Anthology of Black Humor. André Breton
over the Fascist menace, the constraints of military service, and his enforced separation from Jacqueline, their four-year-old daughter, Aube, and the majority of his friends—seemed to take as its main focus the fate of his anthology. “I would ask you and Gaston Gallimard to please not make me lose hope over Black Humor,” he wrote to Paulhan in January 1940. “You know that the silence surrounding me is at least partly due to the non-distribution of my books.” And two months later, he pleaded directly with Gallimard to publish the anthology “in the very period we are living through, [for] I believe that afterward it would no longer be quite so situated.”
Breton’s concern was not merely that of an author eager to see his work in print. In his view, the message implicit in the Anthology was even more pertinent to the wartime climate than it had been several years earlier. “It seems to me this book would have a considerable tonic value,” he told Paulhan at the time. Just as Rimbaud’s anti-war poems and letters had stayed him in 1914, so now he wanted to further that message, to spread the word to youths of the next generation who refused the jingoism of the war effort, as he himself had refused it twenty-five years earlier. In this regard, it is no accident that five of the Anthology’s forty original contributors are Germanic: a devotee of Hegel, Marx, Freud, and Novalis, Breton abhorred the Nazis but would not reject German culture. Instead, he highlighted those Germans whose works most forcefully belied the Fascist program.
Still, although Gaston Gallimard initially professed enthusiasm for Breton’s anthology, in the end he, too, would decline, and it was Léon Pierre-Quint of Sagittaire, the book’s original publisher, who ultimately reclaimed the project in April 1940. On the 29th, a relieved Breton told him: “You know that I had originally composed this book for Sagittaire: I’m delighted that it is now back with you. It seems to me, furthermore, that its publication at any other time would have been less fitting.”
The printed sheets came off press on June 10; four days later, German forces entered Paris and the Occupation began. The puppet Vichy regime was quickly established, as was a censorship board to which all forthcoming books had to be sent for clearance. Pierre-Quint duly submitted the Anthology for authorization in January 1941, but that same month the board gave its unequivocal refusal and the Anthology of Black Humor, finally printed after a four-year delay, languished for another five.
When the book was at last distributed in 1945, it was to almost total silence—hardly more than three or four notices in the papers, including a piece by ex-Surrealist Raymond Queneau, typical of the reigning attitudes, that chided Breton for his parlor anarchism. In any case, Breton, who had left France and taken wartime refuge in the United States, would not see these reactions, or his anthology in the bookstores, until after his return to Europe a year later.
Not surprisingly, the first edition soon disappeared from circulation, and for several years the book was again unavailable. A second, revised edition was issued in 1950, this time to slightly increased notice, and a “definitive” one, featuring a new preface, was published shortly before Breton’s death. Only then did the Anthology of Black Humor begin to receive at least a share of the attention normally paid Breton’s works. Now, thirty years later, sixty years after its completion, it has crossed over to these shores.
* * *
As of this writing, all those included in this volume, with the exception of Leonora Carrington and, possibly, Gisèle Prassinos, are dead. This was not the case when Breton published the final edition, and I have acknowledged the passage of time by putting death dates in brackets for those who, when Breton died, were still alive.
As to the translations themselves, in keeping with the spirit of a collective work I have used existing versions whenever good ones were available, to preserve a diversity of voices. I have also expanded Breton’s selected bibliographies at the end of each prefatory note to account more specifically for English editions of the relevant works, if such exist.
In many cases, however, the texts presented here (not to mention the vast majority of Breton’s prefaces) are being published in English for the first time, and a number of their authors are completely unknown in this country. Which means that, while some names in the table of contents are perfectly familiar to American readers, many others will come as a revelation. In translating this Anthology of Black Humor, it is my hope, as it surely was Breton’s, that the samples provided here will inspire further contact with these strange, hilarious, and sobering minds.
—M. P.
July 1996
FOREWORD TO THE 1966 FRENCH EDITION
The current, revised edition brings to the preceding one a few corrections of detail. It has deliberately not been expanded, even at the risk of leaving a few readers dissatisfied. In the perspective that initially informed this book, it is certain that the author, in the course of these past few years, could not help but see new figures emerge who emit a similar light. He particularly had to resist the temptation to include the works of Oskar Panizza, Georges Darien, G. I. Gurdjieff (as he appears in his magisterial “The Arousing of Thought,” the opening chapter of Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson), Eugène Ionesco, and Joyce Mansour; but he finally chose not to, for obvious reasons. This book, published for the first time in 1939 and reprinted with a few additions in 1947, marked, as is, its era. Let us simply recall that when it first appeared, the words “black humor” made no sense (unless to designate a form of banter supposedly characteristic of “Negroes”!). It is only afterward that the expression took its place in the dictionary: we know what fortune the notion of black humor has enjoyed. Everything suggests that it remains full of effervescence, and is spreading as much by word of mouth (in so-called “Bloody Mary” jokes) as in the visual arts (especially in the cartoons featured in certain weekly magazines) and in film (at least when it deviates from the safe path of mainstream production). My wish is that this book should remain directly linked to our era no less than to the preceding one, and that it should never be seen as some sort of constantly updated annual, a pathetic honor roll bearing no trace whatsoever of its original purpose. Kindly consider this, then, the definitive edition of the Anthology of Black Humor.
Paris, May 16, 1966.
LIGHTNING ROD
“The preface could be called ‘the lightning rod.’”—Lichtenberg
“For there to be comedy, that is, emanation, explosion, comic release,” said Baudelaire, “there must be …”
Emanation, explosion: it is startling to find the same two words linked in Rimbaud, and this in the heart of a poem that is as prodigal in black humor as can be (it is, in fact, the last poem we have of his, one in which his “expression as buffoonish and strange as possible” reemerges, supreme and extremely condensed, from efforts that aimed first at its affirmation, then at its negation):
“Dream”
In the barracks stomachs grumble—How true . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Emanations, explosions,An engineer: I’m the gruyere!. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Chance encounter, involuntary recall, direct quotation? To decide once and for all, we would have to take the exegesis of this poem—the most difficult in the French language—rather far, but this exegesis has not even begun. Such a verbal coincidence is nonetheless significant in and of itself. It reveals in both poets a shared concern with the atmospheric conditions, so to speak, in which the mysterious exchange of humorous pleasure between individuals can occur—an exchange to which, over the past century and a half, a rising price has been attached, which today makes it the basis of the only intellectual commerce that can be considered high luxury.
Given the specific requirements of the modern sensibility, it is increasingly doubtful that any poetic, artistic, or scientific work, any philosophical or social system that does not contain this kind of humor will not leave a great deal to be desired, will not be condemned more or less rapidly to perish. The value we are dealing with here is not only in ascendancy over all others,