Fin-de-Siècle Physiology as Sexual Farce: Alfred Jarry’s The Supermale (1902)

Abstract

Explains ways Jarry’s novella combines his interests in sex, sport, and machines to investigate the nature of human limits and the consequences of transgressing them. Believes Jarry presents a pair of physical ordeals – a prolonged bout of sexual intercourse and a long-distance bicycle race – to celebrate and satirize the new craze for breaking records, and to explore the comic-horrific limits of the clinical gaze and its objectification of the human organism. Claims these preoccupations put Jarry’s book not at the margins, but at the center of a fin-de-siècle scientific culture whose unashamed romanticizing of human potential eventually fell victim to the growing sophistication and specialization within the field of human biology after the First World War.