Alfred Jarry

Alfred Jarry was born in Laval in 1873, his mother from Brittany. He wrote across hybrid genres — novels, poems, absurdist essays, opéras bouffes, speculative journalism — prefiguring postmodern style before the term existed. In 1896 he staged Ubu Roi, a play so crude and anarchic it's now seen as the blueprint for Dada, Surrealism, Futurism, and the theatre of the absurd that arrived decades later. He also invented 'pataphysics, a philosophical concept that outlived him. He died in 1907 at thirty-four.