If the uniquely remarkable opus of Brisset is worth studying in relation to humour, the intentions presiding over it can hardly be called humorous. At no time does the author, in fact, depart from the most serious, the gravest of attitudes. It’s only at the end of a process of identification with Brisset, of the sort required by the study of any philosophical or scientific system, that the reader hastens to take refuge in humour for his own good. For him, it’s a matter of necessity, of sparing himself too great an emotional agitation, as would result from sanctioning a discovery that could shake the very foundations of thought, annihilate any previous conscious gain, and challenge the most elementary principles of social intercourse. Such a discovery is said to be impossible a priori, and insane asylums have been built to keep any of it from filtering through, on the exorbitant chance that this might occur. With respect to Brisset, the public’s instinct for self-preservation seems to have been much less acute, since it led, in 1912, only to his being saddled by a circle of writers with the sarcastic title prince of thinkers. This paltry dignity will seem a disservice only to those who pass by the greatest peculiarities that the human mind has to offer with their eyes closed. The emotional discharge of Brisset’s expression into a humour produced entirely in reception (in contrast to the humour of emission practised by most of the authors who interest us) particularly highlights certain defining characteristics of that humour. The author claims to possess a secret of such import that everything conceived before its revelation can be considered null and void. We are witnessing here the return, not of one individual but, in his person, of the entire race to childhood. (A similar thing happened in the case of Henri Rousseau.) The flagrant discord between the nature of commonly held beliefs and the writer’s or painter’s affirmation of this absolute primitivism generates a large-scale humour in which the person responsible does not participate.
Jean-Pierre Brisset’s guiding principle was the following: ‘The word which is God has retained in its folds the history of the human race since the beginning, in each language the history of every people, with a certainty and an irrefutability that might confound both the simple and the wise.’ From the outset, the analysis of words allowed him to establish that man descended from the frog. As he saw it, this discovery, which he took great pains to justify, then to exploit via an unprecedentedly rich play of verbal associations, corroborated the anatomical observation that ‘human sperm, when seen through a microscope, is such that one would think one were seeing a puddle of water filled with young tadpoles, so completely are the little creatures of this sperm reminiscent of the tadpole’s form and movements.’ In this way, against a pansexualist backdrop of great hallucinatory value and bolstered by a rare erudition, he developed a dizzying series of impressively rigorous verbal equations, constituting a doctrine that he presented as the sure and infallible key to the Book of Life. Brisset did not conceal that he was himself dazzled by the brilliance of the gift he was offering humanity, which he felt should confer upon him divine omnipotence. He recognized no predecessors save Moses and the prophets, Jesus and the apostles. He proclaimed himself to be the Seventh Angel of the Apocalypse and the Archangel of the Resurrection.
It goes without saying that, in personal terms, a communication of this sort was destined to win its author only grave disappointments. ‘La Grammaire logique, published in 1883,’ he says, ‘has spread reasonably well throughout the scientific world. We presented it to the Academy for a contest, but our volume was rejected by M. Renan. In 1891, having failed to find a publisher, we self-published Le Mystère de Dieu [The Mystery of God] and announced two public lectures in Paris. This book caused a stir among the students in Angers. We had made arrangements to give a lecture there, but the local authorities put a stop to our project. In 1900, we published La Science de Dieu [The Science of God] and a broadside printed in 1,000 copies, La Grande Nouvelle [The Great News], which summed up all our previous works. Our criers seemed to be paralysed, and could not sell this great news. We distributed it free in Paris and sent it, along with the book, more or less to the whole world. The book sold after distribution of the broadside, about which we were informed only when our distributor had gone bankrupt. These two publications made enough noise for Le Petit Parisien to devote an entire article to us (29 July 1904) entitled “Among the Crazies.” This is what concerns us directly: they cite a madman “who, by a system of alliterations and non sequiturs, had claimed to found a whole metaphysical treatise entitled La Science de Dieu. For him, the Word is all. And the analyses of words express the relations between things. I don’t have space enough to quote passages from this appalling philosophy. Moreover, reading it leaves one’s mind in a state of utter turmoil, and my readers will thank me for having spared them.” The madman,’ continued Brisset, ‘who was an officer in the judicial police and whose way of writing has nothing to do with the obscure verbiage cited above, was nonetheless pleased with this critique and even sent thanks. On its publication, La Science de Dieu was the seventh trump of the Apocalypse, and, in 1906, we published Les Prophéties accomplies [The Prophecies Borne Out]. A rather long prospectus printed in 2,000 copies was sent hither and yon and, as we still needed to make our voice heard, a lecture was held at the Hôtel des Sociétés Savantes on 3 June 1906. We were met by much ill will, and the posters intended to go all over Paris were put up only around the Hôtel. We had an audience of about fifty, and resolved in our indignation that from then on no one would hear the voice of the seventh angel.’ A second, completely revised edition of La Science de Dieu nonetheless appeared in 1913 under the title Les Origines humaines [Man’s Origins]. In it, the author declares that, as he is old and tired, he fears he will not be able to bring to fruition his supreme project: a dictionary of all the existing languages.
Seen from the perspective of humour, Jean-Pierre Brisset’s work draws its importance from its unique situation, commanding the line that links the pataphysics of Alfred Jarry (the ‘science of imaginary solutions, which symbolically attributes the properties of objects, described by their virtuality, to their lineaments’) to the paranoia-critical activity of Salvador Dalí (‘a spontaneous method of irrational knowledge based on the interpretive and critical association of delirious phenomena’). It is striking that the works of Raymond Roussel and the writings of Marcel Duchamp were produced, whether consciously or not, in direct connection with those of Brisset, whose influence can be traced down through the most recent attempts at poetically dislocating language (‘revolution of the word’): Léon-Paul Fargue, Robert Desnos, Michel Leiris, Henri Michaux, James Joyce, and the school of young American writers in Paris.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: La Grammaire logique, 1883. Le Mystère de Dieu, 1891. La Science de Dieu, 1900. Les Prophéties accomplies, 1906. Les Origines humaines, 1913.
In speech there exist many hitherto unknown Laws, the most important of which is that a sound or series of sounds which are identical, intelligible, and clear can express different things, depending on changes in the manner of writing or understanding these sounds or words. All ideas expressed by means of similar sounds have a common origin and, at bottom, refer to the same object. For example, the following sounds:
Les dents, la bouche [the teeth, the mouth].
Les dents la bouchent [the teeth stop it up],
l’aidant la bouche [with the mouth’s help].
L’aide en la bouche [aid in the mouth].
Laides en la bouche [ugly in the mouth].
Laid dans la bouche [ugly in the mouth].
Lait dans la bouche [milk in the mouth].
L’est dam le à bouche [it’s harm to the mouth].
Les dents-là bouche [those teeth: hide ’em].
If I say, les dents, la bouche, it elicits only familiar ideas: one’s teeth are in one’s mouth. That would be the same as fully understanding the exterior of the book of life that is hidden within speech and sealed with seven seals. But in this book, today open before us, we shall now read what was concealed beneath the words les dents, la bouche.
The teeth stop up the entrance to the mouth and the mouth helps with and contributes to this closure: thus Les dents la bouchent, l’aidant la bouche.
The teeth are the aid, the support inside the mouth [l’aide en la bouche], and too often they are also ugly inside the mouth [laides en la bouche], and this fact, too, is ugly [laid]. At other times, it is like milk: they are white as milk [lait] in the mouth.
L’est dam le à bouche must be understood: it is harm – evil or damage – visited upon the mouth; put more plainly, I have a toothache. We can see by this that the first harm [dam] originated in the tooth [dent]. Les dents-là bouche means: close up or hide those teeth of yours; shut your mouth.
Everything that is thus written in words and that can be clearly read is imbued with an inescapable truth; it is true the world over. What is said in one language is said for the entire world: the teeth are an aid in, and are ugly in, the mouth all over the world, even if other languages do not express this as the French language does (but they say other, equally important things about which our language is silent). The languages have not joined in agreement; the Spirit of the Eternal, creator of all things, has alone determined his book of life. How was he thus able to conceal such a simple science from all men, the world over?
This is the key to unlock the books of speech.
* * *
Let us first note that one can alter the arrangement of words in a sentence without modifying the idea expressed: La porte est ouverte [the door is open] and porte est ouverte là [door is open there] both express the idea that open is the door …
Having admitted this, we then read: ai que ce? [what have I with this?], meaning: ce qu’ai? or qu’ai ce?, in other words, what do I have? This was said on the quays where our forebear stood. The questions ai que ce? est que ce?, expressing: have I that? is it that?, created the word exe, the primitive name for sex …
Then came the question: ce exe, sais que ce? = do you know what that point is?, which then became: Sais que c’est? ce exe est, sexe est, ce excès [Do you know what it is? that ex is, sex is, that excess], and that is sex. We can see that sex was the first excess. One need fear no excess from those who do not possess a sex …
Je ne sais que c’est. Jeune sexe est [I don’t know what it is. Young sex is]. The first thing our forebear saw that wasn’t familiar to him was a young sex being formed. In that case, even the most clairvoyant are sometimes obliged to say, Je ne sais que c’est. Jeune sexe est, in other words: sex is young and young is sex. The word young can be taken as a noun. It results that young designates and designated those who took sex. The young are children whose sex has not yet attained its full potency, for it always develops very slowly.
Tu sais que c’est bien. Tu sexe est bien [You know it’s good. You sex is good]. The word tu [you], like the word young, also designated the sex. It was a child’s word: hide your tu, your tutu. Tu tu = your sex. Tu relues tu tu = you’re looking at your sex again. Turlututu, bitterly repeated the one toward whom that hurtful remark was directed.
Y ce ai que c’est? Il sait que c’est. Y sais que c’est. Y sexe est [What is this Y that I have? He knows what it is. I know what Y is. Y is sex]. Y originally designated sex, then meant I and finally he or it …
On sait que c’est. On sexe est [One knows what it is. One is sex]. The pronoun one designated the sex and was equivalent to in, in this place [en ce lieu], in that eye [en ce l’yeu]. The sex presented itself in the shape of an eye. It was a slight opening. The pronoun one is indefinite, and all the words it can replace initially referred to sex, the origin of all living words: Peter, John, Julie, etc., knows it’s good [sait que c’est bien] and sex is good [sexe est bien]. Anything capable of knowledge was necessarily a sex at its origin, a member of the human or divine family.
Je sais que c’est bien. Je or jeu sexe est bien [I know it’s good. I or game sex is good]. The first game [jeu] was sex. Whence our passion for games. The prudent man kept his game hidden. The pronoun I [je] thus designates the sex, and when I speak, it’s a sex, a virile member of the Eternal God that acts by his will or by his leave. In speaking about his sex, our forebear noticed that he was speaking about his own individuality, about himself.
– from The Science of God, or The Creation of Man
1. Although Breton gives more extensive examples of Brisset’s work, I have retained only the two following excerpts, for obvious reasons. Needless to say, Brisset’s examples (such as in the list beginning ‘Les dents, la bouche,’ or the various sentences revolving around the word sex) all depend on the fact that, because of the rules of French phonetics, each element of the series sounds exactly like all the others. [trans.]