The breaking down of the divine substrate of sovereignty comes with an inevitable secularization, which has been openly at work since Napoleon turned his back on Pius VII. As the sovereigns disappear from the throne as gods they reappear at its side as mere men; their acts become increasingly independent and they end up turning into a parody of their divine ancestors. One of the best and earliest examples of this process is Alfred Jarry’s play Ubu Roi (1896), one of the most important references for Dadaism, Surrealism and the Theater of the Absurd.¹

A despicable and vulgar character, Père Ubu is a demoted captain of dragoons who, instigated by his wife, Mama Ubu—a cross between a fishwife and Lady Macbeth—decides to take the throne of Poland leaving the kingdom in tremendous disarray. The play is based on a farce Jarry and his childhood friends wrote while studying at the Lycée de Rennes to ridicule Félix-Frederic Hébert, the physics professor at the institution. In fact, the name Ubu comes from an affected and infantile pronunciation of Hébert.

Filled with phallic and fecal allusions (which Freud’s theory would soon illuminate), Ubu Roi describes the rise to power of a coward, obese, capricious and sadistic usurper who is completely obsessed with power. Regarding the intersection between violence and law (0.10, 1.17), one scene in particular shows the role of the sovereign as the most gaudy (and funny) executioner. Once King Ubu has ascended to the throne, he summons his nobles to his palace with the excuse of doing some accounting; his true intention is, of course, to execute them by throwing them through a hatch that clearly recalls a toilet:

PA UBU. Bring the first Noble and hand me the nobles’ hook. Those who are condemned to death will be dropped down the hole. They’ll fall into the dungeons of the pigstickers and there in to torture chamber they will be disembrained. (To the NOBLE.) Who are you, buffroon?

FIRST NOBLE. Count of Vitebsk.

PA UBU. What are your revenues?

FIRST NOBLE. Three million zlotys.

PA UBU. Guilty. (He grabs the Noble with the hook and puts him down the hole.)

MA UBU. What vile felony!

PA UBU. Second Noble, who are you? (No answer.) Will you answer me, buffroon?

SECOND NOBLE. Grand Duke of Posen.

PA UBU. Excellent, excellent! No further questions. Down the hatch. Third Noble, who are you? You have an ugly mug. 

THIRD NOBLE. Duke of Corand and of the cities of Riga, Revel, and Mitau.

PA UBU. Down the hatch! Fourth Noble, who are you?

FOURTH NOBLE. Prince of Podolia.

PA UBU. What are your revenues?

FOURTH NOBLE. I am flat broke.

PA UBU. That dirty word! down the hatch…²

Ubu Roi, as the King in Alice in Wonderland, wears his crown over his wig (1). When Mama Ubu complains of his sadism, Ubu answers like a five-year-old: “Hah! I’m getting rich. I’m going to have MY list of MY holdings read to me. Clerk, read me MY list of MY holdings.”³ Here’s a terrifying reminder of the over-compensations that shape human nature: in the absence of all dignity, human or divine, the sovereign regresses to an earlier stage of psychological development. One only has to think of Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro and more recently Javier Milei.

But even more important than his prescience, Jarry places his parody of sovereignty in a very particular scenario, a threshold. “After a musical prelude of far too many brasses to be less than fanfare” he says in his presentation to the play, 

The curtain uncovers a decoration that would like to represent Nowhere, with trees at the feet of the beds and white snow under a clear blue sky, given that the action takes place in Poland, a country sufficiently legendary and dismembered as to be that Nowhere...⁴

With his particular pataphysical wit, Jarry imagines a place that is not such, a threshold that is neither here nor there but everywhere, for he has seen the villainies of the world embodied in a high school teacher and understands that the twilight has opened its maws and swallowed us whole.

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1. W.B. Yeats, who attended the premiere, later said: “After Stéphane Mallarmé, after Paul Verlaine, after Gustave Moreau, after Puvis de Chavannes, after our own verse, after all our subtle colour and nervous rhythm, after the faint mixed tints of Conder, what more is possible? After us the Savage God.” ↩︎
2. Alfred Jarry, Ubu Roi, 129. ↩︎
3. Ibid., 130. ↩︎
4. Taken from “Otra presentación de Ubú Rey” in Ediciones Cátedra, 93.  ↩︎