Louis Aragon's Epic Art
CRUICKSHANK, JOHN
Louis Aragon's Epic Art HOLY WEEK By Louis Aragon Putnam, 541 pp. $5.75. Reviewed by JOHN CRUICKSHANK Senior Lecturer, French Literature, University of Southampton; author, "Albert Camus...
...The core of the novel carries such conviction, I suspect, because Aragon has drawn on his own experiences and observations of the fall of France in 1940...
...But one feature of his imaginative writing has remained constant: It usually takes the form either of poetic lyricism or epic fiction...
...The book has to be read carefully, and one is grateful both for the translator's notes and for trie brief details, supplied at the beginning, about the main historical characters...
...He writes too easily not to write badly on occasion...
...Aragon's lyrical poetry is reasonably well known and many of his poems have been translated into English...
...In Holy Week this fault has largely been removed because of the historical demands of the subject...
...Inevitably, the close relationship between his political convictions and his poetry and novels has made it difficult to assess his work objectively...
...Aragon's reputation, both inside and outside France, has also fluctuated a good deal...
...At the same time, because of his political sympathies, the life of the people is vividly portrayed and the reader has a real sense of decisive historical events taking place in a convincing human context...
...What is not generally known is that his most important fiction—The Bells of Basel, Residential Quarter, The Century Was Young and Aurelien, together with the various volumes of The Communists—is all intended as part of one large and loosely knit epic, with the general title of The Real World...
...The result is a magnificent historical panorama, pulsating with life and containing a wealth of telling social detail...
...Nowadays, it is fashionable to say that his war poetry has worn badly because it was really on the level of the street ballad...
...That the novelist in Aragon should favor the epic form is probably the result of his political beliefs...
...Géricault joins the King more from pity than royalist convictions and several of the novel's most brilliant scenes serve to motivate his ultimate decision that his vocation is that of a painter and social rebel, not of a soldier...
...Holy Week contains an enormous number of characters, many of them only briefly glimpsed, and the scene shifts rapidly from place to place...
...It has been said that this novel lacks warmth—the human warmth of War and Peace, for example— and we are unable to become deeply involved in the lives of any of the characters...
...Yet Aragon is not tempted by facile historical parallels between the two events...
...The overall picture of confusion and indecision is conveyed with great skill...
...author, "Albert Camus and the Literature of Revolt" Since the 1930s, when he broke away from the Surrealist movement to become a Marxist, Louis Aragon has been the leading literary figure of French Communism...
...This is largely true...
...In the past, and in common with many Soviet novelists, Aragon's work has suffered from its simplistic contrast of "good" and "bad" characters, virtue and vice being closely related to considerations of class origin and political alignment...
...Marxism is as yet unborn and Aragon's characters gain in humanity and credibility...
...Since the epic demands simplification and broad perspectives rather than detailed psychological analyses, it has enabled Aragon to turn his back on the traditional French novel—which he rejects as merely amounting to "looking into oneself by means of a system of mirrors...
...The book is primarily an epic of detachment...
...Detailed conflicts of loyalty, and the moral corrosion wrought by rumor and fact, are described with insight and human understanding...
...Because he keeps this principle in mind, Aragon has created an epic which gives the impression of historical authenticity...
...Aragon's work, viewed as a whole, is certainly uneven...
...The central subject of Holy Week —the chaotic withdrawal of Louis XVIII and his often hesitant followers to the Belgian frontier—is brilliantly rendered by Aragon...
...This is a period in French history which Aragon knows intimately, as he showed in his book on Stendhal published in 1954...
...But Aragon displays an imaginative sweep and a rangé of intellectual understanding that make Holy Week his most impressive and most successful work of fiction to date...
...In many cases it has been undervalued or overpraised for reasons having more to do with political bias than with esthetic standards...
...In the immediate postwar years he was admired and acclaimed as "the poet of resurgent France.' After 1949, when his multi-volume novel The Communists began to appear, his stock fell sharply...
...In 1958, however, the publication of Holy Week in France gave rise to a reappraisal of his fiction and prompted much admiration for his gifts as a novelist...
...He says quite clearly in Holy Week: "Nothing is so absurd as to explain the past on the basis of the present...
...Insofar as there is a single hero, it is Théodore Géricault, the French Romantic painter, who serves as a vehicle for much of Aragon's own interest in and knowledge of art...
...The week in question takes place during the famous "Hundred Days," between Palm Sunday and Easter Day 1815, when Louis XVIII fled with his household to Ghent in the face of Napoleon's return to France from Elba...
...The epic also accommodates most easily those ideas about the dialectic of history or the regenerative role of the proletariat that are dear to the Marxist heart (the novels of such Soviet writers as Konstantin Simonov, Mikhail Sholokov and Nikolai Ostrovsky are cases in point...
Vol. 45 • April 1962 • No. 8
