"This catalogue is published on the occasion of the first major museum exhibition in America devoted to the French writer and artist Alfred Jarry (1873-1907). The eclectic, enigmatic bent of Jarry's achievements and the fugitive nature of his early works have posed challenges to the perception of his complex role in the acceleration of modernism. By exploring artifacts of his enterprises in print and on paper, the catalogue Alfred Jarry: The Carnival of Being aims to contribute to a broader appreciation that has already begun: to position Jarry as a crucial hinge connecting the nineteenth- to the twentieth-century avant-garde, and to begin by considering Jarry's exploitation of the medium of the book as both cause and effect of his place in the spectral projects of modernism"--