Customer Reviews

Adventures Of Telemachus, The

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Aragon demonstrates his involvement in the Paris DADA scene with this excellent proto-Surrealist work. In the tradition of Alfred Jarry, he presents an utterly fantastic tale full of wonderful nonsense and absurd wit. That Surrealism arose from DADA is evident in his juxtaposing of unrelated ideas and use of automatic writing techniques (the latter of which produces an effect similar to Breton's Magnetic Fields). If you like the work of Jarry, Schwitters, Tzara, and the like, then you will probably enjoy this.

SCARED FOR LIFE! Porn queen runs to ex-husband as lover is taken in by Po-Po. I was all washed up and there was a relentless wave of phone calls upon me when I found this book. A treatise on parisian intellectual theatrics, these adventures are an unbelievable example of how utterly likable surrealist pretensions can be. It is sure to cheer you up (even cures minor ailments).

Man oh man, what a trial it was trying to get into this book. I'm normally a fan of surrealist writing (see my reviews of Breton's NADJA, Aragon's PARIS PEASANT and Carrington's THE HEARING TRUMPET) but TELEMACHUS seems to me to be a rather torturous exercise in literary gymnastics. I've been told that in this work Aragon pulls out all the stops as he uses every pun, metaphor and literary device available to rework and subvert French literary traditions. It doesn't seem to have come off too well in the translation though. The plot is very loosely based around the adventures of Telemachus, who is shipwrecked on a fantastical island with his androgynous Mentor. On the way he is tempted by the blandishments of Calypso and her nymphs. But that's about as much plot as you get. The narrative (if one can call it that) consists of sentences strung in a truly surrealist manner. Remember how the Parisian Surrealists were all enchanted by that one famous line by Lautreamont about the chance meeting of an umbrella and a sewing machine? Well, in this work Aragon takes these surrealist juxtapositions to the extreme. The result is initially surprising and one cannot doubt the startling beauty of some of the images originally afforded by this technique, but when the entire book is written in this fashion, it gets very hard indeed. Not a good introduction to surrealist writing at all--in fact, it really put me off. Read it if you absolutely MUST.

Louis Aragon (1897-1982) published the most enchanting of all surrealist novels, translated as "Paris Peasant," in 1924. Two years earlier, on the cusp between DADAism and surrealism he had inverted (and perverted) the 17th-century didactic book of the same title by Fenelon. Both authors imagined Telemachus, son of crafty Ulysses and patient (and far-from-guileless) Penelope, setting out to find out why his father has not returned to Greece with the other victors of the Trojan War.

Telemachus and his ancient Mentor (the goddess of wisdom, Minerva in gender-crossing disguise) wash up on the shores of Ogygia, where his father had earlier dallied with Calypso and her nymphs. The family resemblance is instantly noticed, and Calypso wants to take up with the younger image of the lover who abandoned her. He is also lusted after by the nymph Eucharis.

I am making it sound as if there was a plot, but the book is almost entirely digressions that are not senseless, but are mostly pointless, as Aragon played with words and the strange juxtapositions DADAists conjured and adored. I would estimate that the text is less than 20,000 words. Perhaps it is delightful in French, though I doubt it. It was certainly a provocation, including a lesbian tryst and the debauching a virtuous youth (the inversion of Fenelon). In the formulation of the helpful (trés academic) introduction by the brave translators), Aragon (et al.) "freed himself from the constraints of mimeticism in regard to fable, meaning, and language, ... dissociated language from significance... [and] generated a verbal overflow or overkill, kindling the desire for and the voluptuousness of verbal indulgence"... which is not everyone's glass of absinthe.