A Sense of Umour: Jacques Vaché

Umour bears a relation of course to humor, without which it could and would not be. But this relation occasions something irreducible to that relation, the advent of a subject that occupies the null place of this excised h and is charged with maintaining a difference that is perilous and threatened with loss—a subject with a sense of umour. Umour is less a thing that can be referred to, or a sense that can be defined, than an operation (a countersense) that expropriates sense, not simply the sense of humor but sense as such, through this particular act of excision: umour cuts itself off from humor. And Vaché’s genius lies in what quite easily could be passed over merely as a bad joke, a bit of stupidity: a mere misspelling. But this bad joke, this bit of silliness, this error, if approached with the requisite seriousness, founds an operation whose effect produces a concept (or is it an anticoncept?)—umour—and a subject that is engendered in the act that thinks it. Thus we have two moments: the excision of the word whose concept, in turn, induces the excision of the person. The subject of umour is not a person, which is to say a subject that installs itself in the gap between the I and the me, making Vaché the impersonator of his own nullity.

Vaché’s descriptions of umour are often evasive and even surreal avant la lettre: “you know the horrible life of the alarm clock—it’s a monster that has always frightened me because of the number of things its eyes project, and the way in which this honest man stares at me whenever I enter a room—why then does he have so much ’umour, why?”² But he is at his least evasive when he writes: “There is a lot of wonderful UBIQUE in ’umour also—as you will see—But—of course, this isn’t definite and ’umour derives too much from a sensation of not being very difficult to express—I think that it’s a sensation—I was going to say SENSE—also—of the theatrical (and joyless) futility of everything.”³

If umour is a matter of a lapse or a failure (a bit of idiocy) or absentmindedness—and Vaché tells us, alluding to Jarry’s Ubu, that it is wonderfully UBIQUE—it nonetheless more closely approaches the sense of humor by way of its missing part than does humor itself—that is to say the word. The sense of humor is humorous, but humor (the word) is not literally humorous. And this gap between word and its sense (what it means) is constitutive of the word’s reference. Whereas humor is not humorous, umour perhaps becomes so, and increasingly, the more it is insisted upon: the more its difference from humor is insisted upon. For one of the few responses that Vaché gives to Breton’s request for a definition of umour is: “IT IS IN THE ESSENCE OF SYMBOLS TO BE SYMBOLIC.”⁴ Whereas humor, the word (the signifier), cannot refer to itself as an instance of humorousness, umour is that which it is not: it is humorous. Humor excludes its sense; umour includes its sense. It is identical to that which it is not. And its sense derives from this vacuity: a word whose sense is in turn indexed to the absent place of the letter (the missing h). Umour (due to the excision) is not humor, but in being not-humor it can be literally humorous. Through the inclusion of this negation as its content, it enacts its own vacancy and it becomes the thing that it is not. As humorous, it is itself by being not-itself, performing the thing that humor (the word) cannot.

We have a material differentiation (at the level of the signifier) that produces an apparent superposition of sense: humor, a sense referred to; and umour, a sense produced through negation. This superposition is misleading. The humorousness of umour derives from either its stupidity or its playfulness. It does not share humor’s “goodness,” which is exposed by the idiom in English: “Will you humor me?” Humor is bound up with “good will.” Umour, on the contrary, is inseparable from a maliciousness, an ill will, trespass and violence—all of what Deleuze associates with misosophy⁵ and Breton with “black humor.” Umour is essentially improper. To have a sense of umour is to have a sense for the (joyless) futility of sense—its vacuity.

We have looked at the way in which umour is a sense, but how is it a sensation? Vaché’s appropriation of this absence, his adoption of a misspelling, sets into motion a comical play between the act of saying (speech) and the inscription of the said (written language). The I solicited to enunciate the word “umour” can only acknowledge that which is amiss in it by remaining silent, by not saying but recording what is said literally. I must perform this absence by not speaking. As soon as I say “umour,” I betray it. To literally record the phonic pronunciation excises the h, cleaving the sensation from the garment of sense. One hears correctly, that is, literally, but transcribes incorrectly; one writes down umour instead of humor. One acts as if one did not know the language that one speaks. One has to become an unconscious recorder, a true mime. Literalization forces an estrangement between the word and its sense. And this as if introduces a foreignness, a silent and insidious incursion, into the language one speaks. Umour produces a short circuit between sensation and sense, that which is registered, recorded, transcribed and that which is understood. Umour exposes that sense implies a disavowal of the literal and that this disavowal makes possible understanding. To transcribe knowingly entails that one understands in advance that humor includes a silent h such that when one says umour one means humor. Vaché’s insistence on the excision entails a perversion of this aim—as if one could say humor but mean umour, twisting it by means of an ill will. Umour cannot be said but only done, enacted; it has to be spelled out. If it is uttered, enunciated, spoken, its effect cannot be felt on the word, but only on language as a whole when enacted as silent, material excision. As such, umour situates the subject called upon to enunciate it in the gap between sensation and sense, a gap moreover that threatens the sense of the word with the non-sense of its articulation, instituting an asymmetrical (nonoppositional) break between sense and non-sense. Non-sense distinguishes itself from sense, but sense does not distinguish itself from non-sense. Deleuze calls this a “unilateral distinction”; its material difference has to be affirmed. It is this difference that makes a difference insofar as its sense now entails non-sense. Umour is both a sensation and a sense of the futility of making sense. By implication: If the sense of umour is humorous, then that which is humorous in umour is non-sense. Umour names a non-sensical sense or a sense of the non-sensical.

There is something comical as well about the fact that umour’s sense (its meaning) cannot be uttered, that its sense can only be sensed. When one says “umour,” its very utterance conceals the fact that it is amiss, that anything is awry (a parody perhaps of the ubiquitous insistence on troop morale)—its sense appears to be the same, but all the while it has been corrupted by an absence, an absentee letter whose failure to appear marks the word deviously, directing it off course, as if to amplify its own silence. It both obeys and refuses the laws of sense in being misheard, and it plays rather a game with the sense of humor that threatens it with its own non-sense of a senseless excision. The sonic equivalence of humor and umour reduces the sense of umour to humor in order force a counter reduction that renders its sense equivalent to non-sense. Its non-sense cannot be said but only sensed as the very gap between sense and sensation. As such, umour cannot be communicated; it can only be performed or enacted. Or, paradoxically, it is a sense that derives from not being understood. As a word it fails at the level of sense, while differentiating itself at the level of language’s brute matter. It conveys its own senseless noise in the form of a resounding silence.

If one follows, as I have attempted to do, this paradoxical logic of umour, one grasps that its power consists in this principled reduction: the reduction of sense to non-sense. If it did not take us too far afield, it would be interesting to pursue how this reduction is a comical parody of the phenomenological reduction. Although umour performs the operation of this reduction to non-sense in an exemplary manner by exposing this gap between sensation and sense, each word can in turn be estranged through its reduction to its materiality. Non-sense, far from being excluded from sense, establishes itself as the null sovereign of its own enterprise afflicting language as a whole. Umour marks a gap in sense, a non-sense, that threatens all sense with the vertigo of its own vacancy.

The operation of umour is twofold: it reduces sense to sensation (through an act of literal inscription), i.e., to the gap between sensation and sense, and thereby separates sense from its content. It evacuates sense, it liquidates it. All sense is potentially non-sensical. As an operation, umour is at once material and formal, and it is this duality that inflects Vaché’s dandyism, giving it theoretical teeth. Paul Lenti writes, “As a product of this new century, Vaché saw reality itself as a game; it was all a question of style. He often fantasized about major deceptions while he indulged in such pranks as introducing himself and others under false names, wearing a variety of disguises, bragging about invented pasts, etc.”⁶ Umour does not restrict itself to the word but propagates itself as a sensibility that relates to itself and language through this gap between sensation and sense, through which all sense can be rendered non-sensical. Vaché the subject becomes the differentiator of this difference between the sense of umour and humor. And it is this difference that gives definition to Vaché’s attitude, expressed as much in his official capacities as in his writing:

If this passage is umourous, its locus lies in the question of whom Vaché takes for a walk. Although it is his superiors in his official capacity whom he formally addresses, whom he actually addresses is his “Crystal monocle” and his “theory for troubling paintings.” And by addressing these “objects” that ornament his subject, he separates himself from this official role while performing it, producing a personal effect that is not his concern, that is, not the concern of his subject. If we can conceive of Officialdom as a structure that requires that one appear in person and be accountable, Vaché is only present through his personal effects that serve to occasion an absence, the flight of his consistent identity.

Umour attunes Vaché to the secret action of language’s materiality, a materiality that does not simply undermine the subject that speaks but serves as its armature and ornament: the means through which Vaché installs himself perilously in the gap between his subject and his person. Vaché looks at words through the magnifying glass of his crystal monocle. Words, like clothes, become ornamentation that empties out the self as if it were a mold (moule). Umour lends a singular tone that proliferates across Vaché’s letters. For example, if descriptive, he is generally laconic, even to a comic degree: “I’m bored a lot behind my glass monocle, I dress in khaki and fight the Germans.”⁸ In general the writing is oddly neither literary nor exactly casual in tone, as if at once whimsical and highly considered. His profligate use of the dash, furthermore, hacks his language apart, imbuing it with a sense of incompleteness and his thoughts with an impulsive, capricious punctuality: (to Breton) “Remember that I like you a lot (and you must believe this)—and that I would kill you moreover—(without scruples, perhaps)—after first having rifled you of unlikely possibilities.”⁹ When funny, the tone is dark and macabre: “I hope this document reaches you while you are still alive and doubtless keeping busy cutting off arms and legs with a saw, according to tradition, and wearing a nice white apron on which a hand leaves greasy prints in blood.”¹⁰ Aloof, sartorial, and corrosive, the I that is omnipresent seems unhinged but lucid, as if maintaining itself at the edge of delirium: “I dream of nicely felt Eccentricities or of some droll deceit that causes a lot of deaths, all in a very light molded costume; sporting. Can you show me beautiful shoes, open and garnet-colored?”;¹¹ or, “I will also be a trapper, or thief, or prospector, or hunter, or miner, or oil-driller—Arizona Bar (whisky—Gin and mixed?), and lovely exploitable forests and you know those lovely riding breeches that you wear when using a machine-gun, clean-shaven and such lovely hands for solitaire. All that will go up in smoke, I tell you, or, in a saloon, having made a fortune—Well.”¹²

From such passages in which the I is staged as grandiose and absurd, one can grasp why Breton—whose admiration for Vaché never wavered—writes: “In Vaché’s person, in utmost secrecy, a principle of total insubordination was undermining the world, reducing everything that seemed all-important to a petty scale.”’¹³ Yet this staging of the I breaks with romanticism insofar as it goes hand in hand with an utter deflation of the self. Breton expands on this principle in his introduction to Vaché in the Anthology of Black Humor:

If the self or the person—whose equation we first owe to John Locke—is the seat of moral responsibility, Vaché’s desertion divests the subject of its belief in the self. From the excision of the letter to that of the subject, umour provides him a means of pursuing a principled anarchy. He becomes an absentee subject. To be absentee is a matter of being marked absent. Whereas a delinquent is marked absent by a teacher, and thereby held to account, Vaché preemptively absents his self. He marks himself absent by separating himself from that which holds him to account, actively assuming the void of his presence.

The uncanny effect of this excision makes Vaché not a person, but an impersonator of a subject. The impersonator divests the self, the person, of its obligation to appear identically, which is why the impersonator has always proved such a troubling figure. Impersonation poses the problem of the identity or nonidentity of the subject with its manner, the grain of the voice, the sweep of its gesture. At once producer and produced, the self of the imitator is split, divided in two: itself only by being not itself. Only insofar as the subject is not bound singularly to its manner can that manner be imitated, impersonated, caricatured. As Plato recognized, to produce an imitation of the soul requires a soul that is itself protean, capable of separating itself from itself. To impersonate is to don the mask (the persona) of the other. But in becoming other, the imitator becomes other to itself. And it is precisely this negation that is registered with the im of impersonation. To impersonate implies a negation of who one is, assuming the character of who one is not. A duplication of the self by itself.

Impersonation is not merely the assumption of a false identity but the disavowal of a “true” identity. In putting forth an identity, the impersonator does not believe in that identity; he does not think he is that which he appears to be. Insofar as the impersonator says “I,” this saying is insincere. For the I that speaks is not attributable to the self, but to the me that appears—not the subject but the person. The impersonator asserts as a matter of practice that the I is never where it appears to be. Like the lion in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the impersonator can state: “I am the lion, and I am not the lion, but Snug.” The impersonator plays with this gap between the I and the me, forging an identity that eludes a determinate grasp, shifting perpetually from the position of the subject to that of the object, as if saying “the lion is me, but I am Snug.” The I of the impersonator is fatally split (I am and I am not who I say I am) and can only be mediated through an act that assigns it a proper name. The proper name allows the opposition to be attributed to a subject that mediates the gap between the I and the me, enabling a me to designate an I. But what is the foundation of the propriety of the name? If the impersonator is true to who he is, then the very propriety of this name is in question, just as Andy Kaufman can state, “Andy Kaufman is me; I am Andy Kaufman.” The name is the mask of impropriety. Andy Kaufman’s insistence on being both I and me becomes rather an homage to a nameless subject without propriety.

Impersonation remains good fun—in good humor—as long as the difference between the person and the subject can be measured, discerned. If this measure vanishes, if impersonation slips into imposture, the playful becomes deranged. The key to Vaché’s umour is its dryness, his capacity to deadpan. This is the core of his dandyism: to be absent but not to acknowledge one’s absence, or to believe enough in one’s absence not to get sentimental. It is deadpan that gives dandyism both a comical and a deathly edge.

Although Vaché acknowledged Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton’s manner may be closer to umour. The portmanteau word “deadpan” was coined by a critic from the New York Times to describe Buster Keaton’s singular manner of playing it straight, a lesson that he learned early in the vaudevillian slapstick of The Three Keatons in which he performed with his father, Joe, and his mother, Myrna, as The Human Mop. As he would later comment, “the more seriously I took everything, and how serious life was in general, the better laughs I got.” “One of the first things I noticed was that whenever I smiled or let the audience suspect how much I was enjoying myself they didn’t seem to laugh as much as usual. … At any rate it was on purpose that I started looking miserable, humiliated, hounded, and haunted, bedeviled, bewildered, and at my wit’s end. Some other comedians can get away with laughing at their own gags. Not me.”¹⁵ To deadpan consists in neither identifying nor acknowledging the effect one has on the other and thereby on oneself. To deadpan consists in blinding one’s self to the manner in which one is perceived, and it is this lapsus itself, this incongruity, that produces a laugh. Again commenting on his early comedic training, as reported by his biographer, Rudi Blesh: “The old man would kick me, a hell of a wallop with a number twelve slapshoe right on my fanny. … Now a strange thing developed. If I yelled ouch—no laughs. If I deadpanned it and didn’t yell—no laughs. “What goes?” I asked. “Isn’t a kick funny?” “Not by itself it ain’t,” said Joe. So he gives me a little lesson: I wait five seconds—count up to ten slow—grab the seat of my pants, holler bloody murder, and the audience is rolling in the aisles. I don’t know what the thunder they figured. Maybe that it took five seconds for a kick to travel from my fanny to my brain. Actually, I guess, it was The Slow Thinker. Audiences love The Slow Thinker.”¹⁶ Slow thinking is funny; full retardation is not. If one is an entertainer, this is a limit one does not want to cross. However, umour consists in refusing the moment of shared knowledge, of mutual recognition that serves to release the tension, the unease. Whereas humor offers the promise of release, umour maintains itself in this gap, this interval or delay. For although humor inserts a delay between cause and effect—between the kick and hollering bloody murder—it is umour that puts into question the causal relation as such. The slow thinker slows the relation between A and B, action and reaction; the umourist plays the idiot, dislocating the subject who acts and the self that is affected (the I that receives the kick and the self that feels it), refusing to identify with the manner in which he becomes an object for the audience, the manner in which he is perceived. He is out of step with himself, not keyed into the manner in which he affects the audience: dumb and aloof.

The mature and masterful Keaton focused this tension on the monumental impassivity of his own face. Where we expect some kind of human reaction, we get nothing. If the face is generally used to establish intimacy, enabling empathy between the viewer and the character’s emotional state, Keaton’s refusal of empathy situates his character outside of the range of expected feeling. Hence his distaste for the close-up. This is comedy at its least sentimental, at its least empathic. It short-circuits what David Hume has described as the “universal tendency among mankind to conceive all beings like themselves.” Now whereas we doubtless identify Keaton’s face as human, recognizing in it a shared physiognomy, its impassivity interrupts the prosopoietic operation by which humans “transfer to every object, those qualities with which they are familiarly acquainted, and of which they are intimately conscious.”¹⁷ Rather than finding a human face in the disposition of stone, we find in a human face the disposition of stone. Its featurelessness resists the ascription to it of a shared humanity. It looks human, but is it human?

Keaton’s face serves rather to establish a radical distance, an essential nonrelation between Keaton and the emotional reactions that enable identification. No longer a person to be identified with, he becomes an object to be laughed at. Unaffected by the turmoil in which he finds himself entangled, he acts without reacting. The chaos surrounding him engenders a strange neutrality, distanced not only from the circumstances in which he is embroiled but from the self affected thereby. It is an estrangement absolute, a face that has become a pure, inscrutable surface into which nothing can be read. He cannot be undermined, because there is nothing to mine. Deadpan quite literally describes the deadness of Keaton’s face—a face-skull expressionless like bone. He is an object, his visage delivered up to the gaze of others, but in what sense is he a subject? What is laid bare in the lifelessness of his expression?

Through deadpan Vaché constitutes himself as subject without personality. Put differently, his character constitutes itself as a subject that is not a person. His persona does not serve to conceal his identity, but his identity consists in not identifying with his persona. In this face, we discern a human stripped of its humanity. In becoming a pure face, a face without expression, reduced to being a face-thing, it becomes simply a surface for the other without interiority. As an object it hides something else right on its surface, for its very objectness is that which cannot be reflected, for the other that would reflect it cannot see itself confirmed in this surface. Deadpan exposes the impersonality of the face. It is in this sense that he becomes an object for the other. He becomes an object only by suspending the signs that would allow the other to discern in the face a personality, an interiority, a depth. The inscrutability of Keaton’s face becomes an object that interrupts the circuit of its recognition. But this other can no longer discern in the face anything that would allow it to ascribe to it anything personal. By becoming inscrutable the face becomes impersonal, inhabited by an alien subjectivity but not a person. With this deadpan reduction Keaton effects a split between his personhood and his subjectivity. He becomes a subject without being a person. An absentee subject that marks its absence through the suspension of its personhood.

Vaché seemed to have excised in himself that belief—that need for belief—that seemed so necessary to the subject’s social inscription, discarding the proprietary relation that one has with one’s self. In so doing, he pinpoints a certain slippage between property and propriety (ownness) whereby personhood, the self, is not viewed as an ontological matter—something that is—but as something that one has. Vaché owned his radical lack of significance, embracing the accidental quality of existence, forging his own brand of gay science: umour, or, the practice of excising significance from existence.

Vaché fictioned for himself a life truly elsewhere and an I that is other. For those who appreciated his singular existential cadence (André Breton above all), Vaché was a subject who had truly absorbed the nihilistic lesson of the times: “Jacques Vaché,” Breton writes, “was a past master in the art of ‘attaching little to no importance to anything.’”¹⁸ His death of an opium overdose at the age of 23 shortly after the war in 1919—a suicide? accident, or perhaps both?—completes the picture: as Breton put it, “His death was admirable in that it could pass for an accident.”¹⁹ Necessarily accidental, a final excision that at once means everything and nothing.

Chapter 3 A Sense of Umour: Jacques Vaché

Notes