CHRISTOPHE GRAULLE, ANDRÉ BRETON AND BLACK HUMOR

par Emmanuel Rubio

Following Mireille Rosello's study on the same subject (Black Humor according to André Breton, "after having murdered my poor father," Corti, 1987), André Breton and Black Humor follows a less suspicious approach, less centered on power games, and substitutes the superior revolt of the spirit for the authoritarian system previously described by the critic. We can a priori rejoice in this critical sympathy which, leaving the world of fascination-repulsion proper to Mireille Rosello's analysis, allows us to take into account other aspects of Breton's work. A question of distances? We feel less disoriented in this latest study, more on familiar ground. But this is perhaps also its trap. Following history, composition and theory, the analysis sometimes struggles to detach itself from its object, as if the right distance remained to be taken. As if, in adherence as in resistance, the seduction of the Anthology retained all its power.

Taking into account the chronological organization of the Anthology, Christophe Graulle begins by exploring the literary history implicitly drawn by the figures highlighted by Breton. Among the pre-romantics, he thus stops at Swift and Sade, before questioning the relationship between black humor and the English gothic novel. Romantic humor as pre-romantic thus appears as a weapon against social conventions, and "remains inseparable from a real enactment that draws, before the Baudelairian renewal, the lineaments of a nascent dandyism"; playing with death, it disturbs the traditional opposition between comic and tragic for an "escape of meaning" that is not without recalling Heraclitean dialectics. Modern humor, from the end of the century (Allais and consorts), disturbs all categories of the literary field, travesties all genres and ultimately derives from the crisis of the verb to highlight the modern failure of meaning. To the little reality responds the cult of the self, which the first surrealism will also inherit. Vaché, "prophet of black humor," is given a longer approach. In him find their culmination both dandyism and the derealization of external threats. To his Umour, the author opposes Dadaist humor, less intellectualized; to this same Dadaist humor he opposes black humor, whose tragic background is lacking in the first (though this is perhaps to forget a little the birth date of Dada; all things considered, it does not lack dramatic "background"). With Marcel Duchamp's "ironism of affirmation" are finally drawn the approaches to surrealism and the realized notion.

The major defect of this first part lies in the perfect empathy that motivates the rewriting of the history of black humor. The portraits of humorists given by Graulle are openly inspired by Bretonian models, textually even, and thus risk being simply redundant. The only authors summoned are those of the Anthology, thus freezing, naturalizing the Bretonian division instead of grasping its particularity in a broader context. The various projects of the Anthology, and with them the figures envisioned, before being finally relegated, would obviously have deserved to be studied in detail. We know for example what the notion of black humor owes to Hegel's objective humor. But the Hegelian classification is not itself without being influenced by the "irony" of German romanticism. The initial presence of Jean-Paul or Ritter in the Bretonian project, their posterior disappearance would have deserved some comment, as would the final setting aside of Maturin regarding the gothic novel. The Byronic relay (notably influencing French romanticism), if it did not attract Breton's attention, had retained Desnos. It could also have retained our commentator, without other exclusion. Only such work would indeed allow us to remove all evidence from the Bretonian construction, to grasp it as construction, as reinvention of a history. We will understand that it is not a matter here of defining black humor by the resumption of Bretonian choices or the tracing of another history. Mireille Rosello has well shown how these two gestures, apparently contradictory, actually referred to the same principle of authority. It would be a matter on the contrary, once the principle of choice is admitted, of grasping its modalities as well as its referential.

The theoretical approach to the notion, linked to historical developments, runs through the entire work, and we could not give an extensive account of it here. The relationship to Hegel and to objective humor, highlighted by Breton, is of course at the heart of the reflection. For lack of a precise reading of the first appearances of the theme, in Misery of Poetry or Surrealist Situation of the Object, the debt as well as the rewriting game are not systematically elucidated. The relationship to Nietzsche and to atheism is underlined (let us note however that this atheism can just as well pass through the Feuerbach-Marx lineage), perhaps even over-valued (the assimilation of the Bretonian project to its Nietzschean antecedent remains very debatable). The notice devoted to the philosopher remains despite everything little studied. The patent lack of references on the Anthology of Black Humor, due among other things to the necessities of the Pléiade edition (which only annotated the preface), left open large areas of investigation, which we will regret, here as elsewhere, that they were not explored. Let us note, to go in the same direction, the too large absence of references to the theoretical texts of the humoristic tradition. Schlegel or even Bergson could have been summoned. The surrealist genealogy of discourse on humor is itself rather neglected. The contributions of Vitrac, Crevel, Soupault or Desnos are mentioned in one page, and do not call for other analyses. The Yugoslav inquiry of 1930 on humor appears in the short final chronology, but is passed over in silence in the text. The fact is all the more regrettable as Marco Ristich's response, published in the SASDLR, underlined the ideological risks of Umour, somewhat disrupted the tutelary figure of Vaché, and testified to the difficulty of integrating the notion into the Marxist context of the thirties. Taking into account such a point of view would have allowed there too to problematize a little more Breton's theoretical effort.

A second part questions the anthological device of the book. Opposing Mireille Rosello's reading, and the "tyranny" that the organization of the work would suppose, the author underlines the multiplicity of paths offered, of resonances, of recontextualizations, which make the anthology a book open to the reader's freedom. The games of references from one notice to another, of intra- or intertextuality are explored in this sense; modern approaches to the phenomenon, by Deleuze or Roland Barthes, come to support the proposed thesis. We will regret however that this poetics of the anthology remains fairly general, and does not feed on elements that are nevertheless expected. It would have been profitable for sure to confront the work considered with other surrealist anthologies: The Mirror of the Marvelous, by Pierre Mabille, the Anthology of Myths, Legends and Popular Tales of America or the Anthology of Sublime Love by Benjamin Péret, for example. Beyond the possible definition of an anthological period of surrealism, we could have thus approached a surrealist practice of the anthology, or by default circumscribed the singularity of the Bretonian exercise. It is at least regrettable finally that the evolution of the Anthology of Black Humor during its reissues is not addressed at all. The entries of 1950, the variations in the extracts, to be questioned, would restore to the book all the floating margin, the part of affectivity, of personal history that also make its price.

A last part finally studies Breton's relationships to psychoanalysis, of which the Anthology of Black Humor marks according to the author the most just as well as the most fruitful reappropriation. The panorama that serves as context is fairly brief and not very original, but the attention to the anthology offers more interest. After the Freudian contribution is situated, the cases (Vaché, Jarry, etc., already mentioned by the Pléiade edition) where the distortions in relation to the model are the most glaring are indeed taken up. Underlining the fidelity to the principle of psychic accent transfer, the author thus explores the combinatorics put in place by Breton, despite the Freudian systematic, to account for the individualities in question. The distinction between superego and ego ideal (put in place by Freud subsequently to the texts on humor that were to influence the poet) comes skillfully to account for certain Bretonian analyses. The constellation established around Dalí, paranoia-criticism and the Immaculate Conception is finally brought together happily with the foundations of black humor, and the summary of the second issue of SASDLR, summoned for this purpose, is to say the least convincing.

Let us signal to conclude the annexes offered by this work. A short chronology, beginning in 1930, gives the "historical landmarks concerning the elaboration of black humor." A bibliography groups indifferently the works used by Breton for his extracts or his own bibliographies. Two tables finally compare the three editions of 1945, 1950 and 1966; based on bibliographic notices, they do not however account for the variations of the corpus truly cited, the disappearance between 1945 and 1950 of such extracts from Huysmans, Allais, Apollinaire or Prassinos, as well as the appearance in 1966 of Roussel's texts hitherto forbidden from reproduction.