When I began reading this book I felt as if I was keeping up with understanding what Aragon was describing, but soon after, maybe 15 pages in, I realized I actually wasn’t. Many times throughout my reading, I found myself retracing over previous pages or trying to make sense of it for minutes at a time before continuing. Then it hit me, that it was more of a description – like a recollection of experience. In that aspect it was admirable, even when it seemed like some ideas were too strung out and overly specific.
This intense description reminded me of the beginning of Combray by Marcel Proust, which I wrote about last week. Similarly, Paris Peasant and Combray had sections where entire backstories and contextual pieces would draw me out of the actual story, or lack thereof, causing me to evaluate if it was me or the text. These works were also similar in their recollective elements, ensuring readers understood how the current situation of the stories came to be.
Though, this text was unique when it comes to narrating and tying in characters. There wasn’t any obvious voice speaking, it just came out as thoughts. Speaking to speak, is the impression it gave me, but with a faint agenda.
Certain parts of Aragon’s writing appeared to be confrontational or pessimistic, or like the speaker was very aware and planted in their ideas. Or in today’s jargon, one could say the speaker was woke. I assume this tracks though, as I took it as the speaker was talking from experience. Examples of this are on page 13, where there is talk of “human fantasies,” “plaiting thick tresses of darkness,” and how one “false step” can “reveal a man’s thoughts.” Here is where I caught my first glimpse of modernity in this text. When I think of modern, I think of how society is today. So in relation to the examples I referred to, one that stands out is of revealing one’s true thoughts and how that comes as a false step. It reminded me of “cancel culture” and how one seemingly wrong move can put society against you. Especially with how the internet is today, it seems that every other day someone is being exposed for something and having their lives diminish because of it – no matter how miniscule it may look.
I now ask, what aspects of the world today do you feel are depicted by Aragon’s descriptions and why that is?
Hi Raymon! I really liked reading your post. I definitely also felt lost in the text at several points as well, and I also noticed the author’s occasional pessimism or agenda. I didn’t interpret it as confrontational or necessarily “woke” all the time, but more like coming to terms with the Passage de l’Opéra’s demolition, despite it being a place full of insight and imagination for the narrator.
To answer your question, I feel like the spirit of “wonder of the everyday” in the novel has been emphasized a bit more today: with the onset of social media and the wide availability of things like video and photography, people can document thoughts that were once “ephemeral” for some aesthetic or memory-related reason. In terms of events in the story, I drew a parallel in my blog post about gentrification and the demolition of the Passage, in which people seem to be moving toward a more “modern,” and more efficient reality at the expense of things like community and people.
Hi! I can fully relate to feeling a bit lost about what Aragon was trying to get at initially. Similar to Proust’s Combray, there isn’t much of a traditional narrative structure in this text which felt confusing at first. Hence, for this text, I found that sometimes just reading for the “flow” rather than focusing on individual sentences or words made it a lot easier to catch the basic gist of what they’re trying to describe.