Perhaps Ambrose Bierce’s greatest merit is that his nightmares are absolutely clear, lucidly atrocious. Bierce (…) is a master of the short story: he surpasses Poe in horror, Lovecraft in the phantasmagorical, Algernon Blackwood in the macabre, and Mark Twain in sarcasm.
Alberto Manguel
Perhaps when the reader has already read Mark Twain, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, and even Nathaniel Hawthorne, they realize, from hearsay—if they haven’t already read him—that a rare and legitimate author has been excluded, one as difficult to dethrone as he is classic. He is the writer of “The Old Black Skeleton in a Millroom,” “A Resident of Carcosa,” “The Case of the Coulter Gorge,” and many other inventions of horror, mystery, and mischief. Not only did Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914) become a temptation when he published The Devil’s Dictionary in 1911, but he was also the youngest member of his family—composed of a strict mother, a father fond of reading the Bible who alternated between the poetry of Lord Byron (he had an excellent library) and nine children whose names he did not like—and the youngest of nine children.
The youngest child in his family—composed of a strict mother, a father fond of Bible readings who alternated with the poetry of Lord Byron (he had an excellent library), and nine children whose names all began with A—Bierce lived with the prejudices and limitations of the time. He tolerated the tyranny of his home as best he could. However, he soon began to experience personal freedom when he met a woman with whom he shared a bed and books. Pleasure can be closer than one thinks.
While still a teenager, he entered military school. He fought on the side of the North (the Union) in the Civil War (1861-1865).
He was only 17 when he served as a surveying officer. During the Battle of Kenesay Mountain, he was wounded and thus left the war. Upon arriving in San Francisco, he became a journalist. From then on, Bierce showed his distrust of all political positions. He married Mary Ellen (Molly) Day and they had three children.
After living in London between 1872 and 1875, he returned to San Francisco. There he resumed journalism and writing stories. But his first narrative was The Haunted Valley, published in 1871 in the newspaper Overland Monthly. From that year on, he began to make a name for himself as a writer until he became the most respected on the west coast of the United States. At over seventy years of age, he went to Mexico and joined Pancho Villa’s troops as an observer and perhaps as a correspondent. He is said to have died in 1914. His body was never found. He departed like one of his literary characters, but his work returned through television and film. Carlos Fuentes considered him in his novel Gringo Viejo (1985), which was made into a film in 1989 by Argentine director Luis Puenzo.
In his famous essay Supernatural Horror in Literature, H. P. Lovecraft says of his fellow countryman:
Bierce’s work is, on the whole, uneven. Many of the stories are obviously mechanical, and marred by a vulgar and artificial style derived from journalistic models; but the bitter malevolence that lurks throughout them is unmistakable, and some stand out as permanent peaks of American horror fiction.
The Devil’s Dictionary first appeared in 1906. It was published by Doubleday, Page and Company in book form under the title The Book of Cynical Words, a title the author did not like (“a name,” Bierce said, “I had neither the power to reject nor the joy of approving”), but it was imposed on him due to religious prejudice. It was compiled from what Bierce had published in the weekly magazine La Avispa from 1881 to 1886. Those that appeared in El Examinador from 1887 to 1906 were also included. In 1911, he published the definitive version. In the seventh volume of his Complete Works (fourteen volumes), Bierce expanded the 1906 dictionary (which contained five hundred words from A to L) with five hundred more words (M to Z). Now he took advantage of his editorial freedom and titled the book as he had always wanted: The Devil’s Dictionary.
The Dictionary… consists of 998 written satirical definitions. Bierce drew on his experience in short story writing and the spicy, free, and clear style he learned from Mark Twain, his admired friend, but he did not forget his first vocation: journalism. With all of the above, it was not difficult for him to conceive of other meanings for familiar words in a highly personal way. However, Bierce’s uniqueness lies not only in the wit of his explanations, but also in their mocking and aggressive tone.
What was “the bitter Bierce” trying to achieve by writing this dictionary? Was it to illustrate? There is no doubt about that. However, he does not impose a single way of behaving. Rather, he warns against observed behaviors. Bierce wanted to reach readers, and to do so he could not isolate himself completely from society. If not interact with others, he needed at least to witness how relationships between people were. He gladly revealed one of his obvious obsessions: observation. For this reason, the content of many of the definitions pays indirect and unexpressed homage to those who contributed to the study of common characters. This is how he conceives his plan(t)eamientos, which lay bare appreciated behaviors.
However, between and after each definition, it is as if he reproaches us: before knowing what annoys you about others, analyze what may annoy you about yourself. It has to be this way for someone as skeptical and scathing towards his own kind. It is not surprising that he enjoys entertaining himself, as well as contradicting the established order: the power of social institutions and statutes, trust in roles. It is his cynical way of fighting human hypocrisy in favor of freedom. Human freedom according to Ambrose Bierce’s definitions? Let us turn to his Dictionary…
Man, n. An animal so immersed in the ecstatic contemplation of what he believes himself to be that he forgets what he undoubtedly should be. His chief occupation is the extermination of other animals and of his own kind, which, despite this, multiplies so rapidly that it has infested the entire inhabitable world, except for Canada.
Freedom, n. One of the most precious assets of the imagination, which allows one to evade five or six of the infinite methods of coercion by which authority is exercised. A political condition which every nation believes it has a virtual monopoly on. Independence. The distinction between freedom and independence is rather vague; naturalists have found no living specimens of either.
Alberto Garrandés is right when he said:
Bierce did not write a well-intentioned book. In fact, he did not even intend to write a book. The various urgencies of his life determined, as I said, that this, his masterpiece, was born and expanded, after its resounding arrival to readers, like that critical mass that is nanoseconds away from transforming into the mushroom cloud of an atomic explosion.
Now there remains the question of authorship in reference to Satan. Is Bierce alluding to himself or to the group he portrays? Irony reigns once again with full intent. Although this writer repudiates the human condition, he also shows the tense but continuous link with it: “For masterpieces are not singular and solitary births; they are the result of many years of common suffering, of suffering for the body of the people, so that the experience of the masses is behind the singular voice.” I do not know if Virginia Woolf, the author of the quote, has a direct reference to the man who also caricatures the supposed backwardness of women in relation to men.
Time has passed since the complete publication of The Devil’s Dictionary in 1911. Despite its few localisms, it is a work that continues to portray, with mischievous mastery, human beings as they are.
