“I SHIT ON THE ENTIRE French army.” Every time I read that phrase—the very last in Louis Aragon’s Treatise on Style—it warms the cockles of my black and seedy little heart.
Of course, pretty much everyone has been shitting on the French army since at least the Battle of Agincourt, so the sentiment was not particularly new, even in 1928. But in the context of the Treatise on Style (which appeared that year as Traite du Style), the aforementioned phrase is merely the last salvo in a book that is the literary equivalent of a hail of razor blades. Completed in 1927, the Treatise was not published until the following year, because literary giants André Gide and Paul Valéry did everything in their power to keep it from going to press.
Louis Aragon, the most elegantly vituperative member of the original Surrealist circle, was for many years André Breton’s closest friend and ally; a critic of the Surrealists once wrote that “Aragon’s heart beats in Breton’s chest.” (This trope is particularly apt because the two friends first met during World War I in the French army, where they served as medical officers—Aragon came by his hatred of the army honestly.) Aragon wrote the Treatise during an extended stay on the coast of Normandy, while Breton was writing Nadja. Even during its inception, the book proved to be an irritant; Aragon hammered out fifteen pages every day to Breton’s two or three. After one of the two Surrealists’ regular cocktail sessions–cum-workshops, the frustrated Breton remarked to his wife Simone that “what Aragon is writing, which he reads to me nearly every day, is keeping me from writing too much. It’s so, so brilliant: you have no idea.”
Aragon’s caustic Gallicisms are the stuff of which Monty Python routines about apoplectic Frenchmen are made. His own countrymen (“this race of cesspit cleaners”), the American press (“spilled sperm of a continent”), hack writers of all stripes (“subway ink-slingers, fresh-air scribblers, poetypists and anguishographers, high-strung people screaming in the streets while brandishing little pieces of soiled paper, stay-at-home parchment pen pushers, jotters on the run, etc.”), Christians (“So many virgins for Lesbos! So many Saint Sebastians for Sodom!”), neo-symbolist poets (“the mussels that attached themselves to the keel of the Drunken Boat”), all are just so many fish in Aragon’s barrel. Not even the reader is immune from Aragon’s barbs, as this serpentine sentence demonstrates:
Be aware that if I look both ways before I cross the street—even though not to do so would be more heroic in your eyes and even though you thought you could detect in my writing an idea of existence that is not compatible with prudence—it is because I have no desire to be run over, since I don’t believe it is very wise to allow oneself to be run over; this, however, does not take away my right to say that I am not at all grateful to my mother and father for having brought me into the world, and that I also want to arrive on the other side of the street with my right hand—and preferably with my two feet—in order to slap someone more easily, perhaps even you, whom I have the avowed intention of slapping sooner or later.
It is precisely on the level of the sentence that Style enters into the fray. As entertaining as the constant stream of invective is, without Aragon’s rhetorical gamesmanship—the constant digression and embellishment, the hyperbolic metaphors, the complex punning, the ironic aphorisms, the sudden shifts in tone and diction, the bathetic caricatures, and the all-pervasive umor (the Surrealists’ term for their own particular strain of sardonic humour)—the Treatise would be mere verbal abuse. Rather, the book is a stylistic tour de force in the service of a very particular—but still relevant—aesthetic agenda.
After a brief introduction—where Aragon casually mocks the style and accuracy of two brief newspaper articles which describe his arrest for the robbery of several churches—the final section of the Treatise on Style presents a table-turning sophistry worthy of Jacques Derrida. It was (and still is) a common misperception that surrealism is a synonym for lazy writing. Instead, Aragon argues, “It is when you write a letter because you have something to say that you are writing any old thing. You give in to your own arbitrariness. But in surrealism all is rigor. Inevitable rigor. The meaning is formed outside of you. The words grouped together mean something in the end, whereas in the other case they meant at the outset what they expressed only later in a very fragmentary way.”
Or, as Jack Spicer would write, many years later, “Surrealism is a poem more than this. The intention that things do not fit together. As if my grandmother had chewed on her jigsaw puzzle before she died.… To mess around. To totally destroy the pieces. To build around them.”