CONTENTS

Extra footnotes to “How to Construct a Time Machine” by Alfred Jarry:

— From Selected Works of Alfred Jarry, edited by Roger Shattuck and Simon Watson Taylor. New York: Grove Press, 1965. Reprinted here by permission of Grove Press, Inc. The piece originally appeared in the February 1899 issue of the Mercure de France under the title: “Commentaire pour servir à la construction pratique de la machine à explorer le temps.”

Keith Beaumont comments: "This lengthy article—whose author was given, in the Mercure, as ‘Dr. Faustroll’—was inspired by H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine which had recently appeared in a French translation by Henry Davray. Where Wells was interested primarily in the uses to which such a machine might be put, Jarry was fascinated by the idea of the machine. He was of course as aware as anyone of the inherent contradictions, not to say absurdities, of such a notion, but far from wishing to expose such contradictions, he set out to play with them” (Keith Beaumont, Alfred Jarry: A Critical and Biographical Study. New York: St Martin’s Press, 1984, pp. 333-34.

— Professor Shattuck writes that Paul Valéry “at the beginning of his career (in an essay inspired by H. G. Wells) developed his theory of the symbol as a “‘time machine’ that fuses and embodies different states” (Paul Valéry, Occasions, translated by Roger Shattuck and Frederick Brown with an Introduction by Roger Shattuck [Princeton: at the University Press, 1970], xxix).