{"id":86946,"date":"2015-06-23T16:50:58","date_gmt":"2015-06-23T20:50:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=86946"},"modified":"2015-06-23T16:50:58","modified_gmt":"2015-06-23T20:50:58","slug":"the-brief-and-bitter-encounters-of-ambrose-bierce","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/06\/23\/the-brief-and-bitter-encounters-of-ambrose-bierce\/","title":{"rendered":"The Brief and Bitter Encounters of Ambrose Bierce"},"content":{"rendered":"

See more of Jason\u2019s work in our new Summer issue<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

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When I was a kid, I came across Ambrose Bierce\u2019s The Devil\u2019s Dictionary <\/em>and found it to be a revelation of cynicism\u2014even somehow liberating in its bleak honesty.<\/p>\n

Bierce\u2019s writing has fallen out of fashion over the past century. His specialty was the dispensation of devastating aphoristic truths. If I had to name a single literary antecedent, it might be Blaise Pascal. While Pascal was content to note the pain and weakness of humankind, though, Bierce injected his epigrams with a dose of fanciful weirdness. Take this one, for example, which almost reads like stage directions for a vaudeville routine:<\/p>\n

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Meeting Merit on a street-crossing, Success stood still. Merit stepped off into the mud and went round him, bowing his apologies, which Success had the grace to accept.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Most of Bierce\u2019s works are so direct and evocative that illustrations might only cloud their effect. But these unusual exchanges between virtues personified\u2014many of which are collected in A Cynic Looks at Life<\/a><\/em> (1912)\u2014cried out to me as mini-comics. I hope this form brings out their idiosyncrasies. <\/p>\n

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Jason Novak is a cartoonist in Oakland, California. His illustrations accompany Chris Bachelder\u2019s <\/em>The Throwback Special<\/a> in our Summer issue, and will continue to appear as we serialize the novel through our Spring 2016 issue.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

See more of Jason\u2019s work in our new Summer issue. When I was a kid, I came across Ambrose Bierce\u2019s The Devil\u2019s Dictionary and found it to be a revelation of cynicism\u2014even somehow liberating in its bleak honesty. Bierce\u2019s writing has fallen out of fashion over the past century. His specialty was the dispensation of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":312,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2384],"tags":[6962,134,18543,737,12976,18540,2783,18542,6024,18541,886],"class_list":["post-86946","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-look","tag-ambrose-bierce","tag-cartoons","tag-credulity","tag-cynicism","tag-drawings","tag-epigrams","tag-illustrations","tag-reason","tag-suicide","tag-virtues","tag-wisdom"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nDrawings of Ambrose Bierce\u2019s Bitter, Misanthropic Epigrams<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Jason Novak illustrates the author\u2019s famously acerbic pronouncements.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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