CHRISTOPHE GRAULLE, ANDRÉ BRETON ET L'HUMOUR NOIR

par Alain Mascarou

According to Annie Le Brun, the recent exhibition on the Surrealist Revolution was guilty of "the double falsification consisting in the crushing of all historical perspective and in the banishment of the black" (La Quinzaine Littéraire, 1-15 April 2002). In this case, one cannot be too grateful to Christophe Graulle for having devoted a monograph to the Anthology of Black Humor, among André Breton's works one of those that most deliberately inscribe themselves in their time, and one of the most apt also to allow us to confront the blackness of our own. One of the merits of Christophe Graulle's study is the insertion of the Anthology into the history of ideas, but far from reducing it to a cultural object, he reveals its poetic magnetism, this through the most rigorous examination of a notion that transcends the cleavage of literary genres, transcends that of thought and the arts. It remains so effectively recourse today that the allusion to Breton and Rimbaud (to the signatory of the Anthology and to one of its authors) once imposed itself on a chronicler of the first round of the French presidential election. Thus Pierre Georges wrote: "If one still had some sense of humor, black and republican obviously, one would have only one word to qualify what happened on this Sunday: 'abracadabrantesque'!" (Le Monde, 23 April 2002). This is certainly not the qualifier that would attract Christophe Graulle's enterprise, but it alone is perhaps able to restore its savor, relevance and impertinence – duality inscribed from the first lines of this essay, which indulge in a malicious rewriting of the opening paragraph of the Chants de Maldoror.

Christophe Graulle has made himself a historian for the Anthology of Black Humor, better, historian of a history of literature according to André Breton, in the double ambition of deploying its richness and density of texture – for this, "a transversal approach" was indeed necessary, which combined literary, philosophical, psychoanalytic analysis –, and also of bringing out its conducting axes, vanishing points, in distant echo to Breton's critical writing, all the more mastered as it runs "on the flank of the abyss," all the more objective as it sounds vertigos.

What is indeed stated from the outset, from the first chapter, "Prehistory and history of black humor," is the tight intertwining of these stakes for André Breton: certainly, to write a literary history in the light of surrealism and, in so doing, legitimize it, "reactivate a mythical filiation," but, at the same time, to sketch less an intellectual autobiography than – to borrow a neologism from Claude Louis-Combet – an indirect "automythobiography." But if Christophe Graulle's role is to show how incarnated this history is, it is because the works whose encounters mark it have no other criterion than their "power of uprising," the quality of vibration they emit in the awakened poetic consciousness, proportional to the grip they allow on the event. Also the proximity of the notion of "black humor" with these other epicenters of the Bretonian work that are "the insulator," the will to "disorient sensation," or the "paradoxical affective reactions," this internal networking, is so immediate only because it is from the feeling of historical "catastrophe" (to borrow the vocabulary of another grand master of funereal facetiae, Christian Dotremont) – the war of 14-18, the second world conflict – that the texts of black humor receive their resonance: it is the event that proposes the reading grid of the model figures of Lautréamont, Jarry, Vaché – which reactivates their necessity: black humor, according to Breton, "can alone play the role of valve" to the misfortune of the times. Thus is justified the chronological perspective adopted (it underlines, moreover, the effects of anticipation and retrospection: the discovery of Lautréamont preluding to that of Jean-Pierre Duprey, the year Forty seen through Alfred Jarry): before approaching the Anthology itself, Christophe Graulle pursues his investigation into black humor before black humor through Dada and linguistic research in its wake, not without having devoted a whole chapter to examining the mythification of the inventor of the notion, according to Breton: Jacques Vaché.

But neglecting the anecdotal register, Christophe Graulle strives above all to demonstrate the alliance of the theoretical and the lived. This is the case with the idea of "paradoxical affective reaction" (appeared in the poet in 1917), contemporary with the definition of (h)umor according to Vaché: "a SENSE – also – of the theatrical (and joyless) uselessness of everything": it stipulates a cold gaze placed both on the pain of others and on one's own, converted into a pleasant object, that is a double movement of self-release and enjoyment of it. Capital of humor, this attitude disqualifies the real, delivers as its only message the refusal of the message. So irrecuperable is lived the superior dandyism of a Jacques Vaché that it derives from mystification, which supposes a victim, and an accomplice, so that the conditions of what Breton calls the "mysterious exchange of humoristic pleasure" are united. However, his true stature, soldier Vaché will receive it from the confrontation with Hegel (at the beginning of the 1930s) and Freud (between 1930 and 1940), in a later double-trigger consecration, which reserves for these system men, for the last at least, an unorthodox treatment. And it is according to the same double direction, progressive and regressive, that Dada is treated, whose taking into account of black humor values could not, according to Christophe Graulle, have taken place as long as circumstances would not have brought Breton to the theorization already begun by Freud and Hegel: it is from the latter that he borrows (in March 1935) the appellation "objective humor" to designate jointly Vaché and Dada, assimilation that their common desacralizing will justifies, but that the declension into "black humor" (from 1936) will make more adequate to Vaché, to this "enjoyment of the tragic" (according to Christophe Graulle's terms) foreign to Dada. The reference to the philosopher and the psychoanalyst does not obscure the recognition of the power of enunciation of which black humor is the superior mark, and which will illustrate, following Dada, Marcel Duchamp's "ironism of affirmation."

Chapter IV thus comes to the volume of the Anthology, to this line of fracture which is so sovereign only through the extension imposed by Breton on the Hegelian notion, for him twice reductive: it confines "objective humor" to an epoch, and to an artistic field. The poet transforms it into a "movement of thought" such that, according to Christophe Graulle, it becomes "a high-risk practice that commits the individual to react to an order of things perceived as unacceptable." The complexity of the new notion is testified by the cumulative criteria of the choice of individualities and works, here reduced to three: the writings of black humor, the ways of being, the invention of a surrealist genealogy (it would respond to the necessity, in the years 1945-1950 – the first publication intervenes in 1945 – of a recentering of the movement on itself and its sources). Thus the relevance of the dandy figure is deduced from his capacity for evolution, his perfectibility, from Baudelaire to Corbière, from Lafcadio to Duchamp, in an interweaving of attitudes and works that makes the humoristic gesture as much a writing effect as a conduct. This inverted ridge line does not go, however, without accident: Rimbaud marks a slackening, a drop in tension. Thus the dynamism of the entire collection results from a relative balance between centrifugal forces (the anthological risk, the disparity of texts despite the requirement of choice, the difficulty for the author to interfere in the polyphony) and centripetal (the metaphor of electricity, which unifies the notices, as do also the references to Hegel and Freud which sketch this "theoretical framework of reference" that the cross-references from notice to notice, from text to notice, from text to text reinforce). But if the Anthology is, for Christophe Graulle, "an authentically surrealist book," it is through its collage technique, the excess of non-interpretable meaning that it provokes, through the chain destabilization effect that creates, step by step, the assembly of these corrosive texts, united by a deliberate strategy of discourse crumbling and denunciation of the real.

Thus the dotted lines that open or conclude certain fragments appear as much as a uniformization effect (as the author suggests) as on the contrary a mark of discontinuity, which accuses the raw coffering aspect, not the polish of academic "selected pieces." And these unbreakable poetic nuclei will only reveal their intensity, their density all the more in the last two chapters, which lead successively to Hegel's Aesthetics and to Freud's side: Christophe Graulle has taken seriously the double theoretical guarantee displayed by Breton. If it is a matter of references to the philosophical system, the poet takes care not to lock himself into speculative thought, and Christophe Graulle's approach is here particularly probative, which alternates the analysis of Breton's readings and the lived examples that he invokes, either in the Anthology, or in his Entretiens: the critic intersects the reminder of Breton's debt to Fichte's idealism and the memory of this soldier who on the combat front denied its reality, Hegel, Cravan and the extreme consequences of Aesthetics: self-negation, doubling, even the emergence of an "I" marked by inadaptation to the world. As such, the notices of the Anthology, united by their fundamental dissonance, could figure as so many alter egos of their author.

It is again in the workshop of the Anthology of Black Humor that the incursion to Freud's side leads us, an even more complex situation, so much denser and freer appears the inspired commentary that Breton delivers of psychoanalysis's propositions. Two-handed workshop, first: always concerned with linking the Anthology to the poet's work, the author shows how L'Immaculée Conception (November 1930) and its "simulation essays" relay the reflection on Freud by Breton and Eluard – whose part Étienne-Alain Hubert has recalled in the elaboration of the Anthology. But it is through a close comparison of Freud's texts and Breton's notices that Christophe Graulle elucidates the poet's conceptual inventiveness, the skill with which he plays with Freudian interpretation. The example of Rimbaud's treatment is significant: Breton dissociates from the theory of displacement the socio-linguistic assimilations that Freud proposes; the intervention of the sole enunciation situation seems to him sufficient to analyze Rimbaud's incapacity to be a long-term humorist, equal to Jacques Vaché. In this case again, while judging the contestable notion of a "superego in lace" worthy of interest, Christophe Graulle evaluates it as a heresy destined to ensure Vaché's mythification. Surrealist, the Anthology is thus also in the bold manipulation of Freudian tools, and in the informed appropriation of the authors it allows.

At the end of this rigorous, warm, lucid essay, the function of the Anthology of Black Humor in André Breton's contemporary work, and its current chances, is specified. But before coming to this, let us note the new light it brings to the notion of author. If the "humoristic pleasure" resides in such a "mysterious" exchange, it is through dissociation, not immediate empathy, that it implies between reader and author. The "exchange" is rather of the order of disidentification, the reader alone having the pleasure premium. The extreme example is that of Jean-Pierre Brisset, of this "humor all of reception" (Breton) to which his reading invites, foreign to the work but necessarily entrained by taking it seriously. From this second state of humor, one could find, coming then to the chances of the work, an example in the use made by Breton of totalitarian regimes, reduced to supporting the theorization of humor, supported by the denunciation of this "stereotyped aspect (of the superego) of which the fascist and the Stalinist will participate to the same degree." And one understands from then on, in this attention to circumstance, which makes humor a response to planned Evil, that it is nothing less than innocuous or outdated, as Raymond Queneau claimed (falsely naive?) in 1945. One also grasps that it thus reinvests a sacred, without succumbing to the hermetic temptation that Arcane 17 would make one fear. Its "violence of transgression, writes Christophe Graulle, (makes it) a heretical thought." It brings André Breton closer to Georges Bataille, of whom, in the article cited above, Annie Le Brun recalled the opinion according to which "in matters of tearing man away from himself, there is surrealism or nothing." Thus this quest for a literary and existential ancestry seems one of André Breton's surest titles to posterity.