INTRODUCTION: LAUGHTER IN THE DARK
Breton’s Anthology of Black Humor is aptly named in more ways than one. Originally intended as both a showcase for the Surrealist conception of humor and a way for its impecunious author to earn a quick advance, the book ultimately took Breton longer to assemble than practically any other work. It suffered years of publisher’s delays, ran afoul of the censorship board and contributed to its author’s dangerously poor standing under the Vichy government, and in the final account earned Breton very little money at all. As to its philosophical impact, and despite Breton’s lifelong view of it as one of his major statements, the Anthology has never received the kind of attention granted most of his other books, making do instead, in the general response to Breton’s opus, with the condescending status of poor cousin.
This relegation to the second tier is unjustified, for the Anthology of Black Humor not only gathers into one volume texts by many of Surrealism’s most important precursors and practitioners, but it still stands as the first and most coherent illustration of a form of humor that, as Breton notes in his introduction, has only gained in prominence since the concept was first codified. Who today—in the wake not only of the Theatre of the Absurd, but even more so of the writings of Kurt Vonnegut, John Barth, et al., not to mention Monty Python’s Flying Circus and its avatars, the films of David Lynch and the Coen brothers, or even such mainstream television fare as Saturday Night Live—could fail to recognize a distinct timeliness in the dark, acidic humor of Sade’s jovial Russian cannibal or Leonora Carrington’s party-going hyena, or with the dismissive whatever echoing from the selections by Rimbaud, Apollinaire, and Jacques Vaché?
There is, in fact, a lot of what today we would call “attitude” in these pages. This attitude, which takes the form of both a lampooning of social conventions and a profound disrespect for the nobility of literature, is perhaps the one thread that links these otherwise disparate writers: from Jonathan Swift’s famous, deadpan prescriptions for overpopulation to Jacques Rigaut’s nonchalant relations of his suicide attempts, from Charles Fourier’s delirious cosmogony to the mind-bending wordplay of Jean-Pierre Brisset and Marcel Duchamp, from Alphonse Allais’s neighborly pranks and Alberto Savinio’s rude soirée to Alfred Jarry’s pataphysics and Charles Cros’s physics of love. If some of Breton’s choices (particularly those that most explicitly challenge the rules of “acceptable” society) occasionally appear a bit heavy-handed, they nonetheless join with the others in subverting our expectations, upending our preconceived notions of life and art, and often—no small feat—making us laugh.
This laughter, however, is always a little green around the edges, for as Breton is quick to point out, black humor is the opposite of joviality, wit, or sarcasm. Rather, it is a partly macabre, partly ironic, often absurd turn of spirit that constitutes the “mortal enemy of sentimentality,” and beyond that a “superior revolt of the mind.” Taking his cue from Freud’s remarks in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious—the Freudian terminology recurs throughout his presentations—he describes this form of humor as “the revenge of the pleasure principle (attached to the superego) over the reality principle (attached to the ego)…The hostility of the hypermoral superego toward the ego is thus transferred to the utterly amoral id and gives its destructive tendencies free rein.” A recipe for psychic unrest, perhaps, but hardly the stuff of mirth.
Still, despite the very modern aspect of black humor, the concept itself dates back well before Breton’s definition of it, to Jonathan Swift at the beginning of the eighteenth century (Swift who was already listed in the 1924 Manifesto as being “Surrealist in malice,” and whom Breton here singles out as humor’s “true initiator”). Breton himself had begun appreciating this kind of humor in 1914, via some recently unveiled works by Rimbaud: as he saw it, Rimbaud’s offhand rejection of French nationalism during the Franco-Prussian War perfectly mirrored his own skepticism at the outbreak of World War I, and, perhaps more to the point, sounded the bitter guffaw over which the bellicose folly of his times had little hold.
But his first direct contact with the living spirit of black humor did not come until a year and a half later, during his service in the army medical corps, when he met a fellow soldier named Jacques Vaché. Although the two young men knew each other for a comparatively short time, and although Vaché’s written output consisted of little more than a series of “letters from the front,” his importance for Breton can be gauged not only by his prominent inclusion in the Anthology, but also by the various essays Breton would write about their friendship over the following years (notably in The Lost Steps). It was Vaché who provided Breton with his first definition of humor as it applies here—“a SENSE … of the theatrical (and joyless) pointlessness of everything”—and whose words and actions showed the young intern just how unsettling its manifestations could be. “In Vache’s person, in utmost secrecy, a principle of total insurbordination was undermining the world,” Breton later commented, “reducing everything that then seemed all-important to a petty scale, desecrating everything in its path.” From that moment on, this particular form of humor—or umor, as Vaché spelled it—would become a main preoccupation of Breton’s, and a major criterion in his evaluation of works and individuals.
Nevertheless, it was not actually Breton who came up with idea of an anthology of black humor. In early 1935, finding to his distress that his recently married second wife, Jacqueline Lamba (the heroine of Mad Love), was expecting their first—and Breton’s only—child, and desperately short of money, he appealed to his friend Léon Pierre-Quint, the editorial director of Editions du Sagittaire, to find him a book project that would demand little time and effort, but whose commercial prospects would justify a reasonably high advance. After several false starts, Pierre-Quint and the American poet and translator Edouard Roditi, a member of Sagittaire’s editorial board, proposed an international anthology of writings that would gather and introduce the main proponents of umor.
By the end of 1936, Breton had assembled texts by the forty original contributors to the Anthology (the last four, plus Charles Fourier, were added in a later edition, while several extracts by the original authors were deleted). He had also drafted the short introductory pieces that preface each excerpt, as well as “Lighting Rod,” his overall foreword to the volume, in which he elaborates his own theory of black humor.
Unfortunately, by this time as well, Editions du Sagittaire was on the verge of bankruptcy, and after some hesitation Pierre-Quint ceded the rights to rival publisher Robert Denoël. But neither was this edition to see the light of day: Denoël was experiencing his own financial difficulties, on top of which Breton’s requirements for the book—photographs of the contributors throughout, a full-color cover designed by Duchamp, a Picasso etching for the deluxe editions—made the production costs prohibitive. In 1939, after France once again found itself at war, Denoël abandoned the project altogether.
In despair, Breton then turned to Jean Paulhan of Editions Gallimard, the publisher of several of his best-known works (among them Nadja and Mad Love), hoping that Paulhan could rescue the Anthology