Alphonse Allais
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Alphonse Allais
Allais, Alphonse (1854-1905). French humorist. Several collections of his tales, selected from his weekly contributions to Le Chat noir, Le Journal, and Le Sourire were published in his lifetime. Among the best-known, re-edited in recent years, are A se tordre (1891), On n'est pas des bœufs (1896), and Le Captain Cap (1902).
Expert in the logic of illogicality, in the practicality of the impractical, Allais was a master of the pun and a skilful exponent of many styles (notably the mock-literary and mock-academic). The often surreal quality of his humour was acknowledged by inclusion in Breton's Anthologie de l'humour noir. At times as gently whimsical as Thurber, at others as black and sardonic as Ambrose Bierce, Allais recalls the fantasy and invention of the Cyrano de Bergerac of L'Autre Monde and prefigures the word-play and absurdist vision of the Vian of L'Écume des jours and L'Automne à Pékin.
[Alistair Blyth]
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Alphonse Allais
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Alphonse Allais (20 October 1854 – 28 October 1905) was a French writer and humorist born in Honfleur, Calvados.
He is the author of many collections of whimsical writings. A poet as much as a humorist, he in particular cultivated the verse form known as holorhyme, i.e. made up entirely of homophonous verses, where entire lines rhyme. For example:
par les bois du djinn où s'entasse de l'effroi,
parle et bois du gin ou cent tasses de lait froid.
Allais is also credited with the earliest known example of a completely silent musical composition. Composed in 1897, his Funeral March for the Obsequies of a Deaf Man — consisting of nine blank measures — predates comparable works by John Cage and Erwin Schulhoff by a considerable margin. His piece "Story for Sara" was translated and illustrated by Edward Gorey.
Allais participated in humorous exhibitions, particularly in those of the Salon des Arts Incohérents of 1883 and 1884, held at the Galerie Vivienne. At these Allais exhibited arguably the earliest examples of Conceptual Art. Of his art, perhaps the most influential were his plain white sheet of Bristol paper Première communion de jeunes filles chlorotiques par un temps de neige (First Communion of Anaemic Young Girls In The Snow) (1883), and a similar red work Apoplectic Cardinals Harvesting Tomatoes on the Shore of the Red Sea (Study of the Aurora Borealis) (1884).
He died in Paris.
Principal works
- À se tordre, 1891
- Vive la vie!, 1892
- Deux et deux font cinq, 1895
- Amours, délices et orgues, 1898
- Ne nous frappons pas (literally Let's not hit one another), 1900
See also
- Incoherents
- Ni vu, ni connu (1958)
External links
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Oxford Companion to French Literature
The New Oxford Companion to Literature in French. Copyright © 1995, 2005 by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.
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