By establishing a relationship between humour noir (black humor), an expression Huysmans invented in 1885, and the humeures noires (black moods) that led his character André Jayant to seek out a comforting book, one that reflected his own miseries but in aggravated forms, André Breton implicitly suggested that the former, when related back to its humoral origins, was a remedy for the latter. Here we explore the hypothesis that realism and naturalism were conceived as the expression of such a “height of melancholy.”
CLIL theme: 4027 -- SCIENCES HUMAINES ET SOCIALES, LETTRES -- Lettres et Sciences du langage -- Lettres -- Etudes littéraires générales et thématiques