L'Amour ploymorphe d'Alfred Jarry

The theme of love is a constant throughout Jarry's major works; however, each one examines love from a unique angle. As love metamorphoses from work to work, it gives evidence of a particular facet of Jarry's own personality. If we synthesize our analyses of the individual works, it becomes clear that the various manifestations of love in Jarry's literary universe contribute to a coherent ontological statement: the oblique personal vision is omnipotent and is capable of creating and destroying reality by its own volition. L'Amour en visites (1898), by means of a series of eleven brief tableaux, condenses Jarry's kaleidoscopic vision of love into a single work. Through a detailed analysis of each tableau we establish that Jarry's fundamental motif, the supremacy of the individual's perception, structures each one, affording the reader a panoramic view, in miniature, of his total literary creation. (In French) (LKS)