SOURCE: Bridgeman, Teresa. “Innovation and Ambiguity: Sources of Confusion in Personal Identity in Les Jours et Les Nuits.” French Studies: A Quarterly Review 45, no. 3 (July 1991): 295-307.

In the following essay, Bridgeman examines the linguistic ambiguity and innovation of Jarry's second novel, Les Jours et Les Nuits, and his contemporaries' mystified and unreceptive response to it.

Alfred Jarry's Les Jours et les nuits: Roman d'un déserteur presents a challenge in ambiguity which few readers appear prepared to take up.¹ Remy de Gourmont, in his review for Le Mercure de France of Jarry's early collection, Les Minutes de sable mémorial, defends obscurity which, as part of the process of literary innovation, represents the essence of the creative spirit; and blames the reader for any difficulties in reading: ‘L'obscurité en écriture, quoi? La préface de M. Jarry donne un système par lequel un anatomiste se guiderait,—mais...