This study examines the nature of the comic in the work of the French writer Alfred Jarry. At first glance, it is explained by traditional structural features, based on the principle of the juxtaposition of opposing phenomena. When perceiving Jarry's texts, the reader may think that the writer protests against the ugly aspects of life and human nature. If that is so, Jarry is comparable to Rabelais and other famous masters of laughter. However, when determining the specificity of Jarry's comic principle, one must consider its universal conceptual nature. The fundamental contradiction underlying his comic style is the opposition to a metaphysical mode of thought of the doctrine which Jarry characterises as “pataphysics”. Becoming Jarry's primary means of overcoming a metaphysical worldview, the comic is generated in his texts through a phenomenon he designates as “clinamen”, a term deriving from Epicurus's teaching on the atom, which is capable of making minor, arbitrary deviations from a straight line of fall, thus demonstrating the presence of freedom in nature. In Jarry, the comic, while losing its familiar meaning, serves as a means of overcoming a metaphysical way of thinking through deviations from the norm of rationality. Not for the purpose of restoring it, as in Rabelais, for example, but rather to ultimately destroy all normativity through the pataphysical destruction of logocentrism and its binary structure.
For citation: Taganov A.N. The nature of the comic in the works of Alfred Jarry, Ivanovo State University Bulletin, Series: Humanities, 2026, iss. 2, pp. 43—51.