Week 2 Paris Peasant

I really enjoyed “Paris Peasant” by Louis Aragon because of how unconventional it was compared to other novels I have read. It was unconventional to me because it read kind of like a travel guide! I do like the stream of consciousness style where we may observe the narrator’s train of thought. Sometimes I find this style kind of tedious and hard to follow but in this text, I enjoyed hearing about his descriptions of Paris, as it is so beautiful. Having visited Paris before myself, reading this text felt a bit like revisiting the city through a novel. As I was reading, I truly felt like i was ready somebody’s journal entries. With the very very detailed description of the architecture, the author paints a picture with poetic imagery of the city of Paris.  I felt immersed in the landscape and daily life of Paris. It seems as if the narrator is “people watching” and likes to make up his own interpretations of each person that he comes across. Even if he doesn’t know every detail about somebody, “time gradually fills an imaginary portrait of each one” (37). I think that this speaks a lot about his imagination, and his ability to dream. Even though sometimes he may imagine somebody with a complicated history, he also views people very robotically sometimes. For example, he sees the hairdressers as “the products of a school which viewed hairdressers as precision instruments: their methods are devoid of humanity” (43). Here, he places more emphasis in their physical actions of their everyday labour. I notice that the narrator also jumps from thought to thought very quickly. For example, one second he is talking about the hairdresser and then he moves on to talking about the psychology of being at the hairdressers. The complexity of his thought process is fascinating to observe, and thought-provoking to the reader. The images that are incorporated within the text also present more depth to the story. The menu included enhances the story because the reader may experience part of the scene by reading the menu along with the narrator. The narrator seems to really allow himself to indulge in the beauty of everyday life. Just as he says in the prologue, he “retain[s] this sense of the marvellous suffusing everyday existence” (11).

A question that I wondered was, did the author actually experience the sights he described, in order to explain them so vividly?