Anthology of Black Humor. André Breton
as the dog’s. This noble friendship is the kind that leads to collective and corporate bonds, while the servile friendship of the dog favors only despotism, the Civilized and barbarian regime that would hardly allow noble passions to flourish, as they do in the elephant. Despots prefer the friendship of the dog, who, unjustly mistreated and debased, still loves and serves the man who wronged him.
2. Love.—It is decent and faithful in the elephant; it is scandalous and criminal in the dog, who in love is the most ignoble of quadrupeds, uniting all vices in this passion; like the loves of the Civilized, in which wiles, fraud, and oppression hold sway.
3. Paternity.—It is judicious and honorable in the elephant. He does not wish to sire offspring who would be born to misery, and he will not procreate in slavery. It is a lesson for the Civilized, who murder their children by producing too many of them without being able to provide for their well-being. Morality or theories of false virtue stimulate them to manufacture cannon fodder, anthills of conscripts who are forced to sell themselves out of poverty. This improvident paternity is a false virtue, the selfishness of pleasure. Thus has nature preserved the elephant from this vice, making him the very model of the four affective passions taken in their truly social sense, passions that are suited to general relations. The dog, emblem of false virtues, embodies the kind of false paternity that engenders anthills, litters of eleven (the first of the anti-harmonic numbers), veritable heaps, three-quarters of which will perish by the knife, the tooth, or starvation.
4. Honor.—This is the fourth molded virtue in the elephant; but it is not the kind of moral honor that claims to disdain riches and recommends that one drink from cupped hands, like Diogenes. The elephant wants not only good food (eighty pounds of rice per day); he also appreciates luxurious clothing, edibles, dishware, and libation. He is humiliated when one switches from silverware to earthenware.
If the elephant is the model of the four social virtues, we must, for the fidelity of our portrait, take him as representative of the fate ridiculed virtue suffers in Civilization. Thus nature has covered him in mud. He himself likes to be covered in dust, in the image of the virtuous man who chooses the path of poverty rather than seeking out a fortune that he can attain only by practicing every vice, plunder, baseness, venality, injustice, trafficking, speculation, monopoly, and usury. Nature could have provided this noble animal with a rich coat like the tiger’s; but this would have been absurd and inaccurate, for in our societies real and truly honorable virtue leads only to poverty. I say real virtue and not philosophical virtues, such as the wisdom of the chameleon who lends himself to any infamy that will bear fortune.
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Nature has given the elephant ivory defenses, very rich weapons, by analogy with our social status that allots luxury to force, to the unproductive dominant class. Thus his trunk, which is simultaneously a weapon and a machine, is poorly dressed because it is productive, and the elephant must represent the state of industry and virtue falling victim to injustice and mockery. As an emblem of virtue’s fate, he is laughable behind by the contrast between his rump and his scrawny, graceless tail.
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The extreme smallness of his eyes make for a shocking contrast with the huge dimensions of his body. It depicts the narrow views of the virtuous man.… His ears are the opposite of his eyes. Their immense mass and flattened form figure the suffering of the man of good will who hears only the language of hypocrisy and perversity in our societies, in which some preach virtue without practicing it and others brazenly preach joyful vice. The just man is overwhelmed and offended by this double language of debasement; his ear is flattened from hearing only falseness: this ill-being is externalized in the elephant’s ear.
—from Final Analogies
† “Publication des manuscrits de Fourier,” vol. 4.
THOMAS DE QUINCEY
1784 – 1859
“De Quincey,” Baudelaire said, “is essentially digressive; the term humorist can be applied to him more appropriately than to anyone else. At one point, he compares his own thought to a thyrsus, a simple rod that derives its entire physiognomy and charm from the complicated foliage entwined around it.” In his two famous memoirs (1827 and 1839), published together as On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts, he attempts to lay hold of crime not, as he says, “by its moral handle,” but in an extrasensory, wholly intellectual manner, and to consider it solely in function of the more or less remarkable gifts that it brings into play. Leaving aside the all-too-conventional horror it inspires, murder, according to him, demands to be treated aesthetically and appreciated in terms of its qualities, as one would appreciate a work of art or medical case study. The object of pure speculation that it thus becomes is mainly valuable insofar as it meets certain criteria: mystery, indeterminacy of motives, obstacles overcome, breadth and splendor of its success. Brilliantly filling a single one of these conditions, moreover, can be deemed satisfactory: “There was … an unfinished design of Thurtell’s for the murder of a man with a pair of dumb-bells, which I admired greatly.” One of the book’s heroes, Toad-in-the-hole, an extremely unnerving convulsive character, is identified with the “Old Man of the Mountains,” precursor and master of the art, a “shining light” who later dazzled Alfred Jarry.* In an 1854 postscript to his book on three exemplary murders, the author justifies the willful extravagance of his developments by his desire not to completely abandon levity in such a shocking context, and he lengthily invokes the precedent of Swift.
“The reader,” De Quincey says elsewhere, “will think I am laughing … Nevertheless, I have a very reprehensible way of jesting at times in the midst of my own misery.”* Few lives were as pathetic as his, few stories as cruel or as marvelous. He wasn’t yet seventeen when he ran away from the provincial school in which his guardians were trying to keep him. Soon out of resources, he wandered through Wales, surviving on blackberries and rosehips. He nonetheless managed to reach London, where he found shelter in a large abandoned house that was occupied at mealtimes by a weasel-faced businessman and, day and night, by a timid ten-year-old girl who acted as this enigmatic fellow’s servant. At breakfast, his host left him some crusts of bread, and the little girl huddled against him to sleep on the floor. In the course of his peregrinations around London, the young De Quincey, who made it a philosophical policy to converse familiarly with anyone—man, woman, or child—that he might meet, fell into a platonic romance with a sixteen-year-old prostitute, Ann, an adorable creature full of tenderness and innocence. Baudelaire dreamed of plucking “a feather from an angel’s wing” with which to describe all the love and desperation that bound those two together. “Poor Ann,” recounted Marcel Schwob, “ran to Thomas De Quincey … as he stumbled in wide Oxford Street under the hefty street lamps. Her eyes brimming with tears, she held a glass of port wine to his lips, kissed and caressed him; then she disappeared once more into the night. She might have died not long afterward. ‘She was coughing,’ said De Quincey, ‘the last time I saw her.’ Perhaps she was still wandering the streets. But although he looked high and low, although he was ridiculed by all he approached, Ann was lost forever. When later he had a warm house to live in, he often thought with tears in his eyes that poor Ann should have been living there, with him, instead of (as he imagined her) being ill, or dying, or desperate, in the central darkness of a London brothel. She had taken with her all the pitiful love that was in his heart.”*
Lost forever? No, for at least she returned seventeen years later to haunt his opium-eater’s dreams (it was only in 1812 that he began using drugs, to overcome