Louis Aragon Was One of France's Most Prolific, Prominent, and Contro

Jennifer Stafford Brown "AU FEU DE CE QUI FUT BRULE CE QUI SERA": LOUIS ARAGON AND THE SUBVERSIVE MEDIEVAL ouis Aragon was one of France's most prolific, prominent, and contro Lversial modern poets, causing strong reactions even among those he supported. As a novelist, a poet, an art critic, a member of the surrealist move ment and the French Resistance, and an active member of the PCF, he was throughout his long life a major figure of the French cultural landscape. From his well-known surrealist poetry to his cycle of socialist realist novels to the difficult postmodern works he wrote late in his life, his wildly diverse body of writing leaves no shortage of work for biographers and scholars. Aragon never accepted the status quo. As a surrealist, and later as an ardent Communist, he pushed the boundaries of metaphor, image, and style while passionately advocating literary and social change. During the turbulent years that led up to World War II, however, as well as during the war itself, the nature of his work changed subtly. Aragon, faced with national crisis, turned to the creation of a national myth. For him, as for many other authors, this new sense of nationalism had its roots in the Middle Ages. His contemporaries, as well as his later critics, were bewildered and intrigued by the unexpected source for this myth, going as it did against so many of his social and authorial sensibili ties: "Le projet d'Aragon est ala fois ideologique et poetique. II recherche les moyens d'une expression nationale, ou pour mieux dire franr;aise, a la fois populaire et savante ... il va done arehours de l'avant-garde, de son elitisme et de sa volonte de rupture. lIse tourne vers la poesie medievale" (Murat 198; emphasis mine). Aragon took the Vichy and fascist nostalgia for a golden Middle Ages and subverted it to his own devices, using Occitan troubadour poetry and the trohar clus (encrypted troubadour poetry) of medieval poets like Arnaud Daniel to strengthen and give a historical context to his wartime work. Aragon's popular reputation arguably rests on the poetry he wrote dur ing the Occupation, despite his many other references to and works on war (Kimyongiir 259). It is easy, however, for critics to miss the significance of the medieval trope in Aragon's work. For instance, in M. Adereth's Aragon: The Resistance Poems, the works analyzed are Le Creve-Coeur, Les Yeux d'Elsa, and La Diane franr;aise. There is no mention of Broceliande (1942), The Romanic Review Volume 101 Number 3 © The Trustees of Columbia University Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/romanic-review/article-pdf/101/3/325/807149/325staffordbrown.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 JENNIFER STAFFORD BROWN and only the briefest mention of the Middle Ages as a time period Aragon found "important and topical" (43). Even in Michel Murat's excellent analysis of rhyme in Aragon's wartime poetry, "Aragon, la rime et la nation," he con cludes that medieval verse simply played "un role declencheur" in his work (198). Only Gisele Sapiro, in La Guerre des ecrivains, her definitive analysis of the various French authors battling on both sides during the Second World War, notes Aragon's borrowing of medieval images at any length. Aragon's reinvention of medieval verse was not merely a strange phase, despite its being apparently out of step with his surrealist and communist personas. The medi eval tropes he used were essential to his conception of literary resistance. The Middle Ages provided a national mythology that was ripe for political exploitation: a vision of a medieval France broken and divided by war and language, but reunited by poetry. It also provided the model for a secret code that enabled Aragon to publish his contraband poetry legitimately while also subverting the censors. Aragon took Vichy imagery and turned it on its head: the France you praise is not the real France, he said. The best examples of his use of the Middle Ages as resistance are to be found in his essays-especially in "La Le~on de Riberac"-and in his seven-poem cycle, Broceliande, published in 1942.This article will use close readings of Broceliande to show how crucial these medieval images were to his subversive wartime poetry. When the war broke out in 1939, Aragon went into battle as a medic. His unit moved from place to place, and by the time Petain's accession to power and the subsequent armistice took the breath away from an entire nation, Aragon had been decorated twice for courage in battle. The armistice found his unit at Riberac, where he wrote "La Le~on de Riberac," his first theoretical explanation of the value of medieval verse to modern literature. After demo bilization, however, Aragon was left in the "zone libre," without contact with any other member of the PCF, for nearly eighteen months. Maurice Thorez, leader of the PCF, was in Moscow; other party leaders were in Brussels and Paris (Staraselski 156). Aragon missed the development of the clandestine Communist Party in both halves of a broken France; he also missed the party's gradual abandonment of the principles of national communism for a more international version. Lacking normal interaction with the party, he and Elsa began to lean more and more toward national communism, drawing on spe cifically French cultural heritage for their material. Subversion of the occupier, in Aragon's eyes, meant French cultural continuity and the defense of inde pendent art. While living in Carcassonne, Aragon and Elsa began publishing legally in Vichy-approved journals, but when their activities in the Resistance began to put their lives in danger, they were forced to break contact with publishers and editors as they moved from town to town (Sadoul 32). With few exceptions, Aragon and Elsa spent the war in the south of France. As exposure created by open publication became increasingly dangerous, Aragon Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/romanic-review/article-pdf/101/3/325/807149/325staffordbrown.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 LOUIS ARAGON AND THE SUBVERSIVE MEDIEVAL published several poems and essays clandestinely rather than publicly toward the end of the war. His wartime poetry was virulently criticized by the Drieu La Rochelle-led NRF, made into popular songs, and read by Catholic as well as communist resistants. Aragon had spent the two years before the war reading all the medieval verse he could lay his hands on: chansons de geste, theater, romances, and the lyric poetry of Occitan troubadours. Pierre Daix compares Aragon's pre-war discovery of medieval poetry to Picasso's encounter with Iberian sculpture at the Louvre in 1906. Both occurrences seem so fortuitous as to involve prescience on the part of the artists, but "tout grand artiste doit ainsi savoir se doter par anticipation de l'outillage mental qui lui sera necessaire" (Daix 378). Rather than accept this as a happenstance encounter, however, it is helpful to remember the political atmosphere of the late 1930s: conservative writers like Charles Maurras and Henry de Montherlant warned the populace about France's decadence, created nostalgia for a past of their own making, and exhorted their readers to take lessons from medieval knights. Later, after French defeat, the Vichy government turned to the past for reconstruction. If the modern age had led to humiliation and defeat, then the past must be the ideal: agricultural rather than industrial, male-dominated rather than feminist, seeking its heroes in the knights of the Middle Ages. Images of Petain were associated with Jeanne d'Arc and the chevalier Bayard appeared on Vichy propaganda from posters to children's textbooks. The Middle Ages were thus already a zone of contested meaning: "Face a la decadence ... pourquoi en effet ne pas s'inventer un moyen age chretien fait de grands exploits et d'aspi rations collectives pour montrer aux Franc;ais un point de retour qui peut aussi etre un point de depart dans Ie present?" (Steele 59). Aragon's response-to find a compelling and competing image within the same trope-was typical of his work: put the familiar in an unfamiliar context in order to create a new spark of poetic understanding. He explicitly rejects the Vichy use of medieval images. In his essay "Arma virumque cano" he says, "... on nous scie les pieds avec Ie folklore ces temps-ci. [...] La poesie n'a que faire des certitudes; et si vous donnez au folklore force de loi, je vous previens que, selon toute pro babilite, la poesie, cette rebelle, s'en ecartera" (192). His own use of medieval and folkloric images is therefore directly intended as subversion of Vichy and German propaganda. Aragon wishes to reappropriate national metaphors, stories, songs, and heroes for their proper use: to reflect the people of France. His extensive reading of medieval poetry stood Aragon in good stead. As he faced the difficulties and dangers of working for the Resistance, he began to draw upon the conclusions he had come to about the roots of French poetry and the elements of prosody he had discovered there. Gradually, over the course of the first year or two of the war, the knowledge he had gained of medieval literature turned into a method for writing contraband poetry Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/romanic-review/article-pdf/101/3/325/807149/325staffordbrown.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 JENNIFER STAFFORD BROWN and essays, which would ideally be comprehensible only to sympathetic and educated eyes. In his essay "La Le~on de Riberac," Aragon reintroduces a poet born in that town toward the end of the twelfth century and popularized by Dante: Arnaud Daniel.

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