Rhymed Circumstances in Aragon's Musée Grévin

ABSTRACT

Building on work by scholars such as Michel Murat and Philippe Forest, I argue for the interrelation of two notions—circumstance and rhyme—in Aragon's Occupation-era essays. These essays defend “circumstantial” over “pure” poetry and promote rhyme and reason's compatibility. In keeping with those values, historical and visual analogies (“rhymes”) abound in the Resistance poetry of Aragon's Musée Grévin (1943), whose title foretells fascist leaders' derisory future as immobile, waxen afterimages. Its central poem, by casting Hitler as Goethe's “Sorcerer's Apprentice,” depicts language's power to enchant or immobilize. Furthermore, Aragon's poem itself develops an illusion of imprecatory power exerted over the Führer. It does so, I argue, by engaging with readers' memory for sound, idiom, and history. Rhymes and familiar fixed expressions lend inexorability to the poet's pronouncements. And by “rhyming” historical circumstances (downfallen autocrats) with contemporary circumstances (fascists in power), Aragon prophesies the “pattern's” logical, inevitable conclusion: the fascists' downfall.

KEYWORDS:

• Aragon
• circumstantial poetry
• Hitler
• Musée Grévin
• Occupation
• pure poetry
• rhyme

Notes

1. At the conclusion of his study of Aragon's rhyming technique, Murat observes that the year “1939 rime sinistrement avec 1919” (199).

2. Aragon did not necessarily have Banville in mind as this passage was quoted elsewhere—for example, by Remy de Gourmont (XIII).

3. A Germanophile as a young man, Aragon's firsthand impressions in the French army following World War I were marked by sympathy for the occupied, not the occupier (Forest 142). Forest refers to “Les larmes se ressemblent,” in Les Yeux d'Elsa (1942), which proposes “un parallèle entre l'occupation de l'Allemagne par l'armée française en 1918 et l'occupation de la France par l'armée allemande en 1940” (144).

4. Aragon states in “Les Poissons noirs” that in 1943 he was imperfectly informed about the extent of the ongoing horrors at Auschwitz, leading to “la sous-estimation du nombre des martyres dans le poème” (OC 934).

5. In 1941, Aragon characterized rhyme as not universal and ahistorical but, instead, as typical of the French nation and of the medieval origins of its literature (OC 825–26).

6. Banville's most famous defense of the consonne d'appui appears in the section of his Petit traité de versification française that criticizes Boileau: “Sans la consonne d'appui, pas de rime, et, par conséquent, pas de poésie” (56–57).

7. Regarding the exclusion of sentiment from poetry, Aragon disagrees with those (such as Gide) who would write “Chasse interdite à la poésie” (OC 827). Banville claimed that, thanks to Ronsard, “nous avons su [que la poésie] est un art musical et un art plastique, et que rien d'humain ne lui est étranger” (Poëtes 10). These statements appear both to oppose limitations to poetry's potential scope.

8. In Jauer's interpretation the hache evokes Germany's barbarous destruction of civilization: “en 1871, Victor Hugo utilisait la même image pour évoquer la barbarie: ‘La civilisation vraie allait commencer. Tout à coup, l'an 70 s'est levé, ayant dans sa main droite l’épée, dans sa main gauche, la hache’” (95). Along with its connotations of slaughter and capital punishment—Aragon's poem on Laval refers to “des bourreaux et des haches” (OC 947)—the axe is a central component of the emblem that gave fascism its name.

9. David Evans says of Banville that his “mania for echoes places language itself at the heart of a provocative formalist enterprise in a willful spirit of collage, piecing the message together in ways—logically incoherent, perhaps, but phonetically coherent—which are condoned, even encouraged, by the medium itself” (51). Hackneyed rhymes and elaborate rimes équivoquées may appear, when measured for their degree of novelty, to be opposites. Yet both types of rhyme can lead the reader to perceive the poet's lexical choices as being predicated on sound, not meaning (or phonetic, not logical considerations).

10. In the terms of Cristina Cacciari and Sam Glucksberg's study of “idiom meanings,” Aragon treats the proverb as “compositional.” If idioms were noncompositional, then they would be invariable and function as lengthy, distinct words (217). Aragon creates a context of repeated sounds that motivates the replacement of épée with hache. Cacciari and Glucksberg also discuss motivated and unmotivated modifications of idiom (232).

11. The third-to-last strophe associates memory and language with prognostication as well: “L'astrologue y perd son latin” (OC 952).

12. Founded in 1882, the Musée Grévin operated like a “three-dimensional newspaper” and soon additionally offered historical tableaux, starting with Marat's assassination (Schwartz 120–21). Elsa Triolet's novel L’Âme (1963) recalls the museum's role of “journal plastique” (201). For one character, the wax figures are disturbingly immobile. Brigitte Bardot seems “older” than historical figures like Marat and Napoléon because “Napoléon, c'est historique, c'est pas vieux … La Brigitte Bardot qu'ils ont là, c'est comme un automate à cames et, elle, c'est même pas un automate ! […] pourquoi on ne les anime pas ?” (201). The same approximate dichotomies are implicated both in Aragon's and Triolet's treatments of the Musée Grévin: the automate and the wax figure, the historical and the contemporary.

13. Regarding such responsibility, in 1931, “l'Affaire Aragon” was provoked by his poem “Front Rouge,” which calls for the murder of Léon Blum, among others. André Breton, in defending Aragon, dismissed the work itself as a mere “poème de circonstance” (Forest 355–56).

14. Perhaps recollecting Goethe's most famous Mignon Lied, this poem's opening line asks, “Le connais-tu, dis-moi, ce personnage louche” (OC 947). Another partial echo commences the Pétain section. Its second line, “Présent Maréchal me voilà” (OC 954), mocks the hymn sung to Pétain by Vichy-era schoolchildren: “Maréchal, nous voilà!”

15. Jean-François Louette argues that Aragon's poem seems almost to anticipate Adorno's well-known 1949 injunction against poetry after Auschwitz (Louette 31–32).

16. In discussing Aragon's rimes enjambées, Murat provides this ambivalent appreciation: “La simplification savante et subtile d'Apollinaire tourne à une sophistication aussi grande que chez Valéry, bien que d'une tonalité différente, avec un alliage caractéristique de préciosité et de vulgarité” (196).

17. Having described Aragon's impressive heroism as a “médecin auxiliaire,” Forest is duly skeptical about the efficacy of Aragon's subsequent literary activities: “Car le nazisme fut vaincu par des armes et non par des mots” (494).

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Benjamin Custis Williams

Benjamin Custis Williams is Visiting Assistant Professor of French at Connecticut College. He specializes in French-language symbolism and the petites revues of the 1880s and 1890s. He recently published an article on the polemics surrounding French symbolist aesthetic theories in Forum for Modern Language Studies.