Paris Peasant     by Louis Aragon, Translated by Simon Watson Taylor Original language: French Country: France   Published by Exact Change Format: Paperback, 228 pages ISBN: 1878972103 List Price: $15.95 Buy online from Amazon.com for $11.17

Click on image to see enlargement

This book is a kind of descendant of another unique French book with the strangeness of the urban experience at its heart, also written by a young Parisian rebelling against literary and social convention; the notorious Maldoror of Lautréamont. Surrealism, a revolutionary cultural movement of mostly writers and painters starting in Paris in around 1924, in fact saw Lautréamont as a precursor. While Lautréamont’s Paris is rather surrealist in its disjunctures and impossibilities and its passionate anger at whatever obstructs desire, it fell to the the young Aragon to consciously evoke the surrealist city for the first time, a process to be repeated in many locales subsequently, by Mervyn Peake for instance in a half-ruined London as the Flying Bombs landed, or Reyner Banham dazzled by night-time Las Vegas pulsating with light in the Nevada desert. Here, though, the surrealist city is a collage of objets trouvés like the beautiful and haunting Passage de l’Opéra, a long-demolished arcade which he calls, owing to the diffuse greenish light that enters it and the wary subfusc behaviour of its habitual denizens, ‘a human aquarium’.


Paris Peasant is the first (and perhaps only) textbook of what the Situationists — strongly influenced by early Surrealism — nearly forty years later were to call ‘Psycho-geography’; the plumbing of the resonances of built spaces for the vibrations and sympathies that make love and play possible. In lovely, surprising and above all playful writing the man who went on to become a great Stalinist bore, churning out worthy novels in the cause of Party and Proletariat, celebrates the city as a place of happy and stimulating coincidences, encounters and inexplicable oddities. He offers us the urban world of mystery and possibility with its ambiguous teasing spaces, its public baths and parks with their constant invitations to nature and nudity, however respectable their outward appearence.


Aragon discovers as another of the prime surrealist intersections the café, the quiet, spacious congenial place where reverie and friendship can flow. In contemporary cities where cafés and bars are often filled with loud piped music to snuff out thought before it forms, the sophisticated urbanity of 1920s Paris seems nostalgic.


Alongside The Passage of the Opera are several shorter pieces from the original series of magazine articles that form the book. In the second piece A Feeling for Nature on the Buttes-Chaumont another side of the enormously fertile early Surrealist thought emerges; an updated secular mysticism that finds immanence in everyday objects in their random juxtaposition which Aragon calls a ‘mythology of the modern’. A Feeling for Nature is more discursive than The Passage of the Opera — which is ecstatically gossipy at times — and although full of marvellous language (‘the mental suburbs where these old monsters haunted by the sea’s treacheries are relegated’) it cannot equal the breathless inspiration of the hundred-odd pages of revolutionary writing of its companion piece.

‘Turn round, and see, there right opposite is the little restaurant where, in our progress towards the depths of the imagination, I find the last traces of the Dada movement. When Saulnier seemed too expensive for us, we used to come here, appeasing our inopportune appetites as best we could with food cooked in rancid coconut oil and with their sharp, unpleasant wine, consumed in a stuffy, vulgar atmosphere. What memories, what revulsions linger around these hash houses: the man eating in this one has the impression he is chewing the table rather than a steak, and becomes irritated by his common, noisy table companions, ugly, stupid girls, and a gentleman flaunting his second-rate subconscious and the whole unedifiying mess of his lamentable existence; while, in another one, a man wobbles on his chair’s badly squared legs, and concentrates his impatience and his rancours upon the broken clock. Two rooms: a bar room with a zinc counter and a door opening on a low-ceilinged, smoke-filled kitchen, and a dining-room extended at the end by an alcove just big enough to accommodate a table, a settee and three chairs, this being really a tiny courtyard covered over to provide space for six extra customers. The chorus girls of the Théâtre Moderne, their lovers, their dogs, their children, plus a few commercial travellers, are the chief occupants, these days, of the restaurant’s settees. The whole scene — sweaty walls, people, stodgy food — is like a smear of candle grease.’ p105