In the following essay, Walz explores Aragon's depiction of the Paris Opera Passageway in his novel Le Paysan de Paris and the socio-historical role of the Passageway in Parisian culture.

In the following essay, Collier discusses the urban settings in works by André Breton and Aragon.

In the following essay, Scaldini examines modernity in Aragon's Les Aventures de Télémaque.

In the following essay, Calin explores Aragon's use of collage, and its meaning to his view of literary tradition, in some of his major poems.

In the following essay, Balakian argues that Aragon's first published prose work, Anicet, cemented his importance to twentieth-century art and literature by “igniting” the “spirit of surrealism.”

Aragon believes that the task of literature is to explain the whole personality of man, and he feels that both history and love are its constituting factors. It is both symbolic and significant that it was through love that he discovered the existence of others and he never tires of recalling that he owes this discovery to his wife, Elsa Triolet…. His path to commitment is the path of a poet who has constantly sought inspiration from reality. Personal lyricism and social responsibility are happily bl...

In the following essay, Kimyongür presents an overview of Aragon's sociopolitical views in his novel cycle Le Monde réel.

In perspective, Aragon may well loom as the Victor Hugo of this century…. Like his predecessor he has had an active role in forming a literary movement, he has had his politically and patriotically inspired phases, his colossal narratives, and if he was not exiled at a certain period in his life like Victor Hugo, he has known what it is to be a stranger in his own land, evidenced in the poignant poetry of En Etrange Pays dans mon pays lui-même. The current preoccupation with structual analysis...

Aragon's speciality is a kind of internal rime-calembour, a device which he has never abandoned. The echoes have sometimes a largely musical value, but they often produce a comic juxtaposition which … [makes the words] parody and deflate each other…. (p. 221) This kind of dislocation requires a sense of location: in Feu de joie we find not an absence of logical structure but a parody of structure, as well as an acute verbal intelligence which revitalises both meaning and form.

[Henri Matisse is] a personal meditation by a poet and novelist, whose own place in 20th-century letters has at least minor distinction, on an artist whom he admired from youth, then finally met, to establish a rather formal friendship, dialogue and collaboration. The result is this marriage of a series of texts composed over a period of 27 years with a profusion of images, constituting what Aragon prefers to call a novel, with Matisse evidently the protagonist. The book can be seen as belonging to a long a...

L'Armoire à glace un beau soir is a play which emerged as the door closed on dada and that to surrealism opened. It displays the impulse to break new ground while continuing to express trust in instincts founded in Aragon's dada past. (p. 50) In L'Armoire à glace un beau soir, the opening roster of characters admits us into the world of the play. The names are largely generic. La Femme, Le Soldat, Le Général, Le Président, Les Deux Soeurs. Even the nam...

Holy Week is a rich, complex, poetic novel which rewards several readings and its author is the same penetrating Marxist thinker, the same staunch patriot and lover of his country, who before taking this journey to the past, sent book after book into the thick of contemporary political battle. There has been no change, and no recantation before the literary and cultural Inquisition. Just as Galileo muttered, "The earth does move," so Aragon, not under his breath however but openly, says here t...

["Holy Week" ("La Semaine sainte")] is crammed full of figures bearing historic names and describes aspects of a well-known episode of nineteenth-century French history [the weeklong journey towards exile of Louis XVIII to escape the triumphant Napoleon]. Nevertheless, Aragon warns us that "Holy Week" should not be read as a historical novel; and in the main this admonition should not go unheeded. For if, on the one hand, the definition of what constitutes a histori...

When Louis Aragon, one of the founding fathers of dada and surrealism, turned to the proletariat for regeneration, he did so with that splendid violence characteristic of the cults he once championed…. His poem, "The Red Front," brought down the wrath of the authorities upon his head, as their police minds would not put down to poetic license his open advocacy of the shooting of prominent politicians. In time, however, Aragon's initial intoxication gradually gave way to the more ...

[It was surprising to learn that Aragon] had written a social and collective novel, "The Bells of Basel." For the social novelist has to be not only the master of his characters but also their humble servant. He has to do what Aragon always refused to do: he has to surrender himself in order to create a work that will have an independent life. "The Bells of Basel" … is a novel of the class struggles in France that preceded the Great War. The subject is similar to that whic...

"Residential Quarter" ["Les Beaux Quartiers"] is the second novel in [Aragon's] projected series. It is longer and more unified and far more exciting than "The Bells of Basel."… The general theme is the social struggles and political intrigues that preceded the World War….

Holy Week deals, in some 270,000 words, with one of the most stirring episodes in French history…. And what does M. Aragon make of it? One of the dullest chronicles that ever came from the pen of a poet—which is saying much. Poets, used to the exactions of verse, imagine prose to be easy. Holy Week reads as if it had been compiled by a committee of fact-finders and translated by an electronic computer. The author not only indulges in a ponderous style, he seems unable to select his materials a...

["Residential Quarter"] is very uneven in quality. Aragon has much talent: his power of description is remarkable, his virtuosity brilliant, his style nervous and swift. He keeps the complicated strands of his oversize novel well in hand; sweeps the reader along, achieves excitement, terror, and emotional stress. But his novel is marred by gratuitous obscenity and a ribald vulgarity that detracts from its serious purpose as a social commentary…. In Edmond's thoughtless affair wit...