Louis Aragon’s L’Armoire à glace un beau soir: A Play of the Surrealist “Époque de sommeil”

Abstract

Louis Aragon’s U A rm oire à glace un beau soir: / A Play of the Surrealist “Epoque de sommeil” Annabelle Henkin Melzer I Louis Aragon was, in the Paris of 1919, a member of that floating commune of young writers who met at Certas in the Passage de l’Opéra, at its annex Le Petit Grillon, and occasion­ ally at the restaurant of Mme. Saulinier, a few steps away on the rue du Mont-Thabor. Its members were twenty years old in 1920 and gathered around the periodical which they had de­ fiantly named Littérature. 1 This small yellow-covered magazine, which published the works of Gide, Max Jacob, Reverdy, Cendrars, and Isadore Ducasse, Comte de Lautréamont, had set out to make a sweeping indictment of “traditional” literature, and Aragon was, at twenty-three, one of its three editors. Tall and delicate, with a thin moustache, he was already a leading figure in the French cultural avant-garde and a precocious literary success. The other two editors were André Breton, at twenty-four, the guru, and Philippe Soupault, twenty-three, the strongest devotee of dada who loved all things African and who once appeared costumed as the President of the Liberian Re­ public. About these three gathered Paul Eluard who worked in his father’s real-estate business during the day and wrote poetry at night, Roger Vitrac, a nonchalant young giant of twenty-one who was to become the group’s most serious dramatist, and Jacques Baron, at seventeen, the youngest. This was the “sur­ realist” group in 1920, before there was a surrealism. The war had drawn to a close. Breton, Aragon, Soupault, and Eluard had all been at the front. Breton and Aragon, both medical students at the time, had worked at the Val-de-Grâce training center, and Breton had later been transferred to a hospital for shell-shocked and crazed soldiers where he observed 45 46 Comparative Drama the new psychoanalytic method and work with dreams at first hand. Eluard had been gassed and invalided. In fact the greater part of their generation had been killed or maimed. Those who survived were not left merely with a sense of being lost, but were, in Gertrude Stein’s words, “une génération fichue.” The demobilization was gradual. The days were filled with a strange new freedom. Of his mood at the time Breton recalls: En ce qui me concerne, délivré du joug militaire, je suis pour me dérober à toute nouvelle contrainte. Advienne que pourra. . . .2 It was into this setting that Tristan Tzara arrived in 1920, bring­ ing with him the mold of dada performance which he had tried and tested in Zurich: simultaneous poems and masked dances; sketches in which the text was peripheral while the actor created according to the spontaneity of the moment—often carrying both sets and costumes on his back—moving in the gray zone between actor and object; events in which surprise and shock were raised to the level of scandal and created a new oneness between the public and the performer. The Littérature group was ripe for his arrival. The exploits of the papa of dada were enticing to the group of young poets eager to bring their maga­ zine and its writing more directly in contact with an audience, and Breton had written to Tzara: Avec Philippe Soupault et Louis Aragon il ne se passe pas de jour que nous ne parlions de vous: “Tristan Tzara aimerait ceci, ou. . . .” Je vous attends, je n’attends plus que vous.3 What followed were two years of intense activity and excite­ ment, all, however, basically moving towards disillusionment with Tzara’s dada antics. From 1920-22, the young Littérature poets performed in Tzara’s dada manifestations, playing roles which proved largely antithetical to their dispositions. Picabia would often disappear, unable to submit himself to the indig­ nities of clowning before an angry mob, and neither Breton nor Soupault seemed to be finding the way to match their person­ alities to Tzara’s own. Aragon, although considered “un peu snob” and often put out by the public disturbances, would still join in...