SOURCE: Eruli, Brunella. “Jarry's Messaline: The Text and the Phoenix.” L'Esprit Créateur 24, no. 4 (winter 1984): 57-66.

In the following essay, Eruli argues that although Jarry's novel, Messaline, may be set in ancient Rome, it resembles the symbolist Art Noveau of Mossa and Klimt in that it is concerned with representing a place outside of space and time; also the phoenix in Messaline serves as a symbol for the work itself, repeatedly dies and is reborn, one meaning killed off as another arises, always provisional.

One might easily think that, in writing Messaline, Jarry was simply indulging in one of the commonest of male fantasies: the female at once insatiable and impenetrable, virgin and sinner, whore and mother.¹ It was one which, sublimated as an artistic myth, ravaged all before it last century, from Mallarmé's Hérodiade to Moreau's Messaline, from the Salomé of Oscar Wilde or Strauss...