Paris, Capital of the Debacle: Aragon, Jasieński, and Revolutionary Catastrophism

Abstract

Expressions of desire for catastrophe, imagined as a remedy for bourgeois inertia, are common among writers of the interwar avant-garde. This catastrophism exerts a powerful influence upon their conceptions of political revolution. Whereas the dominant revolutionary force in the period—Soviet Marxism—understood revolution to mean the seizure and wielding of state power by the proletariat, sympathetic intellectuals of the avant-garde tend to conceptualize revolution as the wholesale destruction of the institutions and symbols of capitalist modernity. Here I explore the “revolutionary catastrophism” of the interwar avant-garde through two texts in which the destruction of Paris, an exemplar of the bourgeois order, is evoked: the Polish Futurist Bruno Jasieński’s 1928 novel Je brûle Paris (first published serially in the French Communist daily L’Humanité), and Louis Aragon’s 1930 collage-poem “Front rouge.” Each of these texts represents revolution as a blind, destructive force, akin to a natural disaster. But they also contrast interestingly with much apocalyptically-themed literature because of their utopianism. It has become a cliché to remark that today it is easier to envision the end of the world than a more modest end to capitalism; what these texts propose is that the two might not look so different.

Keywords:

• Louis Aragon
• Bruno Jasieński
• interwar avant-garde
• Communism
• Futurism
• Surrealism

Notes

1 For example, see Slavoj Žižek, “Introduction: The Spectre of Ideology.” Mapping Ideology, edited by Slavoj Žižek, London, Verso, 1994, p. 1.

2 Jameson himself is hesitant to recognize this as his own coinage, but has yet to provide another source, remarking elsewhere that “someone once said that it is easier to imagine …” (“Future City” 76; my emphasis).

3 Incidentally, one of the organizers of the congress was Bruno Jasieński (see Nina Kolesnikoff, Bruno Jasieński: His Evolution from Futurism to Socialist Realism. Waterloo, Wilfrid Laurier UP, 1982, p. 8).

4 For a full publication history, see Olivier Barbarant’s “Notice” (in Aragon, pp. 1360–1369).

5 The phrasing here belongs to Wat’s interlocutor, Czeslaw Milosz. See Alexandre Wat, Mon siècle. Translated by Gérard Conio and Jean Lajarrige, Paris, L’Âge d’Homme, 1989, p. 43.

6 In fact, this portrait of Mayakovski includes the other two members of his ménage à trois, Ossip Brik, the Russian formalist, and Brik’s then-wife Lili, sister of Elsa Triolet (and thus, somewhat later, Aragon’s sister-in-law). See Paul Morand, “Je brûle Moscou.” L’Europe galante, Paris, Grasset, 1925, pp. 165–203; and Marci Shore, Caviar and Ashes: A Warsaw Generation’s Life and Death in Marxism 1918–1968. Yale UP, 2006.

7 See Nina Kolesnikoff, pp. 7–8.

8 For a relatively recent example, see Stephen Jay Gould, Punctuated Equilibrium. Cambridge, Belknap Press, 2007.

9 See Michel Beaujour, “De l’Océan au Château: Mythologie surréaliste.” The French Review, vol. 42, no. 3, 1969, pp. 353–370.

10 For example, “À vous Jeunesses communistes / balayez les débris humains où s’attarde / l’araignée incantatoire du signe de croix” (498).

11 See Jacqueline Chénieux-Gendron, “Sade et Saint-Just: Quelques têtes révolutionnaires dans le surréalisme.” La Légende de la Révolution au XX^e siècle: De Gance à Renoir, de Romain Rolland à Claude Simon, edited by Jean-Claude Bonnet and Philippe Roger, Paris, Flammarion, 1988, p. 98.

12 Common on the interwar Left was the sense that the contradictions that led to the First World War had not been resolved, and that another war was more or less imminent. Thus, in the happy, counterfactual ending of Jasieński’s novel, one reads that “Sous la pression des masses ouvrières, le gouvernement français dut faire des concessions, détruisant l’intangibilité immaculée du traité de Versailles. La menace imminente de guerre était, semblait-il, conjurée” (297).

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Notes on contributors

Jeff Fuller

Jeff Fuller is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of French Literature, Thought, and Culture at New York University. His research explores the concept of littérature engagée as marking out a particular relationship between writing and historical time, and more specifically of writing to the present, as exemplified in the interwar texts of Louis Aragon, Paul Nizan, and André Malraux.