Louis Aragon

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Louis Aragon (1897-1982) was a surrealist author, poet of the French Resistance during World War II, and the leading Communist writer in France.

Louis Aragon was born in Neuilly on Oct. 3, 1897. He was educated to be a physician. In 1917, while in the army medical corps, he met André Breton, who enlisted his support in the "surrealist revolution," a literary and art movement that emphasized the irrational and the unconscious. Aragon's poems and prose pieces of the 1920s are all strongly surrealist. The collections Feu de joie (Bonfire) and Mouvement perpétuel (Perpetual Motion) show not only the verbal gratuity that surrealism advocated but the lyrical transformation of humdrum reality as well. In prose, too, Aragon demonstrated the "daily marvelous" by drawing a veil of enchantment over a modern city, as in LePaysan de Paris (1926; Parisian Peasant). In his essays he lambasted everything and everybody representing established values.

When Aragon became a Communist in 1927, the boisterous and brawling surrealist broke with his companions to dedicate himself to a revolution that he considered more viable than Breton's. He married Elsa Triolet, the sister-in-law of the Russian poet V. V. Mayakovsky and an author in her own right.

Aragon radically shifted the basis of his art and wrote a series of four novels during 1933-1944 in a style that harkened back to 19th-century realism. The novels paint a panorama of French life before World War I. Although intended to be an indictment of the bourgeoisie, they do not show Aragon's political views so obviously as the next series, Les Communistes (1949-1951; The Communists), which deals with France of 1939-1940. For his next novel he went back a century; La Semaine sainte (1958; Holy Week) is about the painter Théodore Géricault and his times. With La Mise à mort (1965; Death Blow) Aragon returned to his own times and his own story. His interest in the work of painter Henri Matisse, whose work Aragon collected, led him to write the novel Henri Matisse (1971).

Aragon's personal story has been the subject of his poetry for, other than his surrealist "exercises," it is essentially a poetry of self-expression. Its first great theme is patriotism, the sentiment which promoted a remarkable flowering of poetry in France during the Occupation. Among Resistance poetry, Aragon's volumes entitled LeCrévecoeur (1941; The Broken Heart), Le Musée Grévin (1943; The Grévin Museum), and La Diane française (1944; The French Diana) stand with the finest. The second great theme of Aragon's poetry is love, which surrealism exalted in particular. In volume after volume Aragon sang of his love for his wife, Elsa. Just as he rejoined, in the novel, the older tradition of didactic realism, in poetry he pushed back to romanticism for theme and form. With verses as regular as Victor Hugo's, his poetry is eminently accessible and direct in its appeal.

Aragon published numerous essays on art and literature and particularly in support of the political cause to which he devoted all his mature years. In 1937 he became editor of the newspaper Le Soir. During the war he helped found the Communist weekly Les Lettres françaises. Speaking at Communist meetings and serving in organizations of writers, Aragon gave unstintingly of his time to causes he thought worthy, defending and attacking with the same spirit that had made him the fire-brand of the twenties.

In 1981, French president François Mitterand made Aragon a member of the Legion of Honor. He died in Paris on December 24, 1982.

Further Reading

Hannah Josephson and Malcolm Cowley, eds., Aragon: Poet of the French Resistance (1945), contains useful introductions to both the poetry and prose. Catharine Savage, Malraux, Sartre, and Aragon as Political Novelists (1964), illuminates the conflict between art and politics for these Marxist writers. Maxwell Adereth, Commitment in Modern French Literature (1967), places Aragon in the context of littérature engagée Background material is provided by Henri Peyre, The Contemporary French Novel (1955), and Germaine Brée and Margaret Guiton, An Age of Fiction: The French Novel from Gide to Camus (1957; rev. ed. published as The French Novel from Gide to Camus, 1962). See also Adareth, Max. Elsa Triolet and Louis Aragon: An Introduction to Their Interwoven Lives and Works (Edwin Mellen Press, 1994); Aragon, Louis, translated by Alyson Waters, Treatise on Style (Traite du Style) (University of Nebraska Press, 1991); Becker, Lucille F., Louis Aragon (Irvington Publishers, 1971); and the New York Times (December 25, 1982).

Aragon, Louis (1897-1982). A founding member of the Surrealist movement and France's most distinguished Communist writer, Aragon excelled as a poet, novelist, and journalist. He was born in Paris, the illegitimate son of Marguerite Toucas and Louis Andrieux, a député and former préfet de police and ambassador to Spain, who gave him the name of Aragon. The quest for legitimacy and identity was to become one of the major themes of his work. After a brilliant school career, at the École Saint-Pierre in Neuilly and the Lycée Carnot, during which he showed a precocious literary talent, he enrolled as a medical student in 1916 and met André Breton while attending courses at the Val de Grâce in 1917. He had a distinguished war career, in which he was awarded the Croix de Guerre, and saw service in occupied Germany until he was demobilized in 1919.

The first major period of his literary career began the same year, with the establishment, with Breton and Soupault, of the review Littérature, which became the flagship of the French avantgarde. Initially closely allied to Dada, Breton and Aragon broke with Tzara in 1921 and moved on to found Surrealism in 1924. Aragon's writing of the 1920s constitutes some of the most accomplished and innovative production of the avant-garde. Novels such as Anicet ou le Panorama (1921) and Les Aventures de Télémaque (1922) owe much of their fantastic character to pastiche, whilst collections of poems, Feu de joie (1921) and Le Mouvement perpétuel (1926), make use of what was to become a constant feature of his work, collage. In particular, Le Paysan de Paris (1926), which proposes a new fantastic vision of the city, became a classic text of Surrealism. Aragon's Surrealist writing was theoretically underpinned by the violently polemical essay Traité du style (1928).

In 1927 Aragon joined the French Communist Party (PCF), still believing that it was possible to make of Surrealism a genuinely revolutionary movement, but his meeting in 1928 with the Russian Elsa Triolet, who was to be his companion until her death in 1970, led to closer contact with the Soviet Union and brought him to a more orthodox stance. On his return from the Revolutionary Writers' Congress in Kharkov in 1930, Aragon saw Surrealism and Communism as no longer compatible, a decision which led to his final break with Breton in 1932. Throughout the 1930s Aragon operated as an increasingly important figure in the French Communist apparatus, as a journalist, organizer, and writer. He had written for newspapers since the early 1920s, but in 1933 he became a regular journalist for L'Humanité as well as editorial assistant for Commune. In 1937 he became director of the Communist daily evening paper Ce soir, a post he held until the paper was banned in 1939. At the same time, he became a central figure in the setting up and management of Popular Front organizations, such as the Association des Écrivains et Artistes Révolutionnaires (AEAR) and the 1936 Congrès International pour la Défense de la Culture contre le Fascisme, as well as making frequent visits to the USSR. His writing during the 1930s veered from Surrealism to Socialist Realism, though he was careful to situate it clearly in a national cultural context which allowed him to continue some of the innovative techniques of the 1920s. Thus, whilst the poems of Hourral l'Oural (1934) show a marked return to traditional poetic form, the novels which make up the Monde réel cycle— Les Cloches de Bâle (1934), Les Beaux Quartiers (1936), and Les Voyageurs de l'Impériale (1942)—continue the techniques of pastiche and collage which characterized the writing of the 1920s.

In 1940 a third major phase of Aragon's career began with his role in the Resistance [see Occupation and Resistance]. He fought heroically in the Battle of France and, on the defeat of France, took a major part in the constitution of the intellectual resistance, both with the PCF and with Pierre Seghers, with whom he and Elsa founded the Poésie series. From this period stems some of his finest poetry, Cantique à Elsa (1942), Les Yeux d'Elsa (1942), En français dans le texte (1943), and La Diane française (1945), in which mastery of lyrical form enables Aragon to equate love of woman with love of country and to celebrate the struggle against the Germans. After the war he emerged as the uncontested major Communist writer, though this did not prevent Party disapproval of works such as the novel Aurélien (1944), in spite its apparently orthodox character. Nevertheless, he continued to occupy key journalistic posts within the Party: he was made director of Ce soir in 1947, and director of Les Lettres françaises from 1953 to its closure in 1972. In fiction, he resumed his own brand of Socialist Realism with the cycle Les Communistes (1949-51), though the abrupt ending of the project betrays growing doubts regarding Stalinism. He continued to publish poetry in the 1950s and 1960s, Elsa (1959) and Le Fou d'Elsa (1963), and novels: what is arguably his finest work, La Semaine sainte (1958), La Mise à mort (1965), Blanche ou l'Oubli (1967), and a final collection of short stories, Mentir-vrai (1980). Although he remained a key figure in the PCF until his death and was given an official Party funeral, he became, particularly after May 1968 and the death of Elsa in 1970, increasingly distanced from orthodox Communism.

Aragon's reputation rests upon his importance within the Surrealist group, particularly through his Surrealist poetry and Le Paysan de Paris, and upon the poetry and fiction which resulted from his long relationship with Communism. The wartime Elsa poems in particular confirm him both as a major 20th-c. love-poet and as one of the most important poets of the Resistance. His fiction is important, not merely as the most successful illustration of Socialist Realism in France, but because of the way in which it transcends it to produce genuine textual complexity.

[Nicholas Hewitt]

Bibliography

• R. Garaudy, L'Itinéraire d'Aragon (1961)
• Y. Gindine, Aragon prosateur surréaliste (1966)
• J. Sur, Aragon, le réalisme de l'amour (1966)
• P. Daix, Aragon, une vie à changer (1975)

Quotes:

"Fear of error which everything recalls to me at every moment of the flight of my ideas, this mania for control, makes men prefer reason's imagination to the imagination of the senses. And yet it is always the imagination alone which is at work."

"The whole fauna of human fantasies, their marine vegetation, drifts and luxuriates in the dimly lit zones of human activity, as though plaiting thick tresses of darkness. Here, too, appear the lighthouses of the mind, with their outward resemblance to less pure symbols. The gateway to mystery swings open at the touch of human weakness and we have entered the realms of darkness. One false step, one slurred syllable together reveal a man's thoughts."

"We know that the nature of genius is to provide idiots with ideas twenty years later."

"I demand that my books be judged with utmost severity, by knowledgeable people who know the rules of grammar and of logic, and who will seek beneath the footsteps of my commas the lice of my thought in the head of my style."

"Love is made by two people, in different kinds of solitude. It can be in a crowd, but in an oblivious crowd."

"There exists a black kingdom which the eyes of man avoid because its landscape fails signally to flatter them. This darkness, which he imagines he can dispense with in describing the light, is error with its unknown characteristics. Error is certainty's constant companion. Error is the corollary of evidence. And anything said about truth may equally well be said about error: the delusion will be no greater."

See more famous quotes by Louis Aragon

• Country: France
• Born: October 03, 1897 in Paris, France
• Died: December 24, 1982

Biography

This poet, essayist, historical commentator, anarchist, and man of letters was an important figure in the surrealist movement and in political thought.

Aragon was born to Louis Andrieux and Marguerite Toucas-Massillon. In order to disguise the illegitimate birth, the boy was adopted by his grandmother. At the age of 5, he dictated poems; at 6 he wrote his first text

"Quelle âme divine!"; and at 11, his first novel La sorcière du Vésuve.

In 1913, he began to visit artists at the Salon des Indépendants. He received his diploma in the Latin sciences and in 1915, the philosophy diploma writing on the subject "Is there moral progress?" For health reasons, he was freed from military conscription and wrote that he was disturbed by the ill treatment of the German prisoners. At his mother's request, he studied medicine. In 1924, Aragon, André Breton, Morise, and Vitrac went on a "voyage of discovery" through the Sologne. That year, Aragon wrote the "Préface à une mythologie moderne," his "Lettre à Francis Viélé-Griffin sur la destinée de l'homme," and published Le Passage de l'Opéra and his surrealist manifesto "Une Vague de rêves." On October 11, Aragon opened his Bureau de recherches surréalistes. Breton's manifesto was published and the surrealist bulletin Le Revue was advertised with the note "The collaborators on this revue are dreams." With Jean Bernier, Aragon wrote the pamphlet

"Avez-vous déjà giflé un mort?" In a letter to Bernier, Aragon -- a pure anarchist -- declared that at that time, he had little taste for the communist regime. In 1939, Aragon traveled to the Spanish border in order to provide aid to Spanish refugees. He also participated together with German émigrés and French intellectuals in a demonstration in favor of the "other Germany." He married Elsa Trolet on February 28 and they traveled to the U.S., where they were received by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and attended the League of American Writers conference in Carnegie Hall. Back in Europe, on September 26, Aragon -- clad in an officer's uniform replete with medals and decorations -- escaped with his wife into the Chilean embassy, where he ended his novel Les Voyageurs de l'impériale. The next month, Aragon was mobilized as a doctor's assistant in the 220th Workers Regiment, which he described as made up of "suspects, hoods, white emigrants, communists, anarchists without uniforms, or with armbands and police caps." At this time, Aragon approved of most of the actions of the Soviets and in conversation remarked "A safe man is a dead man, one can say of him that he spent his whole life being certain." Police raided his residence and seized documents, but Aragon continued to read his poetry in public and to speak his mind the rest of his life. His other noted poetic works are "Écritures automatiques," "Le mouvement perpétuel" (1926), "Persécuté persécuteur" (1931), "Élégie à Pablo Neruda" (1966), and "Les adieux" (1981). His other novels include Les cloches de Bâle (1934), Aurélien (1944),

Les communistes in six volumes (1949-1951), La semaine sainte (1958), and Blanche ou l'oubli (1967). His narrative prose includes "Le Libertinage" (1924) and "La défense de l'infini" and his significant essays "La peinture au défi" (1930), "Le crime contre l'esprit (Les Martyrs)" (1944), "La lumière et la Paix" (1950). He also wrote many articles on art and politics that were translated by Lewis Carroll, Petrarch, Tchinghiz Aïtmatov, and others. His poetry has been set to music by Francis Poulenc (Deux poémes, 1948), Lothar Voigtländer (Bitte um Regen (Pray for Rain)/Ritual for two choirs and percussion), and Lino Léonardi, Georges Brassens, Léo Ferré, Joseph Kosma, Colette Magny, and Yani Spanos. ~ "Blue Gene" Tyranny, All Music Guide

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