Imaginary interview with Alphonse Allais
by Charactorium · Alphonse Allais (1854 — 1905) · Literature · 6 min read
It is nearly midnight on the butte, and pipe smoke blurs the cabaret lamps. Seated at a table with a cloudy glass, the man with mocking eyes agrees to answer between bursts of laughter from the room. The conversation, inevitably, will never take the questions asked of him entirely seriously.
—People often forget that you were destined for pharmacy. Where did this white-coat destiny come from?
I was born in 1854 in Honfleur, in my father's pharmacy, among jars labeled in Latin and the acrid smell of crushed herbs. My father took for granted that I would take over the mortar after him: a pharmacist's son grinds, doses, prepares, and dies happy to have relieved the canton's cough. So I learned to weigh powders with a seriousness that, in retrospect, seems to me the funniest of my hoaxes. The pestle taught me one valuable thing, though: that you get surprising effects by mixing ingredients that have nothing to do together. That is exactly what I would later do with words. Chemistry, you see, trained me in humor long before letters.
The pestle taught me that you get surprising effects by mixing ingredients that have nothing to do together.
—How does one go from the Honfleur pharmacy to the Parisian editorial offices?
By flight, quite simply. I was sent to Paris to study pharmacy, and Paris is a city where you enter as a pharmacist and leave as something else entirely. There I discovered that you could sell words instead of syrups, and that the public wanted more of them. I traded the precision scale for the pen and inkwell, which no doubt angered my poor father. But I never disowned the laboratory: all my life I kept a taste for whimsical inventions, outlandish experiments, contraptions that serve no purpose other than to raise an eyebrow. A well-turned tale, after all, is a remedy: you measure the dose, you make it swallowed at once, and it produces its little stunning effect on the last line.
—Tell us about an ordinary evening at the Chat Noir.
Ordinary? There was none. The Cabaret Le Chat Noir, opened by Salis in 1881 on the slopes of Montmartre, awakened when the honest city fell asleep. An incurable night owl, I hardly arrived before the chansonniers had already scratched their first satires. We improvised word games as others play cards, staged canulars of elaborate architecture, and the cloudy glasses emptied in a bohème cheerfulness that did not count its pennies. I even became editor-in-chief of the house journal, which mainly consisted of turning our nightly absurdities into printed columns. The next morning was for recovering; the afternoon, for rushing to editorial offices to deliver my pages. My life fit into this triangle: the cabaret table, the bed, and the newspaper office.
The Chat Noir awakened when the honest city fell asleep.
—This word "fumiste" keeps coming up about you. What did you mean by it?
Fumisme is not laziness, sir, it is a discipline. The fumiste mystifies methodically, cultivates the absurd like a gardener his roses, and takes care that his joke has the rigor of a theorem. We were a whole brotherhood of such people around the Chat Noir, convinced that seriousness is the vainest of human attitudes and that the world deserves a polite tongue-out. The true fumiste does not laugh at his own prank: he presents it with the grave face of a notary reading a will. That is the whole art. To pass off an enormity as obvious, to get an honorable public to nod at a pure folly skillfully packaged — that is what, in Montmartre, earned laurels.
Fumisme is not laziness, it is a discipline.
—In 1883, you exhibited rectangles of solid color. What did you have in mind?
The urge to trap painting in its own seriousness. I presented at the Salons des Arts incohérents a completely black rectangle, which I entitled Combat de nègres dans une cave pendant la nuit — the title explained everything the canvas refrained from showing. There followed a white square, promoted as Première communion de jeunes filles chlorotiques par un temps de neige, then a red rectangle. The caption made the work; the color merely kept silent. The audience laughed, and I laughed with them, but there was a little serious idea hidden under the farce: that a painting can be reduced to almost nothing and still signify, provided you hang the right words on it. I did not know that painters would one day take the thing tragically.
The caption made the work; the color merely kept silent.
—You collected these experiments in an album. How would you present it to someone who has never leafed through it?
My Album primo-avrilesque, published in 1897, is a pocket museum for lovers of emptiness. You turn pages of captioned monochromes, each accompanied by its pompous notice, and you even find a musical joke slipped between two paintings. It is an April Fools' bound, a farce that takes the respectable format of the art book to better mock the art book. I put into it the typographical seriousness reserved for master catalogs, applied to surfaces where there is strictly nothing to contemplate. The reader thinks he is opening a gallery and he opens a friendly trap. It is perhaps my most successful pharmacist's preparation: a potion with no active ingredient, which works only by the conviction of the one who swallows it.
—You are renowned as a master of the holorime. How does one craft such a mechanism?
Through a patient ear and a mischievous eye. The holorime consists of writing two lines that, to the ear, sound exactly the same, but to the eye tell entirely different things. My favorite example goes: "Par les bois du djinn, où s'entasse de l'effroi, / Parle et bois du gin, ou cent tasses de lait froid." Pronounce them one after the other: your ear will swear it has heard only one phrase, while the page shows two, strangers to each other. It is a sleight of hand performed on language itself. I see in it proof that meaning hangs by a thread, and that you only need to cut the same sonic mush differently to change the world's sidewalk. The French language is a joker; I merely help it lie prettily.
Meaning hangs by a thread: you only need to cut the same sonic mush differently.
—Your aphorisms have a twisted logic. Is there a method behind this taste for paradox?
The method is to follow logic so scrupulously that you lead it straight into a wall. Take the question of money, which has always occupied me for lack of it: "One must take money where it is found, that is, from the poor. They don't have much money, it's true, but there are many of them who have a little." The reasoning is impeccable — that is precisely what makes it monstrous. I even titled a collection Deux et deux font cinq, because such a title honestly promises the reader that we will falsify all his accounts. The paradox is not a calculation error: it is calculation pushed to the point where it becomes comical. People think I am being unreasonable; in truth I reason too much.
The paradox is not a calculation error: it is calculation pushed to the point where it becomes comical.
—Still in 1897, you composed a completely silent funeral march. Why this silence?
Because music always says too much. My Marche funèbre pour les obsèques d'un grand homme sourd, from 1897, contains only empty measures: not a note, nothing but white space on the staves. I justified it with a phrase I believe to be true — great sorrows are mute. What can one reproach this score? It is in good taste, it never goes out of tune, and the clumsiest performer cannot betray it. And besides, my deceased being deaf, it would have been needlessly cruel to inflict brass on him. I simply carried his logic to its end: if true grief falls silent, then the only honest music before death is that which is not heard. The audience, for its part, mainly heard my laughter.
If true grief falls silent, the only honest music before death is that which is not heard.
—These gestures of emptiness — bare canvases, silent score — do you imagine they could one day be read differently than as pranks?
That is a question that smells of a trap, and I jump into it with pleasure. If I dare suppose that I will be read in a century, I imagine two kinds of readers. Some will laugh, which is the only correct response to my red rectangles and empty measures. Others — and those worry me — will nod gravely and discover in my April Fools' deep theories that I never put there. They will turn my joker pharmacy into a doctrine, my Album primo-avrilesque into a manifesto. Good for them: a fumiste could not dream of a finer posthumous mystification than to be taken seriously by posterity. I will have pulled off my last hoax without even being there to laugh at it, which is a crowning irony I relish in advance.
A fumiste could not dream of a finer mystification than to be taken seriously by posterity.
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This imaginary interview was generated by artificial intelligence from sources documented in Alphonse Allais's profile. It dramatises what the figure might have said based on what we know about them, but does not constitute attested historical testimony. For primary sources and factual documentation, refer to the full profile.