Tyranny as a Childlike Power. The Ubu Roi of Alfred Jarry

Abstract

In the eighties of the nineteenth century Ubu comes into the world. Thanks to Alfred Jarry, in around ten years this imaginary tyrant with unrestrained longings will rise to an outstanding position in the Parisian theatrical arena. Ubu, anyway, is not a mere culture phenomenon: he is also – better, he is first of all – the outcome of an unprecedented and primitive reflection on power. So Ubu, from the beginning, is the embodiment of the excess, the expression of tyranny as the childish power par excellence, driven by a bulimic imagination and dragged by overwhelming yearnings, always associated with the denial of any decorum and mediation. Ubu is, to a certain extent, one of the most prophetic and accurate anticipations of that imbalance between the autocrat’s longings and the endurance degree of the environment around him: a political pathology which will be the eminent and dramatic feature of the terrible catastrophes of the 20th century. Jarry’s work is even more significant when, in the last of its plays, describes an institutional system protected by a brittle glass bell, unbreakable only by those who hesitate to strike it, and an administrative apparatus so much subject to arbitrary power that it seems built «by the tyrant himself».