Anthology of Black Humor. André Breton
number of individual attitudes that reveal humor, and with some texts in which this humor has been given its highest degree of literary expression. In order to reduce them to a common, fundamental idea, I thought it best to employ Freudian terminology in my account, without this dispelling the reservations caused by Freud’s necessarily artificial distinction between the id, the ego, and the superego.
I will not deny a considerable partiality in the choice of texts, all the more so in that such a frame of mind seems the only one appropriate to the subject at hand. My greatest fear in this case, my only cause for regret, would be not to have proven exacting enough. To take part in the black tournament of humor, one must in fact have weathered many eliminations. Black humor is hemmed in by too many things, including stupidity, skeptical sarcasm, light-hearted jokes … (the list is long). But it is the mortal enemy of sentimentality, which seems to lie perpetually in wait—sentimentality that always appears against a blue background—and of a certain short-lived whimsy, which too often passes itself off as poetry, vainly persists in inflicting its outmoded artifices on the mind, and no doubt has little time left in which to lift toward the sun, from amid the poppy seeds, its crowned crane’s head.
1939.
* “Surrealist Situation of the Object,” in Political Position of Surrealism (1935). [English translation in Manifestoes of Surrealism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969).]
* Armand Petitjean, Imagination et Réalisation (Paris, 1936).
† Pierre Piobb, Les Mystères des Dieux (Paris, 1909).
JONATHAN SWIFT
1667 – 1745
When it comes to black humor, everything designates him as the true initiator. In fact, it is impossible to coordinate the fugitive traces of this kind of humor before him, not even in Heraclitus and the Cynics or in the works of the Elizabethan dramatic poets. Swift’s incontestable originality, the perfect unity of his production viewed from the angle of the very special and almost unprecedented emotion it elicits, the unsurpassable character, from this same viewpoint, of his many varied successes historically justify his being presented as the first black humorist. Contrary to what Voltaire might have said, Swift was in no sense a “perfected Rabelais.” He shared to the smallest possible degree Rabelais’s taste for innocent, heavy-handed jokes and his constant drunken good humor. In the same way, he stood opposite Voltaire in his entire way of reacting to the spectacle of life, as their two death masks so expressively attest: one bearing a perpetual snicker, the mask of a man who grasped things by reason and never by feeling, and who enclosed himself in skepticism; the other impassive, glacial, the mask of a man who grasped life in a wholly different way, and who was constantly outraged. It has been remarked that Swift “provokes laughter, but does not share in it.” It is precisely at this price that humor, in the sense we understand it, can externalize the sublime element that, according to Freud, is inherent in it, and transcend the merely comic. Again in this respect, Swift can rightfully be considered the inventor of “savage” or “gallows” humor. The profoundly singular turn of his mind inspired in him a series of diversions and reflections on the order of “The Lady’s Dressing Room” and the “Meditation Upon a Broom-Stick,” which partake of a remarkably modern spirit, and are responsible in and of themselves for the fact that perhaps no body of work is less out of date.
Swift’s eyes were, it seems, so changeable that they could turn from light blue to black, from the candid to the terrible. This variation perfectly matches his ways of feeling: “I have ever,” he says, “hated all nations, professions, and communities, and all my love is towards individuals…. But principally I hate and detest that animal called man, although I heartily love John, Peter, Thomas, and so forth.” The man who more than anyone despised the human race was no less possessed by a frantic need for justice. He wandered through the ministries of Dublin and his little vicarage in Laracor, anxious to know whether he was meant to look after his willows and enjoy the playing of his trout or to meddle with affairs of state. He did meddle with them, moreover, as if despite himself and on several occasions, in the most active and effective way. “That Irishman,” it was said, “who considers himself an exile in his own country, has yet to reside elsewhere; that Irishman, always ready to speak ill of Ireland, risked for her his fortune, his freedom, his life, and saved her, for almost a century, from the slavery with which England threatened it.” In the same way, the misogynistic author of the “Letter to a Young Lady on Her Marriage” was doomed in his own life to the worst emotional complications: three women, Varina, Stella, and Vanessa, fought over his love, and, if he broke with the first in a shower of insults, he was condemned to see the other two tear each other apart and die without having forgiven him. It was to this priest that one of them wrote: “Was I an Enthusiast still you’d be the Deity I should worship.” From one end of his life to the other, his misanthropy was the only disposition that never altered, and that events never belied. He had said one day, pointing to a tree struck by lightning, “I shall be like that tree; and die first at the top.” As if for having wished to reach “the sublime and refined point of felicity … the possession of being well-deceived; the serene peaceful state of being a fool among knaves,” he saw himself decline, in 1736, into a mental enfeeblement whose progress he was able to follow for ten years, with horrible lucidity. In his will, he left ten thousand pounds to build a hospital for the insane.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: A Tale of a Tub, 1704. The Works of Sir William Temple, 1720. Gulliver’s Travels, 1726. Miscellanies in Prose and Verse, 1727-1735. Directions to Servants, 1751, etc.
DIRECTIONS TO SERVANTS
Masters and ladies are usually quarreling with the servants for not shutting the doors after them; but neither masters nor ladies consider that those doors must be open before they can be shut, and that the labor is double to open and shut the doors; therefore the best, and shortest, and easiest way is to do neither. But if you are so often teased to shut the door, that you cannot easily forget it, then give the door such a clap as you go out, as will shake the whole room, and make every thing rattle in it, to put your master and lady in mind that you observe their directions.
If you find yourself to grow into favor with your master or lady, take some opportunity in a very mild way to give them warning; and when they ask the reason, and seem both to part with you, answer, that you would rather live with them than any body else, but a poor servant is not to be blamed if he strives to better himself; that service is no inheritance; that your work is great, and your wages very small. Upon which, if your master hath any generosity, he will add five or ten shillings a quarter rather than let you go: But if you are balked, and have no mind to go off, get some fellow-servant to tell your master that he had prevailed upon you to stay.
Whatever good bits you can pilfer in the day, save them to junket with your fellow-servants at night, and take in the butler, provided he will give you drink.
Write your own name and your sweetheart’s, with the smoke of a candle, on the roof of the kitchen or the servants’ hall, to show your learning.
If you are a young, sightly fellow, whenever you whisper your mistress at the table, run your nose full in her cheek, or if your breath be good, breathe full in her face; this I have known to have had very good consequences in some families.
Never come till you have been called three or four times; for none but dogs will come at the first whistle; and when the master calls “Who’s there?” no servant is bound to come; for Who’s there is no body’s name.
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Some nice ladies who are afraid of catching cold, having observed that the maids and fellows below stairs often forget to shut the door after them, as they come in or go out into the back yards, have contrived that a pulley