Anthology of Black Humor. André Breton
Cuckold proper, the Short-Horn, and the Long-Horn.*
1. The Cuckold, properly speaking, is honorably jealous and unaware of his disgrace, believing himself to be the sole possessor of his wife. As long as the public maintains his illusion with laudable discretion, we have no reason to mock him: can he become irritated over an offense of which he knows nothing? The ridicule is all for the seducer who cajoles and bows before the man with whom he knowingly shares his beauty.
2. The Short-Horn is a husband who has had his fill of domestic love and who, wishing to seek his love-making elsewhere, turns a blind eye to his wife’s conduct and freely leaves her to her admirers, it being understood that he will accept no child from her. Such a husband is not to be ridiculed; on the contrary, he has the right to comment on the horns of others as boldly as if he wore none himself.
3. The Long-Horn is ridiculously jealous, bothersome for his wife and quite aware of her infidelity. He is a wild man who wishes to rebel against the decrees of fate, but who, resisting clumsily, becomes an object of mockery by his useless precautions, his anger, his outbursts. When it comes to long-horns, Molière’s George Dandin is a perfect example.
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—from Theory of the Four Movements
* The complete table contains sixty-four types progressively distributed into classes, orders, and genera, from the cuckold in the bud to the posthumous cuckold. I have described only three types here, wishing, on this subject as on so many others, to gauge just how far I should develop this Treatise. [Fourier’s note]
DETAIL OF A CREATION OF THE HYPOMAJOR KEYBOARD
For us, a familiarity with nature’s system would be quite useless if it did not give us the means to right existing wrongs and replace divisive products, the creatures harmful to man, with countermolded and useful servants. What good does it do us to know in what order each star entered the ranks of creation; to know that the horse and the donkey were created by Saturn in such-and-such a modulation; that the zebra and the quagga were created by Proteus (a star that is as yet undiscovered but very real, as we see its effects in every domain); that in this modulation Jupiter begat the ox and the bison; and Mars the camel and the dromedary? After these peculiar notions, we would be left with the bothersome certainty that these stars, normally branded idle strollers, have on the contrary performed on our planet sevenfold too many works, by providing us with creatures seven-eighths of which are nefarious.
What we will find precious is the art of bringing them back to the scene of creation through an effort of countermolding, by which he who gave us the lion will give us as countermold a superb and docile quadruped, an elastic carrier, the ANTI-LION: the kind of post animal that would allow a rider, who leaves Calais or Brussels in the morning, to lunch in Paris, dine in Lyon, and sup in Marseille, less worn out by his journey than one of our mailmen at full gallop. For the horse is a rude and simple carrier (soliped), which will be to the anti-lion what the springless carriage is to the vehicle with suspension. The horse will be left for harnessing and parades, once we possess the family of elastic carriers: the anti-lion, anti-tiger, and anti-leopard will be thrice the size of the current versions. Thus an anti-lion will easily cover eight yards with each bound, and the rider, on the back of his charger, will be as comfortably installed as if in a well-suspended berlin. It will truly be a pleasure to inhabit this world once we have such servants to enjoy.
The new creatures that will start arriving five years from now will give us a profusion of such riches in every domain, on sea as on land. Instead of creating whales and sharks, hippopotamuses and crocodiles, would it have cost any more to make these precious servants?
Anti-whales that tow vessels through calm waters
Anti-sharks that help track down fish
Anti-hippopotamuses that tug our boats up river
Anti-crocodiles or river collaborators
Anti-seals or sea-steeds
All these brilliant products will necessarily result from a creation in countermolded aromas, which will begin with a spheric aromal bath that will purge the seas of their bitumen.
Let us skip over the portrait of these forthcoming marvels: rather than satisfying the reader, the prospect bores a generation that has been raised in impiety and doubt in Providence, a generation that, in its mental indigence, imagines that God does not have as much power to do good as he uses to do evil, for which he must have organized a sevenfold majority in subversive creations, as he will organize a sevenfold majority of good in harmonian creations.
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—from Treatise of the Domestic-Agricultural Association
FAMILIAR DEMONSTRATIONS OF THE CATARACT
In harmony, one of the first operations will be to assemble a congress of grammarians and naturalists to compose a unified language, whose system will be regulated based on analogy, with the cries of animals and other natural documents. This work will barely be completed after a century; to finish it, they will have a certain compass that it is not yet time to reveal.
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Punctuation
In addition to the alphabet of letters, we will have to create one for punctuation, which must contain the same number of signs. So little is known of punctuation that French has only seven signs for it; to wit , ; : . ! ? ). The bracket, which was the eighth, is no longer in use. As for accents (é, è, ê, ë), they belong to the various vowels and are not punctuation marks. It is the same for the apostrophe, which would require a mark of its own, rather than just a raised comma. Our language is so poor in this regard that we are obliged to use either the period or the colon, which causes confusion.
I had undertaken to write a work on the full range of punctuation, and had gotten as far as twenty-five marks, illustrated by examples that proved the ambiguity of our current marks: I lost this work before it was finished and I have not returned to it since. Let us note in this regard that the first of all marks, the lowest, called the comma, should be differentiated into at least four distinct marks, to allow us to appreciate its many meanings, its different and infinitely varied senses, which now are expressed by means of a single mark: this is the height of confusion. It is the same for the other marks: they accumulate three or four meanings. Civilized punctuation is in real chaos, much like spelling, which varies with every printer in Paris. The Academy, with its obscurantist principle of not allowing even the most blatant vices to be corrected, has alienated people’s minds to such a degree that it has resulted in widespread rebellion, a universal anarchy in grammar.
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—from The New Industrial and Societal World
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ELEPHANT AND DOG
Let us first define real and false virtue, by comparing the elephant with the dog, one of whom is the emblem of noble friendship and the other of false friendship.
1. Friendship.—It is noble in the elephant, and always compatible with honor. The elephant has none of the baseness of the dog, who, having