Louis Aragon, Jean Paulhan, Elsa Triolet 1920-1964, Time crossed
Louis AragonElsa TrioletJean PaulhanAragon owes to his exceptional longevity, which some do not hesitate to reproach him today, just as they more or less blame Jean Paulhan for not having been shot with his comrades in the Musée de l'Homme network, for having had, as they say, the last word, at the end of this journey through time which ended for him with the disappearance, in 1966, of his contemporary André Breton, and the death, in 1968, of the author of The Applied Warrior, The Bridge Crossed and The Flowers of Tarbes, his senior by thirteen years. The article he devoted to it in Les Lettres françaises of October 16, 1968 - “Le Temps traversed” - quite naturally follows on from those - “Lautréamont and us” - which he had devoted the previous year to the “generation of 1917”, and to the memory of his meeting with André Breton. It is illuminated by their epistolary dialogue, where we will find a foretaste of what their “general correspondence” could be, in which the crossed voice of Elsa Triolet also mixes. The “jumble of events and men” It constantly touches on what makes man, “in his relationships with others”, what, “to simplify,” says Aragon, “we call politics”. Politics, or the novel, thanks to which “time, like a bridge, crosses itself: like cars, but also like a river”.
Publisher : Gallimard