At almost one hundred years since its inception, Surrealism is now a ubiquitous, household term.

Its presence in the vernacular is testament to the movements far-reaching influence. With aspirations illimitable in scope, the Surrealists dreamed of having influence on every sphere of human activity, which is why it is somewhat counterintuitive to limit the range of enquiry by considering these texts as self-contained pieces of literature. By way of an entrance, it proves fruitful to trace authorial intentionality of the respective works as a way of situating the texts in their rather useful and volatile historical contexts, but also delineates where Louis Aragon and Andr Breton depart in their practise. Such an approach however, does involve ignoring Aragons hermeneutical directive from the blurb, which Simon Watson Taylor also references in the introduction to the 1994 edition of Paris Peasant: I was seeking a new kind of novela novel that the critics would be obliged to approach empty handed (xii). This is in harmony with Bretons iconoclasm towards literature in the first Surrealist manifesto in 1924. Criticising the novel form for harbouring naturalist and positivist techniques, a methodology which he feels is stifling outdated, he calls for a radical change in the psychological exploration of character. If one takes heed to Aragons instruction, arrives empty handed and treats his prose work as autotelic, it becomes difficult to outline what the Surrealists are reacting against and the thread that ties these works together appears to be all but a tenuous one. This lack of critical orientation is a situation that is not something new for readers of Aragons work. Anne Balakian outlines the important historical validity in Aragons Anicet, published five years before Paris Peasant in 1921: In Anicet Aragon shows the threats to the cult of beauty in the twentieth century, but he offers no solution. He leaves his young characters in a quandary and suggests that they had better not look to their elders for guidance or inspiration (247). Detached from the footing of their predecessors whilst at the vanguard of a new revolutionary moment captures the positioning of the Surrealists. Despite being collected under the same umbrella, this somewhat misleading categorisation suggested a cohesion that was not as hermetically tight as the fragmented yet collaborative enterprise may suggest. To be catalogued under the Surrealist label was at the expense of continual disruptions; each member had their own idiosyncratic vantage for how they considered the movement and its projection for the future. This is a difference which the domain of visual art lends itself more readily to identifying, where the array of different styles proved to be a successful attraction of their exhibitions, their most impelling form of publicity. Akin to the famous surrealist title Poisson Soluble published in 1924, Paris Peasant presents a similar contradiction in terms, assuming that peasant is not a reference to its enological translation. An insoluble fish and a peasant in Paris: we know, of course, there are no such animals. These incommensurate terms serve to highlight the confluence of two ostensibly incompatible images, a juxtaposition which came to be known as the quintessential Surrealist methodology: the merveilleux quotidien. One cannot ignore the indebtedness to Giorgio de Chirico here, an Italian painter who helped establish a type of metaphysical painting, stemming from his paintings which he started in 1910 of desolate cityscapes. It was through the use of juxtaposition, augmented with shadow and lighting that gave Chircos paintings an ethereal quality; this is something which stylistically the Surrealists undoubtedly

modelled themselves on, a homage they articulated by including Chirco in their 1925 Paris exhibition. ARAGON TOO MUCH REALISM. SURREALISTS ANTI-FORM Chided by Breton for borrowing too heavily from novelistic practise, Paris Peasant apparently fell short in the Surrealists resistance to categorisation. This disagreement, which was one of many from the turbulent cenacle, tells us that from Bretons perspective there is something different at stake in the two texts in question, justifying a comparative reading. With regards to form, it is in fact Breton that Balakian accuses of constructing the very categorisation he was trying to avoid: Instead of destroying the novel as Breton had hoped, he contributed strongly to the shaping of the antinovel as a form (23). This is a concern which very much haunted the former nihilistic energy of the Dada movement which Breton and Aragon grew out of. Aware of the slightly subversive nature of his project, Aragons decision to write on Paris marked a departure from the Surrealist protocol. His inspiration for Paris Peasant is umbilically grounded in realism, to the terra firma of Paris and to the normative assumptions unavoidable in the production of any text, which from a logical point of view must, to varying extents, be modelled on reality. The aversion to narrative marked their departure from the logic and its respective coherence that was the dominant configuration of the novel. Aragons collage of shop signs, newspaper cuttings , municipal inscriptions and even notices left between two placards listing the clearance sale prices of champagne and port, we assume are faithfully reproduced. The almost Balzacian level of detail and a precision reminiscent of Andre Gide, feels like a infringement of the narrative and at the same time a revitalizing of it. It is arguably this reworking which Breton took disliking to; whilst there are several features that the texts share, Bretons fragmentation revolves centrifugally around the mysterious and unsubstantiated character at the heart of the text. In comparison, Aragons Paris Peasant, which appeared in instalments in La Revue europenne before being published as a single text in 1926, feels like each of its sections could be read independently. Whilst the quasi-philosophical bookends: A Preface To A Modern Mythology and The Peasants Dream do augment the reading process and provide an exaplanation of what is at work the text, the philosophical lens acts as a reading guide that is in many ways superfluous. The final chapter A Peasants Dream was added later to the 1926 publication, which symmetrically offers an extension and reworking of the preface. Whilst they do enrich the Aragons text and mark the greater weight which he places on the reactionary philosophy of the Surrealists, at times it does undermine some of the rather gauche praxis of their methodology. Accordingly, they become not useful pragmatic documents, but capture Aragons method and offer a point of comparison to Breton. These sections are best read in the same way as his vertiginous prose and the same way that Breton reads Nadjas letters: I read them same way I read all kinds of Surrealist texts with the same eye (144). Aragons opens Paris Peasant with a staunch anti-Hegelianism, yet for all its denunciations, it is hard not to recognise it as going full circle and offering but a variant of Hegels model. His initial concern is how the synthesis of the new in the dialectical method carries with it the errors of the old: Man invokes its authority in making

deductions, and comes to conclusions on the same basis (6). Where Aragon finds liberation in fleeing this stranglehold of certainty: The lid of the box has just been lifted. This new freedom exhilarates me so much that I am no longer master of myself (7), Breton grants that being servile to this new form of consciousness can entail petrifying coincidences (48). Leaving oneself at the mercy of chance, whatever is at stake in this ambiguous claim, stems from the rejection of Cartesian certainty, that which flatters man as the basis for judging truth. Aragon argues that Certainty is not reality. From this fundamental belief proceeds the success of the famous Cartesian doctrine of evidence (6).

HOBBES SOCIAL CONTRACT. NADJA INSTITUTIONALISED, SURREALISM INCOMPATIBLE WITH THIS. Consequently, when Breton claims that there is likely inaccuracies in Nadja, this is not a disclaimer or a means to evade accountability, but a pronouncement of an entirely new sensibility in which the stifling model of exactitude no longer looms over ones head: It is of little importance if an occasional error or omission, a genuine anomaly or lacuna casts a shadow across my narrative, across what, taken as a whole, cannot be substantiated (24). Given the instruction that the text cannot be read as a summation of its parts, which is arguably why Breton was adamant to avoid the label of a novel, Nadja is rendered a proudly irrational document, finding its home in Aragons admirable gardens of absurd beliefs (10). Paris Peasant presents doors that do not lead where you would expect them to lead, windows locking on unknown corners and the handkerchief merchants establishment possessing a stairway bathed in shadow (82) that eclipses anyone passing to the upper storeys: Paris and all its constituent parts take on an ethereal maze.

In the opening pages of A Feeling for Nature at the Buttes-Chaumont, Aragon states: Then, without feeling reluctant any longer, I set about discovering the face of the infinite beneath the concrete forms which were escorting me, walking the length of the earth's avenues" (115). Breton and Aragon unearth new connections and chance encounters in the ordinary textures of human experience, opening up an endless nexus of associations that proliferate, eclipsing any possibility of certainty that lies in the spirit of Enlightenment ontology they wish to overturn. Whilst Aragons link to realism was too strong for Breton, as descriptions of factual places were considered ill-assorted with automatism, it was in fact this very novelty that was met with critical appraisal, for it presented something new and potentially gave room for genuine vicarious pleasure; some reportedly using Paris Peasant as a guide to the 19thcentury arcade in the Opra quartier. This presented a welcome change to the more abstract, truncated and un-relatable products of automatic writing that attempted to bypass conscious control.

PRODUCTION > FUNCTION It appears that in both texts, and the Surrealist project at large, the method one uses to conceptualise the external world seems to be of paramount importance to the Surrealists, where the object of these observations appears to be secondary. With an emphasis wholly on production and next to nothing on the function of the work, in both texts the blithe loafers do not carry the burden of decipherment, which would be the laborious and painstaking analytical framework of the psychoanalyst they proudly modelled themselves on, Sigmund Freud. Given that the aesthetic is given precedence over the interpretative, it is no wonder why Freud, when he met Breton in 1921, saw no parity between the Surrealists art of censorship and therapeutic dimension of psychoanalysis. Breton even concedes, in response to Nadjas unbelievable claims to a window that changes colour, that he can offer no logical interpretation of the events: I am sorry, but I am unable to do anything about the fact that this exceed the limits of credibility. Nevertheless, in dealing with such a subject, I should never forgive myself for taking sides: I confine myself to granting that this window, being black, has now become red, and that is all (83). Breton acknowledges the expectations that his readership would have had by announcing and subsequently failing to satisfy this line of enquiry. similar to the PLATES SMASH. It appears that once one has broken from the routinised mundane consciousness, a seemingly liberated consciousness follows. It appears to be solely in the process of liberation, regardless of the product of such a liberated perception, that the Surrealists preoccupy. To leave the reader even more stranded, Breton includes passages within Nadja which he claims are of absolutely no relevance to the text: As I woke this morning, I had unusual difficulty shaking off a rather squalid dream which I feel no need to transcribe here, since it derives chiefly from conversations I had yesterday and bears no relation to this subject (50). The fact that he brings our attention to this suggests that the novel, despite its fragmentation, marked detachment from its predecessors and its attempt to escape form, this qualification suggests that there is an intended direction, for this confession of superfluity is predicated on there being a unity it departs from. Aragon marks his departure from customary practise by calling for a knowledge, a science of life open only to those who have no training in it (10). This refusal to give up each idea to abstract reason for analysis demands a lack of education. For what use is rational enquiry when in Le Passage de lOpera where an ordinary shop, outlined in realistic terms, transmogrifies into an oceanic world where we witness the appearance and disappearance of a siren, only to find the following day the shop has returned to its original state, leaving a small clue which suggests the transformation did in fact take place.

Much like the displacement and condensation that characterised Freudian dream imagery and the parapraxis that interrupts everyday life, Wherever the living pursue particularly ambiguous activites, the inanimate may sometimes assume the reflection of their most secret motives: and thus our cities are peopled with unrecognised sphinxes which will never stop the passing dreamer and ask him mortal questions unless he first projects his meditation, his absence of mind, towards them (13) One way that Aragon markedly differs from Breton is that he extends his topology from the city to the countryside. From Le Passage de lOpera to Le Sentiment de la nature aux Buttes-Chamont, Aragon implies a universality to his venture; the synthesis of the marvellous quotidian is by no means contingent on locality. After a thoroughgoing explication of the geography of the park in the north-east of the city throughout part VII including details of its roads and contours. Aragon integrates the fantastical images we found earlier in the city, this time witnessing the account of Marcel Noll seeing a white apparition on the Suicides Bridge. Whilst Aragon suggests a universality to his automatic strolling, it is too facile a conclusion to render the specificity of these landscapes as having the same function. The arcade, populous and exhaustless in its abundant content, is contrasted with the passivity and the arduous journey taken to even locate the park. Whilst Benjamin, in drawing on the work of Baudilaire, done much to characterise the flaneur as a city dweller, Aragon, Noll and Breton even-handedly arrive at the park drunk with openmindedness (park VI). MORE ON PARK Ultimately the city proves to be the place, given its dynamism, that is in greater sympathy with their topos. The Surrealists do not offer the critique which their predecessors Blaise Cendrars and Guillaume Apollinaire laboured over in their poetry. Capturing the polarity of life in the metropolis, they touched not only on the rapture of urban experience, but also the despotic hold and utilitarian limitations of industrial life. Aragon and Breton do cover the more seedy aspects of the city and do not present a blind utopianism; immediately Breton and Nadja are accosted by vagrants and Aragon draws attention to the mobile human tapestry (37), the more licentious aspects of the city. Whilst documenting the more decadent aspects that inevitably arise with city-life, presenting a thoroughgoing critique of city-life is not at the heart of Surrealists agenda. This was a poitical edge that the Situationists took much more radically some thirty years later, taking inspiration from Surrealism and anti-authoriarian Marxism. Aragon does hint, albeit briefly, to a defence of the arcades small traders against its projected annihilation by the Boulevard Hausmann Building Society in collusion with the City of Paris administrators. ANTI MONOPOLISATION ANTI-ELITISM see website Paris Peasant has a greater political edge, what with the pamphleteering arguably hinting to the more revolutionary political orientation that he took from the 1930s, where his political commitment to communism aligned him with the French Communist Party and the respective aesthetic doctrine of socialist realism, marking his departure from the Surrealist group.

Liberated from the demands of scrutiny, the narration of both Paris Peasant and Nadja feel like they carry a certain speed, picking up certain images and abandoning them for the next, as if to provide no time to give up each idea to abstract reason for analysis. The title of Aragons volume of poems Le Mouvement perptuel which he published in the very same year, pertinently captures this sense of speed. The anticlimactic nature of these texts are a byproduct of this perpetual movement, or at least does not satiate our conventional novelistic expectations. The movement which characterises these works provides a textual imitation of a resistance to a threat towards individual liberty; to apply a definition is to impose a finality on something, a closure that threatens the rhizomatic web of connections that Nadja and Paris Peasant expose in their stroll around Paris. Aragon makes a relevant allusion to speed in his preface: Each day the modern sense of existence becomes subtly altered. A mythology ravels and unravels (10). Aragon would go on to say some forty years later that in Paris Peasant he wanted to reverse the process of myth that gradually progressed into romance from people losing faith in the myth. This speed and the Surrealists mark a departure from the British Romantics who repelled city life as they felt overcome and suffocated by masses of people, but this provided the perfect labyrinth for the Surrealists. . After only just meeting her after a seventy page preamble, their relationship comes to a grinding halt and Breton spends the final stages of the book with a rather mundane denunciation of what appears to be his personal aversion to psychiatry.

LINK Bretons facsimiles in Nadja have a different function. The forty-four photographs, alongside the diary-like logging of events, do give the impression of historical authenticity similar to that of Aragons replications verbatim. For all the schizophrenic-like interruptions of the narrative, in true psychoanalytic fashion, the photographs illuminate that which is ultimately not present: the eponymous Nadja. This adds up to what feels more like a case study than a romance, possibly stemming from Bretons medical background in psychiatry. Comparatively, Breton makes little use of extended detailed description; he never tells us exactly what Nadja looks like and gives scant regard to anything other than the emotional impact she has on him. This is information which we know he has, therefore we posit her characterisation as emblematic: She had no hesitation, as I have said, about telling me the most unfortunate vicissitudes of her life, not omitting a single detail (135). Nadja remains spectral-like, constantly echoing the opening clause: Who am I? (11). Both the book and the characterisation of Nadja occupies a liminal space, an indeterminacy characteristic of the scepticism which now haunts human agency in the wake of Freud. Accordingly, the Breton captures this uncertainty by his continual reference to being at the mercy of chance: I have yet to relate, only the most decisive episodes of my life as I can conceive it apart from its organic plan, and only insofar as it is at the mercy

of chance (19). The use of the word plan suggests an unconscious determinism, a concatenation of events that is fundamentally driven by forces outside of our control, namely desire. On several occasions Breton brings into question the notion of free will: I dont know why it should be precisely here that my feet take me, here that I almost invariably go without specific purpose, without anything to induce me but this obscure clue: namely that it (?) will happen here (32). It seems that Breton and Nadjas chance encounters are at such a frequency that this is not a remarkable account of statistically improbable chance, but rather the magnetism of passion which outweighs all other forces. Breton unremittingly highlights the improbability of the situations that keep occuring, for he runs completely at random, in one of the three directions she might have taken (91) and is, of course, is inevitably led to her, again and again. The lines between conscious and unconscious actions is blurred, signalled when Breton documents a level of awareness that is consciously unconscious: I unconsciously watched their faces, their clothes, their way of walking (64) and goes on to claim that Nadja looks into my hat, probably to read the initials on the band, though she pretends to be doing it quite unconsciously (77). With all the desired objects on display, Aragons depiction of the Parisian arcade could be argued to be a paradigmatic extension of the unconscious. Chance has another use in both of these texts, for it is used to mark a departure from Enlightenment epistemology, a notion that would have merely been an ancillary property of human experience given that its opposite, empiricism, is ineluctably tied to humanism. This denunciation of rationality is a lineage which the Surrealists carry in the vestigial nihilism of Dada and in the poetry of Lautremont which sought to destruct an anthropocentric universe. The Peasants Dream gives a series of pronouncements echoing his texts Posies. As the vigour of positivism ultimately resulted in the atrocity that was the First World War, it is no surprise Breton makes claim to an impartial perspective, for any conception established by way of a association to past values has been tainted by the barbaric capacity of reason: I shall discuss these things without pre-established order, and according to the mood of the moment which lets whatever survives survive (23). This assumed impartiality, freed from the prejudice of his historical horizon, to use Gadamerian terminology, is an area like Bretons selfconfessed failure of automatism that does not hold up to critical scrutiny, but it highlights the desire of the Surrealists to break the affiliation from their bitter history. The phenomenologists, which cannot be ignored due to their close historical proximity to the Surrealists, dispelled the notion of an assumed neutrlaity. Heidegger on the hermeunitc circle on Being and Time published less than a year after Paris Peasant. The Husserlian notion of intentionality, invoking the division that Kant laid out between the noumenon and the phenomena, posits the directedness of consciousness and the impossibility of such a proverbial impartiality.

The implicit and explicit references to Rousseau in Nadja and Paris Peasant is a fitting one. Rousseau is a figure which almost overlooks the Surrealist project in their several areas of overlap; Breton can actually see a statue of Rousseau from behind and two or three stories below (27). Aragon, with a striking parallelism to Rousseaus Emile, questions: Can knowledge deriving from reason even begin to compare to knowledge perceptible by senses? (9). Rousseaus pedagogical imperative advocates a method of learning which favours an experiential approach over the indoctrination into language. He argues in Emile: The noblest work in education is to make a reasoning man, and we expect to train a young child by making him reason! This is beginning at the end; this is making an instrument of a result. If children understood how to reason they would not need to be educated (FIND). Rousseau contributed to the movement in Western Europe for individual freedom and against the absolutism of church and state. This emancipation can be seen in the Surrealists call to recover a sense of pleasure PLEASURE QUOTE, by way of distancing themselves from the stifling epistemology of reason. He holds that children are formed so that they will naturally grow into virtuous adults, it is however, the influence of a corrupting society that sabotages this process. Similarly, the Surrealist takes issue, particularly Aragon in his preface, to the stifling inculcation of this apparently flawed dialectical rationalism, inheriting all the errors from the position which it displaces. Breton is adamant that Nadja is not to read his books that he hypocritically gives her; he argues: life is other than what one writes (71). ample importance of expression rather than repression to produce a well-balanced, free-thinking child.

"The Creator makes all things good; man meddles with them and they become evil."

Both texts make ample reference to the inadequacy of language in representing the external world. This is a area which later critical theory would go to on to explore the relationship between language, self reflexivity and consciousness. As a culmination of all these Aragon poetically alludes to what he believes is a crisis of modernity: The modern word is entirely wedded to my idiosyncrasies. A great crisis is brewing, an immense disquiet taking shape as it approaches. Beautiful, good, right, true, realso many other abstract words are crumbling into dust at this very moment (111). SECOND MANIFESTO That point of the mind at which life and death, the real and the imagined, past and future the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low cease to be perceived contradictions (FIND) The fruition of Freud as the final addition to the famous triumvirate collectively known as the hermeneutics of scepticism; the absolutism implicit in the scientific method which, as a continuation of Dadaism, the Surrealists associate with the bloodshed of The Great War. Not a disparity between Aristotelean forms, or even the linguistic relativisation of the postructuralists which that shortly follow the movement, but

merely a scepticism in our ability to appeal to the truth as a result of the radical attacks on the autonomy of the human subject, which also manifested in a crisis of representation between the late 19th and early 20th century. This is a concern which Breton hints to throughout Nadja: Only few days ago, Louis Aragon pointed out to me that the sign of a Pourville hotel showing in red letters the words: MAISON ROUGE consisted of certain letters arranged in such a way that when seen from a certain angle in the street, the word MAISON disappeared and ROUGE read POLICE (56). Breton indicates a parallax when the object changes according to ones perspective, a directedness that was instrumental in the phenomenologists division between Kants phenomenon and noumenon, but Breton gives this a further Surrealist transmogrification by completely changing the sign altogether. Bretons world is a vertiginous web of shapeshifting phenomena that proves impossible to take refuge in any logical analytical framework. In addition to this, the fact that the optical illusion actually reads POLICE, Breton claims specifically only significant due to the fact that one or two hours later, Breton is with the lady of the glove (59), who proceeds to show him an engraving which seen straight on represents a tiger, but which, regarded perpendicularly to its surface of tiny vertical bands when you stand several feet to the left, represents a vase, and, from several feet to the right, an angel (59). Unable to see the correspondence between the two images, Breton ends the paragraph by claiming that under such conditions their connection cannot be avoided and because I find it quite impossible to establish a rational correlation between them (59). Seemingly, the object of the sign reading POLICE is of no consequence, it is only that a similar transformative act happened a few hours later that connects these events which otherwise would not be relatable. This is not the only episode where Breton comments on the importance of the particularity of subjective experience. On the photographs which accompany Nadja, Breton states: I wanted in fact with some of the people and some of the objects to provide a photographic image of them taken at the special angle from which I myself I had looked at them (152). Discontented, for they lack the magic they once had and are not true to the experience, Breton frustratingly reports: Becque is surrounded by sinister palings, the management of the Thtre Moderne on its guard, Porville dead and disillusioning as any French city, the disappearance of almost everything relating to The Grip of the Octopus (152). It is important from Breton to capture the drive as it was experienced in his subjectivity. impressionism, Cezanne, unified field theory,

When I am near her I am nearer things which are near her (90) alterity, not the Hegelian subject of the journey to a collective conscious.

The moment we are told that Nadja has the enchanting ability for waiters to uncontrollably drop plates at the sight of her, he abandons it, as if we are simply servile to this mystical fact and a rational critique of it does not bear thinking about. (81) Images flutter down like confetti. Images, images everywhere. On the ceiling. In the armchairs wickerwork. In the glasses drinking straws. http://orangemanor.wordpress.com/2010/10/14/paris-peasant-le-paysan-de-paris-poemby-louis-aragon-1926-rolf-venner/ Breton alludes to the title Nadja is titled as such, according to the introduction, because in Russian its the beginning of the word hope, and because its only the beginning (xi). Consistently elusive, this could refer to countless things, perhaps the beginning of a hopeful relationship that ended as soon as it began, perhaps its only the beginning of the influence of Surrealism, that which Breton hopes will radically transform the zeitgeist of Western thought. Paris Peasant is full of extraordinary and ingenious arbitrary imagery, and there is a genuine parody of automatic writing in part V of A Feeling for Nature. Dubbed as surrealist realism, the collage procedure which Aragon employs is an imitation, at the lexical level, of how the fantastical finds its way out of the quotidian. Surrealist procedures imitate and parody both the serious philosophical debate about objective reality in which the Surrealists were then engaged, and the lyrical excesses inherent in automatism. the representation of chance is a heavily mediated one and it is impossible to record what has chosen to be omitted from Paris Peasant and Nadja.