MICHEL MEYER PRESENTS ARAGON'S LE PAYSAN DE PARIS

par Maryse Vassevière

Michel Meyer, professor at the Mermoz high school in Saint-Louis (Haut-Rhin), provides here a good critical analysis, pedagogical and reliable, of this great surrealist text which he presents as the equivalent of Nadja, by showing—through other examples as well—how much the texts of Aragon and Breton intersect and respond to each other in the 1920s.

Conceived as an immense dissertation, with particular care—to excess—for transitions, this work, which contains a good part of summaries and syntheses on the major parts of this fragmented text and on the key scenes (blondness, gardens, the discourse of imagination), is organized in two phases that distinguish content and form. Concerned with starting from form, as in any methodical reading approach, Michel Meyer first analyzes the surrealist writing of Le Paysan de Paris in a first part entitled "The Obsession with Collage" (the composition of the work; contrasts of styles; the aesthetics of collage and its consequences). Then he arrives at the link between the work and the man that he places under the sign of the crucial question of identity for Aragon, in a second part entitled "From Collage to the Quest for Identity." He then treats the question of identity through the philosophical reflection conducted by Aragon from German philosophy, then by questioning the signs of surreality (conceived according to the principle "to live as one writes") and by finally showing that the wavering identity of the young Aragon is found and structured thanks to two strong organizing principles that stand against the risk of dissolution and that will structure all his work and all his life: the myth of Paris and the religion of woman. This analysis is followed by an anthology of significant extracts from Aragon's texts that illuminate Le Paysan de Paris (Une Vague de rêves, several extracts from Chroniques I, Le Roman inachevé, La Défense de l'infini—but on this last point, the link is not sufficiently shown), from Breton's texts that echo with Aragon's text (Nadja, "L'esprit nouveau," "Angélus de l'amour") and other texts that one could consider as intertexts even if the study is not proposed (Villiers de L'Isle Adam, Zola, Céline). The dossier ends with a set of critical texts of unequal importance, the most suggestive reference being that of Walter Benjamin who in his unfinished book on the passages recalls what he owes to reading Le Paysan de Paris and shows how the 19th century and modernity meet in the Parisian passages. I add that this will also be the case for Aragon.

The strong points of Michel Meyer's work reside in the interesting analyses he proposes on the philosophical quest at work in Le Paysan de Paris, on the link with cinema, already noted, and especially on the theatrical aesthetics that emerges there and that had not yet really been shown, as an anticipation of Théâtre/Roman, and finally on the continuity of Aragon's work that always plays between realism and surrealism. Concerning the first point, Michel Meyer points to the reference to Plato (without really specifying what his analysis owes to Michel Apel-Muller who found the edition of Plato owned and annotated by Aragon), the reference to Kant and the overcoming of Kantian idealism by the double reference to Hegel and Schelling, but one would have wished for more attention to the work of Aragonian scholars on this subject. I repair this gap and point out two major references in the journal Recherches Croisées on Aragon and Elsa Triolet of the ERITA group (Équipe de Recherche Interdisciplinaire sur Elsa Triolet et Aragon. Site: http://www.louisaragon-elsatriolet.com): Nathalie Piégay-Gros, "Philosophie de l'image," RCAET n° 5, 1994, Emmanuel Rubio, "Présences de Schelling dans Le Paysan de Paris," RCAET n° 8, to appear. I add, concerning the naturalism of Le Paysan de Paris, the article by Franck Merger, "La présence des textes de Zola dans Le Paysan de Paris" to appear also in RACET n° 8.

Finally, if the continuity of Aragon's work is well shown (thus Michel Meyer underlines the trace of surrealism in the novels of the Real World and, for example, the presence of passages and Parisian cafés in Les Beaux Quartiers and Aurélien), the analysis does not always avoid the pitfall of stereotypes. Thus for example, the passage to a realist, and even socialist realist, aesthetic is always qualified as "conversion"—with the implicit that there is religion in Aragon's communism—without seeing that this enters into contradiction with the observation, very pertinent otherwise, that there is an obvious realist temptation in Le Paysan de Paris already. Similarly, the stereotype of Aragon's other "conversion" to unique love leads to a very moralizing presentation of La Défense de l'infini: Le Con d'Irène is defined as a violent and poetic text that "shows the impasse of a sexuality where love is absent." In reality things are more complex and Aragon brings the same tender and respectful gaze to the women of the brothel in the "Passage de l'Opéra" as to the marvelous woman of the "Songe du paysan," this "brilliant and brown friend" whom Édouard Ruiz and Lionel Follet have taught us was Eyre de Lanux (see all the details in the precious edition of La Défense de l'infini, Gallimard, Les Cahiers de la NRF, by Lionel Follet).

Generally speaking, one would have liked more precision in the references (pp. 27, 38, 57, 85) and a vigilance that would have made it possible to avoid dating Le Fou d'Elsa (1963) to 1951 (p. 91). As one would have liked a greater sensitivity to the satirical dimension of this text, to the violence of the irony against bourgeois society that sets the tone of the passage on gardens (the garden is not only that of love: beside the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont, place of wonder, there is also the horror of suburban gardens where man "grows tender and sways in the middle of this cretinous figuration of happiness" and "laughs softly beside the fuchsias") and which connects the lyricism of Le Paysan de Paris to the flamboyant and sharp pages of Traité du style and La Défense de l'infini.