Textual Practice

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The persistence of irony: interfering with surrealist

black humour

Doug Haynes

To cite this article: Doug Haynes (2006) The persistence of irony: interfering with surrealist black
humour, Textual Practice, 20:1, 25-47, DOI: 10.1080/09502360600559761

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Textual Practice 20(1), 2006, 25 47

Doug Haynes
The persistence of irony: interfering with surrealist
black humour

Is not perhaps all ecstasy in one world humiliating sobriety in that

complementary to it?
Walter Benjamin

Chance is the master of humour, Max Ernst once wrote. And for Ernsts
Surrealist colleague, Andre Breton, the publication of his Anthology of Black
Humour was not without a strong dose of malchance. Beset by technical
and financial problems between 1936 and 1940, the book had finally
been printed by Editions Gallimard when, in early 1941, it was refused
authorization by the new Vichy censors. Distribution had to wait until
1945, at which more world-weary moment the collection received indiffer-
ent reviews and the accusations of parlour anarchism often then levelled at
an unfashionable Surrealism. Although further French editions appeared in
1950 and 1966, it is significant that an English translation of the work
(City Lights) was produced only in 1997 after a decades-long lull in inter-
est.1 The accidents of the history of Bretons project, then, have surely
obscured much of what was original and critically illuminating about it.
In Lightning Rod (Paratonnerre, 1939), the Anthologys introductory
essay, Breton coined the phrase black humour to describe a complicated
combination of Hegels poetic objective humour [Objektiverhumor] and
Freuds 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.2 This weariness is particularly true of the
United States, where the very mention of such humour conjures a quasi-
existentialist 60s and 70s literary criticism exemplified by Max F. Schulz
and once used to describe the work of the generation including Barth
and Pynchon writers who would eventually be more widely regarded
as postmodern.3
Textual Practice ISSN 0950-236X print/ISSN 1470-1308 online # 2006 Taylor & Francis
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
DOI: 10.1080/09502360600559761
Textual Practice

A number of critics have nevertheless tried to recharge Bretons

Lightning Rod. Most effectively, Paul Rays study of English Surrealism
examines the Freud-Hegel relation in the text while, influentially,
Matthew Winston tracks the perceived shift between Bretons humour
noir and American black humour.4 In French, Annie Le Bruns ardent
defence of Bretons humour as the extreme point of the human adven-
ture, and Mireille Rosellos critique of Bretons rigid hypermoralism
both also stand out.5 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. This neglected side of Bretonian humour is the
one the present article seeks to address. Surely it is ironic that many of
the Anthologys commentators regard the work primarily as a document
of profound sceptical detachment from life when even the cultural scruti-
neers of Vichy gleaned something politically subversive from its aesthetic
strategies. Against, for example, Rosello, who sees Breton simply indulging
his own tastes as the sovereign arbiter of the black tournament, I contend
that his choice of contributors is far less arbitrary than she suggests.6 In
Lightning Rod, he insists that all 45 authors, drawn from across national
and historical boundaries and including Swift and Sade, Lautreamont,
Jarry, Baudelaire, Nietzsche and Lewis Carroll, Kafka, Marcel Duchamp,
Gise`le Prassinos and Leonora Carrington, express a common, fundamental
idea (p. xviii). This idea, I argue, provides a model for black humour which
uses Hegels objective humour to perform a dialectical turn on Freuds
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.
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). It is, in other words, Swifts glacial irony that initiates
black humour. And irony, as V. N. Volosinov has usefully suggested,
can be considered an encounter in one voice of two incarnate value
judgements and their interference with one another it is a way of
speaking by contraries, or by contradiction.7 Unlike the Aristotelian
ironic tradition a punctual communicative mechanism wherein we say
one thing to infer another for Volosinov, the mode signals and preserves
ongoing tensions between differing social interests at work within

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 Doug Haynes The persistence of irony

language.8 This is a productive perspective from which to read the Anthol-

ogy in as much as it figures the semantic splitting that occurs in irony to be a
reference to wider social traumas and suggests also that aesthetic meanings
interfere with practical ones. In the following discussion, I propose that,
as with Swift, alongside the immediate, comedic impact of the works in the
Anthology there lies also a countervailing, aesthetic seriousness that inter-
feres with and comments upon the very conditions of that laughter.

The first issue to address, however, is the view that black humour is just
personal affectation: a cool outlook partaking perhaps of the temporary
anaesthesia of the heart that Henri Bergson thought necessary for laugh-
ter.9 Rosello, for example, sees Bretons avowed lack of pity black
humour is the mortal enemy of sentimentality, says Breton (p. xix)
tipping over into a reactionary, masculinist and self-aggrandising disdain
for the poor or for women, upon whose bodies many of the cruelties of
such humour are played out. For this we might turn to Baudelaires narra-
tion from Paris Spleen of his despotic attack on an artisanal Parisian
glazier whose goods are not beautiful enough (pp. 101 3). Or we might
mention, as does Susan Suleiman, such cases as the maid in Leonora
Carringtons story, The Debutante, whose face is ripped off to provide
a disguise for a talking hyena (pp. 337 40).
These are difficult points to answer so early in the present essay. 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 Bretons phrase
from Nadja. In The Shoddy Glazier, Baudelaire draws us at first philo-
sophically close to his narratorial perspective when he describes the con-
stitution of his type of bohemian protagonist lazy, voluptuous souls,
immersed in boredom and reverie upon whom the occasional mad
frenzy must suddenly come (p. 101). Later, though, during the attack
itself, the scene descends into farce: a play-acting of once-momentous
struggles:

I rushed out to the balcony and grabbed a small flower pot, and when
the man reappeared on the sidewalk below, I let my little engine of

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war fall in a perpendicular drop . . . drunk with folly, I screamed at

him furiously: Make life beautiful! Make life beautiful!
(p. 103)

Such camp ineffectuality, despite causing the glazier to fall over and
break his glass, transforms the declasse warrior, with his little engine,
into something of a demented figure of fun himself and from whom the
reader withdraws investment. The reader is more the witness of a kind
of exhausted decadence a clash of the bohemian consciousness with
the awkward facts of life than a protagonist here. Similarly, in The
Debutante, the remorseless logic of the narrative, wherein a debutante
first befriends a hyena, then teaches it French, and finally substitutes it
for herself during her coming-out ball, agonizes the reader as the person
who can see the danger but can do nothing about it. That the debutante
is utterly complicit with this logic in fact turns the humorous sting, as
Suleiman points out, upon high society rather than the obvious victims
of the narrative.10 So, while black humour is of course frequently tenden-
tious, its target, as this study will suggest, is the nature of social conflict as
such, rather than any underprivileged group.
In fact, the discourse of physical cruelty so evident in a writer like
Sade, for example, whose influence is felt throughout the Anthology can
be read here as a connection to the concerns of the avant-garde and
modernism more generally. The human body per se, not just that of the
female or the powerless person, frequently serves as the canvas upon
which the modernist consciousness articulates itself. Sometimes elegiacally,
sometimes projectively, in modernist works, it is typically abstraction, dis-
figuration or the trope of the machinic that take precedence over mimetic
representation and the verities of humanism. Picassos Les Demoiselles
dAvignon (1907), with its distorted, primitivist (and admittedly female)
figures, arguably introduces this tendency into the visual realm. Surrealist
assemblages such as those of the pictorial cadavre exquis, or the monstrous
multipart body, conjoin elements of chance with a similar symbolic vio-
lence against the integrity of the body. 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.
Baudelaire, in his essay On the Essence of Laughter (1855), is among
the first to consider the importance of this duality for humour. Discussing
the coarse but delightful laughter derived from watching another person
fall over, he observes that, [t]he man who trips would be the last to laugh at
his own fall, unless he happened to be a philosopher, one who had acquired
by habit a power of rapid self-division and thus of assisting as a disinter-
ested spectator at the phenomena of his own ego.11 To become an

28
 Doug Haynes The persistence of irony

object for oneself in this way, even an object in pain, he suggests, is philo-
sophically and ironically humorous: a dedoublement indicating a partial
transcendence from ones naturalized material and psychic predicament.
Laughter, he concludes, is the expression of a double, or contradictory,
feeling.12 It is a feeling that Paul de Man, in a discussion of Baudelaire,
terms the self-escalating act of consciousness, a doubling that catalyses
the self as representation.13 The philosophical fall, de Man writes, splits
the subject into an empirical self that exists in a state of inauthenticity
and a self that exists only in the form of a language that asserts the know-
ledge of this inauthenticity.14 For a later avant-garde writer like Wyndham
Lewis (not included in the Anthology), the same dualism is at once inher-
ently absurd and yet spares us from the gravity of insect-like unreflectivity.
In The Meaning of the Wild Body (1927) he writes:

The root of the Comic is to be sought in the sensations resulting

from the observations of a thing behaving like a person. But from
that point of view all men are necessarily comic: for they are all
things, or physical bodies, behaving as persons.15

Lewis first-person protagonist in his story A Soldier of Humour, he tells

us, looks like a visi-goth fighting machine, but it is in reality a laughing
machine, a character driven by distaste towards his own meaningless
and contingent blond-skinned gut-bag.16
Both Lewis and Baudelaire hence figure a certain self-objectification
and even self-immolation as the essence of humour in the respect that
the latter are symptoms of the necessary intertwinement of abstraction
and materiality, subjectivity and objectivity.17 Surely, we might note, the
punctured, febrile exhortations of the protagonist of Baudelaires glazier
story to make an ugly world as beautiful as he would like it are also
related to this. These tensions are important for Bretons humour too,
although the latters central gesture goes beyond the kind of intransitivity
that de Man suggests. De Man envisages ironic doubling as a folie lucide in
which consciousness experiences a bitter self-alienation from a world
anterior, but absolutely lost to it. Bretonian black humour, on the other
hand, as I will discuss shortly, is more concerned with a world aesthetically
refracted, rather than effaced by the ironic consciousness. The sense of
splitting the body, the body and mind, or separate human faculties
belongs, we might say, to what Peter Nicholls describes as a spectacular
disembodiment proper to the modern. [O]nce penetrated and expanded
by capital, he writes, the body no longer offers itself as a privileged object
of representation, but exists instead as a source of discrete sensory intensi-
ties which elude symbolisation.18 Aesthetic attempts to retextualize the
body, the self, or the authentic voice must, then, bear the trace both of

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capitals disintegrative effects and its internal and constitutive incongrui-

ties, all of which resurface in the new and, I argue, blackly humorous
text, in a manner we might compare to that of the arm involuntarily
raised in a Nazi salute by Dr Strangelove in Stanley Kubricks film.
Many of the critics noted above, however, see black humour as a
mode via which to prioritize an essential self. Ray and Winstons interpret-
ations of Bretons humour as a variety of Romantic irony illustrate this
approach. Black humour, for them, contrives a detached, mocking presen-
tation of the absurdities of the world as well as the self within it, a self
superseded by its humorous counterpart. Their analysis reflects the satur-
nine spirit of Breton and many of his contributors but, at the same
time, confines black humour to a narrow subjectivism. The laugher who
laughs even at him/herself is not really a figure of pathos but is elevated
to a position of radical self-assertion. Ray, for example, views such
humour as the supremacy of the pleasure principle over the reality prin-
ciple; . . . a victory of mind over the world, a standpoint he shares with
Le Brun, who describes black humour as a total revolt of the ego which
refuses to let itself be affected by its own sensibility.19
These writers lean towards a Freudian rather than Hegelian reading of
Bretons schema. For Freud, in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious
(1905) and again in his later paper Humour (1927), humour is a special
category of the comic. It contains something fine and elevating, some-
thing mastering that lifts the self above a vain and foolish world, an
insight that Breton too notes in Lightning Rod. Freud clarifies his
thought with an example of gallows humour: the condemned rogue
who, when led out for execution on a Monday, comments, Well, this
weeks beginning nicely. The joke is defined as conveying the message,
Look here! This is all that this seemingly dangerous world amounts to
and it depends upon the psychic intercession of the paternalistic, uncon-
scious superego to do so.20 Rescuing the embattled ego-self, as Simon
Critchley in his discussion of Freud quips, the superego is your
amigo.21 Liberating pleasure from the grip of reality, the superego
affords the saving in psychic expenditure that Freud sees at the heart of
all laughter.22 One can easily imagine the appeal this might have for
Surrealism, with its wish to rise above reality and overcome the world
at hand.
But interpreted thus, the way is open for black humour to become
prey to the charges of subjectivism levelled against Surrealism in general,
criticisms that began with one of its greatest admirers, Walter Benjamin.
Inspired by Louis Aragons modern mythology from Paris Peasant
(1926) a Surrealist reimagining of Parisian city space Benjamins
unfinished Arcades Project [Passagen-Werk] (1927 40) sought to dissolve
Aragons impressionistic perceptions into what Benjamin called

30
 Doug Haynes The persistence of irony

the space of history.23 Surrealism, for Benjamin as for later critics, was all
too concerned with the private topography of the individual mind, the
dream, the reverie, personal desire and the unconscious to recognize prop-
erly the social content these things might contain. The glass house in which
Breton had claimed to wish to live was decidedly opaque.
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. In
this sense, and like Freuds superego, it surely reprises something of the
subjective irony of Romanticism, in which, as Hegel writes, everything
genuinely and independently real becomes a show, not true and genuine
on its own account or through itself, but a mere appearance due to the
ego in whose power and caprice and at whose free disposal it remains.24
Surrealisms humour, while it surrenders the ego to what lies beneath it
as a more absolute substance, might be expected to reflect this drive to
ironic supremacy, consisting of representations of the irruptive, possibly
utopian, forces of the unconscious within everyday life. Ernsts collage
novels, marked out for special commendation in Lightning Rod, seem
to do just this. Une Semaine de Bonte (1934), for example, seamlessly
and erotically interpolates images of snakes, dragons, torrents, roosters,
the sphinx and other bizarre surprizes into woodcut images culled from
the pages of melodramatic Victorian bodice-rippers.25 Strikingly juxtapos-
ing images of real unconscious desires with those of a moribund, mildly
pornographic, popular imagination, does the irony of Ernsts method
speak by way of contraries, however, or does it dissolve one meaning in
favour of another, subsuming the world beneath its desires?
This ambiguity in surrealist humour resembles the terms of the thesis
Freud advances in Jokes, where jokes act as displacement activities permit-
ting subterranean desires, sometimes sexual, sometimes hostile, to emerge.
Such cathexes, Freud notes, reminding us of their Bergsonian potential for
cruelty, save psychic effort by apparently bypassing ethical and social con-
straints. For him, however unlike, I suggest, for the Surrealists a joke by
its very nature is actually already fully socially sanctioned and contained. Its
excesses are recuperated into sociality as a kind of compromise between
instinct and its repression the pleasure principle in its proper form as
an adaptation to reality. In this regard, we see that humour especially
for Freud, the highest, because most socialized, form of Witz is less
instinctual outburst than the latters mediation. The superego that
enables humour is not only, we might recall, an amigo but also, we
could add, a compadre a father too. [T]he humorist acquires his super-
iority by assuming the role of the grown-up, identifying himself to some
extent with the father, where he reduces the other people to the position
of children, Freud writes.26 Or, in other words, the gratification of

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Textual Practice

humour is cleverly garnered from an accession to patriarchal lawfulness.

The condemned man of Freuds joke, for example, enjoys his own self-
renunciation because in it the pleasure principle is still very much at
work, albeit now rather masochistically. Through a form of irony that is
more elaborated but still mechanically similar to the one noted in our
first encounter with this man, it is now the word of the father, or the
superego as the representative of the strictures of sociality, that comfort-
ingly takes the place of his own. Only his identification with structures
of discursive power in which the breach between nature and sociality
has already been healed allows the man to achieve that externalising
self-objectification noted above in the writings of Baudelaire and Lewis.
Against such covert lawfulness, Surrealisms disruptive use of the
unconscious, on the other hand, seems to have stronger affinities with
Freuds earlier Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901), where slips of the
tongue and other mistakes reveal, through a more untamed parapraxis,
secret narratives of desire running parallel with everydayness, a model
close to Ernsts. And, surprisingly, this iconoclastic tendency in Surrealist
humour has a side that turns it towards an understanding of the social
world, one that is critical rather than complicit. Ernsts collages can be
read, for example, as commenting upon and exacerbating the illicit
desires melodrama both constructs and denies, a sort of pornology of
coy Victoriana. More forcefully, as Susan Buck-Morss ably demonstrates
in her study of Benjamins Arcades Project, Aragons 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.27 Aragons vision unmasks modern gods
as finite commodities, revealing the epoch of commodity-time as in part
enfolded within a vestigial, dreaming, myth-time: Marxs prehistory.
Benjamin reminds us that, for Marx, the death of old forms of life must
be comic, [s]o that humanity parts from its past gaily.28 In the very per-
ception of myth-consciousness, as Jurgen Habermas has put it, one feels, a
shudder at being uprooted and a sigh of relief at escaping; the frisson of any
reflective and historical consciousness, that is, involves a dedoublement.29
By drawing attention to these possibilities for critique in Aragon, what
Benjamin wished for his Passagen-Werk a dialectic of awakening is
perhaps close to the reading of black humour proposed here: a materialist
and dialectical awakening of culture from its deep, bourgeois dream of
itself.30
At face value, Bretons comments from Surrealist Situation of the
Object (1935), where he first limns the ideas that appear in Lightning
Rod, seem to bear out the above, radically interiorising position of

32
 Doug Haynes The persistence of irony

Surrealism. In art, he writes, the more and more systematic search for
[psychic] sensations works toward the abolition of the ego by the id, and
consequently it endeavours to make the pleasure principle hold clearer
and clearer sway over the reality principle.31 The facts of the world are
important only for whatever special affinity they might strike with their
viewer. Art is made, excluding (relatively) the external object as such
and considering nature only in its relationship with the inner world of con-
sciousness; a rapport Breton calls objective chance.32 Even as it experi-
ences this affinity, of course, the subject of objective chance must
perceive equally the paucity of reality, a diminution of the real in relation
to the appropriative consciousness. Yet the Anthology, I argue, does not
present black humour as just the desires of the id, or even Jacques
Vaches crippling Umor his sense of the drab pointlessness of every-
thing (p. 297). The psychoanalytic terms which permeate Bretons
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 Bretons 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 sub-
lates as aesthetic form a subjective idea or feeling of something real, render-
ing the latter socially objective, visible and tangible. Through the reflexivity
of art, a phenomenon acquires its claim to collective understanding and rel-
evance. In this respect, and in Bretons case, we ascend, as it were, from the
more experiential pure mental representation of objective chance to a
fuller consideration of the aesthetic products it enables.33 This advance,
made between the 1935 and 1939 texts, is what specifically catalyses the
possibility of black humour: we have now an embrace, Breton suggests
in Lightning Rod, of the twin sphinxes of Hegels objective humour
and the Freud-influenced objective chance:

Elsewhere, I stated that the black sphinx of objective humor could not
avoid meeting, on the dust-clouded road of the future, the white
sphinx of objective chance, and that all subsequent human creation
would be the fruit of their embrace.
(p. xvi)

It is in this context that Hegels discussion of objective humour from

the Aesthetics is cited, where the philosopher writes, [i]f what matters to
humour is the object and its configuration within its subjective reflex,
then we acquire thereby a growing intimacy with the object, a sort of objec-
tive humour (p. xvi).34 Any reading of this portion of the Aesthetics cannot
fail to recognize that the real object of objective humour, wherein the

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subject can find its proper home (and so, in a sense, lose itself), is in fact a
poetic, aesthetic one.35 Aesthetic objectification as the socialized expression
of experience, then, takes priority in the battle of the sphinxes.
In the case in hand, of course, it is the Freudian unconscious that con-
stitutes the idea rendered aesthetically sensible or manifest; firstly through
the surreal encounter, then, more importantly, through the latters rep-
resentation. The image of the unconscious appears not symptomatically,
as in an individuals dream; as an artwork and a text, black humour is a
specifically social product mediating such experience, lending it concretion
and broader significance. So, paradoxically, the distance of aesthetics
returns us to a reflective and more closely critical understanding of life.
[H]istrionic or fanatical stress on the mysterious side of the mysterious
takes us no further, Benjamin famously writes of the surreal experience;
we penetrate the mystery only to the degree that we recognize it in the
everyday world, by virtue of a dialectical optic that perceives the everyday
as impenetrable, the impenetrable as everyday.36 Any claim to universalize
immediate, irrational or marvellous subjective experience the Surrealist
artwork might make must be seen through this lens. Elsewhere, Benjamin
divides these two, relating sides of experience into Erlebnis and Erfahrung:
shock and something to be undergone, respectively.37
Surrealism becomes, in this case, a dialectical image of culture as a
whole. In so far as especially liberal bourgeois culture enacts a spiritual har-
monization of social antagonisms a harmony that is in a sense the
bedrock and habitus of everyday life it is utopian and ideological at
the same time. This culture is utopian in its gesture towards a properly
binding universality of values, yet ideological in its simultaneous inability
to recognize its own unreconciled social divisions the partial nature of its
values and meanings. So, like other avant-garde modernisms, Surrealism
demonstrates such spiritual reconciliation as abstract, formal and, under-
neath, shockingly violent: a sphere in which, as Benjamin suggests, no
limb remains unrent.38 Amid unthinkable disorder, Aragon writes in
Paris Peasant, completing the fall into formalism, [t]he limbs, in the
throes of an incomprehensible gesture, grew rigid. And the man was no
longer anything but a sign among the constellations.39 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.
Those unaccountable irruptions within the everyday we noticed in
Ernst, for example, hence describe not some Jungian collective psyche,
or Freuds unrealized nature, but encrypt instead a social content that
cannot take direct form. The multipart bodies he depicts realize,
through metaphors of libidinal desire, a social heterogeneity suppressed

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 Doug Haynes The persistence of irony

by class society and its unitary discourse of power. As Benjamin points out,
it is in the masses that the eponymous Nadja of Bretons novel divines,
[t]he great living, sonorous unconscious inspiring Surrealism: here are
the multiple agents of social production alienated and excluded from the
everyday world they create.40 Thus, through its disjunctive images,
poetic, plastic or visual, Benjamin argues, Surrealism eschews a holistic
liberal aesthetic of symbolic illumination, or instructive narrative, in
favour of a method that correctly puts the legitimacy of bourgeois cultural
forms themselves under tension, a method that refracts the violence those
forms occlude and yet, imagistically, suggests a recomposition of the
broken body.41
Theodor Adorno, in a piece that owes much to Benjamins Surreal-
ism essay, looks back on the images of that movement the nature morte
of dismembered bodies and objects upon which libido has once rested to
tell us,

Surrealisms booty is images, to be sure, but not the invariant, ahis-

torical images of the unconscious subject to which the conventional
view would like to neutralize them; rather, they are historical images
in which the subjects innermost core becomes aware that it is some-
thing external, an imitation of something social and historical.42

For Adorno, and in part for Benjamin, Surrealisms most useful appli-
cation is thus as a moment of salutary self-demystification, presenting
humanity more as the cipher of praxis than the other way around. The
same moment, for us, also shows, in nuce, the necessary conditions for
black humour. The formalism of cultural reconciliation is also imbued
with a purely formal, binding ethics, the hypocrisy of which such
humour seeks to expose. It is the turn to these ethically oriented questions,
inherited from the Hegelian side of black humour where, as in Greek
Old Comedy, comedy exists to attack vice or the latter masquerading as
virtue that lends this humour its political dimension.
In their essay on Sade from Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and
Max Horkheimer argue that part of the Enlightenments tainted legacy
is its purely assertive and therefore nugatory conjunction of the culture
of universal reason with moral truth: Enlightenment, they write, . . . is
the philosophy which equates the truth with scientific systematisation.43
In this respect, the Frankfurt School thinkers share with Freud and
Lacan the view that a morality determined by the Kantian categorical
imperative is unfelt, deriving rather from pragmatic calculation and sys-
tematic coherence.44 If effectiveness and coherence are the only ethical cri-
teria, that is, even a will to power could be as valid a basis of ethical system
as the Decalogue. For Breton too, the authors of black humour are black

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philosophers critical of Enlightened modernity those who perceive and

exploit through their narratives the implications of this moral void, or slip.
Laughter [. . .] offers us the void as a pledge, writes mystic Pierre Piobb;
[w]e can imagine the advantage that humour would be liable to take of
[. . .] especially this definition, Breton adds (p. xiv). Such humour has
the freedom, in other words, to be an order not underwritten by abstract
ethical principle Breton cites Paul Eluards comment that Sades distinc-
tion, for example, is to offer us no illusions and no lies (p. 21).
So beneath the proscenium arch of black humour lies, then, a desacra-
lized space populated by characters who exemplify a truth of cultural
Enlightenment unsupported by its ideological myths. They provide narra-
tive voices that, ironically, are aligned with, not rebelling against, or trying
to assuage the inner motives of praxis. Therein lies their accent on cruelty.
The Anthology is full of examples of figures whose ethical horizons, released
from a superstitious fear of divine retribution, are defined by the systema-
tic, sceptical coherence of disillusioned reason: Swifts A Modest Proposal
takes the part of the Whig landowner in Ireland who, on the grounds of
economic calculus, modestly proposes that the Irish poor sell their own
children as a foodstuff for the tables of the rich; Sades ogre, Minsky,
from Juliette is a resolute libertine: what you have the madness to call
depravity is nothing more than mans natural state. He keeps a harem
of two hundred girls I eat them when the ways of lust have sufficiently
mortified them (pp. 24 5); Nietzsche plays an abject God, occupying a
students room, sentenced to wile away the next eternity with bad jokes
(p. 130); Jarry is represented by extracts from Ubu and an account of
The Passion Considered As An Uphill Bicycle Race: Jesus was in a
dead heat at the time with the thieves. We know that he continued the
race airborne but that is another story (p. 225); and Ducasses Maldoror
successfully assaults man and the Creator in the name of his own will
(p. 139). Duchamp, for his part, provides poetic fragments such as,
Incest, or familial passion (p. 280), while Gise`le Prassinos, in Succession
of Limbs, writes of the couple who keep their child in a box that they kick
down the stairs in order to teach him to walk (pp. 344 6). Black humours
theatre of cruelty pace Artaud thus translates scientized rationality
into a phantasmagoric yet substantially realistic social logic.

But the shocking revelation that modernity is a thinly veiled theatre of

cruelty is not, however, the full extent of black humours capacity for
irony, although that perception guides our subsequent understanding of
the mode. Just as Benjamin was always less willing than Adorno to
consign Surrealist insights to monolithic irrationality, the wholesale
reduction of black humour to a dialectic of Enlightenment does not
fully explain its particularity in the cases of different writers. Here, then,

36
 Doug Haynes The persistence of irony

I will consider the side of black humour that is partly frustrated wish, partly
objective social contradiction: its proximity to a notion of the unconscious.
In order to divine the place from which this humour speaks, that is, we
must address the unconscious withheld but implicit in the discourse of
the mastering voices of black humour: an unconscious composed of
muted historical voices.
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 unof-
ficial 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.45

He argues that what official discourse ideologically prevents from objecti-

fication in speech structures of experience and feeling that he sees as
sometimes collective and therefore proto-revolutionary, sometimes
merely isolated and declasse is necessarily incomprehensible in its imme-
diacy. 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.
It would be easy, perhaps, to relegate black humour to exactly such a
gibber of the inexpressible. As obscenity, semantic or syntactical con-
fusion or incongruity, certain texts such as those of Ducasse, Rimbaud
or even Kafka certainly contain a foreign element: the anomie of a con-
sciousness that has lost its way or is unable to understand itself historically.
Equally, the parade of nasty-minded practical jokes and acts of violence in
the Anthology could be seen as the metonymic residue of a poorly-
understood class violence within the declasse, broadly bohemian con-
sciousness of its authors. Yet, as I have suggested, black humours chief
orientation is to unearth an inert asociality at the heart of sociality
itself the so to speak extrinsic moral law governing social interaction.
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

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release its hidden content. Hence the magisterial unreason of Swift or the
diabolic misanthropy of Ducasse.
Indeed, the very fact that the narrative voices in the Anthology are
those of mastery attests to their insufficiency, or need for an other.
Hegel foresaw this when he set objective humour against what he
termed subjective humour. The latter, chiefly ascribed to Romanticism,
is delineated in his comments on Solgers infinite absolute negativity,
or radical demythologization of the world to become expressive material
for the lordly subject. This is a process without end, Hegel suggests: the
principle of demythologization applies equally to everything, cancelling
even itself. Self-sufficiency is raised to the level of an empty, but, paradoxi-
cally, universal and infinite law, becoming external again.46 A similar,
twisting logic can be observed in the shift we noted in our readings of
Freuds condemned man. The mastering irony with which this man
rescues himself from his fate, as we have seen, derives from the part of
himself already given over to general mastery what Freud calls the
superego. His subjective pleasure is really the pleasure of the other, so
disillusion about the world, in his case, occludes his reliance upon it.
Self-recognition is mediated through the superegoistic master, who trans-
forms the contingency of imminent death into a source of intellectual plea-
sure. The id, or self of unrestricted desire, that in Bretons psychoanalytic
analysis asserts its natural rights throughout the Anthology thus grades into
the intangible but compelling thrall of the paternal superego. And this is
why Breton thinks it best to employ Freudian terminology . . . without
this dispelling the reservations caused by Freuds necessarily artificial
distinction between the id, the ego, and the superego (p. xviii). Now
black humour really is speaking by way of contraries: absolute mastery is
indistinguishable from absolute domination: that which liberates, enslaves
in equal measure.
We can therefore go on to make the obverse point that the legitimat-
ing authority of the superegoistic voice that which lends it apparent
substance is in fact paradoxically derived precisely from its transform-
ation of material contingency into abstract principle, its premature and
hegemonic reconciliation of the material and ideational. What this voice
must thus necessarily misrecognize, then, is its appropriation of, and
dependence upon the voices of others, along with all the material concerns
the latter might try to express. Consequently, the link between the dispa-
rate writings in the Anthology is their exposure of mastering discourses to
the multivocity or even contextual relativity they try to calm or obviate.
And this is the clearest sense in which they are ironic: the black humour
text speaks for the other as much as it speaks for itself. Just as the uncon-
scious of psychoanalysis is revealed through its immanent pressure on,
and shaping of conscious thought, so the monologic, unitary aspect of

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 Doug Haynes The persistence of irony

especially the discourse of power is always under pressure from its hetero-
glossic aspect. Indeed, this is what comprises the relation of the periphery
to the centre. In a sense, black humour thus sets out to expose the bad
conscience of a dominant discourse, an expose that varies according to
context, as the final section of the present work will show. One is reminded
here of Kants famous, bathetic definition of a joke from his Critique of
Judgement (1790). For him, [l]aughter is an affect that arises if a tense
expectation is transformed into nothing.47 Inaugurating a process of rep-
etition, laughter lies at the boundary of our play of representations; like a
mistake or error, a joke, Kant says, [it] must always contain something that
can deceive us for a moment. That is why, when the illusion vanishes,
[transformed] into nothing, the mind looks at the illusion once more in
order to give it another try.48 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.
As readers of black humour, the joke-work we are expected to
perform, then, is more arduous than Freuds spontaneous saving of
psychic energy, although, on a local level, so to speak, individual transgres-
sions of taboo might function as Freud imagined. There are jokes and wit-
ticisms in these texts. And there is certainly no shortage of the incongruities
that Francis Hutcheson, prefiguring Kant, in his Thoughts On Laughter
(1758) thought central to humour.49 But in the wider sense, the reader
must pass from affective involvement to a more distanced reflection in
order finally to get the joke. Discussing Schillers Kantian notions of
comedy, Mark G. Ward suggests that an oscillation exists between direct
subjective affect in the enjoyment of comedy and those moments in
which the comic material becomes qualitatively changed to a perception
of its objective aesthetic form.50 Black humour, I argue, raises such oscil-
lation into a dialectical move. This shift to aesthetic distance demands a
double interpellation: firstly, the reader of affect, who is immersed,
beguiled and close to the text; and secondly, the reflective reader, who,
in meditating upon the first, really submits to the logic of the work and
so can go beyond it. The exoticism of shock, or comedic affect, as we
saw with Benjamin, becomes aesthetic reflection. The black humour
position is constructed through the interference between readerly feeling
and narratorial detachment. For a writer like Sade, for example, Breton
stresses a narratorial remove, or doubling, even in the excesses of the
latters texts, tipping [the reader] off that the author is not taken in,
either (p. 19).51 Sade as pure dominator, the one that, as Gilles Deleuze
says, implies no suspense or system of aesthetics, is rejected.52 The favour-
able comparison of Swift with Voltaire in the Anthology also alludes to this:
Voltaire bears a perpetual snicker, the mask of a man who grasped things
by reason and never by feeling, and who enclosed himself in scepticism;

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Swift, on the other hand, dispassionate as his writing seems, grasped life in
a wholly different way and was constantly outraged (p. 3), writes Breton.
In addition to the two readers we have mentioned, it is worth noting
that we could even posit a third, preliminary reader the one who adopts
the position Breton himself occupies as anthologist in as much as the
black humour text does not necessarily advertize itself as such and requires,
first of all, recognition. Is Sades Juliette really intended to be funny? Is De
Quincys On Murder Considered As One of the Fine Arts? The intention of
these works is probably less important than the exegetical work, driven,
Breton says, by a considerable partiality (p. xix) that shows them in a
humorous light. 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.
In order to illustrate further the points made above, some key passages
from the Anthology should be examined in greater detail. Hence I will
consider both Swift and Ducasses approach to ironic language and,
finally, restage Freuds gallows joke, this time as a summation of black
humours aesthetic gesture. Since Swift is the progenitor here, I turn
firstly to him and to the most substantial excerpt of his work included in
Bretons text: the propagandising pamphlet A Modest Proposal (1729).
This text demonstrates in a number of ingenious ways the splitting of its
mastering voice and the revelation of those material interests covertly
supporting it.
The pamphlet, penned after Swift returned to Dublin to become
Dean of St Patricks, excoriates English imperial policy in Ireland. As a
prolific writer, political journalist and wit, Swift was of course skilled
at transforming outrage to irony: the proposal here is anything but
modest Irish children can become less burdensome to their families
and the state by being eaten by the rich. Through the persona of the
narrating Proposer, Swift writes,

I have been assured . . . that a young healthy child well nursed is at a

year old a most delicious, nourishing and wholesome food, whether
stewed, roasted, baked, or broiled, and I make no doubt that it will
equally serve in a fricassee, or a ragout.
(p. 11)

Older, less obviously tasty offspring, he suggests, might be spared for

breeding purposes. The advantages, he argues, are abundant. One would
reduce the numbers of Papists, provide much-needed funds for the
peasantry, boost national income and stimulate the catering trade.
Swifts attack is upon the English Protestant absentee landowner class
that the Proposer represents and in whose grip Irish tenant farmers were

40
 Doug Haynes The persistence of irony

suffering. Proposal satirizes not only the characters callousness but also his
modern ideas, principally his adoption of an economic calculus valuing
free-market mercantilism ahead of labour power. One of Irelands long-
term problems leading ultimately to the 1845 49 famine was the fact
that exporting agricultural products to the English imperium and
elsewhere was more profitable than home consumption. Without state
intervention, the drift of goods was inevitable. Only human flesh remained
on the domestic market.
On one level, then, the doubleness of Swifts irony suggests that
economic rationalism can also be a kind of cannibalism. By bridging
this shocking incongruity, the reader locates the source of the writing
voice elsewhere than in its explicit, modest intention, perceiving that
voice as split. In this sense, we understand Bretons notion of Swifts
sublimity, his hidden voice; Swifts structuring premise is that there is
no Swift, leaving the reader to supplement the text with a satisfactory
re-narrator.53 On another, more specific level, though, this irony itself
comes into question, further revealing what the overt speaker wishes to
conceal. The Proposer is not just a landowner but also a member of
the emergent, mercantile Whig chattering class whose discourse is dissem-
bling, witty or polite and which Swift satirizes elsewhere. In Genteel and
Ingenious Conversation (1704), for example, using the persona of the
Whiggish stenographer Wagstaff, Swift shows that politics and politeness
are linked: disingenuously disavowing anything but superficial resemblance
between the two words, Wagstaff nevertheless suggests that with possession
of a knowledge of the noble art of politeness, a true spirit of loyalty to the
Protestant succession should steal in along with it.54
Beneath the language of polite wit, then, lies a cultural constellation:
the freedom of reason, trade and empire-building enabled by the weaken-
ing of previous institutions of church and court.55 Shaftesburys 1709
Whiggish Sensus Communis: An Essay on the Freedom of Wit and
Humour codifies this when he conjoins politeness with reason and
freedom: All politeness is owing to liberty. We polish one another and
rub off our corners and rough sides by a sort of amicable collision,
he writes. To restrain this, is inevitably to bring a rust upon mens
understandings.56 Tellingly, a metaphor is also made linking wit and
trade: restriction on wit i.e., taking offence is likened to a trade
embargo. [I]mpositions and restrictions reduce it to a low ebb. Nothing
is as advantageous to it as a free port, he writes.57
Raillery and wit hence preserve the English genius and dissenting
character whilst avoiding conflict among the nascent Whig bourgeois
class, a conflict that might calamitously reprise that of the Civil War;
instead, its humour strengthens that class and allows it to pursue its
own, private interests. Ideas do not have to acknowledge an institutional

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Textual Practice

basis; they are social only in the most pragmatic sense. Denizens of the
coffee house and theatre, this new class and its discourse might construct
a new public sphere but represent, in fact, the pursuit of individualism.
Polite language reflects this, far removed from Swifts Lockian ideal of
transparent discourse. As Ian Higgins notes, for Swift, the Proposer thus
exemplifies Whig hegemony: private self-interest and public evil.58 By
taking politeness at its word, by pushing to breaking the injunction
against offence, Swift forces the recognition that this style of language of
genius is in fact the cultural logic of the politics of an ascendant and
rapacious social group. He returns to that language, on its own terms, the
referents it would rather not acknowledge: displaying as its real, but
ghostly subjects the victims of sectarianism, empire and servitude.
Isidore Ducasse (Comte de Lautreamont) is included in the Anthology
both because the law of evil he claims for his macabre, violent, repetitive
and syntactically tortuous poem Les Chants de Maldoror (1869) breaks with
liberal ethical notions and because he ironizes the lyric subject of Romanti-
cism. There is also a historical trajectory here in that the public life about
which Swift was so sceptical has become here yet more rationally prag-
matic. For Breton, Ducasse signals the fragmentation of modern life and
thus of subjective forms of expression that might pretend to coherence.
Discourse in Ducasse loses its centre almost entirely, becoming a negative
imprint of the subjective impulse. Breton writes that here, [a]ll of modern
life is sublimated in one stroke . . . the green membranes of space and the
shops of Rue Vivienne [and] the [consciously utilitarian] scientific perfect-
ing of the world . . ..59 In the poem, he writes, this instrumentalized reality
is situated in the light of apocalypse, a standpoint at which we discern,
the limits at which words could enter into contact with words, things
with things (pp. 132 4, my emphasis). The apocalypse of modernity
is thus rendered through a failure of mimetic language: a reification and
real alienation of language that affects, in Maldoror, the possibility both
of logical syntax and indexical referentiality. It signals also, then, the
impossibility of the writing subject, who cedes to aesthetic language
what can no longer be achieved through subjective intention. In Ducasses
text, the assertion of the speaking subject is equally a moment of loss, a
self-aware turn on the Romantic irony Hegel so disliked.
Because it hence conjures an apparently autonomous aesthetic space
wherein different rules apply, Ducasses language is, Breton tells us, at
once a solvent and an unequalled germinal plasma (p. 133). Referential
loss, and the loss of subjective mastery over language evident, not
least, in Maldorors vertiginous shifts between author, narrator and charac-
ter as well as the poems many paratactical incongruities are not
lamented but vigorously pursued as the terms of an internal poetic
logic. This logic, as noted, consists of a law of evil, one that Breton

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 Doug Haynes The persistence of irony

locates in the pursuit of the absolute freedom of forbidden desires. The

twist here, of course, is that the nature of this freedom which the poet
asserts absolutely, assaulting man and the Creator (p. 139) is not that
of the writing subject but that of language, an observation Maurice
Blanchot has also made of Ducasses work.60 As a language that carves
only its own space, Maldoror is, then, surely an admission of subjective
insufficiency in terms of the latters expression: a turn against the subject
that considers itself adequate to aesthetic objectification and a turn
which thus comments upon the state of sociality. As Adorno notes of an
idiom from the generation preceding Ducasse but one equally concerned
with a freed language the poetry of Holderlin [i]n cutting the ties
that bind it to the subject, language speaks for the subject, which . . . can
no longer speak for itself.61
A dissertation upon itself upon its own interjections, digressions
and uncertain mise-en-scenes Maldoror is also self-reflexive about its own
status as humour. The narrator disdains laughter as an irruption:
How like a goat one is when one laughs! he remarks. Such laughter is
simple excrescence: Laugh, but weep at the same time. If you
cannot weep with your eyes, weep with your mouth. If this is still
impossible, urinate. For him, who embraces every quality, [l]aughter,
evil, pride, folly . . . compassion and love of justice (p. 138), nothing is
incongruous, nothing external. Humour here is not primitive, biological
or even semantic; it belongs to language as a recognition of the latters
rebuke to the hubris of subjective mastery, situated beyond affect in the
negative space of the aesthetic.
Something of Ducasses aesthetic ventriloquism can be found also in
the irony of Freuds condemned man if we return finally to that joke, now
as an example of dramatic irony and so another kind of aesthetic gesture.
The rogues remark that the week is beginning nicely, Freud writes, is
misplaced in a nonsensical way; its nonsense demonstrates, for him, as
we have seen, the synthetic power of the superego to find a way to
resolve the contradiction between self and world. But in fact, the remark
resists such solution; it actually speaks two ways: firstly to the rogue
himself, who derives pleasure from its obstinate refusal its perverse
capacity to retain his interests and secondly to its reader, in whom,
through interpellation, it engenders both a certain tristesse and the
perception of contradiction, which lead to the laugh. In one sense, this
contradiction is simply that the week cannot continue and so the tristesse
is empathetic, even ethical: a recognition of the heroic pathos/bathos of
the one who resists to the end. Yet in a further sense, the reader is drawn
closer to the situation and made painfully aware that what the joke
really shatters is the possibility of redemption through language it shat-
ters the collective (and aesthetic) dream of the unity of human life with

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its organisation and expression. Language in the condemned mans remark,

like that of Ducasse, is strangely subject-less (the week beginning nicely); it
is passively alien and nonsensical syntactically, as it were, misplaced at
odds with life. Yet it strives nevertheless to register a subjective intention,
only the trace of which remains.
All these senses are preserved in the joke. So when we contrast the
wishful subjective residue in the rogues remark with the plain sense
that signals death, we laugh. At the same moment, in a way, we also sanc-
tion the rogues demise. Is this why we laugh? When we take the side of an
alien language, is not this demise also our own? Is this why we continue
laughing? Objective reality, rendered as language, is not cancelled by
Freuds joke, nor is it resolved as lawful, nor still is it transformed
into the utopia of a parole pleine; it is humorously and tragically divided
into us and them although it is uncertain where we stand, swaying
between empathy and callousness. 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 latters
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.

University of Sussex

Notes

1 See Mark Polizzotti Laughter in the Dark, introduction to Andre Breton,

Anthology of Black Humor, trans. Mark Polizzotti (San Francisco: City
Lights, 1997), for a fuller description of the publishing history of the work.
All future references to this volume will be given in the text.
2 William Solomon, Secret Integrations: Black Humor and the Critique of
Whiteness, Modern Fiction Studies, 49 (2003), p. 471.
3 See Max F. Schulz, Towards a Definition of Black Humor, in S. B. Cohen
(ed.) Comic Relief (Carbondale: University of Illinois Press, 1978).
4 Paul C. Ray, The Surrealist Movement in England (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1971); Matthew Winston, Humour noir and Black Humor in
Veins of Humor, ed. Harry Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1972).
5 Mireille Rosello, LHumour noir selon Andre Breton (Paris: Jose Corti, 1987);
Annie Le Brun, Lhumour noir, in Ferdinand Alquie (ed.), Le Surrealisme,
(The Hague: Mouton, 1968), p. 100.
6 Rosello, ibid., p. 57.
7 V. N. Volosinov, Freudianism, A Marxist Critique, (London: Academic Press,
1976), p. 113.

44
 Doug Haynes The persistence of irony

8 See Norman Knox, The Word Irony and its Context, 1500 1755 (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 1961).
9 Henri Bergson, Laughter, An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, trans.
Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell (London: Macmillan, 1907), p. 64.
10 Susan Suleiman, Surrealist Black Humor: Masculine/Feminine, Papers of
Surrealism, www.surrealismcentre.ac.uk/publications/papers/journal1, p. 3.
11 Charles Baudelaire, On the Essence of Laughter, in The Painter of Modern
Life, trans. Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon, 1995), p. 154.
12 Ibid., p. 156.
13 Paul de Man, The Rhetoric of Temporality, in Blindness and Insight: Essays in
the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (London: Routledge, 1983), p. 220.
14 Ibid., p. 214.
15 Percy Wyndham Lewis, The Meaning of the Wild Body, in The Wild Body
(Haskell House: New York, 1970), p. 246.
16 Lewis, A Soldier of Humour, ibid., p. 5.
17 Ibid., p. 4.
18 Peter Nicholls, Modernisms: A Literary Guide (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995),
p. 123.
19 Ray, op cit., p. 57; Le Brun, op cit., p. 100.
20 Sigmund Freud, Humour, in The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund
Freud, Volume 12, trans. James Strachey, James Strachey and Anna Freud
(eds) (London: Hogarth Press, 1958), p. 220.
21 Simon Critchley, On Humour (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 102.
22 Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, trans. James
Strachey, Angela Richards (ed.) (London: Penguin, 1991), p. 167.
23 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and
Keven McLaughlin (London: Belknapp/Harvard University Press, 2002),
p. 458.
24 G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, Vol. 1, trans. T. M. Knox
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), p. 65.
25 See Publishers Note to Max Ernst, Une Semaine de Bonte: a Surrealist Novel in
Collage (New York: Dover Publications, 1976), p. vi.
26 Freud, Humour, op cit., p. 218.
27 Louis Aragon, Paris Peasant, trans. Simon Watson Taylor (Boston: Exact
Change, 1994), p. 117.
28 Cited in Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the
Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), pp. 25760.
29 Jurgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick
Lawrence (Cambridge: Polity, 1987), p. 108.
30 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, op cit., p. 462.
31 Andre Breton, Surrealist Situation of the Object, in Manifestoes of Surrealism,
op cit., p. 273.
32 Ibid., p. 260.
33 Ibid., p. 260.
34 Hegel, Aesthetics, op cit., p. 609. For the sake of clarity, I use this translation
rather than Polizzottis version from the City Lights edition.

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35 Hegel provides the example of Goethes Meeting Again. Here, he says, we

have before us no subjective longing, no being in love, no desire, but a pure
delight in the topics, an inexhaustible self-yielding of imagination, a harmless
play, a freedom in toying alike with rhyme and ingenious metres . . .. Hegel,
ibid., p. 611.
36 Walter Benjamin, Surrealism: Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia,
in One Way Street, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (London:
Verso, 1997), p. 237.
37 Walter Benjamin, On Some Motifs in Baudelaire, in Illuminations, trans.
Harry Zohn (London: Fontana, 1992), p. 190.
38 Benjamin, Surrealism, op cit., p. 239.
39 Aragon, op cit., p. 189.
40 Benjamin, Surrealism, op cit., p. 230.
41 Ibid., p. 233.
42 Theodor Adorno, Notes to Literature Volume 1, trans. Shierry Weber
Nicholson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), p. 89.
43 Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Juliette Or Enlightenment and
Morality, in Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (London:
Verso, 1995), p. 85.
44 See Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Vol. 7, Jacques Alain Miller
(ed.) (London: Tavistock/Routledge, 1992).
45 Volosinov, op cit., p. 89.
46 Hegel, op cit., p. 68.
47 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, trans. James Creed Meredith
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952), p. 203.
48 Ibid., p. 204.
49 See Francis Hutcheson, Reflections upon Laughter, and, Remarks upon the
Fable of the Bees (New York: Garland, 1971).
50 Mark G. Ward, Laughter, Comedy and Aesthetics: Kleists Der zerbrochne Krug,
(DMLS: Durham, 1989), p. 46.
51 See Annie le Brun, Sade: A Sudden Abyss, trans. Camille Naish (San Francisco:
City Lights, 1990).
52 Gilles Deleuze, Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty, trans. Jean McNeil
(New York: Zone Books, 1989), p. 76.
53 Frances Deutsch Louis, Swifts Anatomy of Misunderstanding (London: George
Prior, 1981), p. xvi.
54 Jonathan Swift, Genteel and Ingenious Conversation, in Jonathan Swift,
Angus Ross and David Woolley (eds) (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1984), p. 580.
55 See Lawrence E, Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 182, for a discussion of Swift,
institutions and the public sphere.
56 Anthony Earl of Shaftesbury, Sensus Communis: An Essay Upon the Freedom
of Wit and Humour, in Characteristicks (London: Smith, 1963), p. 46.
57 Ibid., pp. 456.

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 Doug Haynes The persistence of irony

58 Ian Higgins, The Politics of A Modest Proposal, Symposium on Jonathan

Swift and the Politics in his Age (Dublin: Deanery of St. Patricks, 2003),
http://www.unh.edu/english/swift
59 Breton refers, among other things, perhaps, to the Hausmannisation of Paris
that converted its Arcadian byways to rational space.
60 See Maurice Blanchot, Lautreamont and Sade (Paris: Minuit, 1963).
61 Theodor Adorno, Parataxis: On Holderlins Late Poetry, Notes to Literature
Vol 2, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholson (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1991), p. 137.

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