Scholars are aware of the pervasive presence of intertextuality in the work of Louis Aragon. The poet himself defined one aspect of the intertextual process—what he calls collage—in his thought and in the creation of his works. Allied to collage as an esthetic phenomenon is Aragon's vision of literature, especially the literature of the past, viewed as a cultural phenomenon. His cultural vision, which dates from the surrealist years, can be seen in the interviews that he gave to D. Arban and J. Ristat:

il s'était au cours de 1921 pratiqué une rupture entre les dadaïstes et nous, c'est-à-dire ceux-là qui sont devenus nommément les surréalistes en 1923 … sur la question même de l'activité littéraire. En particulier à cause du refus de Breton, d'Eluard, de moi-même, de Soupault, de jeter par-dessus bord du point de vue pur et simple de la table rase, ce qu'on appelle aujourd'hui l'héritage littéraire … [les] surréalistes, les gens de ce siècle qui se sont le plus attachés à redonner vie véritable à des oeuvres du passé abusivement accaparées par l'académisme et l'université, qui ont rappelé l'attention sur des écrivains abusivement rayés par les modes et l'enseignement de l'attention des générations nouvelles. …¹

Je me souviens avoir été invité une fois, peu de temps après la dernière guerre, et j'y suis allé innocemment, à l'École polytechnique où les jeunes gens de la génération d'alors m'ont profondément méprisé parce que je parlais des chansons de geste et des poèmes du Moyen Age. … eux pensaient que ça ne valait rien, que ce n'était pas intéressant, et que mieux valait n'en pas parler. J'étais d'un avis différent, je le suis encore. Pour moi, la tradition française passe, comme on le sait, par divers auteurs méprisés, passés sous silence.²

The cultural and the esthetic function together. Aragon's vision of the past is concretized, given flesh so to speak, through the functioning of collage; and he makes the intertextual process function by incorporating material from the tradition. I propose to examine how the phenomenon works in three of Aragon's most successful long poems: Brocéliande, Les Poètes, and Le Fou d'Elsa.³

In Aragon's great Resistance poem Brocéliande (1942),⁴ the reality of the German occupation is projected onto a legendary medieval past, derived from the troubadours and from Arthurian romance. Aragon chooses a medieval theme in order to delude Vichy censors (his “contraband” corresponds to Occitan trobar clus) and because the Middle Ages offers Frenchmen of his generation examples of deeds in arms and of respect for woman absent from modern French bourgeois culture and from the recent pseudo-heroism of the Germans. This genuine medieval chivalry was embodied in works of literature invented by Frenchmen, part of France's cultural heritage offered as a gift to other countries, such as Germany.

Although there are allusions to French texts and authors in Brocéliande—Marie de France, Thibaut de Champagne, Arnaut de Mareuil, the epic Huon de Bordeaux—for conscious textual imitation, Aragon turns to Dante's Commedia. Brocéliande comprises a series of alternating cantos in twentieth-century free verse and in terza rima. Aragon chooses Dante in order to underscore how the innocent Celtic Other World is transformed by Hitler into an inferno (“Du fin fond de l'enfer Soleil nous t'appelons” p. 334), and because Dante honored French literature in the De vulgari eloquentia and praised an Occitan, Arnaut Daniel, above all modern poets, the only personage in the Commedia to speak a language other than Italian.

In Canto 5 (pp. 339-41) the forest of Aragon's Brocéliande, narrated in terza rima, subsumes, grows upon, and ingests the wood of the suicides, Canto 13 of the Inferno. Dante tells of warped boughs and poisonous thorns, monstrous stunted bushes in knots, nocchi, (v. 89), which are the bodies of the suicides in hell. Their leaves are torn apart by loathsome harpies, creatures with human necks and faces but clawed feet, piè con artigli (v. 14). The damned are tortured by these harpies, by other creatures, men and beasts, who rush through the wood tearing leaves and causing fractures, rotture (v. 132), and by Dante the Pilgrim, who himself mangles a twig. The twig belongs to Pier delle Vigne, the Emperor Frederick II's chancellor, a just man (giusto [v. 72]) faithful to his lord; “già mai non ruppi fede/al mio segnor” (vv. 74-75). Nonetheless, by committing suicide he was unjust to himself; and, according to the Dantean vision, since Pier and the others uprooted the soul from the body, an unnatural act, their souls are imprisoned in a strange body, a vegetable form beneath them in the order of nature, until Doomsday, when their earthly flesh will be restored but only to be hung from the branches of these trees.

Dante's mesta/selva (vv. 105-06), pianta silvestra, (v. 100), and alberi strani (v. 15) are metamorphosed by Aragon into an arbre étrangement triste (p. 339), which twists (tord) its vegetable arms into the equivalent of the Dantean knot. The tree is bound by chains of birds. Dante's harpies also appear in Canto 4, as clouds of locust-birds with griffe labourante and dents (p. 337), who bite the land of France. They are an image of German war planes, in particular the Stuka dive bomber, that created havoc during the Exode. On one level, Aragon's trees imprison people in much the way that Merlin was entombed in the Lancelot-Grail Cycle. However, since “Ce n'est pas Merlin qui est prisonnier” (p. 339), this is a symbol or an allegory for young men of the Resistance hiding in the Maquis and hanged from trees or, tied to wooden stakes, shot by a firing squad. Hence the “blessures du tronc” (p. 339) far more serious than the rotture of leaves in the Commedia, for it is not a poet-pilgrim who tears one twig but “d'atroces bûcherons” (p. 339) armed with axes and a bourreau (p. 340) who come to martyrize the trees. These are the Nazis or their French collaborator allies. They martyrize not one great politician, as in Dante, but a host of anonymous freedom fighters, no less idealistic, just, and faithful than was Pier delle Vigne, who all seek glory (gloire [p. 340]), all sons of the motherland, as Pier was the feudal son of his emperor.

However, Aragon repudiates the Christian fatalism of the Commedia. His men are not suicides. They are murdered by the bûcherons yet accept death gladly. They fall willingly and nobly, a sacrifice for the good. Because their deeds are not unnatural they can be reborn. In poetic terms, their blood will fertilize the earth, and with an Apocalyptic shower of fire, a storm from heaven, a new harvest will be reaped and a better world created. For the trees will be cloven, flowers torn apart, the sky itself rent asunder, and, as in Caesarian birth, men will leap out of the bark:

L'étoile neigera le long des paraboles
Orage des héros orage souhaité
Grande nuit en plein jour cymbales des symboles
Se déchire la fleur pour que naisse le fruit
Le ciel éclatera d'un bruit de carambole
Et l'homme sortira de l'écorce à ce bruit.

(p. 341)

Whereas Dante's men are damned, Aragon's will be saved. And their Apocalypse will occur not in a distant future; for on the trees of Brocéliande we find “lorsque la nuit sur la forêt descend / L'INRI d'une défaite à son front de ramures” (p. 340). These trees are the crosses of innocent martyrs, images of Christ. Using Dante's own allegorical method, Aragon assimilates his freedom fighters to Christ, King of the Jews (Jesus Nazarenus Rex Iudaeorum), mocked, tortured, defeated yet who rose from the dead to triumph over his persecutors:

Est-ce la nuit du Christ est-ce la nuit d'Orphée
Qu'importe qu'on lui donne un nom de préférence
Celui qui ressuscite est un enfant des fées.

(p. 332)

In Dante the trees cannot speak. We hear only their sighs, guai (v. 22), the Harpies bring lamenti (v. 15) upon them, and Pier delle Vigne tells his story only when the Pilgrim breaks a twig. Speech is associated with violence; words hiss forth with the flow of blood, “si de la scheggia rotta usciva insieme / parole e sangue” (vv. 43-44). Indeed, Virgil has the Pilgrim wound the trees intentionally, for otherwise he would never have discovered or believed the secret of the forest. In Brocéliande also there is silence. A tree sighs, gémit (p. 339); names are throttled in the woods or murmured in silence. Aragon tells us that the Collaborators deny the truth of the Resistance and execute Communists in secret, so that no one will know, so that even their memory will perish. However, at the moment of death they cry out ton nom (p. 341) under the hail of bullets. Ton nom? Is it France the mother of men? Mary the Mother of God? Marie de France, the French mother of poetry? Perhaps all three. And the nightingale on the sepulchre, bird of love and of charity, symbol of the preacher of God and of the poet of love, “le centurion veut en vain l'étouffer” (p. 331); he shall sing on the branch the liberation night of love. And he shall be Louis Aragon:

Une clarté d'apocalypse embrasera le noir silence
Quand au scandale des taillis le rossignol
Lance
L'étincelle de chant qui répond au ciel incendié de son signal
Ah que je vive assez pour être ce chanteur.

(p. 346)

Pier delle Vigne was a poet, Virgil a poet, Dante a poet; and Aragon as speaker, prophet, and witness, shall sing for his age the patriotism and commitment, the passion and fury, of his predecessors. The Speaker in Brocéliande, Aragon's persona, intervenes obtrusively in the action. He does not forget, he does not keep silent. Although perhaps he will not live to see the great night, he shall sing of it like the watchman in a medieval alba. Replacing Merlin, replacing Dante, he also contributes to the good fight. Heroism is embodied in sapientia as well as in fortitudo. Although speech can be throttled, speech can also be shouted forth. And it is the duty of the French poet, son of a French Merlin, Arnaut Daniel, and Marie de France, to shout forth the young men's names, to tell the truth, and to call for victory.

Les Poètes (1960, revised 1969)⁵ is no doubt Aragon's most personal, most esoteric book of verse. It is metapoetry, a sustained series of meditations on the creative process and the poet's own evolution as a creator. These meditations also concern the poets Aragon has known and loved, the friends he has cherished, and the books he has read.

The intertextual richness of such a work is scarcely calculable. The Prologue alone (pp. 159-67) names almost thirty writers ranging from medieval Persia (Nizāmī, Hāfiz, Sa'dī, Omar Kayam) to the Europe of romanticism (Hölderlin, Pushkin, Desbordes-Valmore, Nerval, Aubanel) to Aragon's own contemporaries (Machado and Lorca). Other poets appear later in the book. Special attention, whole sections, are devoted to Cervantes, Desnos, Mayakovsky, and the Czech surrealist and communist Nezval. Aragon is a master of parody and pastiche. He recreates in French the style of the Spanish romancero to evoke the death of Machado; he pastiches the Molière comédie-ballet in one scene, seventeenth-century burlesque in another. he writes in the style of Desnos on Desnos, and in the style of Verlaine, Carco, and Apollinaire to evoke the Paris of their epoch. “La nuit des jeunes gens” (pp. 265-88), in which three poets, overheard by a fourth, discourse on poetry while sauntering through Paris, recalls Aragon's own surrealist prose, Anicet and Le Paysan de Paris, and also recreates for our time the mood and temper of La Fontaine's Songe de Vaux.

Beyond this, Les Poètes is governed by a deeper, more basic pattern of intertextuality, Aragon's book, “theatrical” in appearance, assimilated by the reviewers to a play or an opera, begins with a Prologue, in which an actor is presented in a manner to create Verfremdungseffekt; the actor then sings a lyrical passage directed to and concerning the sky, stars, and the firmament. The following section, entitled “La tragédie des poètes” (pp. 169-217), concerns first an old man in his room, frustrated over the shortness of life and his incapacity to satisfy his intellectual desires; second, a young man, also in his room, also struggling with fate and the creative spirit; finally a beautiful woman in love. The remaining sections contain nocturnal and theatrical-visionary scenes of magic and conclude with glorification, indeed apotheosis, of a woman. My reading of this sequence leads me to propose that it is grounded in, and takes its inspiration from, the greatest single artistic masterpiece of modern times, Goethe's Faust (with overtones from Marlowe and Gounod). Aragon finds in Goethe's text the archetype of man's tragedy and triumph as a rebel, the notion of the creative spirit ever striving, ever consecrating the self to meaningful activity, ever rising higher in the quest. Goethe's words, “Es irrt der Mensch, solang' er strebt” (v. 317) and “Die Tat ist alles, nichts der Ruhm” (v. 10188), for that matter Faust's pact with the devil:

Werd' ich beruhigt je mich auf ein Faulbett legen,
So sei es gleich um mich getan'. …
Werd' ich zum Augenblicke sagen:
Verweile doch! du bist so schön!
Dann magst du mich in Fesseln schlagen,
Dann will ich gern zugrunde gehn!

(vv. 1692-93, 1699-702)

become in Aragon's mind the situation of all poets and the condition according to which all art has to be created.

Fascinating indeed is the way the Faustian vision is transformed under the Frenchman's pen. Goethe's Prologue in Heaven recounts a dialogue between God and Mephistopheles. Neither exists in Aragon's universe. His persona, his speaking voice, is both god and devil, “Je suis l'Archange et Lucifer” (p. 166); his anguished inner debate with himself is the modern equivalent of the romantic confrontation of Faust with “der Geist, der stets verneint!” (v. 1338) yet who also ‘Die stets das Böse will und stets das Gute schafft’ (v. 1336). Significantly, in the Prologue Goethe's light of the sun, God's day, the glory of the firmament—the imagery of Sonne and Tag—are transformed by Aragon into a night vigil, ce soir (p. 161), the time of the Unconscious, the irrational, of an esthetic invention, in which a lone poet contemplates the stars, stars in the pantheon of verse. For in his firmament are to be found not angels praising God but images of the poets he loves, men like himself whom he contains within himself. He praises them; they praise no one.

Then, the old artist gives way to a younger one, and old creation to a renewed vision, not by a pact with the devil or a visit to a witch's kitchen, but uniquely with the cry “Je parlerai de ma poésie” (p. 179). The quest for knowledge, power, and love is reduced, fused, into a poet's obsession with his art. In place of the innocent Gretchen, seduced by a dashing hero whom she adores, we find a poet, Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, an older woman formerly seduced by a dashing hero she adored and still cherishes years afterwards. Unlike Gretchen, Desbordes-Valmore survives her loss, joys in her passion, and lives on, albeit in suffering, to love and create. The various magical theatrical spectacles in the Faust, grotesque and fantastic—the Prologue at the Theater, the Witch's Kitchen, Oberon and Titania's Golden Wedding, the Emperor's hall—become, in Aragon's intertext, a surrealist dream-play concerning the torture of Prometheus the poet, benefactor of mankind, and a surrealist magical spectacle, grotesque and fantastic—“Spectacle à la lanterne magique”—where Goethe's mock-resurrection of the Shakespearean Oberon and Titania and of classical Paris and Helen are parodied by a fantastic union of Julienne and Jean-Julien, “Les amants de la place Dauphine” (pp. 230-36), underscored by a refrain-couplet from the French neoclassical burlesque poet Charles Dassoucy. The Walpurgisnacht scenes, “In die Traumund Zaubersphäre” (v. 3871), inspire “La nuit des jeunes gens” (pp. 265-88), where poets debate the magic of poetry, not in the Brocken, not in the Pharsalian Fields, but in the magical, dream-inspired Paris of the 1920s. Finally, Faust's marriage to Helen of Troy, the wedding of the German medieval and classical Greek spirits, giving birth to issue, their son Euphorion, who, however, dies and whose death causes Helen to disappear, is transformed by Aragon into his own concrete, enduring marriage to Elsa Triolet, which gives rise to artistic creation in prose and verse that will also endure. Like Gretchen, like Goethe's Mothers and the Ewig-Weibliche, Elsa leads Aragon onward and upward, he sees the world through her eyes, she is his guiding spirit. Because of her, he strives and creates. And, leading a politically-oriented social existence (like Faust in his later years, who cried: “Solch ein Gewimmel möcht' ich sehn, / Auf freiem Grund mit freiem Volke stehn!” [vv. 11579-80]), committed to bringing the light of truth to the City of Light, Aragon receives from Elsa alone the forgiveness and apotheosis that Faust ultimately attains through the intercession of Gretchen, the Mater gloriosa, and assorted women saints.

Faust serves then as a major intertextual nexus (fabric, structure) that shapes our reading of Les Poètes. In addition, Aragon has inserted in his poem collages—pre-texts—of briefer scope, that serve as mises en abyme and textes générateurs. The most important of these is a lyric by Mayakovsky, translated of course by Elsa Triolet:

La nuit
                              a imposé au ciel
                                                  une servitude de tant
                                                                                et tant
                                                                                                                        d'étoiles
C'est l'heure
                              où l'on se lève et où l'on parle
aux siècles
                              à l'histoire
                                                            à l'univers

(p. 304)

Aragon claims that he would exchange this poem he loves and all of Mayakovsky's opus for one term in the Russian language, revealed to him also by Mayakovsky, a functional image, the hare as light dancing on the wall. Nonetheless, in spite of his willingness to sacrifice poetry for poetry and a metaphor for a metaphor—one collage for another—Aragon loses and sacrifices nothing. He keeps both the image and the poem. For Mayakovsky's pre-text in ten brief Futurist lines states the themes and motifs—night time, the sky or heaven, the stars, poetry, the poet's duty to speak to history and to posterity—that the Frenchman will amplify in two hundred thirteen pages of intertext. Aragon does not renounce the Mayakovsky verses; he devours, assimilates, and creates from them his grandiose meditation on the creative process which is also, in fine, a meditation on Mayakovsky, one among so many poets in Les Poètes cut down in their youth by a hostile world.

If Argaon states his readiness to lose Mayakovsky, this is because in his private mythological universe, Mayakovsky does not exist in and for himself but for another. On November 5, 1928, Aragon met Mayakovsky; on November 6, 1928, he met Elsa. For Aragon, time B.E. (before Elsa) is the past; time A.D. (anno dominae) is the present. Mayakovsky is a sort of John the Baptist who preaches in the name of the Savior who comes after. Thus, in Les Poètes, Mayakovsky appears in the section “Le discours à la première personne” (pp. 293-325). The section immediately following is entitled “Elsa entre dans le poème” (pp. 326-48). In this section the Speaker keeps Elsa awake at night (he is jealous of the men she dreams about when asleep: the anguish that accompanies creation corresponds to the pangs of jealousy) by explaining to her the genesis and composition of his verses: “Je lui montre la trame du chant” (pp. 334-45). Les Poètes contains its own criticism. The critic is, of course, Aragon himself but also, presumably, Elsa. He points out to her, in Les Poètes, that one of the poems in Les Poètes, the one in which he the Speaker assumes the role of St. John the Apostle at Patmos, hiding in a cave with his eagle, is inspired by and can only be understood in conjunction with Elsa's novel Roses à crédit, in which the heroine, Martine, is compared to a bat beating its wings, imprisoned in its (her) room. Aragon also learned from Elsa that bats navigate through a system of radar located in their tongues. The text of the lyric in question does indeed reveal a paradoxical juxtaposition between or fusion of the speaking personae St. John and Martine, between eagles and bats, and between Patmos and Paris's Fourteenth Arrondissement:

Je suis Jean du Calvaire qui fus témoin de la Croix et du supplice
Est-ce que je puis me taire dans cette caverne où j'ai juste assez
D'espace pour meurtrir ma tête aux parois comme font les insensés
                                                            A qui souffrir paraît une injustice
Je suis l'Oiseau prisonnier de son malheur qui se débat aux barreaux
Incompréhensibles de sa cage et s'y déchire à plaisir les ailes
Je suis l'Oiseau qui ne pouvant comprendre une restriction du ciel
                                                  Se fait à plaisir son propre bourreau
Oú donc ai-je vu déjà se produire une telle métamorphose
C'était une jeune femme et non pas un vieux carnassier comme moi
Un immeuble neuf au vingtième siècle une histoire de tant par mois
                                                            Dans la décomposition des roses
Qu'est-ce qu'il me prend de Pathmos à tourner vers la Porte d'Orléans
Mes yeux nocturnes traversant au loin les espaces anachroniques
C'est que le malheur en tout temps partout bat des mêmes ailes paniques
                                                                      Pris dans le piège pareil du néant.

Either Aragon as Speaker reveals to his readers (and to Elsa) the actual genesis of his text or he has reshaped the lyric to conform to an idea derived from his private domestic myth. In any case, Elsa's novel is, within the fictional world of Les Poètes, the texte générateur for one six-page lyrical passage of Les Poètes, and perhaps for much more. After all, Martine's bat and St. John's eagle are birds, and the bird is surely the dominant image, the arch-image, of Les Poètes as a whole. Elsa's and Martine's bat, St. John's eagle, Jove's eagle that tears at Prometheus, Poe's raven, the Narrator who soars into the sky, who is both a flying angel and flying Lucifer in rebellion—these are figures for the creative process, for the pain, suffering, exaltation, and liberation of the poet, for making words and images. Aragon contains his poets within him. To give them birth, he tears open his belly, wounding himself. But he does not contain Elsa Triolet. She possesses him, she gives birth to him, she creates him, for she is God. He is to her as a creature to the Creator, he belongs to her. By engendering him, she is said to engender and generate all his verse, including the text in which they both appear, Les Poètes.

It is not easy for a poet or a lover to maintain such a program and retain his sanity. Which brings us to Le Fou d'Elsa (1963),⁶ perhaps Aragon's most sustained effort in verse. During the height of the Algerian War he tells of the Fall of Granada in 1492, lamenting that a superior, cultured, Muslim civilization was destroyed by Castilian barbarians (the ancestors of General Franco and of French pieds noirs), thus that Islam never had a chance to flourish in Western Europe. In the surrealist tradition he also renews the conventions of fin' amor by having his protagonist and alter ego, a fictional seventy-year-old Arab-Andalusian poet of the fifteenth century, fall in love with Elsa Triolet, whom we know to be Aragon's flesh and blood wife in twentieth-century France. As in Les Poètes, Aragon's persona—in this case the Fool—adores an inaccessible deity who has created him, through whose eyes he views the universe. Out of love for her, he goes insane and loses his identity, even his name. He is known as “The Fool”—both madman and jester—and, as jester, as the sacred fool of his society, partakes of wisdom, sancta stultitia. Aragon's hero is the embodiment of scandal—daring to love in such a manner—and the prophet and witness to a new order, a future dominated by the Ewig-Weibliche, where:

L'avenir de l'homme est la femme …
Je vous dis que l'homme est né pour
La femme …
On verra le couple et son règne
Neiger comme les orangers.

(pp. 184-85)

Most important of all, like the protagonist of Les Poètes, like the Speaker of Brocéliande, the Fool is purported to be a poet, the last great singer of al-Andalus. His city is held up to praise because it is a land of culture, inhabited by versifiers who perform their work publicly and discourse on art and the creative imagination. More to the point, the Fool, like Aragon himself, is a poets' poet. In a dream he addresses his spiritual children, the writers who will come to Granada after him: Juan de la Cruz, Chateaubriand, and Lorca, quoting the works of all three. He also beholds Don Juan. He dreams of them, assimilates them, and sings for them. And, in one of the most moving passages in all of Aragon's writings, the veilleurs, phantoms of the great poets, painters and literary characters, past and future, of whom the dying fool has dreamed, they who have formed him intellectually and played such a role in his life, come to escort him to his grave:

Ah quand Grenade au petit jour Guitare ô coeur à mort blessé
Dans les bras de brume des champs comme une brune en ses amours
Sommeille encore et le soleil à peine est rose sur les Tours
Ici qui vous fait accourir avec les chansons du passé
Ce sont fantômes qui s'en vont à ma rencontre ou papillons qu'attirent
                                                                                                    les dernières lampes
Et celui-ci marche sur la mer familier des dauphins
A l'un la mort l'autre la vie on voit le temps battre à leur tempe
Un tiers venu renverse au sol l'heure comme un verre de vin

(p. 402)

Et voilà les morts d'après moi leur foule au-delà de ma vie
Leur cortège descend de la neige à l'orange de soudain reflue et gravit
Au-delà du Sacro-Monte ce sentier roux comme un renard
Qu'allez-vous faire cavaliers par la Sierra de Viznar
C'est un jour étouffant qui se lève où l'août est lourd et chaud

(p. 403)

Like Les Poètes, Le Fou d'Elsa alludes to textes générateurs, inserted as collages, that launched the author onto the creative path: a poem by the Soviet writer Mikhail Svetlov, translated by Elsa Triolet (the refrain: “Grenade mes amours / Grenade ma Granade,” [p. 20]); a nineteenth-century French song beginning “La veille où Grenade fut prise” (p. 16) read by Aragon in 1960; and, obviously, the recent fictional corpus—three novels—by Elsa Triolet: Le Cheval roux, Le Rendez-vous des étrangers, and L'Ame. Indeed, Le Rendez-vous des étrangers contains Svetlov's text as collage and mise en abyme. Aragon also constructs his book in the style, language, texture, and even genre appropriate to his theme: he recreates brilliantly the rhythm of the Koran and of various medieval Islamic poetic forms, including the qasīdah and the zajal. He follows the Arabs in alternating prose and verse and in composing an elaborate, ornate Kunstprosa of unusual verbal richness. Last but not least, he has Jean Molinet and Christopher Columbus, meeting in the Spanish camp, speak French, in a scene recounted by Aragon in a reasonably accurate pastiche of fifteenth-century Middle French.

The intertextual foundation of Le Fou d'Elsa comprises two major pre-texts: the first one is the romance Lailā and Majnūn by the Persian poet Jāmī. In the Persian text, a reworking of an earlier romance by Nizāmī, the hero is driven insane by passion, a love-dementia which will become the dominant theme of Le Fou d'Elsa. Jāmī himself was seventy years old in 1484, thus is almost the exact contemporary of the Fool, who, according to Aragon, read the Persian romance, identified with its hero, and wilfully followed him into insanity. On his deathbed, the Fool beholds in a vision the tomb of Jāmī, who has just died. Thus the historical poet Jāmī becomes an alter ego for the imaginary poet the Fool, himself an alter ego for the flesh-and-blood Louis Aragon, and the Persian romance Lailā and Majnūn one of the central mises en abyme in Le Fou d'Elsa. A second mise en abyme is La Celestina by Fernando de Rojas, the first masterpiece of modern Spanish literature and still another work treating fin' amor. Rojas plays a role in Aragon's story: he is to be found in the Spanish camp where he recites his play before a select public (pp. 370-76). Aragon quotes passages in French and in the original Spanish. Indeed the love of Calisto and Melibea ends as tragically and as beautifully as those of the various Fools and their Elsa-Lailā.

Finally, and here Le Fou d'Elsa is indeed unique in Aragon's work, the poem manifests a structure of intratextuality and artistic pseudo-mystification. Within the book is to be found the Fool's dīwān “Chants du Medjoûn” (pp. 71-116), the collection of lyrical texts he allegedly composed for Elsa. It is accompanied by a learned commentary ascribed to the Fool's assistant and disciple Zaïd. The rest of Le Fou d'Elsa—Aragon's book as a whole—can be considered an elaborate commentary on the Fool's dīwān enclosed within it, recounting how it was composed and what happened to the Fool as a result of its composition; and as mise en abyme the dīwān states in lyrical form the themes that the englobing, incorporating text will treat narratively. Similarly, the first section of Le Fou d'Elsa, containing a most interesting incipit, “Tout a commencé par une faute de français …” (pp. 15-25), reveals how the book came into being, explains its composition, and discusses the chant liminaire—another autotext, another mise en abyme—also contained within it. This chant liminaire, in the form of a ballade, takes as its refrain the incipit of the French song—La veille où Grenade fut prise—mentioned above:

J'ai tout mon temps d'homme passé
Sans lendemain dans les fossés
Attendant une aube indécise
La mort à mes côtés assise
Enfant-roi du palais chassé
La veille où Grenade fut prise. …

(p. 22)

Aragon is strikingly modern in that he constructs a work of art which begins with, and one of whose principal themes is, its own genesis and its own criticism, a poem by a poet about a poet writing poetry about poetry. In this he is no less strikingly medieval, for Le Fou d'Elsa recalls medieval Occitan and French works—the razos, vidas, Le Roman du Castelain de Couci, Machaut's Remede de Fortune and Voir Dit, among others—which are poetic pseudo-biographies or pseudo-autobiographies, which were purportedly written in order to explain the circumstances under which the protagonist, a poet of love, allegedly wrote his poems of love. Guillaume de Machaut also was a poet who wrote poetry about a poet writing poetry. Thus Aragon maintains his conviction that the Middle Ages and the twentieth century, and the Third World and Europe, are bound by aesthetico-cultural ties that make up the fabric of history and of art. In this way, he tells us, writers, lovers, and fighters understand the past, live the present, and create the future, for all men.

Notes

1. Aragon parle avec Dominique Arban (Paris: Seghers, 1968), p. 63.

2. Jean Ristat, Qui sont les contemporains (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), p. 319. For Aragon's views, Les Collages (Paris: Hermann, 1965) and Je n'ai jamais appris à écrire ou “les incipit” (Geneva: Skira, 1969). Scholars have discussed intertextuality primarily in the prose works: Wolfgang Babilas, “Le collage dans l'œuvre critique et littéraire d'Aragon,” RSH, 38 (1973), 329-54; Daniel Bougnoux, “Blanche ou l'oubli” d'Aragon (Paris: Hachette, 1973); Lionel Follet, Aragon, le fantasme et l'histoire: Incipit et production textuelle dans “Aurélien” (Paris: Éditeurs Français Réunis, 1980), especially chapter 8.

3. For a recent study of two of these works, from the perspective of epic, see William Calin, A Muse for Heroes: Nine Centuries of the Epic in France (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1983), chapter 17.

4. Aragon, L'Œuvre poétique, vol. 9 (Paris: Livre Club Diderot, 1979), pp. 321-50.

5. Aragon, L'Œuvre poétique, vol. 13 (Paris: Livre Club Diderot, 1981), pp. 157-355.

6. Aragon, L'Œuvre poétique, vol. 14 (Paris: Livre Club Diderot, 1981).