Rhymed Circumstances in Aragon's Musée Grévin

Abstract

ABSTRACTBuilding on work by scholars such as Michel Murat and Philippe Forest, I argue for the interrelation of two notions—circumstance and rhyme—in Aragon's Occupation-era essays. These essays defend “circumstantial” over “pure” poetry and promote rhyme and reason's compatibility. In keeping with those values, historical and visual analogies (“rhymes”) abound in the Resistance poetry of Aragon's Musée Grévin (1943), whose title foretells fascist leaders' derisory future as immobile, waxen afterimages. Its central poem, by casting Hitler as Goethe's “Sorcerer's Apprentice,” depicts language's power to enchant or immobilize. Furthermore, Aragon's poem itself develops an illusion of imprecatory power exerted over the Führer. It does so, I argue, by engaging with readers' memory for sound, idiom, and history. Rhymes and familiar fixed expressions lend inexorability to the poet's pronouncements. And by “rhyming” historical circumstances (downfallen autocrats) with contemporary circumstances (fascists in power), Aragon prophesies the “pattern's” logical, inevitable conclusion: the fascists' downfall.