On the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of the disappearance of Aragon, Daniel Bougnoux publishes, jointly with the last volume of Complete works of fiction (t. V, Paris, Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade), a biographical essay which captures the power of Aragon’s work in its ambiguities.
Aragonian studies has never been a peaceful field. The author’s political and aesthetic reversals have in fact sparked violent polarizations. The primacy given to ideological questions has from this point of view particularly weighed on the stylistic study of the works of Louis Aragon (1897-1982). From a chronological perspective as well as from a generic perspective, the unity of the work also proves problematic. ; there are few who have succeeded in embracing in the same movement the surrealist, the communist won over to realism, and the Aragon of “ lie-true “.
This is the ambition of Daniel Bougnoux in Aragon or the confusion of genreswhose publication has just caused quite a stir. While we solemnly celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of the novelist’s death, the controversy is neither political nor aesthetic, but concerns a biographical anecdote that the essayist recounted, before the chapter in which he had placed it was censored by Gallimard. This famous chapter 7, which recounted a scene from “ completely carnivalesque homosexual flirting » is now downloadable from the Bibliobs website.
Daniel or the director
It is in this stormy context that the essay by Daniel Bougnoux, a trained philosopher and professor emeritus in communication sciences at Stendhal University in Grenoble, has reached us. An important figure in mediology, he is also an experienced Aragonian, having notably directed the critical edition of Aragon’s fictional works in the Pléiade library. To write the little opus which interests us, Bougnoux stripped himself of his academic trappings to don the clothes of “ madman of Aragon “. In a foreword fantastically addressed to the one he has read and reread tirelessly for years, he fully embraces his fascination and suggests that the portrait of Aragon that he offers also offers, implicitly, an image of himself . In this, Bougnoux perfectly follows the line of the collection “ Both », which aims to explore the intimate links uniting the author of an essay to the person he chooses to study. In doing so, Gallimard offers its readers “ subjective stories, a thousand miles from traditional biography “. Subjective, this essay is undeniably so. Bougnoux in fact places his discovery of Aragon within the framework of his years of training in khâgne, then at the École Normale Supérieure. He evokes the then unequaled prestige of philosophy (around key figures like those of Foucault and Derrida) and the good-natured contempt that we had to display for literature as it was taught. Aragon rightly echoed this relationship between philosophy and literature, this distrust of the reigning intellectualism. In this context, the discovery of Blanche or oblivion (1967), which an adorable young woman read to him on a deserted beach in Tunisia, is presented as an explosion. Like Proust in his essay On readingBougnoux associates this romantic work with memories imbued with sensuality (“ the burning of salt and the deafening noise of the sea », p. 28) and dates from this day his reconciliation with the novel, understood as an admirable thinking machine.
Bougnoux’s approach certainly aims to shed light on the complex personality and work of Aragon, but also presents itself as an attempt at investigation intended to shed light on “ by what mysterious springs » Bougnoux (himself) infatuated with this work, to the point of making Aragon (his) drug ? » (p. 21).
Aragon or perpetual motion
Willingly opting for a psychological or even psychoanalytic approach, Bougnoux attempts to identify the elusive figure of his favorite author in the eighteen ends of the chapters which make up this free essay. It’s not an easy thing. From the surrealist dandy to the fierce communist, from the “ mad » from Elsa to the aging Aragon surrounded by his cute ones, the distance can indeed seem insurmountable. Thematized by Aragon, the fragmentation of the self even constitutes the favorite subject of the third period of writing, that of the “ deconstruction novels “, where he multiplies the intrusions of authorship, and in which a “ narrative carnival scatters points of view » (p. 38).
Outside of the strictly literary framework, Bougnoux also sees the signs of this problematic identity in Aragon’s relationship to his public image. For example, he emphasizes the disturbing dissimilarity between the author’s different photographs, whose features are difficult to recognize from one image to another. He also reports that, during the posing sessions that Aragon offered Matisse in 1942 as part of their cross-portrait project, the painter complained about this model “ almost cinematic, which never stopped moving » (p. 73). It is difficult to identify a subject that “ bubbles and trickles “, Who “ contains too many people » (p. 82). This moving image was followed, in 1978, by the worrying impassivity of the white mask worn by Aragon: a symptom of a quest for identity or a desire to shy away from embarrassing questions about his historical commitment. ?
Resistant to any fixed image, Aragon also refused to complete the constitution of his “ Poetic Work “. This building with vague generic outlines − and therefore virtually infinite −, increased from year to year by its author, reflects the refusal of “ make an end ” as “ these mature men whom (he) loathes “. We can only subscribe to the words of Bougnoux, according to which “ to never end, (Aragon) therefore had the passion to methodically undo himself. And to complicate his character » (p. 58).
The will of novel
The term “ character » applies without difficulty to an author whose life has all the characteristics of a novel. The initial lie of his birth, which consisted of passing off his mother for his sister, his father for his godfather and his grandmother for his adoptive mother, is a true family novel which directly inspired Blanche or oblivion. This matrix lie obviously plays a founding role in the constitution of the man and the novelist that Aragon is, as in his conception of “ lie-true “.
Insisting on what distinguishes Aragon from the surrealists, Bougnoux shows that the author ofAurélien “ written to explain this world, not to escape from it » (p. 15), that he seeks the infinite in reality. The novel would offer Aragon this “ expanded mentality » which Kant attributes to the man of the Enlightenment, and which profoundly distinguishes him from an author like André Breton, a fierce slayer of the novelistic form, whose penchant for esotericism is well known. In Aragon, on the contrary, everything is intended as a novel, if indeed we understand the genre in its plasticity, its porosity in the essay, in poetry, in the theater. The novel notably allows him to tell the problems of commitment from the inside. In Crazy Elsathe agony of Granada can thus be read as that of communism, the novel offering its author a means of exorcising the pain of lost political hopes. For Bougnoux, “ few texts will have said with this force and this delicacy the horror of being a communist after, say, Stalinism – and how this horror can be turned into paradoxical honor: honor of (torturous) fidelity, of confession (… ) and always with the ample beauty of a song through which, without denying anything, the prophet-poet strives to emerge with his head held high from the shame inflicted by History » (p. 105).
Voluntary servitude and gender confusion
“ The honor of torturous fidelity »: this is the beautiful formula that Daniel Bougnoux proposes to understand the voluntary servitude which in turn subjects Aragon to a movement (surrealism), a woman (Elsa Triolet), a party (the communist party) and pushed him to proudly “ showing off his chains and his wounds » (p. 125). It is obviously on the political level that this attitude is most striking. To understand the unwavering support given by Aragon to communism, even in its worst wanderings, the essayist attributes to the director of French letters an aristocratic morality of allegiance, similar to that of Géricault, character of Holy Week Who “ makes out of honor the choice of a certain dishonor » (p. 130).
Correlatively, Bougnoux sees the emergence of a criticism of individualism very early in Aragon, which manifests itself from the period of the surrealist games. By a theoretical stroke of force that is audacious to say the least, Bougnoux underlines the continuity between automatic writing, which subjects the individual to the dictates of the unconscious, and subordination to the Party apparatus. In either case, Aragon would abdicate his will and his critical sense, agree to “ to be thought » not without a writer’s secret jubilation in abandoning himself « to utter, under the mask of communism as in the days of Dada, some loud nonsense » (p. 127). This leveling may seem questionable. Bougnoux here seems to put back to back the idiocy skillfully cultivated by Dada to fight against the prevailing brainlessness and the far more criminal lies of Stalinist propaganda which served on the contrary to justify serious abuses. If the psychological reading of Aragon’s journey proposed by the essayist obviously does not lack interest in understanding the man’s successive commitments, it nevertheless has the disadvantage of exonerating at times perhaps a little easily Aragon from any political responsibility and, incidentally, also to evacuate literary questions (but Bougnoux lends itself, in this, to the exercise of style imposed by the collection).
At the same time, the essayist shows himself fully aware of the risks of such “ gender confusion “. As he bluntly explains, “ Aragon eroticizes the Cause ; but by helping to make politics a romance novel and a family affair, he exposed himself to a catastrophic mix of genres » (p. 127). More than the grotesque image of an outrageously painted aging Aragon, it is this “ gender confusion » much more crucial than we will remember from Daniel Bougnoux’s enlightening essay.