The Parisian farmer
Der Pariser Bauer (French original title: Le paysan de Paris ) is a 1926 novel by the French writer Louis Aragon and a major work from his surrealist phase. A German translation under the title Pariser Landleben appeared in 1969, a new translation with the title Der Pariser Bauer 1996.
Structure and content
The work, dedicated to the surrealist painter André Masson , consists of an introduction and three successively created, loosely connected parts, which partly consist of accidental observations and splintered thoughts during walks, partly of reflections and philosophical excursions (especially in the foreword and in the third part). In keeping with the writing method propagated by André Breton in the Manifeste du Surréalisme (1924) , it has a structure similar to that of Breton's Nadja , published in 1928, making it one of the key works of surrealism. The work has no actual plot, but mainly consists of description and reflection. Actually it escapes the definition of the genre ; although it is mostly referred to as a novel, it is more of a literary assembly work, in which Aragon appears consistently as a first-person narrator.
The short Préface à une mythologie moderne (“Foreword to a modern mythology”) contains a polemic against false certainties, against the appearance of evidence , the habit of constant rational analysis, the control mania and the permanent fear of error. Aragon agrees to praise the “dictatorship of sensuality” and the imagination that seeks the “wonderful things in everyday life”. It is only through them that the truth emerges, which is only confirmed by errors.
The first part ( Le passage de l'Opéra , "The Opernpassage") depicts Aragon's living environment on the Passage de l'Opéra , built in the 1820s . The Parisian passages are also known as rues couvertes , as “covered streets”, as the side house facades give them a street-like appearance. In 1919, in the Opernpassage in the 9th arrondissement , which consists of two parallel galleries, Aragon, André Breton and their friends agreed to meet regularly here in Café Le Petit Grillon instead of in the now hated Montparnasse or Montmartre . When Aragon was working on the text, the passage built in the 1820s was about to be demolished because of the extension of Boulevard Haussmann ; it took place in 1925.
Aragon begins by stating that secularization has destroyed the old temples and culture: "Today the gods are no longer worshiped on the heights". He goes into the caves and looks for the foreign, sees the untimely, pre-capitalistic behavior of its inhabitants and develops a “metaphysics of places” by - following an arbitrarily chosen path - describing the passage with an almost naturalistic, hard-contouring precision that reminiscent of the Nouveau Romans . This is where it differs from the surrealist idea of the écriture automatique . of impressionistically flowing automatic writing that actually rejects description as a literary form. Memories of his time during the French occupation of the Rhineland and of his playmates from the cafés are woven in. Again and again he reflects on the transience of the passages or describes them with metaphors of death.
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Aragon's Paris consists of an “unrestrained” accumulation of picture galleries with book, stamp, hat and walking stick shops, cafes, an hour hotel and a romantic bed and breakfast hotel in which his poet friends live, an auction house, a bathhouse, a vulgar theater , a women's and a men's hairdressing salon, a brothel disguised as a massage parlor, which Aragon frequently visits, and their shabby interiors, which are already doomed by the “American urge” to give the cityscape a “dead straight cut”. In the dark holes of this reality, magical abysses open up for Aragon: In the sea-green, deep-sea glass passages, he sees “human aquariums” that generate sexual associations, a “landscape of wicked professions”. Then there is again talk of a “glass coffin” and dangerous animals such as the hairdresser's hair dryer with its “snake neck”. Again and again, individual objects are focused and, as it were, microscopically enlarged. The blond hair of one of the hairdresser's customers, the women who are looking for lovers or suitors in the cafés stimulate his erotic imagination. The “drug of the imagination” asserts its leading position in an address to the will, reason and sensibility of humans inserted in the descriptions.
But the “big rodent”, the Boulevard Haussmann , will break up the built subterranean landscape and profoundly change the “ways of strolling and prostitution”. Aragon describes a struggle that could "degenerate into shootings", a "real civil war" between small traders and other landowners threatened with expropriation and ruin against the banks behind which the big department stores such as Galeries Lafayette stand. He names the dubiously low compensation amounts and names the machinations of the investors. Documentary material is incorporated that disrupts the typographical consistency of the text. For example, a full bar menu with price information is inserted or a notice stating that a “front-line fighter 1914–1918, war disabled”, who was robbed of his business by a finance company and “unable” to “settle down”, bought the inventory his bar is looking for.
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The second part, Le sentiment de la nature aux Buttes-Chaumont (“The feeling of nature on the Buttes-Chaumont”) bears the German subtitle “Anschauende Idea”, borrowed from Schelling: Every idea has a visual core. These ideas are actually lenses and spectacle into symbols of the Absolute are places. For Aragon, nature includes not only the objects "in which humans do not participate", but "quite simply the outside world". But their sensual perception is not separated from their own subconscious: The modern, colorful gods of the gas pumps designed by “metal sculptors” and the adored oil wells represent an era of acceleration that has transformed people.
With this insight, Aragon embarks on the search for the new natural myths. He describes a nocturnal walk with his friends André Breton and Marcell Noll in the avant-garde landscape garden Parc des Buttes-Chaumont , which is located in the 19th arrondissement, when it opened in 1867 . Depressed by boredom ( ennui ) and tired of the games of the modern age, the friends go on a feverish search. But they also encounter harmless, honest or feeble bronze or marble statues through which man tries in vain to protect himself from the intrusion of the divine into his world. To this end, he stages counter-rituals: The page-long inscriptions on a bronze barometer column with a map of Paris contain information about the area, addresses, meteorological and compass data, names of members of the parliament, which are reproduced in the text with meticulous typology and again disrupt the print image. Between statuettes, hills, a waterfall, a grotto and a lake, the lovers meet in the shade. But in everything there is “the woman” whose curves can be found in the terrain, whose image is the whole world. Everything is divine insofar as it is similar to "woman". Here Aragon's description of the park breaks off, the myth has been discovered. He also lives in the park's past as a place of execution, which, like the stone “suicide bridge”, is an element of modern mythology, a general subconscious so to speak. The realization makes the three friends shudder. Aragon praises the novel, mythical nature experience in the city as a source of surrealistic inspiration. For him, as for Schelling, the feeling of nature merges with the mythical meaning and finds the inner ground of life. But in order to recognize the magic in everyday life, the head must first have separated from thinking.
In the third part, Le songe de paysan (“The Farmer's Dream”), Aragon tries, in the form of loose fragments of thought, to clarify how a surrealist and critic of idealism can describe (and change) reality. He takes up considerations from the foreword, according to which the real is not abstract, but figuratively concrete: “Only the concrete is poetic”, it is materialized, exerts strength, can move people. The idea of God as an attempt to find an order behind the disorder of the world is only an expression of mental inertia, but there is a metaphysics: not of the concept as in Hegel , but of concrete knowledge. The image is the awareness of the concrete, and the key to concrete knowledge is the love that Aragon found in two women. (One is probably embodied by the Bérénice in his novel Aurélien .)
interpretation
According to Yvette Gindine, the title of the novel refers to Aragon itself. Aragon - according to Gindine - feels like the farmer on his domain, which he knows well and which gives him a sense of ownership. This already heralds the stance of socialist realism , which Aragon took after his turn to communism and the rejection of surrealism in 1930:
Alternating between abstract reflection, poetic-emotional and naturalistic-precise, sometimes vulgar language, Aragon questions the linguistic fixations of the lifeworld; but through his writing he brings out its secrets - an example of the "regression" of 20th century literature from the purely aesthetic to the mythical, as described by Rosario Assunto .
Rüdiger Pfromm sees Aragon's work as an attempt to give Friedrich Schlegel's view of the progressive work of art and Novalis ' conception of a total work of art a contemporary interpretation. The aim is to change society through a poetic life. Peter Bürger considers this experiment to have failed: The ego, which is oppressively subjected to the outside world, tries to grasp it as an “emanation of itself”. The elimination of conscious thinking is a relapse into a regressive magical thinking and an idealistic-illusory conception of freedom, which Walter Benjamin also shared, but which Hegel had already criticized for the romantics' idea of freedom, which absolutely posits individual subjectivity to morality.
reception
Aragon's surrealist description of the passages influenced Walter Benjamin's unfinished study of the Paris passages , in which he initially referred heavily to Aragon's text. In 1927 or 1928 he translated some excerpts from Le passage de l'Opéra . He later distinguished himself from Aragon and, in addition to the architectural form of the passage that emerged in the early 19th century, also focused on the social and economic changes of this era. For him, the passage from the magical fairy palace and the dreamy deep sea world of Aragon is transformed into a temple of commodity capital.
Trudy Schmidt writes about the German edition in 1969: “In places you are simply delighted and almost breathless from meeting this real poet. [...] Aragon is a man who has been moved and a seducer at the same time. [...] We are carried away by his moods when he philosophizes, mocks, when he is depressed or bored. [...] But in large parts of the book you can feel how much his work is fed by the unconscious. [...] Aragon gives us a piece of contemporary and cultural history. He reveals secrets of areas within the great city of Paris that point to the future in their doom. "
Gisela von Wysocki considers the experiment, which Pfromm has declared to have failed, to be tempting, even seductive: the author is a myth researcher on an adventure trip through the “tin monster” of the city; he is shifting urban reality into “shamanistic territories”.
Fritz J. Raddatz emphasizes that Aragon precisely fixes a certain moment of change: “It is not the fleeting impression of the passers-by that is made pictorially [...], but a social finding is finally made clear. Not in a realistic way - Aragon's book is an attempt at new mythology; clear and meaningful and interpretation in the sense of the surrealist central concept of significance are parallel key words here ”(in the sense of transforming the banal into the significant, bearing meaning). At the same time, the book is a “hymn to a new nature” that moves the farmer's field into the city.
expenditure
- A fragmentary preprint in La revue européenne and La révolution surréaliste 1924/25.
- Le paysan de Paris. Éditions Gallimard , Paris 1926. Further editions 1948, 1966 (Collection Le livre de poche), 1978.
- Le paysan de Paris in: L'OEuvre poétique , 2nd edition, Volume I, Book III. Messidor / Livre Club Diderot, Paris 1989, pp. 701-912.
- German
- Paris country life. Translated from Rudolf Wittkopf . Rogner & Bernhard, Munich 1969.
- The Parisian farmer. Translated by Lydia Babilas. Library Suhrkamp, Frankfurt 1996, ISBN 3-518-22213-9 .
- English
- Paris Peasant. Translated and with an Introduction by Simon Watson Taylor. Boston 1971.
literature
- (KN): Aragon: Le paysan de Paris. In: Kindlers Neues Literatur Lexikon , ed. by Walter Jens. Munich 1986, vol. 1, p. 588 f.
- Yvette Gindine: Aragon, prosateur surréaliste. Geneva 1966, pp. 57-74.
- Gisela von Wysocki : Sternstunde des Obscuren , in: Die Zeit , 11/1997, March 7, 1997.
Individual evidence
- ^ All citations in this section after the new translation from 1996.
- ^ Michaela Doyen: Cityscapes. Louis Aragon, Le Paysan de Paris :. In: SymCity 1 (2007) .
- ↑ The first arcades were replaced by large department stores for mass consumption in the 1870s. JF Geist: Passages: A building type of the 19th century. Munich 1969.
- ↑ Aragon 1996, p. 82. Since 1920 the French Sudan had the borders of today's Mali .
- ↑ Actually Marcel Priollet from Strasbourg, a companion of the Surrealists. Sometimes he is also referred to as a writer. He is said to have disappeared in the Spanish Civil War . Aragon, German edition 1996, translator's note, p. 235.
- ^ So the German translation 1996; actually it should be called “The Peasant Dream ” ( de payson , not du paysan ).
- ↑ Note from the translator, p. 225.
- ↑ KN 1986, p. 589.
- ↑ Rosario Assunto: Theory of literature among writers of the 20th century. rde 372, Reinbek 1975, pp. 82-86.
- ↑ Rüdiger Pfromm: Revolution under the sign of myth: A historical investigation of Louis Aragon's Le Paysan de Paris. European University Theses, Vol. 106. Peter Lang, 1985.
- ↑ Peter Bürger: The French Surrealism. Frankfurt 1971, p. 116.
- ^ Walter Benjamin: The passage work. In: Collected Writings. Volume V in two parts; edited by Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser. Frankfurt 1982.
- ↑ Anne Christine Bussard: "This strange mixed structure of house and street". The passage and its representation by Louis Aragon and Walter Benjamin. University of Lausanne 2016.
- ↑ Trudy Schmidt: Future in decline. Louis Aragon's surrealistic cityscape Le Paysan de Paris for the first time in German , in: Frankfurter Rundschau , October 7, 1969.
- ↑ Wysocki 1997.
- ^ Fritz J. Raddatz: Dream on millimeter paper. On Louis Aragon's book 'Pariser Landleben' , in: Süddeutsche Zeitung , 10./11. January 1970.