Words like historic, romanic and chic are a part of my common vocabulary when I think about Paris. However, through reading Aragon’s “Paris Peasant” (1994) , I was offered an opportunity to imagine a distinctively different Paris. In his vivid descriptions of the city, it’s places and people and things, the narrator induces an almost painful nostalgia through his surrealist tone- ..”in this world that surrounded me and which seemed to me to be a prey to quite new obsessions” (113). The old order of the world was disintegrating, and the world was on the brink of change during the time of Aragon’s writing, and he posits the narrator as witnessing and processing this shift through meticulously archiving the daily, and the mundane.
Aragon’s descriptions of the mundane descriptions of landscape, setting and people (friends and strangers alike) are a testament to the fact that the old world is not redundant. He writes about sacred places at the turn of the century- “At least each space of space is meaningful, like a syllable of some dismantled world” (169). Through this description alone, Aragon engages in the brave act of preserving history. The ordinary times, even as they are re-shaped into something extraordinary by temporality, cannot deem the past as unimportant in its original form.
As a reader, I felt the narrator move through life embodying the ethic of the avant-garde. Time becomes clung to objects and setting, which appear almost ghost-like. I believe this spectral feeling is created within the readers because Aragon does not not rely on a plot or characters to illustrate the aforementioned themes in his work. Instead, he relies on the literary tactic of stream of consciousness, where the flow of his thoughts become the words on the paper and the backbone of the story. To me, this promotes the idea of the ghost setting, and ghost object and ghost people referenced in his work are an entity worthy of social examination, and not just as dead and forgotten as the tidal wave of time seeks to wipe them out.
Overall, the book creates a feeling of the narrator hanging in between remembering what is gone and cautiously awaiting what it yet to come by offering a still, provocative account pf the present- “I do not seek the right. I seek the concrete.” (202). This is culturally revolutionary because many people associate the turn of the century and technological innovation as a symbol of development. The new world is an embodiment of progress, but the process of such changes might reveal significant details, as evident in Aragon’s work.
Astha Kumar
Food for thought:
While recognizing the broad usage of surrealism in Aragon’s work, can we maybe point to smaller and specific instances of its usage?