Alfred JARRY, Eugène DEMOLDER & Claude TERRASSE. Pantagr - Lot 21

Alfred JARRY, Eugène DEMOLDER & Claude TERRASSE. Pantagruel. Circa 1897-1911. Set of autograph manuscripts and drafts totaling 1016 pages. Exceptional collection of over a thousand pages: unpublished autograph manuscripts of Pantagruel, Alfred Jarry's longest-running project. Originally conceived as a Mirlitonesque fairy tale for the Théâtre des Pantins, Pantagruel was gradually transformed into a lyric play. An enormous mass of "hopelessly complex" manuscripts (Patrick Besnier) was reduced, in 1911, by Claude Terrasse and other collaborators, to a slender libretto for an opera bouffe. "This Pantagruel and the madness of the enterprise can scarcely be understood rationally as a libretto for a comic opera. [...] For Jarry, it was first and foremost a game, an exploration of connivances and complicities. There is not ONE Pantagruel, but literally five or ten, and in reality many more, like so many versions of a dream that is constantly being restarted, a veritable work in progress, born and growing out of its own impossibilities and contradictions. Neither an adaptation nor a continuation of Rabelais, not even a variation on his universe, Pantagruel is rather a dismantling followed by a reassembling, a skilful deterioration, a loving destruction, both trivializing (mise en mirliton) and cannibalizing Rabelais. At the heart of Jarry's relentlessness lies a desire to put an end not only to this particular work, but to literature as a whole, which he is trying to reduce to some infernal round of puppets. What was undoubtedly one of Jarry's great dreams thus lies behind the hybrid hybrid 'product' published as Pantagruel. In this dream, which sought to transcend literature and theater, Rabelais became both an absolute (in which Jarry sought to merge) and a disjointed puppet (he played with it). Only a few thousand pages, preferably illegible, could materialize this dream" (Patrick Besnier). The thousand sheets presented here, skilfully sorted, classified and commented on by an intimate connoisseur of Jarry's work, are of major interest for the study of this long-term undertaking. They enable us to retrace the various stages of writing, from the first attempts at adaptation in 1897 to the final stage, the playable version developed by Demolder and Terrasse. To all appearances, they come, for the most part, from "the enormous bundle of papers, in which were inextricably mixed illegible drafts in pencil, legible drafts in ink, copies and recopies of different versions, without order or numbering", entrusted in the early 1950s by the Matarasso bookshop to Emmanuel Peillet alias Sainmont. Known from the only analysis published by the latter in the fifteenth Cahier du Collège de Pataphysique (1954), this set has since disappeared from circulation. Sainmont claims to have extracted a 96-leaf manuscript from it, offered for sale in the catalog of the Matarasso bookshop in 1952. In all likelihood, this is the almost complete version of the 2nd version described below, totaling 105 pages. In addition, there are three manuscripts and three synopses of the last version from the Noël Arnaud collection (acquired at a public sale on June 20, 2005, lot 232). Detail, according to the classification used by Sainmont and Besnier, which divides the genesis into three stages: Version 1 (1897-1901) for the Théâtre des Pantins, with Willy's assistance. - First fragments and drafts, 27 pages in-8, autograph manuscript in ink with parts added in pencil; - Autograph drafts, 14 folio pages; - First draft, very close to the Rabelaisian work in language and form: autograph manuscript, 43 pages in-8, including a count in Terrasse's hand of a hypothetical performance; - Third draft, in verse, modernized at Claude Terrasse's request, 57 pages, mostly folio: clean copy with additions and corrections. 30 pages in Jarry's hand (prologue, 1st and 2nd acts), carefully edited with didascalies and character names underlined in red; 22 pages attributed to Mazade; contains Claude Terrasse's plan reproduced in the Almanach du Père Ubu 1899, with, on the back, the program for the Théâtre des Pantins on rue Ballu (2 pages in-folio). "It's a fact that the manuscripts of the modernized versions of the I[ère] version are all incomplete. Only the Prologue and 1st Act are to be found, carefully written and underlined in red ink. So much so, in fact, that we wondered whether the ending had ever been fully written" (Sainmont, Cahier de Pataphysique no. 15, 1954, p. 26). Ve