SOURCE: Cutshall, J. A. “‘Excuses Madame Rachilde’: The Failure of Alfred Jarry's Novels.” Forum for Modern Language Studies 24, no. 4 (October 1988): 359-74.

In the following essay, Cutshall examines the critical and commercial failure of Alfred Jarry's novels, providing an overview of the works themselves and their historical context, and suggests that a radical reappraisal of Jarry's work as a novelist is long overdue.

How, and why, did Alfred Jarry come to write his seven novels? To some, this question, which I will endeavour in this article to go some way towards answering, will no doubt appear banal. To others, in the light of these works' scant success and the fact that, as a corpus, they are little read even by scholars, it will probably just seem a matter of no great importance. It would be easy to claim that attitudes such as these which might reasonably, eighty years after...