Anthology of Black Humour

Andre Breton, André Breton, Mark Polizzotti is the author of Revolution of the Polizotti, Mark Polizzotti

• Publisher: Telegram Books
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781846590740
• eBook ISBN: 9781846591983
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Ancient & Classical Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

This is Breton's definitive statement on l'humour noir, one of the seminal concepts of Surrealism. In his provocative anthology of the writers he most admires, Breton discusses the acerbic aphorisms of Swift, Lichtenberg and Duchamp, the theatrical slapstick of Christian Dietrich Grabbe, the wry missives of Rimbaud, the manic paranoia of Dali, the ferocious iconoclasm of Alfred Jarry and Arthur Cravan and the offhand hilarity of Apollinaire. For each of the authors included, Breton provides an enlightening preface, situating both the writer and the work in the context of black humour - a partly macabre, partly ironic, and often absurd turn of spirit that Breton defined as `a superior revolt of the mind'.

Benjamin Péret

1899–1959

It took – the reason I’m weighing my words will soon become clear – it took an unfailing detachment, of which I surely know no other example, to emancipate language as far as Benjamin Péret was able to, and this from the start. He alone fully performed on the word the operation corresponding to alchemical ‘sublimation,’ which consists in provoking the ‘ascension of the subtle’ via its ‘separation from the dense.’ The dense, in this regard, is the crust of exclusive meaning that has covered all words, and that leaves their juxtapositions practically no flexibility outside of the compartments in which immediate or conventional usefulness, solidly bolstered by routine, has narrowly confined them. The tight compartment that prevents signifying elements, now frozen in words, from entering into new relations constantly widens the zone of opacity that alienates humanity from nature and from itself. This is where Benjamin Péret steps in as a liberator.

Before him, in fact, the greatest poets had basically excused themselves for having ‘very frankly’ seen ‘a mosque in lieu of a factory,’ or had adopted a defiant attitude to report that they had witnessed ‘a fig eat a donkey.’¹ In uttering these words, they seem to have the feeling that they’re committing a violation, or profaning human consciousness, or transgressing the most sacred of taboos. With Benjamin Péret, on the contrary, this kind of ‘bad conscience’ has come to an end; censorship no longer obtains, and one takes it as a given that ‘everything is permitted.’ Never had words and what they designate, finally freed from domestication, shown such glee. It’s not only that natural objects succeed in dragging even manufactured objects into the hullabaloo; each side vies with the other for availability. We have finished once and for all with old-fashionedness, with dust. Frantic joy has returned. It’s all the magic in a glass of white wine:

this wine is white only at sunrise
because the sun runs a hand through its hair

Everything is set free, everything is poetically saved by the reactivation of a generalized principle of mutation and metamorphosis. We are no longer forced to celebrate ‘correspondences’ merely as great but unfortunately intermittent glimmers. Now we are oriented and moved by an uninterrupted series of passionate chords.

I speak of this from too close up, as if describing a light that, day after day for thirty years, has made my life more beautiful. Humour gushes here as if from the source.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Le Passager du Transatlantique, 1921. Au 125 du boulevard Saint-Germain, 1923. Immortelle Maladie, 1924. 152 Proverbes mis au goût du jour (with Paul Eluard), 1925. Il était une boulangère, 1925. Dormir, dormir dans les pierres, 1927. Le Grand jeu, 1928 … Et les seins mouraient, 1928. De derrière les fagots, 1934. Je ne mange pas de ce pain-là, 1936. Je sublime, 1936. Trois cerises et une Sardine, 1936. Au paradis des Fantômes, 1938. La parole est à Pér...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: Laughter in the Dark, Mark Polizotti
• Foreword to the 1966 French Edition
• Lightning Rod, André Breton
• Jonathan Swift
• D.A.F. de Sade
• Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
• Charles Fourier
• Thomas De Quincey
• Pierre-François Lacenaire
• Christian Dietrich Grabbe
• Pétrus Borel
• Edgar Allan Poe
• Xavier Forneret
• Charles Baudelaire
• Lewis Carroll
• Villiers de l’Isle-Adam
• Charles Cros
• Friedrich Nietzsche
• Isidore Ducasse (Comte de Lautréamont)
• Joris-Karl Huysmans
• Tristan Corbière
• Germain Nouveau
• Arthur Rimbaud
• Alphonse Allais
• Jean-Pierre Brisset
• O. Henry
• André Gide
• John Millington Synge
• Alfred Jarry
• Raymond Roussel
• Francis Picabia
• Guillaume Apollinaire
• Pablo Picasso
• Arthur Cravan
• Franz Kafka
• Jakob van Hoddis
• Marcel Duchamp
• Hans Arp
• Alberto Savinio
• Jacques Vaché
• Benjamin Péret
• Jacques Rigaut
• Jacques Prévert
• Salvador Dalí
• Jean Ferry
• Leonora Carrington
• Gisèle Prassinos
• Jean-Pierre Duprey
• Acknowledgments