Monday, January 30, 2012

Lurching into the unknown ...

... Book Review: Alfred Jarry - WSJ.com. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Despite, or because of, the riots the play was a great success. Jarry, however, proved unable to renew himself. Novels and plays, full of brilliant phrases and scenes poured out from him over the next decade, but these tended to rely on incidents in his own life made "Jarryesque" by crude satire and a liberal use of expletives. A huge play, based on the Renaissance satirist Rabelais, kept being rewritten, first for marionettes, then as an operetta. Nothing came of it.

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