Louis Aragon is a twentieth-century personification of Dada; he is a writer, poet, and critic who deconstructed the literature and politics of France, giving his Dada-shape to French literature and then projecting that voix-et-image (voice-and-image) of "Aragon-France" into his pacts with Surrealism and Communism and throughout the art world. His egalitarian body of work balances the equation "œuvre=ouvré" (work=wrought) in that his life's work is open to all readers: non francophone as well as francophone. This condition of author-reader equality is the essence of Aragonesquerie, the antithesis of Roland Barthes's assertion in "La Morte d'auteur" (1968; translated by Richard Howard as "The Death of the Author," 1986), that "the birth of the reader must be requited by the death of the Author."

In a literary career that spanned seven decades, Aragon published more than one hundred volumes of writing. More than a dozen additional volumes have appeared...