This turned out to actually be a really interesting read. Though short it is full of insight relevent not just to some obscure poetical form but for aesthetics as a whole. I have always loved Jarry but despite the ubiquity of his name throughout avant-garde literature this is the first peice that I have been able to find that takes a critical and philosophical look at what it was he was actually doing (important for the fact that Jarry never outright explained it, rather he acted upon it, in life as well as in wiriting).

The elegance of Bok's writing makes the erudite concepts easy to follow despite ones not always being familiar with particular postmodern philosophies concerning language and knowledge. Definitely serves as a jumping off point into some really great stuff. I couldn't agree more with Bok in his description of Jarry's paralogy as not being against logic or rationality, but as serving to reconcile math and science with poetry. Where "in the world of possibilities, reality is the exception," Jarry offers a pataphysical universe where poetic exploration serves as a liberation from paradigmatic constraints on actual existence, not as a type of metaphysical transcendence that fills the new age isles in every bookstore but as a pataphysical reality in which meaning is liberated from objectivity and epistemelogical anarchy serves as the impetus to an infinite amount of permutations for creativity. "To explore the rule is to be emancipated from it by becoming the master of its potential for surprise, whereas to ignore the rule is to be imprisoned in it by becoming the slave to the reprise of its intention." Rule is not puerily caste aside for some sort of petulant rebellion, rather it is apperceptively used and superextended in a hyperbolic Umour that creates its own world replete with charicatured contradictions and personified irony, getting one over on metaphysics by getting one over on itself.

The historical mapping of Jarry's ideas was also very enjoyable to read. I had never considered the futurists as being so intimately related to Jarry before, never really knew what the hell Oulipo was doing (l'OUvroir de LIttérature POtentielle, who knew?), and never even heard of the Canadian Jarryites before. Overall Bok's breakdown of the structure and nature of Pataphysics (though not being exhaustive) and his extensive knowledge of those who do and have experimented within 'Pataphysics (both poets and philosophers alike) make this well worth the time and reinvigorates the individual creative process, not by offering some new form or fad, but by looking into the nature of the poetic experience itself(be it writing or reading) as being just as fantastical as that of the logical and thus instilling the poetic back into the scientific, the scientific with the poetic, and revealing the distinction as merely superficial when, all things being equal, reality is just as outrageous as what it could have been, and by extension, will be. Ha-Ha ( )

am still ruminating & regesting; very nice to have a survey of post-jarry pataphysics; very heady (and ironic?) to read it in such academic prose, but that's how it is

nothing i'd read to my aunt irma long distance over a telephone, but some folks here i know will dig it 'tho


"pataphysics is the science ... " ( )