Aragon, 'Le Fou d'Elsa': un poème à thèses (review)

Many readers of Aragon turn away from Le Fou d'Elsa (1963) because of its length and its 'écriture difficile tant par son originalité stylistique et multigénérique que par son contenu encyclopédique' (p. 72). While in no way downplaying the 'dissonance' and 'monstruosité' (p. 9) of this challenging text, Hervé Bismuth sets out to clarify issues of style and genre by reference to Aragon's earlier and later writings, and unpicks with great erudition the complex referential intertextuality of this historical narrative with contemporary overtones (Spanish Civil War, Algerian War), based around the fall of Moorish Granada in 1490. Before examining the thèses of the title in the second section, he begins his conquest of the 'citadelle paradoxale' of Aragon's text with a discussion of its disconcertingly unpoetic boundaries, a preface that purports to reveal the work's genesis and a (partial) glossary of foreign terms and names which says much about Aragon's partis pris in the book (a useful supplement to this glossaire is provided in an annex). A masterly chapter then shows how Aragon's extensive source material is 'digested' and deconstructed in a fictional rewriting of history from the Arab point of view in which the text becomes an 'allégorie à grande échelle' (p. 142). The second major thesis discussed by Bismuth is a discourse on love interweaving Arabic and Western intertexts with the cultural mediation of Goethe to hold up a mirror to Aragon's own egotistical 'monolâtrie' (p. 193) for Elsa. The study then addresses the provocative generic hybridity of the 'poem' and its relationship to the author's ideological positions, before tracing some of the background reading on which its 'hypertextualité vertigineuse' (p. 233) is based. Relativizing specialist views of Aragon's orientalist expertise which have either praised him unconditionally or dismissed him as a dilettante, Bismuth concludes on the convincing counter-claim that this 'auteur polygraphe' (p. 238) was in fact, in outlook and intentions, the last of the French Romantics. While Le Fou d'Elsa may continue primarily to attract geographers and ethnologists of Aragonia, at least there is now a thoroughly well-informed guidebook to the text's many tricky byways to assist the more adventurous of literary tourists as well. For both categories Bismuth's book is essential reading, reassessing and greatly deepening available scholarship.