M. Aragon ?s Novel
The name of Louis Aragon is probably unfamiliar to the_ majority of those English readers who display an occasional interest in the French novel. Yet his new novel, his first since 1926 (if Le Paysan de Paris and Anicet ou le Panorama can be considered novels) has aroused more excitement and interest among French critics than any other book since Celine's Voyage an Bout de la Nuit or Malraux' La Condition Humaine. For the artistic and political opinions of Louis Aragon have influenced a whole generation. In 1920, he was one of the most violent young poets of the Dadaist group ; shortly afterwards, he founded, together with Andre Breton, the doctrinaire and subversive " surrealisthe " over which he presided, as twin-pope, until two years ago, when he joined' the Communist Party and abandoned literary theory in favour of political action. In 1934, he represented French literature at the Soviet conference in Moscow.
His Paysan de Paris and Traile du Style won him the en- thusiasm of critics who were forced to admit that his style was as perfect as any acadethician's. His translation of Lewis Carroll's Hunting of the Snarly seems to have been his last purely literary achievement. Since 1929, La Grande Gaffe, La Peinture an Defi, Persecute Persdcuteur and Aux Enfants Rouges only expressed his desire to break with tradition ; they seemed irrelevantly subversive, disap- pointingly childish. His recent poems, " Hourra l'Oural,!!
and " Les Cloches de Bile " were therefore expected to of&r—a justification both of his new political views and of the esteem he had been held in, for the past ten years, as prodigal son " of the classical French genius.
of his recent poetry seemed strangely reminiscent of Paul In a way, they have both been disappointing. The technique
Morand's U.S.A. 1927, perhaps because American prosperity and the Russian Five-Year plan both have an almost childish faith in figures and the future. Les Cloches de Bale, as .a novel, is equally surprising; Its chastened style and elementary construction come as a surprise to all those who had become used to the fireworks and absurdities of his earlier prosody. But both his recent books mark a distinct advance in contem- porary letters. They are rare examples of a completely. logical and unsentimental conversion to communism ; one might almost say that in them Aragon scouted the way for all the recent converts or half-converts of the " Associatiou des Ecrivains et Artistes Revolutionnaires." - -
Les Cloches de Rile is the story of a sensitive girl's struggle to attain emancipation. The book is divided into four parts : Diane, Catherine, Victor, Clara. Diane is a pre-War cocotte, wife of a shady usurer and mistress of an intriguing motor- manufacturer ; the description of her sordid milieu fills the first hundred pages of the book with a brilliant satire of all that Catherine, the heroine, can never accept. Catherine is the daughter of a sentimental Russian nihilist who has run away from a tyrannical husband and leads an adventurous life, with her two children, in expensive resorts until her beauty fails, then in cheap hotels. Catherine cannot accept the tyranny of marriage ; she prefers to have affairs with good- looking boys whom she , can drop as -soon as they begin to flaunt their traditional and domineering male superiority. Her first affair, with a brilliant young officer who loves her and whom she ahnost loves, leads her on a " Honeymoon " walking-tour in the mountainous regions of Savoy. As they come into a small manufacturing town, they'pass in front of a watch-factory just as the strikers are advancing in a harmless procession ; the terrified owners open fire. In the ensuing confusion, her lover instinctively sides with the forces of law and order ; Catherine rushes towards the nearest victim, already dead. This brings us to page 197 ; Aragon has so far proved himself a brilliant master of prose, of satire and psy- chology. He is human and tender in his handling of senti. merit and futile tragedy ; bitter and just in his description of hypocrisy and sham. The first half of Les Cloches de Bale is certainly one of the finest French novels of the past few years.
Unfortunately, Catherine Simonidze's conversion leads her into a very arid milieu of pre-War anarchists. Her love- affairs become increasingly futile. Her spiritual, or political, faith is more and more spineless. Finally, she becomes con- sumptive. An avalanche of misfortunes and coinciding suicides prompts her to try the same evasion ; as she is abotit to spring into the Seine, -a socialist taxi-driver, VictortNolds her back. She becomes involved in a taxi-strike, works for the trade-union ; she falls in love with Victor, who never notices her affection. She feels more and more attracted towards the striving proletariat, but an invisible., barridr prevents her from ever attaining .her ideal. She becomes compromised in a tangle of police intrigues and is deported.
Here Louis Aragon abandons his heroine : " Hesitating, wavering Catherine ! How slowly she approaches the true , light ! " Bored with Catherine's problems of passing from bourgeoisie to proletariat, past to future, he turns towards Clara Zetkin, the doyenne of the German Socialists, and the Socialist Congress at Basel, in 1912. Clara Zetkin had achieved that complete emancipation which was Catherine's ideal ; and the book closes on a sort of ftmeral panegyric of pre-War socialism and of Clara Zetkin, who died, a few Months ago, a refugee in Moscow.
Les Cloches de Belle Lnight have been a very great novel ; the first two hundred pages are remarkable. But the second half smacks too much of the pamphlet and the whole story lacks " anthropomorphism " ; that is to say, the problem of the story, the communist emancipation of woman, is not properly exemplified in the heroine's life. She never actually meets either Diane or Clara ; she never actually " lives " any of the vital problems of the book. She is a spectator ; and this is her tragedy and the flaw of the book.
EDOUARD RODITI..
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