessun posto e raggiungere l'obiettivo? PATAPAMM!!! è la risposta per provare ad arrivare dove ancora nessuno ha osato andare.

Mount Analogue (1944) is René Daumal's esoteric contribution to the mountain novel genre and the wider cultural phenomenon of "mountain reverence." It records the fate of an expedition that has set out to scale the summits of a singular edifice, incomparably high, situated at the crossroads of the real and the imaginary. The topography of this uncharted terrain is paradoxical in the extreme, it subjects whoever tries to climb it to a series of unnerving, haphazard encounters, each of which complicate our classical models of space, action and orientation. For Daumal these paradoxes require nothing less than a new branch of knowledge, to which he gives the name alpinism (the novel is just as much a treatise on this art as a narrative of events). The article reconstructs the guiding principles of this method, their intersection with a series of related theoretical models, from Kant's sublime to Derrida's trace, as well as the specific aesthetic contexts across which Daumal's euphoric engagement with the mountain is affirmed.

This paper discusses the relation between Duchamp's ‘amusing physics’ (physique amusante) and the pataphysics Alfred Jarry introduced in his fantastic novel Gestes et opinions du Docteur Faustroll, pataphysicien (1911). The fantastic machines Jarry staged in a novel like Le Surmâle (1902) and in the various stories he wrote for magazines such as La Revue blanche, La Plume and Le Canard sauvage have traces in common with the machineries Duchamp gave shape in – for example – his La Mariee mise à nu par ces célibataires, même. And Duchamp sometimes did refer directly to Jarry, for example to his famous 'merdre'.
More interesting though then the thematic parallels are the linguistic experiments Jarry and Duchamp both ventured on, showing some striking similarities.

A total of 84 people were killed in the 1993 Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) raid on Mount Carmel in Waco, Texas. Debates continue about who was responsible—e.g., was it a government conspiracy or cultist militants intent on mass suicide? What hasn’t been fully considered, however, is the role the guns, tanks, toxic gases, and other “theater of war” accoutrements themselves played in the siege and resultant deadly inferno. Traditional metaphysical inquiries rest on the presupposition that the subject is separate from and sovereign over the object it examines. But as we have entered this intensely visual consumer culture, differences between subject and object disappear and the power of the subject collapses. Employing the postmodern metaphysics—here and elsewhere called “pataphysics”—of Jean Baudrillard to investigate this tragic battle, the author will argue that the ATF and the FBI were seduced by the compound’s castle and arsenal as well as their own. The helicopters, snipers, tanks, and CS gas turned what had begun on February 28, 1993, as a raid to serve a search warrant into a full scale military-style attack on a fortress and its peoples. Could it be that the federal agents became and were subordinate to the tools they were using?

Le goût affirmé de s’affranchir des taxinomies disciplinaires ne s’est jamais démenti au sein de l’Oulipo, ensemble disparate d’érudits. De fait, l’Ouvroir compose avec une série d’ambiguïtés qui lui sont constitutives, cela notamment dans les relations entretenues vis-à-vis des savoirs. Une première polarité est repérable dans les origines ésotériques qu’il partage avec le Collège de ‘Pataphysique, société basée sur la connivence érudite mais surtout sur le goût de la farce et de la mystification. Ensuite, la relation privilégiée que le groupe entretient avec les sciences dures, et notamment les mathématiques, est à ressaisir dans la perspective d’un ethos collectivement configuré et distingué dans le champ littéraire. Enfin, davantage que les savoirs mathématiques, la contrainte se présente comme une propédeutique à la lecture et surtout le moyen d’une écriture démocratique en contexte technologique fort.
ABSTRACT
Oulipo’s trend to overcome academic field’s borders and taxonomies has never been questioned. De facto, this motley assemblage has to deal with a great deal of constitutive ambiguities, in its relation to Knowledge. A first polarity is detectable in the original relations Oulipo shares with the College of ‘Pataphysics, a semi-secret society, not only based upon very erudite connivance but also a strong taste for farce and mystification. Another element to enhance is the privileged relations Oulipians have with sciences and above all: mathematics. These are to be understood in the special perspective of a collectively configured ethos, especially designed to obtain distinction in the literary field. With the Oulipo, literary/mathematical constraints states themselves as pragmatic and ironic propaedeutic to reading and writing in a techno-democratic era.

This paper argues that the origin of Giorgio Agamben's abiding interest in inoperativity comes out of his largely overlooked engagement with pataphysics, and with the works of Alfred Jarry in particular. More than a mere reference point, pataphysics emerges as the fundamental signature underlying many of Agamben's philosophical practices and interests. In particular, we can see the imprint of pataphysics in terms of Agmaben's science of the real, the cultivation of a taste for the aesthetics of impossible things and non-knowledge, the politics of exceptionality, analogical empiricism (of paradigms), and the notion of form-of-life. At the same time, the article utilizes Agamben's pataphysics to reveal new meanings and uses for pataphysics, especially with regards to Jarry. In conclusion, the article offers up a theory of study that renders inoperative the signatures of pataphysics in Agamben's writings so that such signatures can make themselves intelligible and, in turn, open to new use.

« Le récit est par nature incomplet. Aucun auteur ne dit absolument tout sur la situation qu'il décrit. Tout récit pose un nombre indéterminé de pré-supposés, et c'est aux lecteurs de les compléter. Suivre une histoire consiste en partie à compléter ce que le narrateur ne dit pas. S'il s'agit de Sherlock Holmes, on va présupposer que c'est un homme, et non un androïde, même si Conan Doyle ne le précise jamais. » Noël Carroll (1996)

https://www.sshf.com/articles.php?id=88

ÖZET
Bu yazıdaki amacım perspektifteki kaçış noktasını ’patafizik yollarla sorunlaştırmak ve orijinizm adını verdiğim
yöntemin potansiyellerini göstermek. Orijinizm –uygulaması karmaşık olsa da– saptanan bir veya birkaç kaçış
noktasına, bir planın veya plan parçasının tüm çizgilerinin yöneltilmesinden ibarettir. Planda kaçış noktaları
varsaymak paradoksal olmakla beraber ilham verici olabilir. Bu işlem mimari işlev ve anlam ilkeleri gözetilmeden
uygulanır. Ancak algoritma mekanik bir işlemden ibaret değildir: “Klinamen” ya da “tasarımcının yorumu”
aşamasında, sonuçlar değerlendirilip gerekli görülen değişiklikler yapılabilir. Bir temsil aracı olarak mimari
perspektif faydacı bir araçtır ve mimarlık tarihinde önemli bir yeri vardır. Bu arka plana bakabilmek için önce
Erwin Panofsky’nin perspektif anlayışıyla Pavel Florenski’nin “tersten perspektif” kavramını karşı karşıya getirerek
felsefi bir tartışma yapmayı denedim. Bu karşıtlıkta Panofsky kaçış noktasının tekilleşmesinin bilimsel önemine
parmak basarken Florenski kurallı perspektife karşı çıkar. Bu tartışmadan sonra, Lucretiusçu klinamen kavramını
kerteriz alarak sapmanın kurucu potansiyeline dikkat çekmeye çalıştım. Klinamen (sapma), ’patafiziğe (hayali
çözümler bilimine), oulipo’ya (potansiyel edebiyat atölyesine), Pomi’ye (potansiyel mimarlık atölyesine) aynı
anda açılan bir kapıdır; ki bu makale bu üç pratiği birbirine bağlama iddiasındadır. Orijinizm, Pomi’nin icatlarından
biridir. Pomi, 2002 yılında Oulipo’dan esinlenerek başlattığım bir mimarlık atölyesidir. Orijinizmle, ’patafiziğin
temelini oluşturan istisnailiğe erişilir: Plandaki sistematik çarpıtma işlemi beklenmedik düzeyde istisnai bir durum
yaratır; öyle ki planın yeni hali üzerinde birçok mekânsal gözlemde bulunulabilir. Tarihsel olarak Oulipo’nun
yöntemleri mimarlığa da ilham vermiştir. 1960 yılında bir grup matematikçi, yazar, şair, bilim insanı ve sanatçının
bir araya gelerek “kısıt altında yazı”nın olanaklarını araştırmaya başlamasından neredeyse altmış yıl sonra, “kısıt
altında mimarlık” yapmanın Pomi’de benzer bir potansiyele işaret ettiği söylenebilir. Kısıt kullanmak, belli bir
olanağı kasten askıya alarak matematiksel yollarla beklenmedik sonuçlara ulaşmayı içerir ve birçok farklı
uygulamadan oluşur. Pomi’den önce mimarlık alanında kısıt konusunda ciddi deneylerin pek yapılmamış olması
şaşırtıcıdır. Böylece Pomi mimarlık eğitiminde son birkaç yıl içinde yepyeni bir alan oluşturmuştur; kendi
işlemlerini icat ederek ilk uygulamalarını yapmaya ve çarpıcı sonuçlar almaya başlamıştır. Mimari perspektifte
gözden çıkarak çizime yönelen ışık, çizimden çıkarak göze yönelse ne olurdu? Bu soruyla beraber Alfred Jarry’nin
ilk kez yirminci yüzyılın başlarında ortaya attığı ’patafiziğin, yani hayali çözümler biliminin mimarlık alanındaki
izdüşümlerini, perspektif kavramını çarpıtarak temellendirmeyi denedim. Orijinizm yöntemi, plan düzlemine
yerleştirilen hayali kaçış noktalarıyla planın yeniden şekillenmesini temel alan matematiksel bir prosedürdür ve
bir dizi ölçümsel işleme bağlı bir algoritmadır. Pomi’de önce mimari planda, sonra da kent ölçeğinde yapılan
birkaç tasarım deneyi, orijinizm’in mimarlık alanında hem mizahi hem oyuncul hem de potansiyel bir tasarım aracı
olabileceğine işaret etmektedir.
Anahtar Sözcükler: Potansiyel Mimarlık İşliği (Pomi), Oulipo, ’Patafizik, perspektif, kısıt altında mimarlık.

"Butter-Spades, Footnotes, and Omnium: The Third Policeman as Pataphysical Fiction

Anthony Adams

From a chance and momentary perusal of the Policeman’s notebook it is possible for me to give here the relative figures for a week’s readings. For obvious reasons the figures themselves are fictitious. (The Third Policeman 103, n.7)

An anthology devoted to small boxes, such as chests and caskets, would constitute an important chapter in psychology. These complex pieces that a craftsman creates are very evident witnesses of the need for secrecy, of an intuitive sense of hiding places. (Bachelard, Poetics of Space 81)


A third of the way through Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman, a reader might be encouraged to attempt the anthology Bachelard envisions; by its close, if not before, the same reader will be considerably dissuaded. Discouragement comes with the knowledge that such little boxes, which represent a psychological rather than a physical threshold, serve both to intrigue and mislead; The Third Policeman contains such elaborate boxes of misdirection that one might despair of ever finding the keys again. The novel tantalizes with its evocation of a brilliantly self-referential world filled with a most crazed sanity, and written in a relentlessly reflexive language. This style has encouraged readers to declare the novel an early exposition of the postmodern awareness that reality is not given, but written. Especially unnerving is a manifest distrust toward any language that threatens to describe reality, combined with a thrill in the madcap constructs of those who make the effort to do so. If the bulk of the action takes place in a hellish afterlife, or at least an intellectual purgatory, then The Third Policeman presents a curiously confusing hell in which inventiveness and verbosity pose greater dangers than any corporal punishment."

ABSTRACT
The discovery of playful, joyous yet mathematical constraints in architecture is one of Pomi’s (Studio for Potential Architecture, founded in 2002) fundamental concerns. Bold planning, a procedure invented among others in the studio can even be contemplated as a counterattack against the cult of thinness of our age. We live in an age where architectural sections hardly ever thicken. Is the progressive thickening of the cross section or of the plan in bold planning then, an equivalent to vulgarisation in language? A stylistic vulgarity (slang) in language does not correlate a building with a thick section. In this article I initially seek to touch on the background of carving out architectural procedures and link this tendency with Oulipo. I
survey the prospective equivalents of bold planning in fields like comics, literature and ’pataphysics. I outline a framework for Pomi by introducing “perversive” procedures; I then discuss some cases in
architectural and urban scale in which the procedure is tested, accompanied by drawings. Basic design must be for architecture what the figures in rhetoric are to the Oulipo. Oulipians invented constraints releasing language and breaking the yoke of conventional writing; an Oulipo procedure hardly prioritizes meaning or grammar. Likewise, this is inventing a playful procedure in architectural design not necessarily conforming to functionality and Pomi procedures perform systematic, mathematical operations that do not correspond
to the consistent codes in architecture. In bold planning, every constituent in the plan is gradually and
evenly thickened: Any plan can turn into a mass without a void, though such a mechanics leads nowhere just as a literary technique implemented blindly will not suffice for a piece of literature to come into being. The plan is then carved, to end up with thinner walls. The final step is “translating” the shell into an
architectural layout, remaining as faithful as possible to the former plan’s programmatic distribution. Pomi
procedures can be grouped into ten categories: Algorithms, uncertainties, translations, aggrandizements, inventories, exclusions, metamorphosis, measural constraints, perversions and finally, inversions. Bold
planning is grouped under the last one. Oulipo constraints can be used only when they are not necessary. This applies to Pomi procedures as well. Pomi procedures are criticism in action, which open up a fertile and intimate experimental space stemming from Queneau, Jarry, Durand, Genette, Perec, Calvino, Bök, Madden and the like. Pomi’s desire is to respond to the canonical with a humor inspired by Oulipo
and ’pataphysics; to put forth poetic consequences with a sarcastic gesture, as opposed to the deadly positivism of the royal sciences.
Keywords: Studio for potential architecture (Pomi), Oulipo, ’Pataphysics, procedural architecture,
architectural education.

Jorge Luis Borges once told a story about a library
of infinite knowledge – ‘The Library of Babel’
– a library so comprehensive that it contained
a copy of every book ever written, every book that
could be written, a library so vast that it even
included books not yet written, books started but
not finished, or even books that had only ever
been imagined. But what such a library could
never contain is the way in which a book changes
by being read – the ways that reading impacts
on, and potentially even re-writes, the story of
the text itself. One might think of a degree-zero
form of reading in which the act of engagement
becomes its own collaborative performance.
It is at this point that reading becomes a form
of writing, fulfilling Roland Barthes’s (1978)
insistence on the ‘birth of the reader’ as a form
of thoughtful engagement with otherwise
static written content. Or one could consider
the text materially, as a geographic site replete
with historical – even archeological – potential.
These books become relational and performative
sites upon which the physical materiality – one
might even (following Jane Bennett 2010) say
the ‘vibrant materiality’ – of the book takes
individualized form. The challenge would then
be to find ways to write and record this second
order interaction such as to reveal the hidden
histories of engagement archived within the
texts themselves.
This essay is a series of meditations on, around
and alongside Jorge Luis Borges’s story, asking
after the limits of writing as an archiving of
information with the specific intent to nuance
some of the idiosyncrasies of Borges’s tale in
order to explore other forms of thinking about
writing. For while ‘The Library of Babel’ outlines
one destiny of writing as an infinite number
of structural variations, to reduce writing to
the production of information is to miss the
embodied potential of a text seen otherwise.
This paper meditates on the performative
and inscriptive complexities of the written
word, extrapolating towards larger trajectories
of ephemerality in the processes of writing
and performance.

While much of Thomas Chimes's (1921-2009) work is deeply indebted to literature, each body of work (his metal and plexi box constructions, drawings, and later white paintings) maintained structured systems that dictated the composition-a process-based manifestation of the classicist and symbolist ideals in his work. In Exploits & Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, 'Pataphysician by Alfred Jarry (a seminal book to Chimes and his artistic practice), the narrator states, "For we are both of the opinion that if one can measure what one is talking about and can express it in numbers, which constitute the sole reality, then one has some knowledge of one's subject." This bold statement would become the subject of multiple late white paintings, and represents Chimes's strong ideological approach to manifesting Jarry's 'Pataphysics within the visual arts. In the artist's own exploration of what we believe, perceive, and feel he relied heavily on the quantifiable boundaries of the universe in astronomy, the body in anatomy and proportion systems, and composition through Fibonnaci's Golden Spiral and classical math formulas. Beyond literature and the arts, Chimes would also take interest in physicists and mathematicians that fused spirituality, philosophy and hard science. This exhibition and publication brings together exemplary works spanning the career of Chimes including drawings and white paintings that have never been exhibited and little-seen metal and plexi box constructions.

Alfred Jarry, in his thirty-four year lifetime that ended in 1907, laid the foundation for the avant-garde of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries’ Western culture. An innovator and rule-breaker, Jarry envisioned and formulated conscious 'Pataphysics, that is, the Science of imaginary solutions, the Science of the supplementary and virtual universe that investigates the particular and the dimension where art and science are on the same side of the coin. As a science and an esthetic, Pataphysics integrates fragmentation, juxtaposition, shifting semiotic borders, creative destruction, playfulness, decentralization, mirroring and data linking.

Resumen:
Clasificando el mundo para comprenderlo a su modo, Perec no cesó de trastocar las convenciones de lo sensible y las jerarquí­as establecidas. Su mirada confiere a la trivialidad, a los seres y a las cosas cotidianas una densidad inesperada que nos turba y nos maravilla.
Perec es uno de los escritores más interesantes e imaginativos del siglo XX que, además de haber sido el creador de los crucigramas semanales de la revista Le Point, de Parí­s, realizó guiones cinematográficos, varias novelas, poesí­as, ensayos literarios y sorprendentes piezas teatrales. Perec, continua siendo casi desconocido para el gran público, a pesar de que existen traducciones de sus obras a 15 idiomas y goza de celebridad entre autores –para quienes constituye una inspiración– como es el caso de Raúl Ruiz1, al modo como Jean Genet lo constituyo para Sartre.
La imagen que Perec dejó tras de sí­ es mitológica. Hombre de infatigable libertad, para quien las palabras eran el medio de imponer eternidad a los objetos, fue perfeccionando con minucia el retrato que iba a dejar a la posteridad.
Desde hace más de una década, Parí­s ha sido poseí­do por el culto a Perec, que se refleja en los incontables grupos teatrales, asociaciones de vecinos y clubes con su nombre. Todo autor francés de crucigramas ha desafiado alguna vez a sus lectores con los palí­ndromos, anagramas, heterogramas, homofoní­as, "bolas de nieve" y demás dramas alfabéticos en los que Perí¨c era un consumado maestro. Quienes lo conocieron dicen que era un hombre extraño, tierno, alegre, atento, curioso, con una inusual conciencia de su lugar en la historia.
Vestí­a siempre una camisa de cuello alto, se cortaba el pelo al rape y sus enormes ojos verdes, que centelleaban ante la menor respiración de la vida, le conferí­an un cierto aire seductor, disipado por los infinitos lunares y verrugas en las mejillas y las orejas apantalladas.
Dos años después parecí­a otra persona. Se habí­a dejado crecer una barba desflecada en la mandí­bula, que casi en seguida se volvió gris. El pelo enmarañado sobre la frente y los ojos, cada vez más abiertos, cada vez más asombrados, dominaban una cara radiante de tierna lucidez.
Adolfo Vásquez Rocca D.Phil

This unpublished paper was written as part of my MA in English at Concordia University.

"An analysis of Christian Bok's "The Xenotext: Book 1" with respect to its compositional origins and framework, and the categorization of such works as part of the canon of the 'abyssal sublime'."

Resumen - Abstract:
Alfred Jarry precursor del Dadaísmo, del Surrealismo y del Absurdo, recién llegado a París desde Laval, la ciudad que lo viera nacer el 8 de septiembre 1873, se convirtió en un habitué de los cenáculos frecuentados por los poetas simbolistas.
Alumno de Henri Bergson en la Sorbona, el aún incipiente dramaturgo era ya un hombre extremadamente cultivado, cuyos versos y artículos eran ya colaboraciones habituales en la 'Revue Blanche’, llegando el mismo a ser el fundador de 'L’imagier'. Consigue el aplauso del gran París en 1896 con Ubu rey, comedia satírica en la que se entremezclan referencias a Macbeth con los excesos de un monarca tan tirano con nobles y plebeyos como cobarde en la guerra.
Alfred Jarry inventa así la Patafísica, “ciencia de las soluciones imaginarias que otorga simbólicamente a las delineaciones de los cuerpos las propiedades de los objetos descritas por su virtualidad”, en su obra Gestos y opiniones del Dr. Faustroll, patafísico.
A partir de esta obra fundacional el colegio de Patafísica se define como una "sociedad docta e inútil dedicada al estudio de las soluciones imaginarias".
Dr. Adolfo Vásquez Rocca