Hello! I just finished reading Aragon’s Paris Peasant and here are some of my thoughts. I initially read the first 50 pages or so and enjoyed the prose, but it was often confusing and it felt like there was little structure, so I had trouble understanding it. Individual sentences seemed to make sense but I often forgot what was going on, and I think I tried too hard to look at how everything was immediately relevant to some narrative that wasn’t there, beyond Paris’s slow march to a newer, modern world in which things must be “correct” and “efficient” to be valuable, and one in which the Passage de l’Opéra did not belong.

After watching the lecture, I think that the lack of traditional novel structure began to feel more justified. It wasn’t that the details necessarily worked together to produce some narrative, and that should’ve been clear from the back, but suddenly the digressions into things that seemed meaningless turned into thoughts and remnants of everyday life subjected to an inevitable end. The clippings, musings, and placards became information that wasn’t meant to last but contributed something to everyday experience, and finding so much insight in them was interesting, especially seeing as we probably consume more information than any time in history now. There doesn’t have to be structure in the things we take in, and the “mishmash of inventions and real facts” really turned into the centrepiece of the book for me.

I think that finding some value and beauty in the everyday as Aragon did, rather than just in extravagance or drama, is something that I’ve heard about often but never really took to heart. I think that I’ve probably had many rapid thoughts walking throughout cities or neighbourhoods, but I’ve always unconsciously made a distinction between information that was “meant to last,” like the things I write for school or make for my friends, and ephemeral thoughts like taking brief notice of surroundings. Sometimes I’d think hard about and remember everything I wanted to stay, and the thoughts that I never paid much attention to just drifted out of memory, despite making up a significant part of my experiences.

I also noticed some parallels in Paris Peasant’s descriptions of the Passage de l’Opéra and one of my favourite Broadway musicals, In The Heights, which was released almost 90 years later, and I think that helped me appreciate Paris Peasant’s message a bit more. Both stories deal with legacies of the ephemeral and the “rubble” piling up as the world modernizes and becomes more efficient and practical. Reading a book, or a compilation of snippets of everyday life, and comparing it to trends like gentrification today, helped me appreciate the “now,” the transition between the past and the future, that we can uniquely control. I think in light of that, my question is “To what extent can Aragon’s portrayal of the “wake” of modernism inform us of modern-day changes and developments?”