Surrealpolitik: The Persistence of Irony: Interfering with Surrealist Black Humour

In 'Lightning Rod' ('Paratonnerre', 1939), the Anthology's introductory essay, Breton coined the phrase 'black humour' to describe a complicated combination of Hegel's poetic 'objective humour' [Objektiverhumor] and Freud's ironic 'gallows humour' [Galgenhumor]; now, however, as William Solomon points out with some accuracy, the same phrase seems to have become merely a tired, generic label, fated to be kept in circulation by book and film reviewers. (page 25)
Tags: [Surrealism, Humor]

All their observations, however, overlook what seems most compelling about the Anthology: the fact that, behind its Freudian mask, it demonstrates a critique of aesthetic language from a specifically social perspective. In this respect, Breton seems to leapfrog the later American notion of black humour as thematized nihilism and return us to a consideration of the vexed nature of representation itself, a task as relevant to 'postmodernity' as it was to the modernist moment from which it sprang. (page 26)
Tags: [Surrealism, Humor]

This idea, I argue, provides a model for black humour which uses Hegel's 'objective humour' to perform a dialectical turn on Freud's notion of the individual unconscious as the source of laughter. Black humour thus becomes the articulation of a kind of 'social unconscious', at its kernel the detection and amplification, through aesthetic form and language, of displaced but agonistic social and historical contradictions. (page 26)
Tags: [Surrealism, Humor]

For Breton, the 'true initiator' and model for the Anthology, is hence Swift, the satirist who 'provokes laughter, but does not share in it' and whose work contains a 'sublime element' that can 'transcend the merely comic' [p. 3]. (page 26)
Tags: [Surrealism, Humor]

The textual incidents related certainly show a hardening of the heart and the 'punctual' meanings they imply seem as close to misanthropy, class hatred and misogyny as they do to an avant-garde breaking of bourgeois taboos. From this point of view, black humour can appear as conservative as any joke that requires a victim. To transgress social mores in the name of an ironic scepticism about their value can equally serve to obfuscate some deeper ideological animus. Yet unrepressed pleasure in social violence, I will argue, is only a preliminary part of the gesture this humour performs. To modify our perception, at least for now, of its simple brutality or prejudice, we might ask whether each work interpellates its reader as textual aggressor, victim or as 'agonised witness', in Breton's phrase from Nadja. (page 27)
Tags: [Surrealism, Humor]

Their 'cruelties', though, are by no means motivated by hostility towards others; they allude, at least in part, to notions of the duality of body and mind: the struggle between matter and abstract ideality. (page 28)
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Many of the critics noted above, however, see black humour as a mode via which to prioritize an essential self. Ray and Winston's interpretations of Breton's humour as a variety of Romantic irony illustrate this approach. Black humour, for them, contrives a detached, mocking presentation of the absurdities of the world as well as the self within it, a self superseded by its humorous counterpart. Their analysis reflects the saturnine spirit of Breton and many of his contributors but, at the same time, confines black humour to a narrow subjectivism...These writers lean towards a Freudian rather than Hegelian reading of Breton's schema. (page 30)
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Considered as the victory of the mind over the world, that is, Surrealism makes the mistake of dissolving a material reality into a psychic one, neglecting the dialecticism prerequisite for such a move. (page 31)
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More forcefully, as Susan Buck-Morss ably demonstrates in her study of Benjamin's Arcades Project, Aragon's oneiric, submarine Arcades work can be seen as more than just fantasy: it is, rather, a specific representation of the intoxicating thrall of technicized modernity as itself a myth-like, 'unconscious' state. The presentation in Paris Peasant of, for example, petrol pumps as strange, alien gods -- 'nymphs in naphtha' -- is ideology critique as comedy. (page 32)
Tags: [Surrealism, Humor]

The psychoanalytic terms which permeate Breton's thought (although not without his own explicit reservations) and the often grotesque images from the texts themselves become, as I will show, signifiers summoning a more material scene. To this end, I suggest that Breton's particular synthesis of Freud and Hegel does not mark off an entirely psychic space for black humour. Instead, he takes seriously the Hegelian notion that art objectifies and sublates as aesthetic form a subjective idea or feeling of something real, rendering the latter socially objective, visible and tangible. Through the reflexivity of art, a phenomenon acquires its claim to collective understanding and relevance. (page 33)
Tags: [Surrealism, Humor]

Reflection upon the distillation of shock-value from habitus, then, lends an understanding of how a palliative cultural discourse is in fact discontinuous, a strategy of ideological containment. Aesthetic shock pries open the illusion of private experience, rendering it public and understandable. (page 34)
Tags: [Surrealism, Humor]

So beneath the proscenium arch of black humour lies, then, a desacralized space populated by characters who exemplify a 'truth' of cultural Enlightenment unsupported by its ideological myths. (page 36)
Tags: [Surrealism, Humor]

But the shocking revelation that modernity is a thinly veiled theatre of cruelty is not, however, the full extent of black humour's capacity for irony, although that perception guides our subsequent understanding of the mode. (page 36)
Tags: [Surrealism, Humor]

In a discussion of social experience not represented by 'official' discourse -- a discourse that serves the interest of the dominant class -- Volosinov writes that: "The wider and deeper the breach between the official and the unofficial conscious, the more difficult it becomes for motives of inner speech to turn into outward speech...wherein they might acquire formulation, clarity and rigor. Motives under these conditions begin to fail, to lose their verbal countenance, and little by little really do turn into a 'foreign body' in the psyche." He argues that what official discourse ideologically prevents from objectification in speech -- structures of experience and feeling that he sees as sometimes collective and therefore proto-revolutionary, sometimes merely isolated and déclassé -- is necessarily incomprehensible in its immediacy. This breach between the 'sayable' and the 'unsayable' acts as a kind of social repression which, because it lacks 'verbal countenance', thus has the 'foreign' or alien quality of a social unconscious searching for expression. (page 37)
Tags: [Surrealism, Humor]

What seems alien here is also that which is best known; black humour points up a foreignness not on the peripheries of social discourse but right at its 'official' centre. Indeed, the two are intimately related. In order to render obvious the alien nature of this centre, then, such humour must establish an appropriate speaking or writing voice at that centre that is subsequently and ironically split or put under tension to release its hidden content. (page 37-38)
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In a sense, black humour thus sets out to expose the 'bad conscience' of a dominant discourse (page 39)
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In black humour, the persistence of this uncomfortable 'other' at the boundary of our play of representations -- its refusal to become nothing -- is its defining feature and source of affect. (page 39)
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The very concept of black humour, then, underlines the role of Surrealism as a reflective activity that regards critique as an essential component of creativity. (page 40)
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'Laugh, but weep at the same time. If you cannot weep with your eyes, weep with your mouth. If this is still impossible, urinate'. [Maldoror] (page 43)
Tags: [Surrealism, Humor]

As an aesthetic mode, black humour is thus harshly self-critical, dwelling precisely on that boundary between the promise of artistic redemption and a recognition of the latter's impossibility in reality. Here we have its odd tone: speaking from a strange, cold and cruel place, it provides a voice that is at once historical in the epochal, Hegelian sense and yet insidiously near to us in its form of address. (page 44)
Tags: [Surrealism, Humor]