The Mentir-vrai and Aragon’s Politics

Abstract

Aragon's concept of the mentir-vrai is multi-layered and complex, but on a simpler level it can be reduced to the technique any novelist would use, fiction or artifice used to create a plausible version of the real that can illustrate a basic truth. In an even cruder sense than that it is the kind of double that characterizes the public rhetoric of any politician who says one thing to the public but is aware of a deeper truth in private. But aside from its literary uses for Aragon, I wonder if it does not stand, equally simplistically, even crudely, as a metaphor for Aragon's rationalization to himself of his lifelong career in the Communist party. That is to say that as in his personal life Aragon lived a whole series of pretenses, so did he do in relation to the PCF. Perhaps Aragon thought all of us must, to some degree, live pretense, or invent narratives for ourselves, or reformulate what we know to be fiction into our own truths. Was Aragon post-modern? Perhaps here is also the explanation for the famous quote at the end of his life that he had in some sense wasted it. I refer to the fact that Aragon was not simply an intellectual working for the but rather a quintessential party intellectual who was on the Central Committee, and edited several important and critical party publications, doubling his career as a writer with substantial journalism and even historical output. He helped make party policy toward intellectuals, was deeply involved in the PCF's internal conflicts, and was its quintessential intellectual of great prestige vis-a-vis the world outside. Use me as a symbol of fidelity to the party, he said. (1) Aragon was as close as anyone in the party leadership to knowing the party's innermost secrets involving its relationship to the USSR. Aragon told Pierre Daix of his troubled trip to the USSR two months before Stalin's death in 1953, his dismay at the Stalin assault on mostly Jewish doctors who had treated the party leadership as agents of Zionism and the CIA, and his visit to Thorez, then convalescing in the USSR, who confided to Aragon that he had been treated wonderfully by one of the accused. (2) Aragon was married to a former Russian Communist; according to Jennine Verdes-Leroux Elsa Triolet was even more sectarian than himself, and spent long periods of time in the USSR where she had personal and family ties. (3) This inevitably raises questions about what he knew of the Soviet reality and chose to mask; the innocence of Stalin's victims in the purges, the dimensions of Stalin's crimes, the size and conditions within the Gulag and the rest. In conversations with several former communists of the period on his influence I gained the impression that he was indeed one of those who were fully informed, frequently ahead of most, even those on the Politburo, of breaking trends within the USSR of major import, for example the whole question of Khrushchev's secret speech and the process of de-Stalinization in the USSR. Aragon was not, therefore, a naive believer that the USSR was utopia; he stayed there too long and knew too many people to have been fooled by Potemkin villages. He very much had his eyes open, and rationalized his commitment to the USSR in the conviction that soiled and imperfect and violent as it was, it represented the necessary historical path to a better future, and was superior to the capitalist west, the crimes of which, from fascism to colonialism could be rationalized as worse. Or, a less charitable construction even than this, he believed its violence and repression were necessary and justifiable, indeed worthwhile measures for the necessary historical process to occur. Beyond his relationship to the USSR there was the question of Aragon's personal repudiation in his public behavior of positions that emerge clearly from his creative work. As a writer one of his most appealing characteristics lies in his powerful feminism. He favors female characters, paints portraits of women of extraordinary character and strength, and in Les Cloches de Bale he has the most eloquent arguments in favor of full female emancipation and equality as are to be found anywhere. …