L'humour Noir Selon and re Breton: "Apres Avoir Assassine Mon Pauvre Pere...". (French Text).

Abstract

Zarathoustra announced the death of God, Freud, the end of man, and post-modern critics, the end of the fictional character; the reader of Breton's Anthology of Black Humor is easily convinced that they all died a violent, untimely death. In the Anthology, De Quincey intends to promote murder to the status of art, Villiers de l'Isle Adam strangles swans with exquisite and bourgeois cruelty, Borel describes the orgiastic black masses of devilish undertakers, Allais kills his neighbor, exclaiming: "She died and it was so funny!", Huysmans proposes to distillate corpses to extract food flavors, and Jarry's "de-brainers" stain the readers with the remains of their victims. As Jesus is crucified on his bicycle, Irish infants are devoured for economic reasons, and Minski eats only human flesh. The Anthology is not, however, reminiscent of Sade, does not read like the endless enumerations of the "gr and initiator." God, man and fictional characters have always been savagely murdered, tortured, dismembered and devoured. Christians refer to the "communion," Freud calls it a "psychoanalysis," critics talk about the "nouveau roman," and Breton, the pope of surrealism, has invented his own ritual. He calls it Black Humor, and the sacrifices are performed during a new kind of textual ceremony: the anthology. The making of the Anthology entails stealing texts, extracting them, cutting them up, then sowing them together with big visible threads, in order to build a body which resembles Bellmer's doll, and whose flexible joints are an open invitation to the reader: when one reads the anthology, one manipulates the dummy and forces it into obscene postures, used the obvious cutting lines to isolate and cruelly separate the parts of a body. Meanwhile, both torturer and victim laugh.