A Brief Pataphysical Study of the Word ‘and’ in Poetic Titles

When viewed under the lens of Alfred Jarry’s 'pataphysics — the so-called science of imaginary solutions that “symbolically attributes the properties of objects, described by their virtuality, to their lineaments” — the humble conjunction ‘and’ occupies a liminal space in poetic titles. Easily dismissed as a mere linguistic connector, ‘and’ here acts as a non-identical operator that defies conventional logic.  

Long acknowledged as a forerunner of the radical avant‑garde — Dada, Surrealism, and Futurism in the interwar decades, and the Theatre of the Absurd in the postwar years — 'pataphysics is the invention of French symbolist writer Alfred Jarry, author of Exploits and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, Pataphysician and Ubu Roi, amongst other things. Meaning “that which is above metaphysics”, 'pataphysics attracted many prominent writers and theorists of the twentieth century, including Jean Baudrillard who called 'pataphysics “the imaginary science of our world, the imaginary science of excess, of excessive, parodic, paroxystic effects”. 

(It is worth pointing out that Jarry mandated the inclusion of the apostrophe in the words 'pataphysique and 'pataphysics, though not in pataphysician, pataphysicist and pataphysical.) 

Pataphysical features include the anomaly, which may be understood as the manifestation of exception or “the repressed part of a rule which ensures that the rule does not work”; the syzygy, which is a surprising conjunction or alignment of things; and the minus-in-plus or less-which-is-more, an errant subtraction that can become a plus and vice versa.  

So why choose ‘and’ over alternatives like ‘but’, ‘or’, or ‘therefore’? Because ‘and’ welcomes without discrimination, binds without imposing order; it counts several elements as one thing. Grammatically, ‘and’ implies addition. But in the pataphysical universe, ‘and’ is an example of a minus-in-plus. When a poet titles a work “Melville and the White Whale” or “Zero and the Anti-Dollar”, they are not simply naming two entities. They are invoking a third, perhaps an impossible third, that lurks behind the manifest sense of the poem’s title.  

Consider this short improvised poem, “The Sheep and the Clock”:  

The clock, its hums in wooden sleep,   
Its gears enchanted by the sheep.   
And in that hush where minutes fold,   
The sheep grows wise, the clock grows old.
  
When a title pairs Term A (“sheep”) with Term B (“clock”), the result is not a simple sum. It is a syzygy, a hybrid — a Sheep-Clock — that consumes the logic of the title. This calls to mind pataphysical sculptor Barry Flanagan’s ‘frog hare’ design — described as a “morphological transformation between reptile and mammal” — for the Collège de ’Pataphysique.  

But the same absurdity occurs even in serious verse, like “The Octopus and the Fisherman”. Though the tone of the poem is serious, the title offers us (if judged pataphysically) such a thing as an Octopus-Fisherman. The conjunction becomes a semantic singularity, an anomaly erasing the distinct identities of the nouns it joins. An Octopus-Fisherman is an entirely different thing from either an octopus or a fisherman. ‘And’ allows communion between terms, no matter how absurd the message. ‘And’ doesn’t just connect; it provokes, compelling each term to reach toward the other, to invent new forms of recognition. In that striving, something genuinely new (and perhaps grotesque) emerges.  

This echoes Michel Serres’s concept of the “third man” or “parasite” — a disruptive mediator that enables transformation and exchange. Rather than choosing between A or B, Serres introduces a third figure that inhabits the threshold, facilitating new relational dynamics. In this sense, ‘and’ is both interrupter and enabler.  

Ultimately, ‘and’ is the bridge between ideas, no matter how disparate. ‘And’ doesn’t assert a truth — it proposes a possibility, however improbable. But given that the reader rarely asks the question as to what happens when things are yoked together in a title, the word ‘and’ is free to operate its absurd pataphysical function in plain sight.