Pataphysics-the Science of Imaginary Solutions
Pataphysics is a rather obscure word. In our time, it’s probably best known from
the Beatle’s song Maxwell’s Silver Hammer: “Joan was quizzical; Studied pataphysical Science in the home.”
I’ve heard those lyrics many times without knowing or really thinking about what “pataphysical” means.
Pataphysics was invented by an eccentric French writer, Alfred Jarry (1873-1907), who was an early modernist playwright. I was reading about this in Peter Gay’s recent book, Modernism- The Lure of Heresy.
Jarry calls pataphysics, “the science of imaginary solutions, which symbolically attributes the properties of objects, described by their virtuality, to their lineaments.”
I like the first part of that -”the science of imaginary solutions,” though the rest of that
sentence is typically convoluted European metaphysics -virtuality…lineaments?
This type or nonsensical or paradoxical thinking is important, though, and helped to inspire the Dada and Surrealist movements. This was part of a wider reaction against rationalism and industrialization.
