[In the following essay, Collier discusses the urban settings in works by André Breton and Aragon.]

In French poetry of the second half of the nineteenth century urban motifs were easily recognisable as signs of street-corner realism (Baudelaire's cats, rats, bodies, jewels, mud, mobs, carriages, cafés, dogs, beggars) or of elevated symbolism (Mallarmé's drawing-room vases and fans). But the Surrealists' interest in the urban per se derives strictly from neither of these sources. Two aspects of city life were particularly likely to appeal to them: the presence in the city of a potentially revolutionary mass audience, exciting to poets who believed that they could change the real world—lying dismembered since the Great War—as well as people's inner lives, and who believed that poetry could and should be written by the people for the people; secondly, there was a concentration in the city of certain cultural and imaginative facilities—the theatre, cinema and music hall for passive consumption and stimulation of escapist dreaming, the café for the social congregation of artists and sometimes for their performances, the brothel and the street itself for possibilities of erotic liberty and random, adventurous encounter.

The paraphernalia of modern urban life are therefore little exploited for their own sake, and indeed, the most common approach was to turn the products of industry into derisorily useless ‘ready-made’ artefacts. Picasso turned a bicycle saddle and handlebars into a bull's head, and Marcel Duchamp outraged art critics by taking a urinal away from its rightful location and end and calling it ‘Fontaine’. Meret Oppenheim's ‘Fur cup and saucer’ and Man Ray's ‘Gift’—a smoothing iron bristling with spikes set in its sole—deliberately work not only against the utility of the real artefact but also against the normal, realistic, sensory reactions and expectations of the consumer. Industrial utility had contributed to the slaughter of the Great War. Official art had apparently upheld the social and moral values that underpinned such obscenity. Perhaps this new, ludic art deliberately subverted both industrial production and its cultural alibi. The cubist collage also takes the tissues and textures of town life (tickets, labels, posters, newspapers) and subverts their text, making it impossible to use them commercially or read them functionally.

Two precursors of Surrealism, Blaise Cendrars and Guillaume Apollinaire, wrote poems which show them to be exhilarated by urban experience but swamped and depressed by its inhumanity. In these poems (Cendrars' ‘Les Pâques à New York’,¹ Apollinaire's ‘Zone’)² the urban is wrenched away from its functional rationale, and its myriad experience becomes the impetus for an oneiric, mythical lament. (See David Kelley's chapter for a discussion of ‘Zone’.) Cendrars' narrator in 1912 New York is the alienated outsider, like Lorca's Poeta in Nueva York (described by Alison Sinclair in Chapter 14); but he is implicated in the very rhythms of the city life he finds so hostile. His vision is less fragmented than that of Apollinaire; he provides a more coherent vision of a clash between religious values and violent, spiritually empty metropolitan experience, where the metropolis is less a technological process than an expressionistic image of capitalist rapacity and social disintegration.

On to the basic form of the rhyming couplet, loosely grouped into paragraphs, Cendrars grafts a fluid narrative, whose metre varies to follow the restless wandering of the outsider, and whose rhyme is occasionally pulverised by the brutal heat, light, violence and sexual provocation assaulting the passer-by. Traditional imagery of stained-glass windows and communion wine is horrifyingly transposed into lipstick- and blood-stained visions, and the female depravity is explained by male exploitation, itself a product of despair. The whole city appears to be an apocalyptic, mercantile Babylon, torturing, scourging and sullying Christ anew, to the point where he is a victim of the birth of a hellish urban crescendo, orchestrated by the thundering subway trains, instead of ascending into heaven. The poet himself feels dawn enshroud him as in burial. Despite the basically simplistic verse form, there is great tension between its formulaic chant and the violent, irrational imagery, transgressing all bounds of taste and logic.

The shock of the images is accentuated by their ironically liturgical formulation; their nightmare illogicality is subverted by their verbal slickness. But the serious moral despair of this long narrative poem is underlined by an insistent refrain—‘je descends … je descends’—which reminds us that the poet plunging into the city is like Dante plumbing the successive depths of Inferno, or Christ himself descending into hell, as Europe would in 1914.

Despite the psychological decentring of Apollinaire and the moral alienation of Cendrars, their self-questioning narratives are still informed by the very urban forces which they represent and criticise. Apollinaire's imagery integrates the city into a cultural tradition, Cendrars' violent, fantastical visions reflect both the violence of his anguish and the violence of the metropolitan threat to culture. Perversely, after 1918, the Surrealists in their revolt evolved a more celebratory attitude to the city, in a deliberate attempt to transcend its utilitarian limitations, and reject its industrial dictates. Aragon's Le Paysan de Paris (Paris Peasant 1926)³ and Breton's Nadja (1928)⁴ are certainly based on a specifically urban and indeed metropolitan projection of the imagination, but the fluid topos of the city is more urbanely integrated into a looser, more exploratory prose structure of fantasy and desire.

Breton's city reminds us of a medieval map of the world—it is a small, flat and patchy place, surrounded by nothingness. Only parts explored by Breton and Nadja seem to exist, in defiance of the map of Paris that a rational atlas would offer. Breton's writing is an avowedly ‘anti-literary’ attack on the traditional novel, and even of prose narrative in general, he says in his preface (p. 6). The simple certainties of description, plot and character have no place here. Rather than the novel's usual recreation of places, events and selves, the narrative becomes the record of a search for them. Breton rejects the convention of realism, that language transparently transcribes an external reality. In calling into question the conventions of prose fiction, he calls into question our perception and mental narration of reality.

Starting vitually at random in a Paris hotel where he lived in 1918, the ‘hôtel des Grands Hommes’, Breton relates a series of random wanderings and encounters. He addresses a total stranger (who then starts to fascinate him), a girl called Nadja. The random becomes more overtly coincidental when he keeps meeting her on the streets of Paris as if she were unable to escape the force of his desire. Breton's use of the random and coincidental is intended to show the power of desire over events and people: ‘Voici deux jours consécutifs que je la rencontre: il est clair qu'elle est à ma merci’ (p. 106), and the operation of this desire through the medium of chance rather than reason or logic is intended to undermine our belief in causal logic as applied to human behaviour; it is intended to persuade us to see rationalism as powerless in the face of passion; and to urge us to rush out onto the streets and act inconsequentially at random.

Nadja is so real that she escapes the control of the narrator. Despite his chance encounters which appear to circumscribe her, the places and events of the novel are invested with a reality, flatly alleged rather than described, as if they were too real to bear the conventional mimetic transposition into organised linguistic structure which we call ‘realism’. Breton provides the complete text of a cinema programme which he did not read, a deliberately undramatic description of a theatre he went to, and a prosaic account of the plot of the melodrama enacted there, which records some of the literal dialogues, but in no way seems to echo the suspense and emotions of the original—he gives the literal text of some lines of Jarry's poetry which appealed to Nadja—and records verbatim surrealistic phrases uttered by Nadja. The chosen impotence of the descriptive discourse is as it were underlined by the inclusion of such rival texts, and even more so by the inclusion of visual matter, such as the sketches Nadja drew, or the ubiquitious photographs of persons and places mentioned but hardly described by the narrative. Thus the non-assimilable nature of brute matter is emphasised, and we are offered, instead of transcription, a kind of documentary residue, or even, in some cases, a fetish-like substitute for experience (photographs of a glove, an advert, a sign, the suspender-clad thighs of a wax dummy), or alternative artistic renderings of experience (paintings by Uccello or Braque). This impossibility of the mode of ‘realism’ as a meaningful transposition of experience appears in Nadja to derive from the unpredictability and unknowability of the world. And this despite the role of the city of Paris as a kind of tame universe, its familiar landmarks and its apparent cooperation in facilitating encounters tending to suggest that reality should be domesticable.

This very schism in the texture of the narrative may perhaps alert us in advance to the likelihood that there will be no resolution to the quest—quest for Nadja, quest for Breton's own identity, quest for explanation of the mysteries of the magical city. On the contrary, the non-rational aura of the quest is consummated in the final discovery of the hypothetical madness of Nadja, consecrating the divorce between the individual, and objective reality.

The motive force linking Breton and Nadja to each other and to the city has been ‘le hasard objectif’—objectified chance, whereby desire warps people, objects and events into coincidental configurations. It is in terms of objectified chance that Breton interprets Nadja's prophetic ability (she predicts that a dark window will suddenly light up), and her psychic gifts in developing the idea that a fountain expresses the circularity of thought, which Breton argues she has somehow derived from Berkeley without ever having read Berkeley.

The desire of the individual is mapped onto the city. Breton feels psychically affected by the statue of Etienne Dolet at the place Maubert, and Nadja hears voices coming from the bust of Henri Becque at the place Villiers. She even shows him a letter allegedly written by Becque, and Breton argues that there is no reason to be more disturbed by inspiration coming from such a source than that coming from God or a saint. Breton himself is obsessively moved by a sign outside a coal-merchant's (‘Bois-Charbons’) to the point that he walks all round the city, haunted by this image, seeking out every coal-merchant's he can find—This force of the environment on Breton and Nadja has its counterpart in Nadja's own active gifts—her presence in a restaurant causes a waiter to keep dropping plates, and her appearance at a train window causes men who see her to suddenly turn and blow kisses at her. Breton argues that there is no clear or necessary frontier between her powers of desire and her possible madness. One might argue that the manifestation of her desire (kissing Breton on the mouth and covering both of his eyes with her hands, while he is driving a car), is rather more alarming than that of her madness (receiving letters from a statue).

At all events, even when interacting psychically with Breton and Nadja, Paris remains a comfortingly familiar village-city, with its cafés and squares, hotels and statues, theatres and coal-merchants. It is smaller than life-size, so that any two strangers are bound to meet at random every few days. It is resolutely old-fashioned—the very antithesis of Apollinaire's hum of trams and blaze of electric lighting. It secretes individuals, not the anonymous throngs of Cendrars' New York. If it is not assimilable stylistically to realistic description, it compensates by taking on a distinctly anthropomorphic topos through the mediation of the idealistic, desirous, transcendental psyche.

But the split between the dreams, desires and intuitions of the individual, and the fantastical reality of the world outside is not thereby healed. Paradoxically, Breton reserves his most lyrical prose for an impassioned theoretical argument against psychiatrists and asylums (‘on y fait les fous’, p. 161; ‘tous les internements sont arbitraires. Je continue à ne pas voir pourquoi on priverait un être humain de liberté. Ils ont enfermé Sade; ils ont enfermé Nietzsche; ils ont enfermé Baudelaire’, p. 166). For the asylum and the psychiatrist support a rigorous divide between real and ideal, objective and subjective. Breton writes a passionate defence of madness as a kind of freedom: ‘la liberté, acquise ici-bas au prix de mille et des plus difficiles renoncements, demande à ce qu'on jouisse d'elle sans restrictions dans le temps où elle est donnée, sans considération pragmatique d'aucune sorte.’ (‘freedom, attained in this world at the expense of the most endless and arduous renunciation, demands to be enjoyed without restriction on the occasions she is available, without any considerations of practicality whatever’) (p. 168).

The narrative refuses to transform the schismatic world into a smoothly homogenised textual unity. Breton's odd mixture of flat allusion, brute illustration and lyrical theory is a beautiful enactment of the problem, on a formal plane. Yet one cannot help feeling that he thereby denies himself the stylistic and structural means to conjure up in the reader's imagination his own imaginings, rather than the cold record of their misadventure.

Aragon's Le Paysan de Paris is in some ways a more consummate rejection of autonomous, willed narration in favour of topographical or unconscious forces than is Nadja. The narrator structures his narrative around the non-fictional exploration of the arcades around the Paris ‘Opéa’ and their boutiques.⁵ But the differences in Aragon are striking. The everyday appears more resolutely trivial, more obviously anecdotal: Aragon describes a bookshop, notes that it is easy to steal books there, then records the exact value of the books stolen at another bookshop in 1920 (twenty million francs) (p. 27). With an almost Balzacian attention to detail Aragon describes the angle from which the caretaker and his wife can observe the stairs leading past their apartment (p. 27). However, this direction of the narrative according to the realistic topography of a walk through the arcades, and an objective description of their denizens is never sustained—it is constantly subverted by the forces of fantasy on the one hand and of sheer matter on the other.

The sum of money noted on page 27 was only an hors d'oeuvre; a little later the narrator passes by a notice of sale of a shop, where the shopkeeper has written out a protest detailing the amount of compensation which he will receive for being expropriated. The narrative does not précis or allude to the poster. It reproduces its entire text and layout and typography as well as the literal text of a newspaper article commenting on the series of expropriations in the arcades, which has been stuck up in another shop window (p. 37-8). Similarly, when the narrator walks into a café and sits down, the narrative yields to a literal transcription of the notices in the café, to the extent that a whole page of text can become a series of adverts for drinks, and their prices (p. 98). These realia, motivated on a realistic plane by their intrusion into the narrator's field of vision, then spill over and as it were contaminate the narrative. The list of drinks in the cafe is accompanied by a rambling sequence of observations about them (p. 96). The newspaper article and protest poster of pages 36 and 37 lead the text into a long enumeration of the financial arguments carried in other newspapers either displayed elsewhere in the neighbourhood or simply read by the narrator. These range from the brute textual fragment of newspaper literally copied on page 40, where only the middle column, discussing the affair, is readable, and the two outside columns are cut off down the middle either by the exigencies of the size of the page of the novel or perhaps by an imitation of the peremptory framing operated on a text by any act of reading, to the selective quotation and accompanying commentary of a more traditional kind (p. 41-2), or a kind of discours indirect libre which seamlessly accumulates the matter of the journalistic arguments (p. 38).

These various intrusions of reality—real reality—into the framework of the narrative—realistic narrative, are disturbing. Are these passages of the text real, concrete reality? Our acceptance of them as such then clearly disturbs our ability to accept the rest of the narrative as an imitation of reality—it immediately appears more obviously fictional. And then we may react from this standpoint against the textual inclusions—is their reality perhaps fictional, are they perhaps referred to, adduced by, generated by the fictional text? Is text the only reality, a fictional reality which reduces all rival external reality to the status of text? The phenomenon is also disturbing for its distortion of the narrative dynamic, traditionally driven by psychological, social or metaphysical springs, by some kind of quest or series of actions, and, even in this novel, by the topological vector of the walk through the city (as in Joyce's Ulysses⁶ or Apollinaire's ‘Zone’). And finally, the whole convention of a linguistic transposition of reality, according to the code of ‘realism’ seems threatened by the blurring of the process of transcription, by the foregrounding of the physical medium of the visual accidents of reality, seen as a college of rival texts, creating a new reality transgressing the framework both of traditional text and conventional reality, rather as Picasso's collages or Duchamp's readymades transgressed these boundaries.

The richness of Aragon's textual procedures is far from exhausted by this approach to his maniacal, self-conscious flooding of the text by a series of associations in the narrator's mind. As the narrator enters the arcades they set up reverberations in his mind which will enable him to move into the world of the ‘merveilleux’, advocated by Breton in his Premier manifeste du Surréalisme;⁷ for outside reality is able to enlighten the workings of the mind, particularly if that outside reality is itself mysterious. In the strangely-lit, unusually enclosed ‘passages’, a transitional, mediatory world invites the narrator to loosen his grip on external reality and allow his internal fantasies to flower and proliferate:

La porte du mystère, une défaillance humaine l'ouvre, et nous voilà dans les royaumes de l'ombre. Il y a dans le trouble des lieux de semblables serrures qui ferment mal sur l'infini. Là où se poursuit l'activité la plus équivoque des vivants, l'inanimé prend parfois un reflet de leurs plus secrets mobiles: nos cités sont ainsi peuplés de sphinx méconnus qui n'arrêtent pas le passant rêveur, qui ne lui posent pas de questions mortelles. Mais s'il sait les deviner, ce sage, alors, que lui les interroge, ce sont encore ses propres abîmes que grâce à ces monstres sans figure il va de nouveau sonder. La lumière moderne de l'insolite, règne bizarrement dans ces sortes de galeries couvertes qui sont nombreuses à Paris aux alentours des grands boulevards et que l'on nomme d'une façon troublante des passages, comme si dans ces coulours dérobés au jour, il n'était permis à personne de s'arrêter plus d'un instant.

(p. 20-1).

(The doorway to mystery, opened by a moment of human abandonment, leads us now into the realms of shadow. In the murkiness of this place there are such locks as fail to properly conceal infinity. Where the most ambiguous activities of the living are pursued, the inanimate may sometimes catch a reflection of their most secret motives: our cities are thus peopled with unrecognised sphinxes, which will not stop the musing passer-by and ask him mortal questions. But if in his wisdom he can guess them, then let him question them, and it will still be his own depths which, thanks to these faceless monsters, he will once again plumb. The modern lighting of the unusual reigns strangely over the kind of covered shopping arcades of which there are many in Paris in the neighbourhood of the ‘grands boulevards’, and which are called, disturbingly, passages, as if in these corridors hidden from the light of day, everyone was forbidden to stop for more than a moment.)

The associations, the fantasies which are developed are the illustration of the idea that man is motivated by desire and by chance, rather than by reason and by will—an idea that is obviously indebted to Breton's championing of Freud's discovery of a fundamentally libidinous unconscious, whose traces as discovered in jokes and dreams and slips of the tongue indicate that it operates according to an irrational process of association.⁸ But there is also Breton's Surrealist belief in the existence of a transcendental plane where the conflict between desire and reality will be resolved: and the whole of Aragon's novel is the record of a quest for and an adventure within the magical realm of the transcendental, like one of Chrétien's Arthurian heroes who has wandered into an enchanted forest:

C'était un soir, vers cinq heures, un samedi: tout à coup, c'en est fait, chaque chose baigne dans une autre lumière … On vient d'ouvrir le couvercle de la boîte. Je ne suis plus mon maître tellement j'éprouve ma liberté. Il est inutile de rien entreprendre … Je suis le ludion de mes sens et du hasard.

(p. 11-12).

(It was one evening towards five o'clock, a Saturday: suddenly, it had happened, everything was bathed in a different light. The lid has just been taken off the box. I am no longer in control of myself, so strong is my feeling of freedom. There is no point in planning to do anything … I am at the mercy of my sensations and of blind chance.)

The strange light and the feeling of alienation from choice are distinctly dreamlike. The random arrangement of the city arcades will now closely enmesh with the imagery liberated by desire. A shop window filled with carved walking-sticks will become a sea in which a mermaid swims (p. 31-2), a tatty ‘maison de passe’ will be described as if its corridors were the wings of a theatre, its bedrooms the artists' dressing-rooms, its layout a network of ‘labyrinthes voluptueux’, its protagonists either ‘assassins sentimentaux’ or ‘héros maudits’ (p. 24-5). The scruffy ‘Théâtre Moderne’ itself presents various arrangements of nude women rather perfunctorily disguising their celebration of desire as one or other of the dramatic genres of the legitimate stage. Aragon argues wickedly that this is the best kind of avant-garde drama:

le modèle du genre érotique, spontanément lyrique, que nous voudrions voir méditer à tous nos esthètes en mal d'avant-garde. Ce théâtre qui n'a pour but et pour moyen que l'amour même, est sans doute le seul qui nous présente une dramaturgie sans truquage, et vraiment moderne.

(p. 132).

(the ideal erotic play, spontaneously lyrical, which we would like to offer as an object of study to all our aesthetes with avant-garde yearnings. This theatre whose only means and end are love itself, is doubtless the only truly modern, unfaked drama.)

that it derives from the miracle play:

le besoin de faire vivre quelques filles et leurs maquereaux, a fait naître un art aussi premier que celui des mystères chrétiens du Moyen Age. Un art qui a ses conventions, ses disciplines et ses oppositions

(the need to subsidise a few whores and their pimps has given birth to an art as elemental as that of the medieval Christian mystery plays. An art with its conventions, constraints and antitheses.)

and fulfils the communal aims of Classical comedy and Tragedy:

Les grands ressorts de la comédie antique, méprises, travestissements dépîts amoureux, et jusqu'aux menechmes, ne sont pas oubliés ici. L'esprit même du théâtre primitif y est sauvegardé par la communion naturelle de la salle et de la scène, due au désir, ou à la provocation des femmes, ou à des conversations particulières.

(pp. 133-4)

(The great springs of Classical comedy, misunderstandings, disguises, crossed loves, and even menechme, are here remembered. The very spirit of primitive theatre is preserved in the natural communion between audience and actors, caused by desire or by provocation on the part of the women or by private conversations.)

The café, too, is a temple where there are sacred rituals (for the proper serving of coffee (p. 99)); and here the modern writer, surrounded by friends and by the traces of reality and desire, can call for pen and ink and realise his dreams:

C'est ici que le surréalisme reprend tous ces droits. Images, descendez comme des confetti. Images, images, partout des images. Au plafond. Dans la paille des fauteuils, Dans les pailles des boissons. Dans le tableau du standard téléphonique. Dans l'air brillant. Dans les lanternes de fer qui éclairent la piece. Neigez, images, c'est Noël.

(p. 101)

(Here Surrealism comes into its own. Images, fall like confetti. Images, images, everywhere images. On the ceiling. In the straw in the armchairs. In the straws in the drinks. On the telephone switchboard. In the gleaming air. In the iron lamps that illuminate the room. Snow, images, it's Christmas.)

And lest it be thought that the brothel, the theatre and the café are too easily tempting to poeticise, Aragon waves his magic wand over the petrol pumps of Texaco and transforms them into ‘grands dieux rouges’, ‘une étrange statuaire’, ‘ces fantômes métalliques’, ‘Ces idoles’:

Bariolés de mots anglais et de mots de création nouvelle, avec un seul bras long et souple, une tête lumineuse sans visage, le pied unique et le ventre à la roue chiffrée, les distributeurs d'essence ont parfois l'allure des divinites de l'Egypte ou de celles des peuplades anthropophages oui n'adorent que la guerre. O Texaco motor oil, Eco, Shell, grandes inscriptions du potentiel humain! bientôt nous nous signerons devant vos fontaines, et les plus jeunes d'entre nous périront d'avoir considéré leurs nymphes dans le naphte.

(p. 144-5)

(Daubed with English words or newly minted words, having only one long and supple arm, a luminous, faceless head, a single leg, and a belly in the form of a numbered wheel, the petrol pumps take on sometimes the air of Egyptian divinities, or the gods of cannibal peoples whose idol is war. O Texaco motor oil, Eco, Shell, great inscriptions of human potential! Soon we will worship at your founts, and the youngest among us will perish for having contemplated their nymphs in your naphtha.)

The twin poles of libidinous fantasy and random observation are seen by the narrater as a constant tension, but also as a fundamental source of imaginative power:

à la limite des deux jours qui opposent la réalité extérieure au subjectivisme du passage, comme un homme qui se tient au bord de ses abîmes, sollicité également par les courants et par les tourbillons de soi-même, dans cette zone étrange où tout est lapsus, lapsus de l'attention et de l'inattention, arretons nous un peu pour éprouver ce vertige. … Un instant, la balance penche vers le golfe hétéroclite des apparences. Bizarre attrait des dispositions arbitraires: voilà quelqu'un qui traverse la rue, et l'espace autour de lui est solide, et il y a un piano sur le trottoir, et des voitures assises sous les cochers.

(p. 60-1).

(on the border between the two kinds of light opposing external reality to the subjectivity of the passage, like a man about to fall into his own abyss, tugged by the waves and by his inner maelstrom, in this strange zone where all is lapsus, lapse in concentration and lapse in relaxation, let us wait awhile to savour the vertigo … For a moment the balance tips towards the heteroclite gulf of appearances, with the odd attractiveness of arbitrary arrangements: now someone crosses the street, and the space surrounding him is solid, and there's a piano on the pavement, and vehicles seated beneath coachmen.)

Compared with his own creativity the novelist finds that that of God is somewhat limited: ‘je m'étonne grandement de l'imagination de Dieu: imagination attachée à des variations infimes et discordantes. On dirait que pour Dieu le monde n'est que l'occasion de quelques essais de natures mortes’ (p. 61) (‘I am greatly surprised by God's imagination, which is limited to minute, discordant variations. It's as if for God the world is only an excuse for some tentative still-lifes’).

God, it would appear, is a nineteenth-century realist. Whereas Aragon is perpetually blurring the frontier between sheer reality and wild fantasy, if he approaches too close to reality it becomes fantastic in its disproportion. Thus the author's ‘passages’ create imagery:

Je quitte un peu mon microscope. On a beau dire, écrire l'oeil à l'objectif même avec l'aide d'une chambre blanche fatigue véritablement la vue. Mes deux yeux, déshabitués de regarder ensemble, font légèrement osciller leurs sensations pour s'apparier à nouveau. Un pas de vis derrière mon front se déroule à tâtons pour refaire le point: le moindre object que j'aperçois m'apparaît de proportions gigantesques, une carafe et un encrier me rappellent Notre-Dame et la Morgue.

(p. 42)

(I leave my microscope for a moment. Say what you will, writing with the eye glued to the lens in a light chamber is truly tiring to the eyesight. My two eyes, unaccustomed to observing in concert, let their senses gently oscillate in order to realign themselves. A screw inside my forehead unwinds gropingly to focus again: the slightest object that I perceive seems to take on gigantic proportions, a carafe and an inkwell remind me of Notre-Dame and the Morgue.)

But this creative oscillation is not allowed to create a novel merely varying between the documentary and the poetic, the realistic and the fantastic. The whole narrative enterprise which synthesises these two modes is in its turn torn apart from the inside by the capricious behaviour of thought and of language. In the great tradition of Sterne's Tristram Shandy⁹ and Diderot's Jacques le Fataliste¹⁰, Aragon plays cat and mouse with his novel and the reader. Gide was to do as much around the same period with Les Caves du Vatican¹¹ and Les Faux-monnayeurs.¹² Aragon may well sing the praises of Death, Lapsus and Libido, but he hastens to deflate: ‘Libido qui, ses jours-ci, a élu pour temple les livres de medicine et qui flâne maintenant suivie du petit chien Sigmund Freud’ (p. 44) (‘Libido who of late has made his shrine of medical text-books and who now wanders around followed by his little dog Sigmund Freud’).

Aragon talks of suspense and mystery but constantly abandons his already flimsy plot in order to describe, say the décor of a hairdressing salon (p. 51), he analyses, nay personifies feelings but they immediately dissolve into whirlpools of language, as when he juggles with the letters and the rhythms of the word Pessimisme (p. 62). He propounds philosophical or psychological views of a provocative nature, but his plan for an atlas of bodily pleasure (p. 57-8), his likening of the Parisian passer-by to Hegel's Idea (p. 45) or his declaration that female desire is better represented by a woman groping for a man's flies than by more mundane cinematic fictions, all dissolve into deliberate whimsy (p. 70). As the book progresses, its pretensions of representation and of fantasy become increasingly sabotaged by the workings of language. A lyrical appreciation of all persons and things blonde becomes entirely unhinged in what could be seen as a savage parody of the traditional ‘Symphonie en Blanc majeur’:

Le blond ressemble au balbutiement de la volupté, aux pirateries des lèvres, aux frémissements des eaux limpides. Le blond échappe à ce qui définit, par une sorte de chemin capricieux où je rencontre les fleurs et les coquillages. C'est une espèce de reflet de la femme sur les pierres, une ombre paradoxale des caresses dans l'air, un souffle de défaite de la raison … Qu'y a-t-il de plus blond que la mousse? J'ai souvent cru voir du champagne sur le sol des forêts. Et les girolles! Les oronges! Les lièvres qui fuient! Le cerne des ongles! La couleur rose! Le sang des plantes! Les yeux des biches! La mémoire est blonde vraiment. A ses confins, là où le souvenir se marie au mensonge, les jolies grappes de clarté! La chevelure morte eut tout à coup un reflet de porto: le coiffeur commençait les ondulations Marcel.

(p. 52-3).

(The blonde resembles the stammerings of voluptuousness, the piracy of lips, the tremors of limpid waters. The blonde escapes whatever defines it, by a kind of whimsical way where I encounter flowers and seashells. It's a sort of reflection of woman on stones, a paradoxical shadow of aerial caresses, a breath of the defeat of reason. What is blonder than moss? I have often imagined that I saw champagne on the ground in the forest. And chanterelles! And agaric mushrooms! Hares in flight! The quick of nails! The colour pink! The blood of plants! The eyes of does! Memory: memory is truly blonde. On its borders, where recall relates to mendacity, what juicy bunches of light! The dead hairstyle suddenly took on a port-wine reflection: the hairdresser had embarked upon his ‘Marcel’ permanent waves)

(And one can perhaps see traces of pastiche of Marcel Proust's white and pink hawthorns¹³ and Rimbaud's hares leaping around in ‘Après le déluge’,¹⁴ as well as of poor Gautier's ‘Symphonie’.)¹⁵

We have seen the voice of narrative itself seriously shattered by the inclusion of alternative texts. The unity of the narrative voice is further upset by the intrusion of sing-song jingles (p. 70), language games borrowed from Desnos (p. 111), by an obsessive vibration of fricative alliteration: ‘La femme est dans le feu, dans le fort, dans le faible, la femme est dans le fond des flots, dans la fuite des feuilles, dans la feinte solaire où comme un voyageur sans guide et sans cheval j'égare ma fatigue en une féerie sans fin? (p. 209) (‘Female is in fire, in fortitude, in feeble; female floats fathoms deep, flutters in foliage, in the phoney sunlit phantasies where like a guideless, horseless traveller I exploit my exhaustion in infinite fairyland’), by a fragmentation of narrative coherence into a farcical dialogue, or should I say triologue, between Sensibility, Will and Intelligence personified as in some medieval allegory—a trick copied perhaps from Gide, with his angels and his devils in Les Faux-monnayeurs (p. 76-9). In this hecatomb of novelistic convention sexual love itself comes in for demystification as the narrator shows us the advert for massage which leads him into a very casually physical experience in a dirty room with a girl with a gold tooth, and closes his clinical description of the brief encounter with an overt challenge to the romanticising or fictionalising reader: ‘Que les gens heureux jettent la première pierre’, declaring of the monogamous: ‘Mes masturbations valent les siennes’ (p. 126). And even the sacrosanct dream, when it interrupts the narrative, produces a parody of its own pretensions, as it delivers chiefly a little box with ‘rien’ written inside it and an inky schoolboyish drawing with ‘J'en sors’ scribbled across it (p. 159).

Walk and desire, random chance and the libido, that is, set out as the motors of this narrative, and their prolix dialectic provides an increasingly fantastical city landscape, which is ultimately much more a textual creation and a hysterical narrative than any pedestrian musing, or mimesis of passion. The prose style and the narrative structure buckle and flex under the impetus of their own elan, as the rhetoric ebbs and flows between object and fantasy, between denotation, connotation and ironic deflation of both. The narrative flows round and through a real city, of course, and we could weakly argue that Aragon is exploring the boundaries of the real city within the limits of the textual, but it would probably be more helpful to argue that he is exploring the boundaries of the text within the limits of the urban, as his gear-crashing discursive disjunctions judder through brute textual matter and through fantastical reorganisations of the whole city topos in relation to a language borne on by a frenzy of imagery and of paranoid flight from reference. These distortions are increasingly obsessive and hallucinatory towards the end of the later section of the book (Le Sentiment de la Nature aux Buttes-Chaumont as consciousness appears overrun by objects and subordinate clauses:

Le taxi qui nous emportait avec la machinerie de nos rêves ayant franchi par la ligne droite de l'interminable rue Lafayette le neuvième et le dixième arrondissement en direction sud-ouest nord-est, atteignit enfin le dix-neuvième à ce point précis qui portait le nom de l'Allemagne avant celui de Jean Jaurès, où par un angle de cènt cinquante degrés environ, ouvert vers le sud-est, le canal Saint-Martin s'unit au canal de l'Ourcq, à l'issue du Bassin de la Villette, au pied des grands batiments de la Douane, au coude des boulevards extérieurs et du métro aérien.

(p. 167)

(The taxi which carried us off including the apparatus of our dreams having crossed via the straight line of the interminable rue Lafayatte the Ninth and the Tenth Arrondissements in a South-West/North-East direction, attained at last the nineteenth Arrondissement at the precise point where the name Allemagne gave way to the name Jean-Jaurès, where at an angle of approximately one hundred and fifty degrees towards the South-East the St. Martin Canal links up with the L'Ourcq Canal, in the confluence of the La Villette Basin, at the foot of the tall buildings of the Customs and Excise, at the juncture of the outer boulevards and the overground metro.)

whilst at the other extreme from this maniacal parody of Balzac or the later Robbe-Grillet, the narrator seizes his own discourse by the throat in an act of naked aggression on his own sentence-structure as well as on the hapless reader clinging on to syntactical logic:

Ainsi …

Ah je te tiens, voilà l'ainsi qu'attendait frénétiquement ton besoin de logique, mon ami, l'ainsi satisfaisant, l'ainsi pacificateur. Tout ce long paragraphe à la fin traînait avec soi sa grande inquiétude, et les ténèbres des Buttes-Chaumont flottaient quelque part dans ton coeur. L'ainsi chasse ces ombres opprimantes, … L'ainsi se promène de porte en porte, vérifiant les verrous mis, et la sécurité des habitations isolées. L'ainsi appartient à la société des veilleurs de l'Urbaine. Et je ne parlerai pas de la bicyclette de l'ainsi.

(p. 184-5)

(Thus …

Ah, there I have you, there's the thus that your frenzied requirement for logic awaited, my friend, the comforting, soporific thus. This whole long paragraph was starting to gather its anxiety copiously about it, and the darkness of the Buttes-Chaumont Park was floating around somewhere in your heart. Thus puts these oppressive shades to flight. … Thus patrols from door to door, checking that the bolts are fastened, and that lonely dwellings are securely closed. Thus is a member of the Urban Vigilante Society. Not to mention thus's bicycle.)

The work has become a self-referential hall of mirrors openly questioning its own sources of inspiration and expression, and sabotaging its own shaping as a reflective narrative, threatening to regenerate itself in perpetuity. In Aragon's struggle between thought and the city, between dream and the number, neither opponent can win—it is language itself, exemplified in the surrealist image, which emerges bloody but unrepentant:

Le vice appelé Surréalisme est l'emploi déréglé et passionnel du stupéfiant image … car chaque image à chaque coup vous force à réviser tout l'Univers. Hâtez-vous, approchez vos lèvres de cette coupe fraîche et brûlante. Bientôt, demain, l'obscur désir de sécurité qui unit entre eux les hommes leur dictera des lois sauvages, prohibitrices. Les propagateurs du surréalisme seront roués et pendus, les buveurs d'images seront enfermés dans les chambres de miroirs. Alors les surréalistes persécutés trafiqueront à l'abri des cafés chantants leurs contagions d'images … le principe d'utilité deviendra étranger à tous ceux qui pratiqueront ce vice supérieur. L'esprit enfin pour eux cessera d'être appliqué. Ils verront reculer ses limites, il feront partager cet enivrement à tout ce que la terre compte d'ardent et d'insatisfait. Les Facultés seront désertes. On fermera les laboratoires. Il n'y aura plus d'armée possible, plus de famille, plus de métiers.

(p. 82-3)

(The vice called Surrealism is the uncontrolled, emotive use of the narcotic image … for each image every time obliges you to revise the whole Universe. Hurry to press this cool and burning cup to your lips, for soon, tomorrow, the dark desire for safety that makes men unite will inspire them to write ferocious, repressive laws. Propagators of Surrealism will be beaten and hanged, drinkers of images will be locked up in rooms lined with mirrors. Then the persecuted Surrealists will peddle under cover of cabarets their poxy images … The utility principle will become alien to all who practice this superior vice. The mind will at last cease to surround them, they will see its limits retreat, they will share out their intoxication with everyone ardent and frustrated on earth. The universities will be deserted, laboratories will have to close. The army will disappear, and the family, and work.)

The unreal cities of Breton and Aragon are a hallucinatory projection of the unreal narrators trying strenuously to write out a space in which to exist through the linguistic formulation of their desire, in the face of a city which figures as an enticing mirror of their desire, but which finally eludes their control, by affecting the shape of the image of their desire, which reacts by distorting the reality of the city, and so on ad infinitum. In which they make poetic prose fiction take the decisive inward turn which characterises modernism.

Notes

1. B. Cendrars, ‘Les Pâques à New York’, 1912. Available in Du Monde entier, Gallimard ‘Poésie’ paperback.

2. G. Apollinaire, ‘Zone’, 1914. Available in Alcools, Gallimard ‘Poésie’ paperback; or Alcools, ed. G. Rees, Athlone Press, 1975.

3. L. Aragon, Le Paysan de Paris, 1926. Page references in this chapter are to the Gallimard ‘Folio’ edition, Paris, 1978.

4. A. Breton, Nadja, 1928. Page references in this chapter are to the Gallimard ‘Folio’ edition, Paris, 1982.

5. W. Benjamin, ‘Paris: the capital of the nineteenth century’, 1935, in Charles Baudelaire, Verso Editions, 1983, discusses these arcades.

6. J. Joyce, Ulysses, 1922. Available in ‘Penguin’.

7. A. Breton, Manifestes du Surréalisme, 1924, 1930, 1942. Available in Gallimard ‘Idées’ paperback.

8. S. Freud, Jokes and their relation to the unconscious, 1905, The Interpretation of dreams, 1900, The psychopathology of everyday life, 1904. All available in Penguin.

9. L. Sterne, Tristram Shandy, 1760.

10. D. Diderot, Jacques le fataliste (written 1773, published 1796).

11. A. Gide, Les Caves du Vatican, 1914. Available in ‘Folio’ paperback.

12. A. Gide, Les Faux-monnayeurs, 1925. Available in ‘Folio’ paperback.

13. M. Proust, Du Côté de chez Swann, 1913. Available in ‘Folio’ paperback.

14. A. Rimbaud, Illuminations, 1872-5. Available in Poésies; Une Saison en enfer; Illuminations, Gallimard ‘Poésie’ paperback; or Illuminations, ed. N. Osmond, Athlone Press, 1976.

15. T. Gautier, ‘Symphonie en blanc majeur’, in Emaux et Camées, 1852, Garnier, 1954.