[In the following essay, Scaldini examines modernity in Aragon's Les Aventures de Télémaque.]

In Je n'ai jamais appris à écrire, ou les incipit Aragon informs us that he learned to read from Fénelon's didactic novel Les Aventures de Télémaque.¹ He also tells us that his own Dadaist Aventures de Télémaque, published in 1922 and “correcting” (in the Ducassian sense of the term) Fénelon's original, could only evolve “insofar as, in the decor of the Odyssey, my life, my modern preoccupations, could disrupt its development.”² Under the auspices of Ducasse's Poésies, Aragon opposes his disruptive iconoclastic text—product of what he calls the “lyric of the uncontrollable”—to one of the most tradition-bound, voluntarily derivative texts in the French canon.³ The two works bear the same title, but they invest it with radically antagonistic values. Where Fénelon seeks to establish the authority and merit of his Télémaque through its inscription in the merged classical and Christian traditions, Aragon seeks a solution of continuity with the tradition and with the literary history which perpetuates it.⁴

The modern work which will effectuate such a break with the past constitutes an isolated moment standing apart from a line of works stretching back through time to the original text, in this case the Odyssey, to which they all defer as their validating model. Each of these works retraces the journey of Telemachus in search of that authority which only Ulysses, the origin, possesses in unqualified fashion. The modern work, however, must refuse to return over hallowed ground; it must redefine its aspirations and somehow play Telemachus without a Ulysses. To pursue the spatial analogy further, the modern text, if it succeeds in achieving a solution of continuity with literary history, will define a place of its own as sole point of reference. The quest journey, with its subordination of the hero to an authorizing object of desire, will be abandoned in the achievement of a presence which abolishes the time and the distance of longing.

Aragon's Télémaque elaborates the conflict of literary history and modernity in precisely these spatial terms. The hero struggles to define a discrete space of autonomous self-hood apart from the déjà-écrit of the Odyssean journey. As a figure in the modern text, Télémaque dramatizes its will to know itself, to determine its limits and to identify the locus of its productivity. In short, his quest seeks the very possibility of the modern.

I

Télémaque is defined by his quest for Ulysses as his justification and raison d'être, as when he introduces himself to the nymph Calypso:

a young man who searches for himself throughout the world, since he pursues his own image, a father endlessly swept far from me by that same fury of tempests and ideas which places me naked at your feet.⁵

Télémaque thus assumes without question the pathetic and dutiful dramatization of the self as follower of the father. This posture is, however, soon problematized by the representation of the quest object and by the nature of the dangers which he confronts:

I travel the Universe demanding from it Ulysses engulfed perhaps in its seas, and sometimes, I rediscover in men's minds the trace of him who escapes me and of whom, goddess, if the bizarre play of passions has ever cast him up on your island, you will not hide the fate from his son Télémaque.

(p. 15)

To pursue Ulysses is to follow the combat of “trace” and engulfing abyss [l'abîme], a struggle in which Ulysses is constantly threatened with obliteration. Yet in a reversal which gives a decidedly modernist valuation to the father's struggles, Télémaque links Ulysses' traditional wisdom and the dangers of the abyss, making the “play of passions,” not the punishment inflicted on the hero, but the moving force of his own, personal destiny. “The wisdom of this hero, far from protecting him from trouble, drags him constantly into new dangers” (p. 14). Aragon suggests a portrait of Ulysses as hero of the perpetual écart. The value of the father is made to lie not in the confirmation of paternal, conjugal and civic principles but in his égarements.

The tension between the “abyss” of égarements and the “trace” of the homeward journey parallels the more amply developed conflicts between self and other, modernity and history which govern the adventures of the hero and the claim of this text to modernity. Ulysses' wanderings are not attributed to the vengeful sentiments of the gods; they are the product of passions quite possibly his own. On the other hand, the model father in pursuit of whom Télémaque traditionally seeks his own identity is here represented as a projection of the minds of others—“I rediscover in men's minds the trace of him who escapes me”—a residue or remainder of an insatiable phenomenon. Ulysses, as the image of a passionate, authoritative self-hood, is thus opposable to his trace which consists in the memory which others have of him. Furthermore, his canonical status in literary history is a function of the trace, image of both his quest journey and the literary tradition which sustains and repeats it. Ulysses's successful return, like the tradition which valorizes it, stands in opposition to more authentic but irrecoverable moments of passionate deviation.

Aragon strongly valorizes digression as such over the dutiful homeward journey. His choice of Ogygia, the isle of Calypso, as a setting is in this regard significant, for it is on Ogygia that the epic-making, homeward-driving values of Homer's Ulysses are put to a severe test. Calypso attempts to seduce him from his allegiance to hearth and throne in order to retain him there for an eternity of amorous gratification. A clear moral lesson is drawn, however, by the intervention of the gods who force Calypso to relent and allow Ulysses to leave.⁶ Fénelon capitalizes on this example in order to test his Christian hero's resistance to the temptations of the flesh.⁷ Télémaque leaves Ogygia and his mistress Eucharis only after Mentor-Minerva breaks the hold of his passion by casting him into the sea. Through his symbolic death in the ocean, Télémaque liberates himself from the slavery of passion and recovers his self-mastery. Self-possession and moral rectitude are all connected with departure from the fatal isle.

As in the works of his predecessors, Aragon makes Ogygia a place of “diversion” but its function is to undo, not merely test, the moral and metaphysical bonds which Homer and Fénelon would affirm. The island is represented as an erotic paradise within which takes place freely what is everywhere else forbidden. The description of Calypso's grotto is a convulsive landscape of fantastic forms:

The grotto of the goddess opened onto the slope of a hill. From the threshold one looked out over the sea, more disconcerting than the sudden shifts of multi-colored time between the steep-carved rocks streaming with foam, sonorous like tin and, on the back of the waves, the loud beating wings of the nightjars. Inland, there was an expanse of surprising regions: a river descended from the sky and in passing caught on trees blooming with birds; chalets and temples, unknown constructions, metal structures, brick towers, cardboard palaces, bordered like a heavy and intricate braid, lakes of honey. … The pigeon-lamps sang in the aviaries and, among the tombs, the buildings, the vineyards, animals stranger than dreams strolled slowly. The decor continued on to the horizon with geographic maps and the set-props of a Louis-Philippe room where angels blond and chaste as the daylight slept.

(pp. 15-16)

This fantastic decor is the product of the collage poetics previously elaborated in Anicet ou le panorama, roman.⁸ Collage, the arbitrary linking of customarily unassociated realities, works disruptive wonders in the everyday world. The landscape of the island reflects such a process with its institution of the apocalyptic. The sexual double-entendre of Calypso's grotto “opening” to a “penchant” [La grotte de la déesse s'ouvrait au penchant d'un coteau] graphically images the generation of a landscape/decor through the combinations of desire. The rhythm and imagery are, furthermore, those of the automatic text with its encouragement of uncensored flow and concatenation. The erotic generates bizarre mergings of natural phenomena and artificial constructions reminiscent of Max Ernst's collages and signifying its own infinite possibilities.⁹ Ogygia is the locus of desire, quite literally a “subversion,” a turning from below which brings down the heavens and gives free reign to repressed desire.¹⁰ We must give to the “adventures” of Aragon's title an erotic value which Fénelon would never admit and which is designed to undermine the moral framework of the earlier text.

Opposing the human to the divine as the erotic to the moribund, the first event in Aragon's Télémaque is the “mortalization” of the heart-broken Calypso by means of a systematic détournement of the precursor text:

Fénelon: Calypso could not console herself over Ulysses' departure. In her suffering, she bemoaned her immortality.¹¹

Aragon: Calypso like a shell on the sea shore repeated inconsolably the name of Ulysses to the foam which carries off the ships. In her suffering she forgot her immortality.

(p. 13)

In Aragon Calypso's divinity is incompatible with her passion and like Minerva, who takes on the human form of Mentor, she becomes taken with mortality and its pleasures.¹² Aragon's modification of Fénelon is noteworthy: he substitutes “forgetting her immortality” [s'oublier immortelle] for “bemoaning her immortality” [se trouver malheureuse d'être immortelle]. This susceptibility to forgetting which permits Calypso's mortalization also images the passion of the modern text to be modern, as the suppression of all that would qualify or relativize its status.

Télémaque, upon discovering the attractions of Ogygia—particularly Calypso—would abandon his quest. Being his own man for achieving a full and authoritative selfhood comes to be associated with the totalization of Ogygia as the space of self-realization. To choose the island is to choose the space of a discontinuous, absolutely autonomous entity in solution of continuity with the subordinating trace of the father. The problem is to institute égarement, to establish the écart, as an absolute and not merely as a temporary digression from a master plot. In Homer the island of Calypso is a parenthetical temptation in Ulysses' homeward journey. The gods intervene in order to break the suspension of the journey (and of the guiding, master tale) and thereby reaffirm the conjugal, paternal and civic values of the hero. But in Aragon's text these values are contradicted, and the parenthetical space is made the total of human reality.

What is suggested regarding the passionate “wisdom” of Ulysses is fully confirmed in Télémaque who opts for the enticements of Ogygia. The collage of Fénelon's title inaugurates an attempt at absolute divergence in which the master plot of the Odyssean journey and the duplicating, euhemerizing cursus ad honorem of Fénelon are subverted by an absolute valorization of the Ogygian idyll. Aragon's Aventures de Télémaque takes up the challenge of being the institution of égarement, opposing the convulsive, lyric moment of Ogygian erotics to the historicizing trace of the quest journey. While this opposition is dramatic and highly appealing to the reader who sympathizes with the hero's quest for unconditioned selfhood, it is perhaps fraught with problems not readily apparent. Mentor, whose lucidity is rivaled only by his cynicism, puts the problem clearly to Télémaque immediately enraptured by the beautiful Calypso:

If you choose to love her, Ulysses eludes you. Think about it. I see no difference between getting involved with someone and fleeing yourself. We admire in proportion to our stupidity; we cherish in proportion to our ignorance. The poppies of words lull young hearts. Beware the tales of desire. The other's desire or our own, how do we decide which is the more dangerous?

(p. 17)

Mentor does not offer Télémaque a choice between autonomous self-hood and subservience to the father, but a choice between selfhood as subservience to the father (adherence to the trace) and an ambiguous blurring of frontiers between self and other in the erotic relationship.¹³ In the textual terms which the phrase “tales of desire” invites us to adopt, the choice is between rival textualities: on the one hand, the fidelity to a tradition of forms and values; on the other, the presumably irreducible text. But this presumption is risky. Mentor's alternative to the repetitions of the canon are mysterious: he speaks only of sleep and indecision.

In his presentation of the choices, Mentor circumscribes the problem with which the text grapples. Beyond the distinctions between self and other he directs the inquiry toward the integrity of the self. He problematizes this notion and thus situates the area of concern not on the level of the relation of this text to the canon, but on the level of the text's relation to itself. As goes Télémaque so goes the text: in Homer his quest is a sub-plot which evolves within the parentheses of Ulysses' Ogygian sojourn to merge eventually and be subsumed under the renewed paternal adventures. He is the sub-plot incarnate. In raising the question of his selfhood, Aragon raises the question of his textuality, of his ability to stand independent of that master plot which is the father. Are such texts possible?

II

The subversion of Fénelon in Book I is followed in the next three books by the forgetting of the quest. It is only in Book V that Télémaque recalls in highly ambiguous fashion his original purpose: “I float on my back in time: that is what I call searching for Ulysses in my special language” (p. 71). His language is strangely conciliatory of the will to self-affirmation through negation of the father, and of the subordinating language of the quest. This attempt to reconcile, or appropriate, a contradictory language to a subversive act follows an epistemological paradox:

After all,—said Eucharis—what do you want from your father?—Knowledge of the past, spinal night, is the beginning of all knowledge. At least that's what people say. The child learns to walk in leading straps. Later he moves in all directions.

(p. 71)

The mixed metaphor “spinal night” posits the symbolic contrary of knowledge as the “backbone” or basis for all knowledge, thus invalidating all that derives from this ground. The equation of “float on my back” and “searching for Ulysses” continues the dorsal imagery and contradicts the Homeric theme of qualifying action. It conveys the value of staying, of abandoning the quest and of being present in Ogygia, the pays de cocagne of time arrived finally at its end and the road of desire at its destination. But this value of presence and self-possession is communicable only through recourse to its imagistic opposite, that which is anything but an idiosyncratic “special language: searching for Ulysses.” Self-possession and authority are functions of the father, and communicable only in terms of the father; ultimately all language is that of the father. The images of independence in this passage are ultimately paralyzing, for they withdraw the power that they offer by means of the same language in which the offer is made.

The rhetoric of this paradoxical selfhood is dramatically represented in Aragon's Dada manifesto “Moi” which Télémaque recites in book II, following his sexual initiation by Eucharis.¹⁴ Beginning “Everything that is not I is incomprehensible,” the text declares a radical solipsism not unlike that which Jacques Rivière made the cornerstone of Dada:¹⁵

Whether I find it on Pacific shores or pick it up in the lands of my existence the shell which I hold up to my ear will resound with the same voice that I will take for that of the sea and which will only be the noise of myself.

(p. 29)

The world is reduced to the status of a mere echo. Even the love object proves to be a fiction projected by the self for hygienic purposes:

There is only I in the world and if from time to time I am weak enough to believe in the existence of a woman I need only lay my head on her breast, hear my heart beat and recognize myself. Emotions are merely languages which facilitate the exercise of certain functions.

(p. 29)

Up to this point the manifesto is little more than the affirmation of a radical subjectivity putting into question all that is outside itself. Only with the closing line of the text is the final, ironic turn given to the preceding statements. “Moi” ends, or rather subverts all ending, with a modification of the opening line: “Everything that is I is incomprehensible” (p. 29). The speaker thus gives a new and quite different value to the “shell” and the love object in the text. They are no longer mere phantasmatic projections of the subject but the sole medium in which anything resembling the self may be grasped. The mere “languages,” first presented in instrumental terms as facilitating bodily functions by a passage through the other, reveal themselves to be indispensible figures, catachreses serving to feign a “proper” self which escapes language and knowing.¹⁶

The final line is a variant of the incipit, an echo of its promise of closure and the negation of it. The “moi” escapes and defies definition. Neither absolutely autonomous nor absolutely defined by the other, it is a liminal space, neither here nor there, where the fictions of selfhood and alterity are played out. The catachresis which is the self motivates an interminable movement (end-less, without a proper term) among the figures it borrows in the hope that one of them will win and sustain belief. Télémaque does not invent this textual fantasy, he grows out of it. Highly susceptible to seduction, willing to be convinced precisely because of his skepticism, he lends himself to all fictions and, in his defining trope catachresis, all fictions lend themselves to him.

Roman Jakobson, in discussing Aragon's metalanguage, links modernity and catachresis through the common process of forgetting. He cites the epigraph to Blanche ou l'oubli where this relation is established: “… everywhere the condition for change is the mind's forgetting of a first term in considering henceforth only a second term. Grammarians have given this forgetting the name catachresis, that is abuse.”¹⁷

No claim to modernity is possible if this repressive forgetting does not take place. At the same time, however, it is in the nature of catachresis, as an appropriative trope, to manifest its derivative status: that is to recount its origins. To read this figure, then, is to follow the genesis of a would-be discontinuous moment; to write it is to suppress as thoroughly as possible all traces of that enabling origin. These are the contradictory impulses of the modern text which simultaneously makes claims and demystifies them.

Fittingly enough, Télémaque is his own worst reader: “This reed lulled to sleep in its suppleness” (p. 30) as Eucharis calls him, fails to grasp the relevance of his own monologue on selfhood. The possibility of the monologue depends on this blindness; it is about his ability to be blind. This ignorance of contradiction, proclaimed and unrecognized, makes possible the tone of conviction with which Telemachus joins the contraries of “floating on (his) back in time” and “searching for Ulysses.” His blindness is that of passion, as Aragon notes after the supercilious speech: “Télémaque lays his stormy head on the breasts of Eucharis and his voice came to die like an ocean wave against these golden heights” (p. 71). The epistemological discourse is set in erotic circumstances conveyed by the imagery of the stormy sea. The situation has nothing of the calm remove we might expect in the contemplation of such matters. This epistemology is necessarily a passionate one, grounded in a rapture which allows for the forgetting of contradictions in the leap toward the object of desire—in this case, autonomous selfhood. Télémaque resolves nothing here: he merely asserts the desire and claims its fulfillment in a wave of passion. It is also through the work of passion that the precarious suspension of contradictions is broken down.

Book V begins with Mentor recalling Télémaque to his quest and criticizing his susceptibility to the enticements of Calypso: “Have you forgotten my teachings, said Mentor to Télémaque, to so grieve the imaginary deaths by the announcement of which the crafty Calypso thinks to keep you on her isle?” (p. 77). While Mentor, as the nihilistic proponent of the “Système Dd,”¹⁸ is far from defending truth from falsehood, he is adept at revealing the illusions in which most desires or beliefs are grounded. He reads Télémaque as Echo reads Narcissus, in the most redundant and ironically repetitive way. His role is that of ironic mirror: he throws back to his protégé the image of his illusions and contradictions. It is against precisely this redundance that Télémaque revolts and in so doing reveals the impossibility of his goals and the productivity of the narrative.

In a desperate attempt to suppress Mentor's ironic voice Télémaque imagines a scenario in which he replaces Mentor as Calypso's lover. In order to accomplish this, he projects upon an indifferent Mentor a passion for Calypso and evokes with some effort a passion of his own for the nymph, a passion in which he soon comes to believe fully.¹⁹ However, a series of misunderstandings has Calypso failing to recognize Télémaque's strategically induced passion which in frustration he satisfies upon the passing Eucharis, only to be approached immediately afterward by Calypso to whom he cannot at that moment respond. Humiliated and frustrated he flees Ogygia to the realm of the procurer Neptune, where he experiences a moment of personal and erotic plenitude:

I have met woman my malady. Exclusive domain of touching, this body ignored by the eyes occupied only with the hair which grows during the lovemaking, this body stretches out and stiffens against my body, will to contact. … The proper word, opened flood-gate, reveals the attention of the male, the precise concern, the vital point. …

(p. 84)

The language of the passage images a culmination: Télémaque would seem to have arrived somewhere at last; to have “made contact” as the tactile imagery of the passage emphasizes. The “proper word” and the stress on vitality and precision suggest the presence and fullness which have been his objectives all along.

The imagery lays claim to a presence which the structure of the episode belies. The realm of Neptune replaces (repetition of place and catachresis) Ogygia as an erotic locus to which the would-be modern hero escapes. But the style in which this new realm is described merely echoes the convulsive lyric of the earlier passage in which Calypso's domain is presented. The statement, for example, that in Neptune's world Telemaque “came into the knowledge of perpetual pleasure” (p. 83) is possible only if the same claim, made for the effect of Calypso's domain, is forgotten or suppressed. Much has indeed been forgotten in this scene, including the comedy of errors and illusions ironic history-making and history-writing power of his own modern acts. His only recourse is palinode.

Palinode is an act of suppression designed to establish a solution of continuity with the traces of past actions and to assert a new beginning which takes itself for an origin.²⁰ As such it is the essential moment of catachresis, the fundamental trope of modernity. Every gesture of self-realization reveals itself to be a fiction of origination masking a subordinating historicity. Télémaque cannot read himself and still be modern. He must imagine himself a presence if he is to repress all that binds him in a time and in a space distant from the object of desire.

III

Télémaque never seems to dominate the account of his adventures. He is overburdened by the inescapable presence of his father, by the persistent emergence of the quest form, by his ignorance and by his potential (the most debilitating form of flattery). Everything that makes him Télémaque limits and conditions him: he is defined by topoi and a victim of them. As such his adventures lead us back beyond character; they are emblems of a textuality of which he is an outgrowth, a symptom, and not the origin. This is the lesson of “Moi” and, indeed, of the final episode where the characters Mentor and Télémaque are destroyed, in what seems to be a movement of the text toward contact on a more fundamental ground with its own modernity. This regressive movement would deny the validity of the Télémaque-Mentor combination as the ultimate image of its own textual operations.

With the destruction of these characters there is a final palinodic moment of great release. The novel closes with a negative Genesis, a cosmic undoing in which we are invited to see the return to some primal, repressed chaos:

Snickering birds passed above the cadavers
whistling danse tunes. The winds rose with joy
and combed their hair with the teeth of the mountains. …
The waters were no longer gathered and coherent but
spread throughout the universe. The sky, delirium
fabric, rent and showed the indecent nudity of
the planets.
                    The firmament arrayed itself with the sex of the
stars. The vault of days and nights became flesh
and those men who had survived the catastrophes died
of desire before the lewd rump suspended above
their heads. The nebula roamed in the laughing
landscapes. The distaffs danced while losing their
silver hair. The great rotary presses fucked
on the stony beaches. The steam-hammers strolled
nicely in the squares and while the metals caressed
each other screaming in the plains of pleasure,
on his tenderness horses the Lord God burst out
laughing like a madman.

(pp. 100-101)

Mentor, Télémaque, their story and its ironies are swept away as tiresome creatures who fail to achieve the power to which the text aspires. It is as if, at last, the text had broken through to a realm beyond juvenile bravado and disabused cynicism. The insane God images the Dada logos of the discourse beyond contradiction. The “Fin” printed immediately afterward would be the beginning of a radically other discourse: a new writing is inaugurated as the preliminary work of annihilation is completed.

The insane God is an undecidable, paradoxical figure who cannot satisfy the reader anxious to conclude, or the modern writer anxious to be, finally, modern.²¹ One simply cannot end there: witness the suppressed epilogue with which Télémaque was to end until Aragon, which gave rise to the desire, the satisfaction of which is now put forward as an ontological triumph. Ogygia, the privileged space which invited and made possible an absolute deviation or abandonment of the paternal “trace” has in fact generated such a “trace,” provoking a renewal of the quest journey in Telemaque's flight toward the experience of the “proper.” Thus out of the locus of desire, the erotic abyss, comes its opposite, the trace of a narrative which denies the claim of the abyss. What we were inclined to oppose, we must now join in a generative interchange. Télémaque returns to Ogygia to find that his escapade has not produced the desired solution of continuity. A son who resembles him—“heredity, that other remorse of matter” (p. 87)—and Mentor who persists in recalling the original, defining quest journey are there to manifest the undeniable vestiges of all would-be discontinuous moments. Son and father are made present to the hero as projections of the self which qualify its autonomy and plunge it back into time and relativity. Télémaque reacts to this inescapable temporality by the murder of his son and the abdication of the throne of Ithaca:

He [the child] soared out over the sea and crashed down out of sight so as not to soil the landscape. …

If that is your opinion on the question of inheritances—I don't think you can pretend to the throne of Ithaca. And Ulysses?

—My poor man, are you still on that?

Come have a drink.

Ridiculous ups and downs, made-up stories crowd at the windows and press their noses absurdly against the window-panes.

(pp. 87-88)

Through this palinode Télémaque would suppress the evidence, both prospective and retrospective, of his historicity and consequent relativity. Significantly, the gesture is accompanied by a derisive representation of narrative. Book VI trails off from this point in a meandering sequence of coqs-à-l'âne intended to empasize the rejection of narrative fiction as a historicizing, cliché-ridden mode. But the narrative impulse is derided here more as a reaction to its inescapable regeneration than as an undesirable and dispensable option. In returning to Ogygia, Télémaque is forced to confront the for reasons which are not clear, eliminated it.²² The significance of this text is perhaps to be ascertained not in the reason for its suppression but in the manner in which it undoes the pseudoconclusion which it follows. We are given an advertisement:

Wanted: enterprising young men intent on never working again, handy with weapons (revolver, knife, rifle) for adventure of every kind. Alternative reversals and comforts. Certain death within short time. Inquire at offices of newspaper.²³

The epilogue turns out to be a representation of beginnings: a new race of Télémaques is born here from the ashes of the recently destroyed world. But no progress has been made and the next apocalypse is seen to be already scheduled. The epilogue stands to the Aventures de Télémaque as both the statement of its most profound desires and as their spatially signified denial. The text remains outside the limits of the “aventures” proprement dites and mimics sarcastically the will to absolute adventure while encouraging it.

Les Aventures de Télémaque is a text which dramatizes its own productivity through a constant subversion of its own closure devices. The text escapes itself in the form of utopian illusions, invariably displacing its core and raison d'être in an unsatisfying productivity. A marvelous study in literary brinksmanship, Télémaque cultivates a liminal poetics where the production of the text is the fascinating negative indicator of that which it approaches but cannot be. In the generative reciprocity of trace and abyss we have the image of the modern predicament, the text describing the limits of its own inadequacy and calling it home.

Notes

1. Aragon, Je n'ai jamais appris à écrire, ou les incipit (henceforth Les incipit), (Geneva: Albert Skira, 1969), p. 19. Fénelon's novel was first published in 1699 as the Suite au quatrième livre de l'Odyssée d'Homère, ou les Aventures de Télémaque fils d'Ulyssee. All references, unless otherwise indicated, will be to Les Aventures de Télémaque (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1968). All translations are my own.

2. Aragon, Les incipit, pp. 20-21. Also see “La peinture au défi,” in Les Collages (Paris: Hermann, 1965), pp. 59 ff.

3. Aragon, Les incipit, p. 21.

4. Sainte Beuve cites as the primary virtue of Fénelon's Télémaque its fusion of these traditions. “Lettres et opuscules inédites de Fénelon,” in Causeries de lundi, II (Paris: Garnier-Frères, n.d.), p. 20. Fénelon's integrative modernism is obviously not to the liking of Aragon who actively seeks the rupture which Sainte-Beuve praises Fénelon for avoiding. For the problematic of an anti-historical modernity, see Paul de Man “Literary History and Literary Modernity,” in Blindness and Insight (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), pp. 142-165.

5. Aragon, Les Aventures de Télémaque (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), p. 14. Henceforth all quotations will be from this edition unless otherwise indicated and will be followed by page references in parentheses. All translations are my own.

6. Homer, The Odyssey, V, 1-42.

7. Fénelon, Les aventures de Télémaque, pp. 187-188.

8. Yvette Gindine (Aragon: prosateur surrealiste [Geneva: Droz, 1966], p. 41), has pointed out that this landscape recalls the poetic “jeu de constructions” which Rimbaud plays with the Parisian landscape in Anicet ou le panorama, roman (Paris: Gallimard, 1921), Ch. I. There the enigmatic Arthur introduces the hero to the pleasures of modernist subversion by means of a combinatory rhetoric of collage. In the random concatenations and associations along the syntagma of which the “Passage des Cosmoramas” (forerunner of the “Passage de l'Opéra”) is the metaphor, we are given the imagistic constructs of desire to which the modern subject gives free play. For a general review of Aragon's writings on collage see Wolfgang Babilas, “Le Collage dans l'oeuvre critique et littéraire d'Aragon,” Revue des Sciences Humaines, 151 (July-September 1973), 329-54.

9. See Max Ernst, Au-delà de la peinture (Paris: Cahiers d'Art, 1937), passim, and Aragon, “Max Ernst, peintre des illusions,” in Les Collages, pp. 27-33.

10. The landscape of the island anticipates the program of moral and metaphysical subversion which Aragon establishes in “La peinture au défi.” There he argues for a return of the merveilleux to the everyday world from which Christianity had banished it. With Christian morality came a repression of bodily instinct necessitating the creation of fantasy worlds where desire could find expression: “Everything which could no longer be expressed in the monkish universe passed into another world, that of the supernatural. In this way the demons, the giants and the fairies were born, and to shelter them, a vast forest began to grow” (p. 37).

11. Fénelon, Les Aventures de Télémaque, p. 3. See Gindine's comparison of these passages in Aragon: prosateur surréaliste, pp. 39-40.

12. Mentor indulges freely in the erotic possibilities of Ogygia. In spite of his divine origins he dies in the final scene (p. 100) when struck by a boulder which catches him in mortal form and thus susceptible to death. He is at that time indulging himself in the all-too-human pleasure of having the last word.

13. A young player delivers a moving discourse on his susceptibility to influence in the play “Les Aventures de Télémaque” which a bored and incomprehending Télémaque attends in Book III. This speech was initially published in Littérature 13 (May 1920) under the title “Révélations sensationnelles,” 21-22.

14. This text was first published in Littérature, 13 (May 1920), 1-2.

15. Jacques Rivière, “Reconnaissance à Dada,” Nouvelle Revue Française (August 15, 1920), pp. 216-237.

16. Fontanier defines catachresis as follows: “Catachresis, in general, consists of the attribution of a sign already attributed to a first idea, to a new idea which did not have any, or no longer had one of its own in its language.” Pierre Fontanier, Les figures du discours (Paris: Flammarion, 1968), p. 213. Also see Gérard Genette, “Figures,” in Figures (Paris: Seuil, 1966), pp. 211, 213.

17. Roman Jakobson, “Le métalangage d'Aragon,” L'Arc, 53 (1973), p. 81.

18. Mentor is the grand orator of the Dada contradiction and delivers a major manifesto in the manner of the Manifeste Dada 1918 where he elaborates the “Système Dd”: “The System Dd has two letters, has two faces, has two backs (“a deux dos”) admits all contradictions, does not admit any contradiction is without contradiction contradiction itself, life, death, life, life, life, let interested parties beware” (p. 35).

19. Télémaque attempts to force opposition from the other as a way of disguising the opposition within himself. The other to whom he reacts is always himself, even in desire: “Télémaque, already the plaything of his imagination hastened too slowly for his own desire” (p. 80). Although his desire is proper to him, it originates in the imagination which relates to him as a subject does to an object. Relations with others are pseudo-relations; they merely “give ground” to a duality within the hero. As Mentor observes this game of mirrors, he counsels Télémaque on the appropriate rhetorical studies: “learn to speak for one hour on metalleptic catachresis and perhaps then you will no longer speak lightly” (p. 78). Naturally Télémaque refuses to heed this advice and performs catachresis instead of reading it.

20. See Richard J. Scaldini, “‘A quoi pensez-vous?’: Reflections on Reading (in) the Early Prose of Louis Aragon,” Dada/Surrealism, 7 (1977), 39-41 for a discussion of palinode and the rejection of narrative.

21. The role of the insane God here is similar to that of the Sorcière in Rimbaud's “Après le déluge” of which this final scene is in part a pastiche. The Sorcière figures a poem out of touch with the experience, the diluvian-modern moment, which generated it. At the same time the mystery of this alienated moment spurs the desire to recapture that moment once again. Like the insane God of Aragon's apocalypse the Sorcière appears at a palinodic moment of destruction and beginning again when Rimbaud calls back the flood waters.

22. Jean Ristat, in his notes—“hors d'oeuvres”—to Aragon's Oeuvre poétique (Paris: Livre Club Diderot, 1974), I, 371, n. 43, leaves open the reason for this emendation, suggesting only that the break-up of the Paris Dada group could explain the omission of a text bearing an epigraph from Tristan Tzara's Première aventure céleste de Monsieur Antipyrine.

23. Aragon, L'oeuvre poétique, I, 330.