Читать книгу Anthology of Black Humor - André Breton - Страница 14

There can be no doubt about submitting to the distinctive viewpoint that informs this anthology a body of work whose multiple horizons are only now starting to be discovered. At the same time, there is surely nothing more serious than that same body of work, and this precisely to the extent that in a “civilized” society the taboo of an almost total ban continues to weigh on it. It took the combined intuition of all the poets to save, from the final darkness to which hypocrisy had condemned it, the expression of a thought considered the most subversive of all, the thought of the Marquis de Sade—“the freest mind that ever was,” according to Guillaume Apollinaire. It took nothing less than the will shown by true analysts, surmounting every prejudice, to extend the field of human knowledge by extracting the fundamental aspirations of that thought. To this task were devoted the successive efforts of Charles Henry, future director of the Laboratory of the Physiology of Sensations at the Sorbonne, in 1887, in an anonymous brochure entitled La Vérité sur le marquis de Sade; of Dr. Eugène Deuhren (Le Marquis de Sade et son temps) at the beginning of this century; and, from 1912 to the present day, of Maurice Heine, whose systematic studies have resulted in an unbroken string of triumphs. Thanks to Maurice Heine, the immense significance of Sade’s writing is now beyond question: psychologically speaking, it can be considered the most authentic precursor of Freud’s work and of modern psychopathology in general; socially, it aims at nothing less than the establishment of a true science of mores, which has been deferred from revolution to revolution.

Even recalling that Sade wrote, on the sheet bearing the manuscript of his stories: “There is no story or novel in all the literatures of Europe in which the somber mode is taken to a more terrifying and pathetic degree,” we are not entirely surprised at the idea that he might periodically have made a concession to black humor. The very excesses of imagination to which his natural genius led him, and in which he was encouraged by his long years of captivity; the madly prideful bias that makes him keep his heroes from ever being sated, whether in pleasure or in crime; his evident concern with varying ad infinitum (if only by complicating them a little further each time) the circumstances that help maintain their aberrations, dot his narrative with a number of plainly outrageous passages, which relax the reader by tipping him off that the author is not taken in, either. For very brief moments the fantastic takes possession of Sade’s work; the real and the plausible are deliberately transgressed. One of the greatest poetic virtues of this work is to situate the portrait of social inequalities and human perversions in the light of childhood phantasmagoria and terrors, and this at the risk of making them overlap, as in the episode concerning the monster of the Apennines that we have chosen to reproduce here.

In more ways than one, Sade magisterially incarnates what we call black humor. It was he who, in life, seems to have inaugurated—at his own terrible expense, moreover—the kind of sinister joke bordering on “amusing murders,” in the sense that Jacques Vaché would later mean it. The misdeeds which earned him his first years of imprisonment were, by a wide margin, much less horrible than was claimed.* This relentless hater of the family, this monster of cruelty, was the same man who—in order, it is believed, to save his in-laws from the gallows, but no doubt especially out of a deep and disinterested conviction—stood up against the death penalty during the Terror and was thrown in jail by the same Revolution that he had enthusiastically served from the first. Freed after the 9th of Thermidor, he was arrested yet again in 1803, following the publication of a pamphlet against the First Consul and his entourage, and transferred as a madman from his prison to the Bicêtre hospital, then to the Charenton asylum, where he died.

It is permissible to see the manifestation of a supreme humor in the final paragraph of his will, in poignant contradiction with the fact that Sade, for his ideas, spent twenty-seven years, under three different regimes, in eleven prisons, and appealed, with more dramatic hope than anyone else has ever shown, to the judgment of posterity:

I forbid that my body be opened for any reason whatsoever. I ask with the greatest possible insistence that it be kept for forty-eight hours in the room in which I die, placed in a wooden coffin that will not be nailed shut before the end of the aforementioned forty-eight hours, at the expiration of which the aforesaid coffin will be nailed shut. During this interval, an urgent message will be sent to M. Lenormand, wood merchant, no. 101 Boulevard de l’Egalité in Versailles, asking him to come in person, with a cart, and to take possession of my body, which will be transported, under his escort, to the woods on my property in Malmaison, commune of Mancé, near Epernon. There I would like it to be placed, without any kind of ceremony, in the first copse of thickets on the right in said woods, as one enters from the direction of the old castle by the main path dividing it. My grave will be dug in this copse by the farmer at Malmaison, under the supervision of M. Lenormand, who will not leave my body until he has placed it in said grave; if he wishes, he may be accompanied in this ceremony by any of my family or friends who, without any sort of pomp, might wish to show me this last sign of affection. Once the grave has been filled in, acorns will be sown on top, so that afterward, the grounds of said grave being covered over again and the copse once again being filled with thickets as before, the traces of my tomb will disappear from the surface of the earth, as I like to think that all memory of me will be erased from the minds of men.

In Charenton-Saint-Maurice, of sound mind and body, on January 30, 1806.

Signed: D.-A.-F. Sade.

“Sade,” wrote Paul Eluard, “wanted to restore to civilized man the power of his primitive instincts; he wanted to deliver the amorous imagination from its own objects. He believed that out of this, and this alone, true equality would come. Since virtue is its own reward, he labored, in the name of everything that suffers, to drag it down and humiliate it, to subject it to the supreme law of unhappiness, with no illusions and no lies, so that those it normally condemns might build here on earth a world on the immense scale of mankind.”*

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Justine ou les malheurs de la Vertu, 1791. Aline et Valcour, 1793. La Philosophie dans le Boudoir, 1795. Juliette, 1796. Les Crimes de l’Amour, 1800. Les 120 journées de Sodome, 1904. Contes et Fabliaux, 1926. L’Aigle, Mademoiselle, 1949, etc.

BIBLIOGRAPHY IN ENGLISH: Justine; or, the Misfortunes of Virtue. Aline and Valcour. Philosophy in the Bedroom. Juliette. The 120 Days of Sodom. The Gothic Tales. Selected Letters.