Aragon’s Paris Peasant (1926)

1. Preface to a Modern Mythology: a program essay

• Error always accompanies truth
  • Critique of dialectics: it makes you base new ideas on the errors of the old
    • It allows ideas of progress, divinity to creep in
  • Critique of Cartesian certainty: flatters man as the basis for judging truth
  • Later, critique of Kant: the unreal is more interesting than the real (61)
  • Critique of religion: laziness to believe in “absolute mediator” (192)
  • Critique of general idealism: lazy cowardice
  • Always conflict: light v dark, thesis v antithesis: thus, the “intoxicating” nature of human life
  • Hooray for error, for the “admirable gardens of absurd beliefs, forebodings, obsessions, and frenzies” (10)
• Problems with modern thinking habits
  • “Can knowledge deriving from reason even begin to compare to knowledge perceptible by sense?” (9)
  • Must train self away from giving up every idea to abstract reason for analysis
  • Man’s “mania for control” and love of ease and the familiar must be given up
• Yet he admits that senses and reason are connected and contingent
• Modernity
  • “Each day the modern sense of existence becomes subtly altered. A mythology ravels and unravels.” (10)
• “A living science” = the art of experiencing the marvel of life

2. Opera Boulevard: exploratory examples of Parisian landscape: literally mapping the enchanting city: both cults, life and death

• A new religion is growing to replace Judeo-Christianity
  • What is it? “Metaphysical entity of places” (13)
  • Why? Like dreams and slips of the tongue revealing truth, ”Wherever the living pursue particularly ambiguous activities, the inanimate may sometimes assume the reflection of their most secret motives: and thus our cities are people with unrecognized sphinxes.” (13)
  • He gives support for my theory about why we should examine spaces more carefully.
• Rationalization will ruin it: architecture from America brings “city planning” in straight lines, ruining the “human aquariums” where we can discover human truths (14)
  • Changing the way people walk will change their thoughts and activities (casual strolling, prostitution), create new people and destroy the old ones
• A Survey of Modern Places
  • Hotels for transients, bookstores, cafes, habitues like institutions (19), canes and walking sticks with bioluminescent light and smelling like the beach (ie, turning the urban landscape into a natural one), prostitutes (“mobile human tapestry” 37), hairdressers (some “devoid of humanity” and “puritanical” but others sensuous and instinctual 43), theatres, concierge’s glass boxes, shoeshine palaces (“breathe the very spirit of modernism…a minor art” 69) and their crazy mix of patrons, lavatories, handkerchief stores, restaurants, hallways, doorways, gunshops, advertisements, champagne stores, arcades, orthopedists,
  • Geography of crazy allies and back and side doors butting against different buildings, windows looking upon strange corners, doors leading where you don’t think they will: it’s a mixed-up dreamworld, unpredictable and irrational, a maze (82 for example)
• 26: turns into anti-big-business, anti-monopoly discussion (modern big biz, especially department stores (Galeries Lafayette), the 1924 way of being radical, more against big gov and big biz and for petty bourgeois merchants)
  • Marx would hate it because it’s only making deals with the petty bourgeoisie (which he doesn’t want to control, but doesn’t want to compromise with)
  • 86: Suggests that he was being ironic and didn’t really support the campaign of the “little sharks against the big ones”
• Why cafes?
  • The patrons wait… “This coveted happiness will never turn up. You may as well be on your way.” (69)
  • Because the bar and cafe owners are “the people who make a very real contribution to the maintenance of true civilization” (81)
  • Their “enviable peace” helps you daydream, and it also gives you endless images and therefore truly helps Art (81)
• Discourse on blondness (40)
• Rebelling machines (41)
• More pleasure, please! We don’t take pleasure seriously enough….
  • “codifying pleasure” “a geography of pleasure” (44)
• Baths (51-58): a risque hint of contagion
  • danger in public intimacy
  • more likely to indulge in some kind of sexual pleasure or perversion
  • yet people no longer take advantage of it
• Dada’s Cafes
  • Petite Grillon Cafe (24), Restaurant Saulnier (58)
  • its Certa Cafe (74) when the judging and excommunicating begin; good description 75-81 (even menus and recommended drinks)
  • their last restaurant 92-3
  • bottom 80: any reform of government intervention in economy will be in order to make the small business owners maintain their standing – not to overturn capitalism itself, but to make it better
• Playlet with Sense, Will, Understanding, Imagination, and Man (62-3)
  • pro-imagination, of course
  • Lit helps you get your imagination back: “The anodyne pretext of literature allows them to offer you at a rock-bottom bargain price this deadly ferment [“disorder” or Surrealism proper] which it is high time to make generally available for consumption.
    • A sales pitch for creative power! Selling Surrealism to the public.
• Surrealism: “uncontrolled provocation of the image for its own sake” (66)
  • What does it offer? Metamorphosis and unpredictability
  • Anarchy, lawlessness
  • “Unprofitable” (67) and “uselessness” (48)

4. The Peasant’s dream

• Significance of disorder
  • Man just tries to make significance out of it, order into it
  • Out from order comes “ideas” about that order
  • Including religion: a way to ignore disorder
• Any idea occurs just because you are already thinking its opposite
  • Newness is just reaction
  • Difference is just syntax
• Metaphysics: ain’t all that bad
  • God is bad, but that doesn’t rule out all metaphysics
  • Definition: metaphysics is the “science of the purpose of knowledge” (194)
  • It is concrete knowledge (not like logic’s abstract knowledge)
  • “I advance to the particular. I am lost in it.” (200) Contemplation of an object, rejection of the artistic image
• Poetic image is where it’s at
  • Poetic image is one of materialization (201), is “the path of all knowledge” (201)
  • All knowledge is particular; all poetry is concrete
• “All metaphysics is in first-person singular,” and all knowledge is directed at subject, not object (203)
• Woman: “you put laws to confusion while at the same time you give expression to them” (196)
  • Yet, don’t think of woman, but instead of a woman
  • 199: falling in love caused a major change of perspective for him (see Auguste Comte’s late change of mind for a woman)
• Against sentimentality; need to look at objects without emotion (204)
• Marvelous is the “eruption of contradiction,” distinguished from reality, which is a state of non-contradiction

Modernity

• In danger of too much rationalization
• Wants, above all, security
• Danger and mystery are a thing of the past and need to be found again (51)
• Yet the city presents opportunities to get beyond this prejudice
• Modernity is “abstract words are crumbling into dust” like truth, beauty, right, good (111)

Questions/Themes

• Paris and Peasant? Peasantry associated with rural…
  • Poverty is universal, whether urban or rural?
  • Does Paris have geographical divisions that resemble the urban/rural divide?
  • Is peasantry a state of mind?
• Examination of these folks translates the naturalists’ obsession with science into an imaginative foray into the underworld for the Surrealists
  • That is, how different is this really from French naturalism?
  • Aragon uses “microscope,” “camera” (32), “all kinds of lenses” as well as alcohol and drugs (33), describes humanity as “magnificent bacterial dramas” (33)
• This high-style, academic in its precision yet breathtaking in detail, sounds like Gide’s Lafcadio’s Adventures and Huysmans: why?
• How does one come to know a neighborhood so well? Why should he have to give a minute process description?
  • Why talk about the danger he’s in and he puts the neighborhood in (85) through this publication?
  • He says it’s not out of a “gift for observation,” but instead “interior boundaries of myself, ideal views I have of my laws” (88)—egotistical indeed (the outer for the inner: seems anti-surrealist b/c it takes the mundane for the deep)
  • 194-5: metaphysics as concrete knowledge means that the whole book was an exercise in metaphysics
• 36: Of the women in the brothels, informal and otherwise: some are “new to the backwaters” because they “simply graduated from sitting at the terraces of the neighboring cafes”
  • Relates to KM’s and Rhys’ portraits of women sliding imperceptibly into types of prostitution
• “Reality of the outside world against the subjectivism of the passage:” is outside more “objective” than “subjective” domestic spaces? (47)
  • Outside space is a chance to think you’re in an impersonal space, while inside spaces is always privatized?
  • At the point where you see both (outside objects, inner feelings), that’s when the amazing thoughts and images occur, when you understand the variations of the world, where “disorder” meets “instincts” (48), pessimism
• Liberally spread references to revolution, mob, placards, etc
• Cafes as meeting spots for art movements (cf The New Age and its habit of meeting in ABC tearooms or cafes) YET (77) to the cafe owners, the Dadaists are just “regular customers, a few young people, a bit boisterous at times, but likeable” (it’s modernism in disguise, at leisure almost in the middle of business)
• The ephemeral is “lacking even the illusion of duration” (89) but he still “endorses” this taste (“polymorphous divinity” it is 87)
• Graphs, cut-outs, pastiche:
  • it tries to push language past signification and into real representation
  • it emphasizes difference among different literary or artistic means of expression (there are different kinds of text from different Surrealistic modes of understanding)
• Catalog: the whole 2nd section is one of a neighborhood, like Joyce for Dublin and Woolf for London