[In the following essay, Greenfield uses Jarry's Ubu Roi to develop André Breton's theory of black humor and to argue that Jarry made a significant contribution to black humor.]

Although it is clear from André Breton's own frequent references to him that Alfred Jarry left an important legacy to humour noir, this legacy has received almost no critical notice. Any mention of Jarry's importance to black humor concerns either his inclusion in Breton's Anthologie de l'humour noir or the interpretation of his humor by Breton's friend, Jacques Vaché.¹ However, neither the Anthologie nor Vaché's letters completely reveal Jarry's contribution to black humor. First of all, Breton's commentary in the Anthologie is not logically useful in determining Jarry's original legacy to humour noir, as Breton already had his own theory of black humor before compiling this collection. Anything Breton says in the Anthologie about Jarry's work involves a demonstration of his own theory, rather than an analysis of Jarry's contribution to this theory. Secondly, while Breton's understanding of Jarry's humor was facilitated by Vaché's interpretation, it was Breton who had first introduced the works of Jarry to Vaché, as Noël Arnaud pointed out in his talk at Cerisy-la-Salle (359).

What is humour noir? André Breton himself does not clearly define this expression, choosing instead to provide numerous examples in his Anthologie; the reader must come to his/her own conclusions inductively. Breton's refusal to commit himself on a clear definition is just one of the problems one faces in determining Jarry's legacy to black humor. In addition, Breton changes his terminology from humour objectif to humour noir without explanation, and refers to Jarry's importance to both, without elaboration.

Breton discussed only humour objectif in “Situation surréaliste de l'objet” in 1935, introducing humour noir for the first time in his Anthologie in 1940. Michel Carrouges suggests that Breton changed his terminology both to prevent any confusion with his theory of hasard objectif, and to distinguish his own new concept of humor from that of Hegel (124). Hegel's writings on objective humor had formed the basis for Breton's own definition; indeed, Breton had quoted Hegel directly in “Situation,” although he didn't acknowledge his debt to him until the Anthologie.²

Breton understood Hegel's objective humor to be the resolution of the dialectic between the subjective point of view of the individual and the arbitrary, “accidental” phenomena he contemplates in the outside world (“Situation” 142; Anthologie 16-17). In “Situation” Breton asserts that objective humor triumphs in the work of Jarry (142); although he himself doesn't elaborate, three of Jarry's own discursive texts support this assertion. In a theater review Jarry wrote that laughter is a response to the discovery of the contradictory (“Franc-Nohain” 630); in his articles “Ceux pour qui il n'y eut point de Babel” (301) and “La vérité bouffe” (304) he affirmed that laughter is also a response to the impression of revealed Truth. Thus, for Jarry, the Truth of existence is contradiction, and an awareness of this Truth causes laughter.

It was this aspect of Jarry's humor, the aspect Breton was later to call the triumph of humour objectif, which Jacques Vaché had perceived and transmitted to Breton. Breton met Vaché in 1916 in Nantes, where the former was serving as an intern at the centre de neurologie and where the latter, a soldier, was being treated at a hospital for a flesh wound (Breton, “Confession” 16). After Vaché returned to the front, he and Breton kept up an erratic correspondence. Breton saved Vaché's letters, later publishing them with others his friend had written under the title Lettres de guerre. It was in one of these letters that, in response to Breton's request, Vaché explained his own use of the word “umour.” This explanation not only prefigures Breton's writings on objective humor, but consists of terms whose source is unmistakably Jarry.

Toward the beginning of his letter of April 29, 1917, Vaché proclaims the importance of Jarry and Ubu, and then follows with a discussion of umour:

Etes-vous sûr qu'Apollinaire vit encore, et que Rimbaud ait existé? Pour moi je ne crois pas—Je ne vois guère que Jarry (Tout de même, que voulez-vous, tout de même—…—Ubu) … Et puis vous me demandez une définition de l'umour—comme cela!—

Il est dans l'essence des symboles d'être symboliques m'a longtemps semblée [sic] digne d'être cela comme étant susceptible de contenir une foule de choses vivantes: Exemple: vous savez l'horrible vie du réveille-matin—c'est un monstre qui m'a toujours épouvanté à cause que le nombre de choses que ses yeux projettent, et la manière dont cet honnête homme me fixe lorsque je pénètre une chambre—pourquoi donc a-t-il tant d'umour, pourquoi donc?—Mais voilà: c'est ainsi et non autrement—Il y a beaucoup de formidable Ubique aussi dans l'umour—

(44-45)

The alarm-clock exemplifies umour because it forces a state of lucidity before the opposition of waking and sleeping; for Vaché, umour involves a comprehensive awareness of all contradiction. This interpretation is supported by Vaché's later reference to the alarm-clock in his letter of August 18, 1917, where umour has become the adjective “umore”:

O Dieu absurde!—car tout est contradiction—n'est-ce pas?—et sera umore celui qui toujours ne se laissera pas prendre à la vie cachée et sournoise de tout.—O Mon réveille-matin … et sera umore celui qui sentira le trompe-l'œil lamentable des similisymboles universels.

(58)³

The umore person is not fooled by illusions, but has a clear awareness of the absurd contradictions of reality.

In his earlier letter Vaché described umour as “ubique,” an invented adjective which incorporates the expressions “ubiquité” and “Ubu-like.” The ubiquitousness of umour refers back to the alarm-clock: to have umour is to be present in all contradictory aspects of existence simultaneously, such as sleeping and waking. The presence of Ubu in the word “ubique” relates to Vaché's assertion of the importance of Jarry and Ubu earlier in this letter, as well as to his final definition of umour in which he uses a paraphrase of the title of Jarry's essay “De l'inutilité du théâtre au théâtre”:

… l'umour dérive trop d'une sensation pour ne pas être très difficilement exprimable—Je crois que c'est une sensation—J'allais presque dire un Sens—aussi—de l'inutilité théâtrale (et sans joie) de tout.

(45)

The word “sensation” has only one meaning to which the word “sens” could correspond closely: the former can mean “the perception of something,” while the latter can mean “the faculty for perceiving something.”⁴ The expression “l'inutilité théâtrale … de tout” implies that life is without value, without any deeper meaning beneath the material surface of theater; the expression “sans joie” indicates a lack of exaltation or depth of feeling: a kind of indifference. For Vaché, umour is the perception, or the ability to perceive, that everything is futile, valueless, absurd, and that the laughter from this perception brings no transcendence.

While Vaché's reading of Jarry clearly had an impact on Breton's early conception of humor, by the time Breton had compiled his Anthologie he had gone beyond umour and had replaced humour objectif with humour noir. This change in terminology brought with it the Freudian notion that humor protects the self from the pain of a hostile world and turns potential pain into pleasure (Anthologie 19-20). Humour noir also involves rebellion: in the Preface to the Anthologie Breton supports Léon Pierre-Quint's view that humor is “une révolte supérieure de l'esprit” (16).⁵Humour noir thus surpasses objective humor by incorporating the notion of the invulnerability and pleasure of the individual in a revolt against an absurd existence.

In Entretiens Breton referred twice to humour noir as having been “inherited” from Jarry (162, 193); although he did not elaborate, he was surely thinking of the legacy of Ubu. In his 1918 essay entitled “Alfred Jarry” Breton had quoted not only from the Ubu plays, but also from lesser-known works which concern Ubu, such as Minutes de sable mémorial and “Les Paralipomènes d'Ubu.” These texts all show Ubu to be the incarnation of what Breton would later call black humor: an invulnerable Self who finds pleasure in his revolt against the contradictions of the outside world.

Ubu's humor involves the destruction of contradiction through his acts and language. In Ubu roi he condemns to death via the trappe every Noble, magistrate and financier, the caretakers of value oppositions (370-72). The Nobles represent social inequality based on land ownership; the magistrates represent law and social morality; the financiers represent the bourgeois values created by money. In Ubu cocu ou l'Archéoptéryx Ubu tries to destroy his conscience, reflection of the value oppositions imposed by society (498). The conscience is a kind of interiorized exterior world; Ubu has ejected his own conscience back outside, and keeps it in a suitcase. Later, when it throws away the suitcase, Ubu throws his conscience down a lavatory drain (505).

Ubu's humor is also manifested in his destructive rebellion against the oppositions between different levels of language. In a recent study on Jarry, Keith Beaumont notes that the humor of Ubu roi derives largely from incongruity pushed to logical contradiction, to be found, for example, in “the frequent alternation … of different registers, from coarse slang and obscenities to deliberate archaisms, then to a pseudo-‘noble’ style, and back to slang again” (117). In Les Langages de Jarry Michel Arrivé considers the function of this alternation to be the neutralization of the opposing connotations (288-89). The following passage from Act IV Scene v of Ubu roi illustrates this function:

PèRE Ubu:
Ainsi que le coquelicot et le pissenlit à la fleur de leur âge sont fauchés par l'impitoyable faux de l'impitoyable faucheur qui fauche impitoyablement leur pitoyable binette,—ainsi le petit Rensky a fait le coquelicot, il s'est fort bien battu cependant, mais aussi il y avait trop de Russes.

(386)

While the entire passage is constructed as a period of the classical form (“ainsi,” “ainsi que”; the metaphoric value of “faux” and “faucheur”), it also contains ridiculous repetitions (“pitoyable,” “impitoyable”), a play on words (between the figurative and literal meanings of “fleur”), and a vulgar expression for the head (“binette”).⁶ Such a juxtaposition of the sublime and the ridiculous results in the neutralization of both.

Ubu's humor involves not only the destruction, but also the resolution of contradictions: it is an implementation of Jarry's theory of l'identité des contraires. Breton himself noted Ubu's rôle as a conciliator of opposites in his 1918 essay on Jarry, quoting the following passage from Gestes et opinions du docteur Faustroll, pataphysicien:

Et de la dispute du signe Plus et du signe Moins, le R. P. Ubu, de la C^ie de Jésus, ancien roi de Pologne, a fait un grand livre qui a pour titre César-Antechrist, où se trouve la seule démonstration pratique, par l'engin mécanique dit bâton à physique, de l'identité des contraires.

(730)⁷

Ubu resolves oppositions by containing them in his own totality. He engulfs his conscience in his gidouille, which is a sort of phallus and digestive system combined: his Id swallows his Superego.⁸ In Ubu roi he absorbs the rôles of the Nobles, magistrates and financiers he's had killed; in Ubu enchaîné he resolves the contradiction between freedom and slavery by becoming a slave to himself:

PèRE Ubu:
Je commence à constater que Ma Gidouille est plus grosse que toute la terre, et plus digne que je m'occupe d'elle. C'est elle que je servirai désormais.

(461)

Ubu resolves the contradictions inherent in language by his use of puns. The American Heritage Dictionary defines the pun as a “play on words, sometimes on different senses of the same word and sometimes on the similar sense or sound of different words.” Puns are examples not only of Jarry's identité des contraires, but also of the linguistic crossroads he mentioned in Minutes de sable mémorial: “dans la route des phrases un carrefour de tous les mots” (171). Breton quoted this passage in his essay on Jarry in 1918 (45); he knew that Jarry considered language to be a network of interlocking phrases and words whose meetings are all significant.

Puns were an integral part of Jarry's conception of language: in his article “Ceux pour qui il n'y eut point de Babel” he posited the profound and schematic significance of puns, adding that “[q]uand les mots jouent entre eux, c'est qu'ils reconnaissent leur cousinage” (299). In Michel Arrivé's analysis of Ubu's jeux de mots he disagrees with Jarry's own assessment of the importance of puns. Although Arrivé admits that Ubu's puns are carrefours, he, nonetheless, maintains that they are not clever and that they lead one into disappointing cul-de-sacs (297). But Ubu's puns are not supposed to be clever, as Jarry himself indicated in “Questions de théâtre” (416); their importance lies elsewhere. Ubu's puns are significant because they induce an awareness of the multiple, often contradictory meanings inherent in words simultaneously, comprising their Truth, their total reality.

Jarry's legacy to Breton's humour noir was his own conception of humor: the lucidity, invulnerability and revolt of the individual before the contradictions of existence. This revolt involves both the destruction and the resolution of opposites, as Ubu demonstrates in his implementation of l'identité des contraires: his gidouille encompasses the universe, while his language is a network of all-inclusive meaning. Jarry's concept of l'identité des contraires also throws light on the relationship, unexplained by Breton, between humour noir and surrealism. If la surréalité is the resolution of all contradictions into unity, as Breton wrote in his first and second Manifestoes (23-24; 76-78), then humour noir is an arm of the surrealist revolution.

Notes

1. Indeed, Vaché's interpretation of Jarry's humor is quoted in critical works on both Jarry and Breton. See Béhar 251 and Alquié 87.

2. Breton used exactly the same words in “Situation” that he would use in the Anthologie when quoting Hegel's definition of objective humor.

3. This statement also reveals Vaché's antipathy toward the symbolists.

4. These definitions were taken from the Petit Robert; the paraphrased translations are my own.

5. Breton is referring to Pierre-Quint's Le Comte de Lautréamont et Dieu.

6. See Arrivé 175.

7. Breton actually misquotes Jarry's text slightly: he replaces “a fait” with “fera bientôt,” and “qui a pour titre” with “intitulé” (“Alfred Jarry” 47).

8. See Arrivé 210. Ubu's gidouille is in fact the most developed part of his character: in “Les Paralipomènes d'Ubu,” Jarry wrote that “[d]es trois âmes que distingue Platon: de la tête, du cœur et de la gidouille, cette dernière seule, en lui [Ubu], n'est pas embryonnaire” (467).

Works Cited

Alquié, Ferdinand. Philosophie du surréalisme. Paris: Flammarion, 1977.

Arnaud, Noël. “Dada et surréalisme.” Entretiens sur le surréalisme. Ed. Ferdinand Alquié. Paris: Mouton, 1968, 350-69.

Arrivé, Michel. Les Langages de Jarry. Paris: Klinckseick, 1972.

Beaumont, Keith. Alfred Jarry, a Critical and Biographical Study. Leicester: Leicester UP, 1984.

Béhar, Henri. Jarry: le monstre et la marionnette. Paris: Larousse, 1973.

Breton, André. “Alfred Jarry.” 1918. Les Pas perdus. 1924. Paris: Gallimard, 1970, 42-58.

———. Anthologie de l'humour noir. 1940. Paris: J.-J. Pauvert, 1966.

———. “La confession dédaigneuse.” Les Pas. 7-22.

———. Entretiens. 1952. Paris: Gallimard, 1969.

———. Manifestes du surréalisme. 1924; 1930. Paris: Gallimard, 1972.

———. “Situation surréaliste de l'objet.” Position politique du surréalisme. 1935. Paris: Denoël/Gonthier, 1972, 121-68.

Carrouges, Michel. André Breton et les données fondamentales du surréalisme. Paris: Gallimard, 1950.

Jarry, Alfred. “Ceux pour qui il n'y eut point de Babel.” La Chandelle verte. Ed. Maurice Saillet. Paris: Livre de Poche, 1969, 298-302.

———. “Franc-Nohain et Claude Terrasse: La Fiancée du Scaphandre.” La Chandelle, 629-30.

———. Gestes et opinions du docteur Faustroll, pataphysicien. Œuvres complètes. Ed. Michel Arrivé. Vol. I. Paris: Pléiade, 1972, 657-734.

———. Minutes de sable mémorial. O.C., 171-245.

———. “Les Paralipomènes d'Ubu.” O.C., 467-74.

———. “Questions de théâtre.” O.C., 415-18.

———. Ubu cocu ou l'Archéoptéryx. O.C., 491-518.

———. Ubu enchaîné. O.C., 429-62.

———. Ubu roi. O.C., 351-98.

———. “La vérité bouffe.” La Chandelle, 303-06.

“Pun.” The American Heritage Dictionary, 1979 ed.

“Sensation”; “Sens.” Petit Robert, 1974 ed.

Vaché, Jacques. Lettres de guerre. 1918. Pref. André Breton. 1949. Paris: Losfeld, 1970.