Memory and Politics: Representations of War in the Works of Louis Aragon (review)

Aragon served as a medical auxiliary on the Western front in 1918 and in the same capacity in 1939-40, in each case with courage and distinction. During the interwar years, the future Communist and résistant condemned France's Moroccan campaign of 1925 and reported on the Spanish Civil War; after 1945 he commented on colonial and Cold War conflict in Indo-China, Korea, and Algeria. Allying post-Freudian concepts of battle trauma to recent theorizations of collective memory and remembrance, Angela Kimyongür offers a systematic examination of this career-long preoccupation, showing how, from the refusal to glorify post-Versailles nationalism or endorse contemporary ancien-combattant attitudes, 'writing war' acquired a central role in Aragon's work: as ideological critique in the journalism, as an adjunct to verisimilitude in the socialist-realist novel cycle (1934 -51), and, more originally, as a means of committing people, places, and events to memory lest they be forgotten. This commemorative impulse, enshrined in the poetic homage to the Resistance martyrs, was officialized by the party in Jacques Duclos's terse injunction 'fais de cela un monument'. More significantly still, the writing is postulated as a site for the exploration of problematic wartime memories only formally acknowledged in 1956 with Le Roman inachevé but whose progressive re-emergence in the prose fiction displaced the ideological towards a not always successful quest for cathartic narrative form. Memories of the First World War punctuate the semi-autobiographical Aurélien, whose 'contemporary' narrative connects the Spanish Republican 'Retirada' in 1939 and the Franco-Belgian exode of May-June 1940. The 'nightmarish' visions of Dunkirk in 'Tapisserie de la grande peur' (August 1940) evokes Pieter Breughel's apocalyptic Triumph of Death, an intra- and intertextual reference that draws some of its affective power from events two decades earlier. Kimyongür concedes that there is 'no medical or other evidence to suggest that Aragon was psychologically traumatised by war' (p. 9), and in places the approach is unduly inferential. However, the apparently obsessive nature of the writing, the increasing incidence of refractory material, at times manifested in discordant flashbacks, and the unstable boundaries between protagonist, narrator, and author offer significant plausibility to an analysis strikingly illustrated in the spectral, almost Celinian images of 1918 in Les Communistes, whose successive versions are usually invoked in the context of Aragon's evolving political agendas. Similarly, La Semaine sainte (1958) and La Mise à mort (1965) owe much of their complex textual layering to the interplay between reworked memories of 1940, a period marked by anxiety about his separation from Elsa Triolet, and the writer's experiences of 1918. In addition to the horrors witnessed at the front, these included being buried alive on the battlefield and the recent revelation of his real identity of his parents, a nod to a psychobiographical hinterland explored elsewhere. Empirical rather than theoretical, this critically sympathetic and well-documented study imparts a different periodicity to a once familiar trajectory that in recent years has been deemed politically off-limits or has simply fallen below the radar.