Unabridged Devil's Dictionary

INTRODUCTION

I N T R O D U C T I O N Any writer of worth, no matter how large or varied his or her literary corpus, typically has a single work that encapsulates precisely his or her worldview and major themes or concerns. That piece may or may not be the writer's very best performance, but it is the one by which his or her essential thought can be most readily identified.Ambrose Bierce's "What I Sawof Shiloh" and "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" may be his greatest works, but The Devil's Dictionary is quintessential Bierce. In fact, his life and career can be summarized in a single sentence: Cynic, n. A blackguardwhose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be. There can be no mistaking that this definition, lodged between "Curse" and "Damn" in the first edition of his celebrated dictionary (nestled somewhat innocuously herein between "Custard" and "Dad"), is Bierce's manifesto; that he defiantly and proudly equates the "blackguard" with himself; and that it is not his vision that is"faulty" but everyoneelse's. The coda to the definition— "Hence the custom among the Scythians of plucking out a cynic's eyes to improve his vision"—is the purest distillation of his vocation: to sing out the truth, loudly and unflinchingly, no matter the cost. The removal of one's organs of sight merely thwarts one's ability to observe firsthand the misdeeds of one's fellow human beings, who continue to commit the misdeeds. Bierce's mission was to eradicate the misdeeds. Bierce was not one to write directly of personal matters in his work. In his later years he penned afew autobiographical sketches, mostly about his CivilWar days and other select colorful moments, but he wrote no sustained account ofhis life, which he considered irrelevant to the evaluation of hiswork. His entire journalistic corpus can be read as a kind of autobiography—not a detailed chronological record of the primary events of his life, for his life was largely dedicated to the solitary work of writing, but instead a record of the life of the mind. Even such terse, unexplicated statements asdictionary definitionsspeakvolumes about the private dimension of Bierce's life. So wherefore The Devil's Dictionary? Its author, ostensibly Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?), said nothing in private correspondence or in print about his pur pose or intent in writing it. It was initially published not as a complete (albeit mock) reference book from which bits were occasionally extracted but as awork in progress in irregular installments published in various magazines and newspapers over aperiod of thirty years. Bierce's"Devil's Dictionary" madeits unheralded debut in 1881 along with "Prattle," his weekly column of miscellaneous commentary, as his first contributions to the San Franciscoweekly,the Wasp. In those daysBierce's workwaspublished mostlyunsigned or pseudonymously, but readers recognized the distinctive work of the former "Town Crier" of the San Francisco News Letter and California Advertiser and the "Prattler" of the.Argonaut, so that a bylinewould have been little more than a formality. The Devil's Dictionary may be said ostensibly to be Bierce's work, because one installment declared it instead to be "oneof the most useful worksthat its author, Dr. John Satan, has ever produced."1 Could anyone but Satan himself be the author of a "devil's dictionary":1 Possibly. Fundamentalists and literalists believe God to be the author of the Bible. But just as biblical tradition holds that God did not literally put pen to paper to revealhis thought, instead inspiring certain writers to undertake that task, we find that the "writer who evolvesthis [devil's] dictionary [is inspired] from an understanding illuminated from Below . . . by the Personage whose title it bears."2 The persona Bierce had affected in print since his days as the Town Crier (1868-72)—probably in vehement rebellion against his fundamentalist upbringing —was that of a close partner of Satan, if not Satan himself.3 For two thirds of his career, Bierce tirelessly affected the persona of a demonic journalist.4 His first book, the pseudonymously published The Fiend's Delight (1873), named for one of Satan's minions, contains a preface that four decades later could have applied to TheDevil's Dictionary: The atrocities constituting this "cold collation" of diabolisms are taken mainly from various Californian journals. They are cast in the American language , and liberally enriched with unintelligibility. . . . In the pursuit ofmy design I think...