Fin-De-Siecle Physiology As Sexual Farce: Alfred Jarry's the Supermale (1902).
Nineteenth-Century Prose 1998, Spring, 25, 1
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Publisher Description
In Alfred Jarry's novella The Supermale (1902) the famously eccentric author combines his interests in sex, sport, and machines to investigate the nature of human limits and the consequences of transgressing them. The Supermale presents a pair of physical ordeals--a prolonged bout of sexual intercourse and a long-distance bicycle race--for the purpose of both celebrating and satirizing the new craze for breaking records, as well as exploring the comic-horrific limits of the clinical gaze and its objectification of the human organism. These preoccupations put Jarry's book not at the margins, but at the center of a fin-de-siecle 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. **********