Ubu Triumphant! A Farce in Five Fits
Christopher Bernard
Introductory Note:
In the opening weeks of 2017, and the first administration of Donald J. Trump, I wrote a number of parodies of Western and American literary texts – from the first chapter of Genesis to poems by T. S. Eliot – expressing the horror, desperation, and absurdity that I and many others felt after a human being who was one of the worst possible candidates in our nation’s history was elected to the most powerful position in the world.
The most ambitious idea I had at the time was to write an adaptation and updating of Alfred Jarry’s notorious absurdist, proto-Dadaist play, Ubu Roi. Jarry’s epic farce, itself an anarchic adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, is the seed of the Theater of the Absurd, which commanded the world’s stages in the wake of World War II, the Holocaust, and the madness of the “mutual assured destruction” of the Cold War. I saw a host of parallels between the unleashed id and power-hungry clown of the anti-hero assassin and tyrant Ubu and our own newly elected president, and I went as far as marking up my copy of the play before buckling down to writing my own version. But other projects demanded time and energy, the opportunity seemed to slip away, and by the end of four years, I was convinced Donald Trump had been definitively tossed into the ashbin of history. My play could be laid to rest as a quaint relic of a bizarre but safely forgotten era.
Earlier this year, while still trying to absorb the extent of this disaster, I remembered my old idea and spent the next month writing Ubu Triumphant! as a way to disgorge some of my own sense of profound horror at what we had allowed to happen. But the relief has been temporary. My sense of outrage and, more importantly, the vessels of the people’s wrath at the deeds of the dictator of our newly defined order are, as I write, being refilled with every passing day and every passing hour.
—Christopher Bernard
Christopher Bernard is an award-winning poet, novelist and essayist, and a co-editor (with Ho Lin, Steven Hill, and Jonah Raskin) as well as the original founder of Caveat Lector. His third collection of poems The Socialist’s Garden of Verses won a PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award and was named one of “The Top Indie Books of 2021” by Kirkus Reviews. He is also
recipient of an Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement Award. His novels include A Spy in the Ruins (“one of the best American novels since Thomas Pynchon and William Gass,” Miguel de Cervantes–award winning novelist Juan Goytisolo), Voyage to a Phantom City (“an enormous achievement,” award-winning translator Peter Bush), and Meditations on Love and
Catastrophe at The Liars’ Cafe. (“puts one in mind of Ulysses as much as Naked Lunch,” award-winning poet Ernest Hilbert). His most recent books are the middle-grade stories, the first in the
“Otherwise” series, – If You Ride A Crooked Trolley... and The Judgment Of Biestia, which won an Independent Press Award in Preteen Fiction in 2025.
Image from Project Gutenberg