SOURCE: Kimyongür, Angela. “Introduction.” In Socialist Realism in Louis Aragon's Le Monde réel, pp. 1-8. Hull: The University of Hull Press, 1995.

[In the following essay, Kimyongür presents an overview of Aragon's sociopolitical views in his novel cycle Le Monde réel.]

Louis Aragon owes his popular reputation to his poetry, both his Surrealist poetry of the early to mid 1920s and his Resistance poetry of the Second World War; but to evaluate him solely in these terms is to fail to acknowledge the varied nature of his literary career as poet, novelist, literary critic and journalist, a career which, from the late 1920s onwards, bears the imprint of his membership of the Parti Communiste Français (PCF). The focus of this study will be the cycle of novels he wrote between 1934 and 1951 entitled Le Monde réel. The cycle is made up of five novels: Les Cloches de Bâle (1934), Les Beaux Quartiers (1936), Les Voyageurs de l'Impériale (1942), Aurélien (1944) and Les Communistes (1949-51), which together constitute a portrait of French society from the Third Republic until the débâcle of 1940. More than this, the novels are an attempt by Aragon to translate his political allegiance to the French Communist party, which he joined in 1927, into literary expression through his espousal of the doctrine of socialist realism. The novels will be analysed in the light of his literary criticism, since it is impossible to discuss Aragon's fiction in isolation from the theoretical work in which he elaborates his aims as a novelist. To ignore his aims and discuss his novels as self-contained units divorced from their guiding purpose is to do him an injustice, as well as to risk over-simplification, and fails to recognise his place in the wider cultural context of an international literary movement.

Socialist realism had been formulated in the Soviet Union in the early 1930s and its precepts were eagerly taken on board by Aragon and elaborated in both his critical writings and his fiction. This study aims to analyse the five novels of Le Monde réel as attempts to translate socialist realist theory into fictional practice. My choice of these five novels is driven primarily by Aragon's own view of them as a thematically and theoretically coherent cycle, but can also be seen in the context of recent studies which acknowledge that socialist realism is not necessarily the impoverished literary form which western critics have frequently branded it and which indicate that there is room for attempts to analyse the achievements as well as the defects of socialist realist fiction. The analysis of these novels can equally be placed in the wider context of literature in its relationship with politics and ideology.

The approach taken by the present study is to see Aragon's adoption of socialist realism in 1934 as a central development in his artistic career, distinguishing him as it does from the many other politically committed writers of the interwar period who, although unwilling to commit themselves so wholeheartedly to the expression of a specific political vision in their writing, were as convinced as was Aragon that it was the writer's duty to engage not just as an individual but as a writer in the political and social debates of the day.

The interwar years and the 1930s in particular were a time of considerable interest in the exploration of the relationship between literature and political or social concerns. The whole question of whether or not it was acceptable or indeed desirable for the writer or intellectual to incorporate his political views into his artistic or intellectual activity was the subject of intense debate, all the more so in view of the increasing politicisation of writers and intellectuals in the reaction against fascism, a reaction which resulted in increasing numbers of them rallying to the socialist and communist causes at this time. The years 1927-8 for example were marked by the entry into the PCF of Surrealists such as Aragon himself, Breton and Eluard, and by Marxist intellectuals such as Nizan, Lefebvre and Politzer, while fellow travellers such as Gide and Malraux added to the numbers of those for whom literary activity and political life could not be divorced. Earlier evidence of such political involvement was the polemic aroused from the early 1920s over the question of the political commitment or engagement of the writer. An early discussion of this question took place between Barbusse and Rolland during the years 1921-2. The debate, which took the form of a series of open letters, was not conducted as a debate about political commitment, since the term was not yet in common currency, but concentrated on the different ways in which the intellectual could best demonstrate his social responsibility. Despite his continued contact with both the socialists and communists after the split of the socialist party at Tours in 1920, Rolland maintained that the duty of the artist lay in remaining free and detached from partisan debate: a result of his independence of mind, which was a central factor in his arguments about the role of the intellectual. Barbusse, on the other hand, who sided with the communist party at Tours and who was a respected intellectual within the party during the 1920s, was principally interested in winning intellectuals over to communism. Anyone who resisted, he considered to be socially irresponsible, maintaining that the intellectual freedom dear to Rolland was neither a necessity nor a right, but a privilege which should come second to the exigencies of the moment. This opposition represents a common one between the writer who believes that art is not a self-sufficient activity but should engage in some way with the issues of the day and the writer who goes a step further than this to promote a specific ideological standpoint.

A very different attitude to the role of the intellectual is represented by Julien Benda who complained in La Trahison des clercs (1927) that the ‘clercs’ were abandoning their duty as intellectuals and becoming involved in what he called ‘les passions politiques’, and condemned their espousal of partisan politics in their work. A less defensive position was taken in the pages of the journal Esprit where the issue of commitment was debated during the 1930s. While the discussion was conducted in deliberately non-partisan terms, it was acknowledged that the intellectual is not working in a vacuum, but within a given society and therefore has a duty to accept his responsibility within that society.

It is against this background of interest in the political role of the writer and intellectual that the intense cultural activity of the 1930s should be viewed. Left-wing writers and intellectuals were involved in a series of international cultural and anti-fascist events which took place across Europe. These events included, most notably for Aragon, the 1930 Kharkov Congress of International Proletarian Writers (RAPP) and the 1934 Moscow Soviet Writers Congress at which the doctrine of socialist realism was officially unveiled. While the influence upon Aragon of the Kharkov congress, marking as it did the dominance of the RAPP and its sectarian cultural policies, is difficult to quantify the Moscow congress had a profound effect upon him. There are two reasons for this. Firstly, having been in something of a literary wilderness since his break from the Surealists, he was more than ready for the new beginning which socialist realism must have seemed to promise him. Secondly, as Michael Scriven has pointed out, the impact of the Front Populaire upon the PCF, placing it at the heart of political activity in France, was to help create an atmosphere of cultural collaboration rather than isolation. Consequently, ‘the Soviet Writers’ Congress (…) provided a unique forum at which communists and non-communists could discuss positive measures to promote an anti-fascist cultural front.’ Such an atmosphere doubtless contributed to Aragon's enthusiasm for the new literary theory. He reported upon the congress in both L'Humanité and Commune, and in the latter called upon the Association des Ecrivains et Artistes Révolutionnaires (AEAR), recently created in 1932, to take the lead in developing a version of socialist realism in France which would be based upon French culture: ‘L'AEAR doit montrer aux écrivains et aux artistes la voie par laquelle nous contribuerons à créer la culture de l'avenir, la culture socialiste des Soviets de France et du monde entier, en reprenant l'héritage de la culture française, remise sur ses pieds.’ Not all of the French participants in the Congress embraced socialist realism as unequivocally as did Aragon. J.-P. A. Bernard has pointed out that figures such as Malraux, Jean-Richard Bloch, Rolland, Barbusse, Nizan and Gide voiced objections or reservations. The non-communist fellow travellers in particular were very suspicious of such a dirigiste approach to literature. Even a loyal party member such as Nizan, who was also present at the Moscow congress, did not embrace socialist realism as unreservedly as did Aragon, preferring to talk instead in terms of ‘littérature responsable’ and ‘litérature révolutionnaire’. He was as keen as was Aragon to produce literature which had a clear ideological message, literature which would help to bring about revolution. He accepted the general principles of socialist realism, but unlike Aragon, who firmly believed in the possibility of translating the precepts of Soviet socialist realism into an authentically French form, Nizan remained unconvinced that the Soviet model of socialist realism was suitable for France. This reticence on the part of both fellow travellers and the other major communist writer of the time meant that Aragon became the most frequent commentator on, and practitioner of, socialist realism in France in the 1930s. Although journals such as Commune and Europe published accounts of the Moscow Congress and a number of articles on the subject of socialist realism, it was not until the late 1940s that the party's critical attention would focus on socialist realism in any substantial way.

This study will evaluate how successful Aragon was as the first and, for a time, the only French communist writer to attempt explicitly to incorporate the doctrines of Soviet socialist realism into a specifically French cultural framework and then to put these principles into fictional practice. The study will begin with an analysis of the factors which led Aragon in the first place to espouse the precepts of socialist realism with such enthusiasm, and by means of reference to his key critical writings on the subject, it will provide an overview of Aragon's interpretation of the theory of socialist realism and identify those features which emerge as being central to his understanding of it. This overview will provide the framework for an analysis of Le Monde réel by means of a detailed and systematic comparison of the novels with the principal features of socialist realism as Aragon defined them. This approach lends itself to a thematic study of the novels which, unlike a chronological analysis which tends to see individual works in isolation, will highlight similarities and differences of practice. This is particularly necessary when most critics are agreed on the unevenness of quality of Aragon's achievements in novel writing. This framework should provide a standard by which the novels can be measured and therefore a means of accounting for such differing success other than the subjective preferences of the critic. It will also offer a means of evaluating Aragon's fictional practice of socialist realism in order firstly to establish the extent to which he is able to incorporate the precepts of the theory into a fictional framework, and secondly to determine the aesthetic success of his novels. In other words the aim is to assess the compatibility of the literary enterprise of novel writing and the ideological task implicit in socialist realism.

Ideology is of necessity at the heart of a literary theory which is defined in terms of the propagation of a socialist outlook on the world, and it is as well to make clear the way in which this term is to be used since, as Susan Suleiman has commented, ‘There as few words in our language (…) as ambiguous, as open to contradictory interpretations, as the words “ideology” and “ideological”’. It can be argued that all fiction, or indeed all culture, and not simply culture which bears its affiliation upon its sleeve, is an ideological process in the sense that it serves the interest of a particular social or political group. This point was made succinctly by Paul Nizan when he maintained:

Toute littérature est une propagande. La propagande bourgeoise est idéaliste, elle cache son jeu(…) La propagande révolutionnaire sait qu'elle est propagande, elle publie ses fins avec une franchise complète. Les critiques bourgeois feront les délicats, disant qu'une propagande ne saurait avoir valeur d'art, on sait assez que l'Art doit être désintéressé. Ce piège grossier de la critique nous fait rire: ces bons domestiques bourgeois de la critique japperont en vain. L'art pour nous est ce qui rend la propagande efficace.

Here Nizan uses the rather emotive term ‘propaganda’ to assert not that all literature is merely utilitarian, for he emphasises that art should coexist with propaganda, but that all literature has a purpose beyond the purely literary: to convey a message, to persuade the reader in some way. He distinguishes between revolutionary literature which is explicitly propagandist, which conveys its ideological message openly, and forms of literature which operate more insidiously in such a way as to conceal the true nature of their ideological purpose. The latter form of propaganda corresponds to one commonly accepted view of ideology within Marxist thought: that ideology is ‘illusion, distortion, mystification’ and may be ascribed to those works which do not contain explicit political, social or philosophical messages, but which impose their views by means not readily discernible to the reader. The power of ideological discourse of this type is to be found, as A. P. Foulkes says of propaganda, (here using the term in a sense clearly opposed to that espoused by Nizan) ‘in its capacity to conceal itself, to appear natural, to coalesce completely and indivisibly with the values and accepted power symbols of a given society.’

The type of ideology conveyed in Le Monde réel is, by contrast, explicit. There is no attempt to lull the reader into a false sense of security by tacitly reinforcing the status quo. The novels are articulated around a socialist view of the world, or more precisely around the view of the world held by the PCF and are a self-confessed attempt to convince the reader of the validity of these views. Ideology for Aragon then has the more neutral sense used by Suleiman in her analysis of the ideological novel when she identifies a discourse as ideological ‘if it refers explicitly to, and identifies itself with, a recognized body of doctrine or system of ideas.’ There is no sense in which the ideology of the novels attempts to conceal itself or tacitly to uphold the values of the system in power, but instead challenges the dominant power of the day and attempts to undermine it by offering an alternative, communist view.

The extent to which Aragon is successful in doing this and at the same time remaining, as he chose to do, faithful to the novel form, an intrinsic part of the bourgeois cultural heritage, is a question which needs to be addressed both in the context of Aragon studies and in the wider context of ideological literature.

Selected Bibliography

Place of publication is Paris for works in French and London for works in English unless otherwise stated.

1. Works by Aragon

i) Books

Anicet ou le panorama, roman. Gallimard, 1921, Collection Folio, 1983.

Traité du style, Gallimard, 1928, Collection L'Imaginaire, 1980.

Les Cloches de Bâle, Denoël et Steele, 1934, Collection Folio, 1978.

Les Beaux Quartiers, Denoël et Steele, 1936, Collection Folio, 1978.

Pour un réalisme socialiste, Denoël et Steele, 1937.

Les Voyageurs de l'Impériale, Gallimard, 1942 (censored version), 1947, Collection Folio, 1972.

Aurélien (Fribourg: Librairie de l'Université Egloff, 1944, Collection Folio, 1976).

La Diane Française, Editions Pierre Seghers, Collection Poésie 44, 1944.

L'Homme communiste, 2 vols, Gallimard, 1946 and 1953.

Chroniques du Bel Canto (Genève: Edns Albert Skira, 1947).

La Culture et les hommes — conférence, Edns Sociales, 1947.

Les Communistes, 6 vols, La Bibliothèque Française, 1949-51.

La Lumière et la Paix, discours prononcé au Congrès National de l'Union Nationale des Intellectuels le 29 avril à Paris, Edns des Lettres Françaises, 1950.

Hugo, Poète réaliste, Edns Sociales, Collection Problèmes, 1952.

Le Neveu de M. Duval, suivi d'une lettre d'icelui à l'auteur de ce livre, Editeurs Français Réunis, 1953.

La Lumière de Stendhal, Denoël, Collection Grise, 1954.

La Semaine Sainte, Gallimard, 1958, Collection Livre de Poche, 1970.

J'Abats mon jeu, Editeurs Français Réunis, 1959.

Entretiens avec Francis Crémieux, Gallimard, 1964.

Oeuvres Romanesques croisées d'Elsa Triolet et Aragon, 42 vols, Robert Laffont, 1964-74.

ii) Articles

‘Le Prolétariat de l'esprit’, Clarté, 78 (novembre 1925) 335-7.

‘Le Prix de l'esprit — I’, Clarté, n.s. 1 (juin 1926) 7-9.

‘Le Prix de l'esprit (suite et fin)’, Clarté, n.s. 4 (octobre-décembre 1926) 122-3.

‘L'AEAR salue le premier Congrès des Ecrivains soviétiques’, Commune, 11-12 (juillet-août 1934) 1153-7.

‘Le Premier Congrès des Ecrivains soviétiques’, L'Humanité (27.VIII.1934) 6.

‘Du réalisme dans le roman’, Vendredi (3.IV.1936) 5.

‘Réalisme socialiste et réalisme français’, Europe, XLVI, 183 (mars 1938) 289-303.

‘Les Ecrivains et la Paix, discours du 29 juin 1946 au Congrès des Ecrivains’, Les Lettres Françaises (5.VII.1946) 1,3.

‘Le jeu du Capifol’, L'Humanité (4.I.1947) 4.

‘Aragon répond à ses témoins’, La Nouvelle Critique, 8 (juillet-août 1949) 75-87.

‘L'Ouverture et l'avenir’, Cahiers du Communisme, 43 (1967) 247-50.

2. Secondary Sources

Adereth, Maxwell, Commitment in Modern French Literature. Politics and Society in Péguy, Aragon and Sartre, Gollancz, 1967.

Adereth, Maxwell, The French Communist Party: a critical history (1920-84). From Comintern to ‘the colours of France’ (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984).

Association des Ecrivains Soviétiques ‘Statuts de l'Association des Ecrivains soviétiques’, Commune, 10 (juin 1934) 1148-51.

Becker, Lucille F Louis Aragon (New York: Twayne Publishers, Twayne's World Authors Series, 114, 1971).

Bernard, Jean-Pierre A., Le Parti communiste français et la question littéraire 1921-1939, préface de René Remond (Grenoble: Presses Universitaires de Grenoble, 1971).

Bibrowska, Sophie, Une Mise à mort. L'Itinéraire romanesque d'Aragon, Denoël, Essai, Dossiers des Lettres Nouvelles, 1972.

Bou Mansour, Fouad ‘Le traitement du thème politique dans Le Monde réel d'Aragon’, Unpublished doctoral thesis (3ème cycle), Université de Paris IV (Sorbonne), 1978.

Carassus, Emilien Les Grèves imaginaires, (Edns du CNRS, Centre régional de publications de Toulouse, Littérature, 1982).

Caute, David Communism and the French Intellectuals, André Deutsch, 1964.

Eagleton, T., Ideology, Verso, 1991.

Fisher, D.J., ‘The Rolland-Barbusse Debate’, Survey, 20 (Spring-Summer 1974) 121-59.

Flower, J.E., Literature and the Left. Society, Politics and the Novel Since the Late Nineteenth Century, Methuen, 1985.

Foulkes, A.P., Literature and Propaganda, Methuen, New Accents, 1983.

Garaudy, Roger, L'Itinéraire d'Aragon. Du surréalisme au Monde Réel, Gallimard, Collection Vocations, 1961.

Garguilo, René, ‘Du réalisme socialiste au réalisme sans rivages’ in Roman, réalités, réalismes. Etudes réunies par Jean Bessière. Université de Picardie. Centre d'études du roman et du romanesque. Presses Universitaires de France, 1989.

Garmy, René, ‘Les Cloches de Bâle’, L'Humanité (31.XII.1934) 5.

Geoghegan, Crispin G., ‘Le Cas Aragon: a case history of the development of a French intellectual through Dada and Surrealism to Communism’, Unpublished M.A. thesis, University of Keele, 1976.

Geoghegan, Crispin G.,‘Surrealism and Communism: the hesitations of Aragon from Kharkov to the Affaire Front Rouge’, Journal of European Studies, 7 (1978) 12-31.

Gontier, Fernande, La femme et le couple dans le roman de l'entre-deuxguerres, Klincksieck, 1976.

Green, Mary J., Fiction in the Historical Present. French Writers and the Thirties (Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 1986).

Haroche, Charles, Les Langages du roman, Editeurs Français Réunis, 1976.

Huraut, Alain, Aragon, Prisonnier politique, André Balland, 1970.

Kelly, Michael, ‘Aragon and the Spirit of the Popular Front’, Quinquereme, 11 (January 1988) 3-13.

Kimyongür, A.M., ‘Aragon's La Semaine sainte: a socialist realist novel?’, Journal of European Studies, xxiv (1994) 243-64.

Lévi-Valensi, J. Aragon romancier, Sedes, 1989.

Lukàcs, G., The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, Merlin Press, 1963.

Mander, John, The Writer and Commitment, Secker and Warburg, 1961.

Mathewson, Rufus W., The Positive Hero in Russian Literature, 2nd edition, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975).

Mirsky, D., ‘Les Cloches de Bâle d'Aragon’, L'Humanité (22.I.1935) 4.

Molodoshanin, Margareth, ‘Louis Aragon: the novel and political commitment’, Unpublished Ph.D thesis, University of Manitoba, 1976.

Nadeau, Maurice, Histoire du surréalisme, suivie de Documents surréalistes, Seuil, 1964.

Pascal, Roy, ‘Aragon - Les Communistes,’ Modern Quarterly (Summer 1952) 169-78.

Ravis, Suzanne (ed.), Aurélien ou l'écriture indirecte, Champion, collection Unichamp, 1988.

Robin, Régine, Le Réalisme socialiste: une esthétique impossible, Payot, 1986.

Roy, Claude Aragon, Seghers, Collection Poètes d'aujourd'hui, 1962.

Savage, Catharine, Malraux, Sartre and Aragon as Political Novelists (Gainesville: University of Florida monographs, no.17, Fall 1964, 1965).

Scott, H. G.(ed), Soviet Writers' Congress 1934, The Debate on Socialist Realism and Modernism in the Soviet Union, Lawrence and Wishart, 1977, (Facsimile reprint, first published as Problems of Soviet Literature, edited by H.G.Scott, Martin Lawrence Ltd., 1935).

Schalk, David L., The Spectrum of Political Engagement: Mounier, Benda, Nizan, Brasillach, Sartre (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979).

Scriven, Michael, Paul Nizan: Communist Novelist, Macmillan, 1988.

Scriven, Michael and Dennis Tate (eds.), European Socialist Realism (Oxford/New York/Hamburg: Berg, 1988).

Soukup, Gerald T., ‘The realism of Louis Aragon: a study of four novels of Le Monde réel’, Unpublished Ph.D thesis, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, 1973.

Suleiman, Susan, Paul Nizan: pour une nouvelle culture, Grasset, 1971.

Suleiman, Susan, Authoritarian Fictions. The Ideological Novel as a Literary Genre (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983).

Verdès-Leroux, Jeannine, Au service du Parti. Le parti communiste, les intellectuels et la culture (1944-1956), Fayard/Edns de Minuit, 1983.

Waters, Lorraine M., ‘The Presentation of a Political Perspective in the Early Socialist Realist Works of Paul Nizan and Louis Aragon (1933-1936)’, Unpublished M.A. dissertation, University of Hull, 1986.