[In the following essay, Balakian argues that Aragon's first published prose work, Anicet, cemented his importance to twentieth-century art and literature by “igniting” the “spirit of surrealism.”]

Among the astonishing areas of neglect in the criticism of twentieth-century literature is the substantial work of Aragon. The oversight is the more surprising in the light of resurgent interest in Dada and surrealism, extending to collateral references such as Jarry, Roussel, and Artaud. André Breton has fared better, although the current scholarly attention to narrative has overstressed the importance of Nadja and underestimated Breton's poetry.

In perspective, Aragon may well loom as the Victor Hugo of this century, and with luck and good health he may well make it to 1985. Like his predecessor he has had an active role in forming a literary movement, he has had his politically and patriotically inspired phases, his colossal narratives, and if he was not exiled at a certain period in his life like Victor Hugo, he has known what it is to be a stranger in his own land, evidenced in the poignant poetry of En Etrange Pays dans mon pays lui-même.

The current preoccupation with structural analysis puts Aragon at a great disadvantage. He writes plain, vigorous French, he is not neurotically subtle, he takes his structures where he finds them—in the satirical novel, the sotie, the historical romance, and a poetry largely conveyed in Romantic lyricism except for a brief early period in which he indulged in Dada écriture. In Le Paysan de Paris and in Le Traité du style Aragon crystallized and intellectualized the precepts of surrealism better than most of his colleagues who practiced the surrealist metaphor.

But in his earliest prose work, Anicet, he accomplished something even more significant: he gave the “materialization of a moral symbol in violent opposition to the morality of the world in which it emerged.”¹ These are the words with which he was to characterize some years later the sense of the marvelous which he shared with Breton and a few others in their search for a concept of the Beautiful to replace the standard and tired ones. If the symbolism in Anicet is overt in its personifications, its negation of the ethics of the avant-garde of the historical moment makes it an unusual monument in the history of literature, not only in French literature but in its global and epistemological context. Anicet tells us how the spirit of surrealism was ignited; but beyond that, its satire of contemporary figures of the artistic world, lightly shaded, is a pretense and a screen for something much more fundamental that troubled Aragon in 1918 as he began his emblematic tale, something that remains one of the essential problematics of twentieth-century literature on an international level: the perilous struggle of the Beautiful in art and writing.

The central magnet of the “Panorama,” as Aragon calls his narrative, is a woman named Mirabelle. If “belle” obviously stands for beauty, “mira” may well imply a reflection—which indeed makes her the center of a multifaceted courtship. But it also suggests the mirror vision, the false appearance, the semblance, implying the mistake that the generation of 1918 may have made in its definition of Beauty. Presumably, an old lover, Guillaume, characterized her as “Mire aux yeux d'argent,”² (untranslatable because the double connotation of silver/money does not come across in modern English, whereas in its French ambiguity lies an element of satire). As the récit progresses it becomes obvious that Guillaume was none other than Apollinaire, and that he was not referring to the color of her eyes but to their venal concerns. “That explains this court of masks around her, and its recruitment, and this symbol of beauty in the hands of the merchants” (p. x). Her gravitation toward wealth results in the choice she eventually makes of a husband: an American multimillionaire businessman wins her hand in a courtship in which his rivals are among the most talented artists of the time.

In identifying Mirabelle as the symbol of modern beauty, Aragon is stating a hypothesis, to be verified or demolished in the analogical progression of the work. At first, the most prestigious artists credited with having remodeled the concept of beauty at the dawn of the century are seen under veiled names and in Guignol exaggerations, arguing about her function:

—I tell you that she is a solar myth

—A conception of the mind

—An obsessive idea

—An image

—A symbol

—Shut up, said Anicet, she is a woman of flesh and bones, else we would not have found her so beautiful

(p. 185).

Mirabelle's background is examined, and it will not take too much deciphering to realize that Aragon is giving the reader his version of the history of the concept of Beauty from its beginnings. She first emerges in the Western world through the constraining realism of a Mediterranean maturation. She assumes a fatal power of seduction that destroys men; she becomes an object of fear and persecution: “mothers threw stones after her as they chased her from a village in Asturias where she had gone to hide a painful secret” (p. 189). She eventually attracted the attention of the bizarre—or shall we say “avant-garde”?—Harry James (a suicidal character whom we subsequently are led to identify with a veiled embodiment of Jacques Vaché).³ The attraction produced instant results: “suddenly he leaned toward Mirabelle, drew her to himself and made her a mother” (p. 190). Retrospectively, Mirabelle passed judgment: “Nobody in the world has ever done so much good and so much harm at the same time” (p. 193). In fact, the Mediterranean Beauty's illicit alliance with the Absurd produced an offspring which, according to Mirabelle's account, was sold as trash.

In Paris, the mecca for the worship of Beauty, the adulterated and modernized version embodied by Mirabelle was wooed by seven identifiable archetypes: a titled crook, an actor, an artist, two poets, a dandy, and a metaphysician. Bringing her their gifts as masked scavengers, they offer her a wide range of alternatives, all resulting from “three preliminary conditions” without which modern Beauty cannot be courted: “theft, lie, mystery” (p. 63).

The glass ball presented by the first suitor is a kaleidoscope that has presumably powers of transcendence. But modern Beauty is capable of using it only to contemplate her own image as the center of all the universe, limiting thus the infinite potential of vision to a confined and narcissistic perspective. The agility of word and movement, the flair for creating illusion, the prestidigitator's aplomb constitute pointedly the stylized stereotype of Jean Cocteau.

The second gift is a polygon of iridescent taffeta containing a beautiful face in its design. In ripping off a piece of the cloth the thief has cut into the face. The iridescence is an illumination of reality; yet there is an element of clumsiness that destroys the beauty inherent in the ever-changing colors. Despite its damaged appearance it is more powerful than the kaleidoscopic luminosity of the first character's ball, which, placed upon the magic though mutilated cloth, loses all its transfigurative quality. The speech of this second masked figure with the lofty lip contains the lexical characteristics which were to become associated with the future leader of surrealism: iridescence, enchantment, the marvelous, the personal spectrum that extends from grey to rose.

The third suitor is a clown, the Charlie Chaplin archetype, the first great star of the new medium for the representation of Beauty on celluloid. Under the name of Pol, he roams through Aragon's novel, giving it the ragtime version of Beauty, the mechanical, accelerated sense of reality. His contribution to modern Beauty is an elixir in the form of a tangerine: “this bizarre little fragrant sun” (p. 60). He procures it at great and comic risk to himself and disrupts the systematized structure of a theater audience as he snatches the precious golden apple from a vendor. All he can do to remunerate her is to give her a spectacular acrobatic performance of his flight. Much valor is displayed, and stunningly succulent is the fruit, but rapidly consumed. Aragon gives a succinct indictment of the value of the cinema to aesthetics: brilliant, gilded, savory but ephemeral—so much effort for so short a satisfaction. We are here very far from the high hopes that Apollinaire had entertained for film as an eventual replacement for the word in the making of poetry, i.e. the Beautiful.

The accent of the fourth suitor suggests that he is either a high-class Italian or a low-class Slav; he brings a diplomatic document, which, if leaked, could cause catastrophic wars. It seems not too far-fetched to conclude that the allegory of the gift and the ambiguity of the place of origin of the giver suggest the involvement of a foreign conspiracy in the shaping of the so-called modern version of the Beautiful. There are elsewhere direct references to futurism and overt ones to Dada. It is interesting to note that Aragon gives neither of these in any guise an important role in the shaping of the new aesthetics; but the foreign suitor in whom they seem to be amalgamated is among the most shady of the whole secret society seeking to espouse Mirabelle

The fifth bearer of a gift is Omme, which is a homonym for Man and for the unit of electrical resistance. Although some critics have identified Omme as Jarry, Aragon's own 1931 preface names Valéry, who indeed fits more logically here as the suitor who brings a resistor and an element of measure, stolen from the Institut des Arts et Métiers. His concern for philosophic truth and rule-oriented humanism, pronounced in what Aragon calls a “white” voice, sums up the self-serving hyperbole of Omme: “the most useful present, the most urgent, and the most worthy of your character and of mine” (p. 63).

The next, a painter, whose manifest and later confirmed model is Picasso, has lifted the signal which railroad stations use to prevent collisions of trains. He compares the gadget to a red flower and reminds Mirabelle of the cataclysmic consequences of his theft: the possible collision of two rapid trains originating from distant points. Here the conquest of modern Beauty demands the sacrifice of order and risks terrible destruction. Had not Picasso caused, indeed, the collision and explosion of long-established and orderly systems, the breakdown of standardization and of accepted relationships?

The last donor brings the faded photograph of a Beauty of a past generation, of the time of the Blue Danube and of Pêcheur d'Islande. One thinks of Rimbaud's Letter, in which he chastized those whose search for novelty only led them back to “the spirit of things dead.” Aragon is here passing a devastating judgment on Chipre, under whose mask is Max Jacob, generally presumed to have been an avant-garde figure.

If there are seven suitors in this scene, the secret society assures the new aspirant, Anicet, that the number of those seeking modern Beauty's hand is not fixed; it is flexible and ever-fluctuating, and she is indeed an equal-opportunity employer, which makes it possible for Anicet to join the ranks immediately. His gift is a stanza of verse, which is received with derision. He will have to do much better than that to prove a worthy contender for the favors of Beauty: “Don't be surprised by anything,” said the fourth masked figure, “and act according to the dictates of your desire for beauty; thus by your actions we shall judge of your aesthetics better than we can by the six mediocre lines of verse you have produced” (p. 73).

A composite methodology for the conquest of modern Beauty emerges out of this allegorical ritual: it is solipsistic, clumsily enchanting, ephemerally glittering, deliberately orderly, perilous, intriguing, superannuated, and amateurishly versified. As narrator, Aragon has not favored any one of the suitors, not even the one with whom he identifies. There is a definite distancing between the two roles he plays: that of participant, in the guise of Anicet, and of third person narrator.

Of his identification with Anicet he makes no secret. What is the meaning of his name? Since he mentions at one point “the fresh fragrance of anise,” it can be surmised that he is a fresh, young, somewhat hallucinated being—a small pinch of anise. Anicet/anisette, the drink that he and his companions took when they were not drinking grenadine! The white and the red liquors of their youth were symbolic of that unusual combination of the pure and the sanguine which was to mark the special quality of surrealism among a host of avant-garde movements: the sensual reality of red, the power of dreams and the search for absolute beauty that the white hallucinatory potion provoked.

Anicet's story could have consisted simply of a solipsistic adventure in which he might have imagined himself as the champion of Beauty, delivering her from the beasts that surrounded her. He could have cast himself as the white knight in shining armor triumphant over a series of unappetizing Minotaurs. The cloak-and-dagger imagery of Anicet is reminiscent of Breton's poetry of the same vintage, but in Aragon's story it contains a measure of realistic irony, which eventually leads his not quite heroic protagonist to prison, to face the indignation and rancor of public opinion; the accusations against him are so grievous that they may well drag him to the guillotine. His achievements in the defense of Beauty have had a destructive rather than constructive character. He succeeded in eliminating two of the unworthy suitors: the metaphysician of “white” poetry and the American multimillionaire. In the course of a tumultuous presence in the arena, he also managed to burn a number of classified museum possessions representing the Beauty of the past: paintings by Boucher, Meissonnier, Millet, Greuze, and Pissarro were destroyed by his libertarian vandalism. He burned his personal bridges as well: “the chains fall: I cease to be the slave of my past” (p. 78). He even pretended to burn the money that his bourgeois family had sent him for his sustenance. It is a pretense recognized as such by Anicet himself, for even as he assumes the role of disinterested rebel, he calls his own bluff and replaces the 1000-franc bill he had destroyed by another one he had kept in reserve.

True, he may have cut himself off from his family, but he dragged his ancestors behind him in the figures of an aged Rimbaud in the first chapter and an aged Lautréamont in the last. Both are presented as superannuated factors, suggesting that even the most powerful firebrands of aesthetics wane in time and that the position of avant-garde is short-lived as youth itself. As Rimbaud tells of his disillusionment, in a lengthy monologue, the reader realizes how rejectable he is becoming in the eyes of Anicet. At the end of his encounter with Rimbaud, Anicet discovers that he has slept with the same Hortense whom Rimbaud loved and then abandoned—in other words the young rebel had pursued an aging concept of Beauty at the very moment when he was thinking of himself as avant-garde. “I noticed what old-fashioned potions I was using, I did not want to persist in my error, and I went off in search of the modern idea of life, of the line that marked the horizon of our contemporaries” (p. 43).

But at the end of the scene with the seven suitors just as he is declaring his dedication to Beauty and to love, the lights go out. He is left in the figurative dark, for if Hortense was second-hand, Mirabelle is fake; the sense of adventure generated in her pursuit is vain and futile. What she had really done is to open Anicet's eyes to the inauthenticity of what is called the new art. Anicet's function is to single out every one of the false pretenders to avant-garde beauty and to bring out their ineptness.

The methodologists also come under attack: “they looked within themselves with a system of mirrors. They did not care about their objectives. All they enjoyed was the method to be used to attain a goal. The world was governed by minds which reasoned about themselves” (p. 141).

The most compelling scenes are those with Chipre and Bleu. Max Jacob's mating of poverty with poetry comes off as an artificial stance. Bleu's most recent triumphs are revealed as academic disgraces. The chapter in which Aragon describes Bleu's rise and fall is called, tellingly, “Decease.” His natures mortes gave the viewer a wonderful sense of living forms, says Anicet, whereas his latest so-called masterpiece in praise of living form, called “Praise of the Body,” is lifeless and stilted. “Anicet suddenly understood that Bleu had passed from the domain of love to that of death and glory” (p. 118). The self-appraisal which Aragon puts candidly into the mouth of Bleu is even more devastating: “What a nonentity it is just the same!” (p. 183). The last glimpse of Bleu in this ignoble gallery of false gods is in a newspaper account of his deposition at the trial of Anicet. He shows himself disloyal and unfriendly toward the young defendant. He speeds off to America to become the subject of much adulation and the recipient of much financial reward under the sponsorship of art critics such as Mr. Bolonais (undoubtedly a variation of the ambivalent sausage) whose function will be to establish and dictate tastes in art not only for the current generation but for posterity. Aragon is here not only challenging the validity of the new art of his immediate predecessors but questioning the operations whereby art is promoted and prestige is artificially generated. His satire casts the artist and the critic not in the intellectual battle against each other, which has for so long been the accepted dichotomy, but in an astonishing and shady conspiracy against a gullible public.

Was there anyone who could still salvage Beauty from false creators and promoters? There is the poet with the haughty lip and the clumsy hand who mutilated iridescently beautiful patterns of a face on cloth in the scene of the suitors. His name, we later learn, is Baptiste Ajamais. “He must have been born at the end of a great river in some port on the ocean for his eyes to have caught the grey glow and his voice to have acquired a certain sonority of shells when he said ‘the sea.’ Somewhere in his childhood, low docks slumbered in the heavy summer evening, and on their still waters there were sailboats that would not leave before the rising of the breeze” (p. 114).

An extraordinary change of style occurs when Aragon is speaking of his friend Breton; the banal and pedestrian tenor of the conversation of the art establishment fades, and the poetic longing that was to characterize and distinguish surrealism from all the other avant-gardes is for a moment fixed on the strange young man coming from the funeral of Harry James, who, having buried the prototype of the absurd, floats in a state of transit, in search of something new.

Whereas Aragon's self-portrait is without glamour, and indeed full of candor and auto-criticism, he adorns his portrait of Breton with an aura of mystery, catches and isolates the rhythm of his speech. Whereas he is Anicet, the subject of transitory excitation, the name Baptiste Ajamais suggests prophecy and permanence, the infinite character of the search. Baptiste is the only one not impressed by the charms of Mirabelle. He tells Anicet: “The conquest of Mirabelle is but an episode, don't forget it, it is the first step in life toward a mysterious end, that I can perhaps discern” (p. 132). When Mirabelle tries to seduce him by undressing before him, Baptiste, unmoved, stares at her coldly. By using Baptiste as his alter ego Aragon demonstrates the ambivalence of his own stand at that moment of youthful incertitude when he might have jumped on the bandwagon of his elders' definition of modernism but didn't. The trouble with the world, according to Baptiste, is that nothing has happened since the world began (cf. p. 237).

Yet where does this purity of posture lead? Baptiste's saintliness is by no means total. He is seen playing with fire, but is cautious not to get burned. Anicet, on the other hand, is shown holding a lamp in one hand and a revolver in the other. The atmosphere that was charged with adventure and vertigo turns into a climate of confusion. All three principals of the narrative are condemned as inept. Mirabelle's beauty was a fraud, and she failed even as a fortune hunter. Anicet was in prison for having pursued false gods and false goods: did he not try to steal Bleu's latest paintings, only to find out that they were worthless? As for Baptiste, he beat a quick retreat to the country and was content to share the fate of Anicet vicariously through newspaper accounts of the trial. He was in the company of two old habitués of a café, one a certain M. Prudence who bore a strange resemblance to Harry James, and the other an old gentleman by the name of Lautréamont. Was Aragon making prophecies about all the graveyards of the avant-garde?

Anicet is indeed the portrait of the author as a young man, but the viewing of the young man is distanced—just as Candide is and is not Voltaire. Candide was the mocking of an attitude of optimism espoused and then corrected by the creator of the persona; in the same manner Aragon was Anicet before he created Anicet, and Anicet's illusion and subsequent disillusionment are crystallized in a self-critical portrayal. When commentators of Aragon quote from Anicet to illustrate permanent attitudes of its author, and when they equate Mirabelle with Aragon's notion of modern beauty, they forget that Anicet is but the record of an historical moment, and as Aragon has said: “I don't think people can understand anything about me if they overlook the dates of my thoughts and my writings.”⁴

Historically Anicet makes an assessment of the avant-garde of the first two decades of the twentieth century. His rejection of the reigning champions of so-called modern Beauty makes this early work a significant document in the history of the modern arts. Whereas at a half-century distance the attitude of most literary and art critics has been to unite the avant-gardes in a continuous flow from cubism to futurism, to Dada and then on to surrealism, a scrutiny of Anicet opens a different perspective. Aragon viewed the early years of the century as apocalyptic rather than as avant-garde. He saw his elders in the pursuit of a false aesthetics and found his own contemporaries floundering even though they may have been rejecting the false prophets of a new Beauty. Despite his confusion, the young hero of Anicet conveys a deep sense of jeopardy in his handling of the symbolism of Art and Beauty to suggest the perilous state of what he calls “the last divinities of men” (p. 162).

From the narrator's point of view the triumph of Bleu is as great a threat to the discovery of a new concept of beauty as the imprisonment of Anicet and the immobilization of Baptiste. Moreover, Aragon makes it clear at the end of the book that the spirit of absurdism, made incarnate in Jacques Vaché/Harry James, is not in his view the true spirit of modernism either. When Baptiste finds under the guise of M. Prudence his old friend whom he had thought dead, his devastating remark to the red-haired character is: “Harry James, I did not really believe you could have died, but now can no longer believe that you are living” (p. 255).

In Anicet Aragon shows the threats to the cult of beauty in the twentieth century, but he offers no solutions. He leaves his young characters in a quandary and suggests that they had better not look to their elders for guidance or inspiration. Indeed, if we remember, this was the very time when Breton had lost confidence in Valéry and when his fondness for Apollinaire had lapsed from a professional to a personal level. The situation at the end of Anicet has a significant historical validity; it makes it clear that whatever future aesthetics was to emerge, the composition of a new cénacle would not be that of master and younger disciples, but a fellowship of peers, shedding the past and looking forward together but without a concerted platform. This phenomenon also explains why as a cénacle surrealism would be subject to constant disruptions as each participant found his own direction.

In the pursuit of a new sense of beauty (beyond the desire to prevent the demolition of the aesthetic principle), the next step in the strategy to save Beauty for our time was to come from Breton in his declaration at the end of Nadja that Beauty must be convulsive or not be at all. The championship of Beauty from Anicet to Nadja suggests a continuity that the Dada episode did not succeed in breaking up. The effort to dislodge Beauty from the passive center of an arena toward which the opportunists gravitated, observed in Anicet, was not an anti-art reaction: Beauty was thought to be a catalytic force shooting off lightning and producng upheaval. The desire for an aesthetics of dynamic power over minds is inherent in Anicet and was to be overtly expressed in the theoretical writing of Breton. In fact, surrealism was to distinguish itself from all other avant-garde movements of the century precisely in its efforts to prolong some semblance of the notion of the Beautiful in a world where the Harry Jameses appear to have triumphed, demolishing both ancient and convulsive Beauty.

In 1929 Valéry, who survived Aragon's verbal annihilation of him along with the other perpetuators of what he considered a false notion of Beauty, reactivated the question, and his prognosis for the survival of the Beautiful was pessimistic and prophetic:

A science of the Beautiful? … But do the moderns still use that word? It seems to me that they no longer pronounce it except in jest. Or else … they are thinking of the past. Beauty is a kind of corpse. It has been supplanted by novelty, intensity, strangeness, in a word by all the values of shock. Base excitement dominates the soul these days; and the current function of literary works is to tear us away from the contemplative state, from the passive happiness whose image was previously connected in intimate fashion with the general idea of the Beautiful. … In our time, a ‘definition of the Beautiful’ can, therefore, be considered only as an historical or philosophical document. Taken in the ancient fullness of its meaning, this illustrious word is about to join, in the drawers of the numismatists of language, many other verbal coins that have gone out of circulation.⁵

In reiterating the alarm of the young Anicet, an aging Valéry was confirming Aragon's worst fears.

The truth of the matter is that the image of a precarious “pulchérie” has been with us for well nigh a hundred years. In the midst of the Symbolist movement, which was presumably centered on the cult of the Beautiful, Mallarmé was foreseeing in cryptic terms the litigation of Beauty in “Prose pour Des Esseintes” in 1882.

He was telling us that beyond the blatant hyperbole, the sorcery, the futility of imaginary landscapes (“de vues et non de visions”) the artifices of faded or exaggerated flowers (“Pulchérie/Caché par le trop grand glaïeul”) the resurrection of Beauty by the Symbolists had been only a survival on paper (“Anastase: Né pour d'éternels parchemins”). Mallarmé's fatal oracle unfolds as a testament of silence:

Oh! sache l'Esprit de litige,
A cette heure où nous nous taisons
Que de lis multiples la tige
Grandissait trop pour nos raisons.

In his last poem, Un Coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard, he had already given up aesthetics to pass on to his episteme.

Were they right, these masters of Symbolism, like Mallarmé and Valéry, to be so faint-hearted toward the future of the cult of Beauty? As we notice how seldom the concept emerges in current literature except in coarse perversion, Aragon's innocent prescience is noteworthy. Unimpressed by the dazzling promises of all the avant-gardes that surrounded him, he had been able to identify Beauty as the major casualty in modern literature.

Notes

1. Aragon, “La Peinture au défi,” in Les Collages (Paris: Hermann, 1965), p. 37.

2. Aragon, Anicet. I use the Livre de Poche edition from the Gallimard 1921 text, p. 214. All subsequent quotations will be from the same edition. The translations are all mine. The work has not been translated into English to my knowledge.

3. Jacques Vaché was the young wounded soldier Breton had befriended in a hospital in Nantes, where he had been on medical service during World War I. Vaché was to symbolize for him, and through him for the surrealists in general, the anti-establishment spirit of cold defiance and grim humor which Breton amalgamated into the surrealist archetype.

4. Epigraph to Aragon, une vie à changer by Pierre Daix (Paris: Seuil, 1975). The translation is mine.

5. Paul Valéry, Léonard et les philosophes, in Œuvres complètes, Pléiade ed., II, 1240.