The Adventures of Telemachus

by Louis Aragon, Judd David Hubert (Translator), Renee Riese Hubert (Translator)

Published in 1922 and modeled on Finelon's seventeenth-century epic of the same name, Aragon's work parodies its heroic models, didacticism, psychological stability, and descriptive and narrative balance.

Genres: Fiction, France, French Literature, Literature, Classics, Surreal, Mythology

144 pages, Paperback

First published September 24, 1922

About the author

French writer Louis Aragon founded literary surrealism.

Louis Aragon, a major figure in the avant-garde movements, shaped visual culture in the 20th century. His long career as a poet, novelist, Communist polemicist and bona fide war hero secured his place in the pantheon of greats.

With André Breton and Phillipe Soupault, Aragon launched the movement and through Paysan de Paris (Paris Peasant), his novel of 1926, produced the considered defining text of the movement.

Aragon parted company with the movement in the early 1930s, devoted his energies to the Communist party, and went to produce a vast body that combined elements of the social avant-garde.

Aragon, a leading influence on the shaping of the novel in the early to mid-20th century, gave voice and images to the art. He, also a critic, edited as a member of the Académie Goncourt. After 1959, people frequent nominated him for the Nobel Prize.

Reviews

[Nate D · Rating 4 out of 5]

The origins of detournement practice in dada-surrealist mythology? Aragon was to become a key Surrealist by the time of his fantastic mysterious-ordinary essay-novel Paris Peasant (before being ejected from the group shortly after), but this 1922 short novel actually precedes the Surrealist Manifesto -- elegantly, amusingly bridging worlds. More worlds than anticipated even, as it's also deeply postmodern, and oddly intertextual. I know the Homeric origins, but there's an interstitial bit of 17th-century moralizing archbishop tucked into here as well, though essentially wiped back out of the framework by Aragon's hand. In the end, the entire story seems to break apart under metatextual play that literally shakes the foundations of the island setting, and finally collapses into the juxtaposed inadequacy of language and Aragon's extreme eloquence in constructing hyper-evocative surrealist tableaux. I just realized that Exact Change have been responsible for keeping some of my favorite books in print and this is one excellent such example.

[Ronald Morton · Rating 4 out of 5]

“In my left waistcoat pocket I carry a most faithful likeness of myself: a burnished steel watch. It speaks, indicates time, and does not understand anything about it.

“Everything that is myself is incomprehensible.”

Louis Aragon, like the other two founders/fathers of Surrealism (Soupault and Breton), was active in Dadaism in the years preceding the Surrealist movement. This book was written/published in 1922, precedes The Surrealist Manifesto(s) by a couple of years, and yet seems to bridge the gap a bit between Dadaism and Surrealism.

Vibrant, philosophical, and Nihilistic, the short work focuses on Telemechus and Mentor/Minerva's stop on Calypso's island, in pursuit of Ulysses. Much of it is focused on Mentor's education of Telemecus, and a system referenced as Dd, which shares touch points with Dadaism. The language is fluid and at times experimental - much of the text is straightforward, but some extended passages are surrealistic and read as if produced by automatic writing (it wasn't).

Really great stuff.

I know myself only as rapture, reptilian motion: blood, blood, blood. My hands, leaden spoons, twist and melt. My body is a circled barrel whose bursts will be more beautiful than thunder; it lifts with the dregs, and the hoarseness of my voice. My knees elude immobility like those of machines. Prodigy’s missile, dagger I depart and kiss I return. The world put to sack succumbs, a cistern under heaven’s cataracts, bursting with my weight hurled down without choice on a random prey: discovery of a toothsome continent, I met the woman, my disease. Exclusive domain of touch, this body unnoticed by eyes preoccupied only with the hair that sprouts in making love, this body spreads out and stiffens against my flesh, deliberate contact. Awkward help steers passion toward delight, makes the couple sway, whale on the back of liquid plains, exchanging embarrassed and naked words, null and come from afar, followed by the streaming noises of clenched teeth, bitten off pieces, sudden vulgarities, precious, piercing. The right word, opened sluice gate, reveals the male's attention, the precise worry, the vital point.

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

Title: Les aventures de Télémaque

Author: Louis Aragon

Release Date: September 27, 2017 [EBook #55637]

Language: French

Produced by Laura N.R. & Marc D'Hooghe at Free Literature (online soon in an extended version,also linking to free sources for education worldwide ... MOOC's, educational materials,...) (Images generously made available by the Internet Archive.)

Free download available at Project Gutenberg.

I made the proofing for Free Literature and it will be published by Project Gutenberg.

Images available at The University of Iowa Libraries

[İlke · Rating 5 out of 5]

Telemakhos'un Maceraları / Norgunk Yayınları /
Çeviri: Ayberk Erkay



https://ilkeilke.blogspot.com/2025/01...

[Jay · Rating 5 out of 5]

Louis Aragon , on his birthday Oct 3
"I set about discovering the face of the infinite beneath the concrete forms which were escorting me, walking the length of the earth's avenues." Louis Aragon

The dichotomous vision and juxtaposition of images of the Ideal and Real realms in which man is caught and must live have not only trapped us in a material world from which we must escape, this dual existence has shattered the human soul into myriad false selves and reflections.
For Louis Aragon, as for Jung, the project of becoming human is to unite our opposites and discover our authentic selves, to become whole. It is also a spiritual journey, a quest like that of Ahab to break through the mask and seize the Infinite, to see with Plato beyond our illusions, to charge with Don Quixote yet again against the windmills that might be giants.
As to his methods, Louis Aragon marshaled the armamentum of Dadaist-Surrealist literature, though sadly only a fraction of his vast work has been translated into English. These methods he has used with intent, to disassemble conventional meaning as though it were a cage of the soul and let us out to run amok.
The Adventures of Telemachus, a brilliant reimagination of his education on the island of Calypso, is a glorious novel of myth and literary-philosophical wit, and an excellent first choice of his works to read.
Paris Peasant is his celebrated Great Book, which may serve as a blueprint for the whole design of his project, a machine for destroying and recreating our world and ourselves.

[Jon · Rating 4 out of 5]

In 1922, somewhere in the weeds between the the Dadaist movement and the Surrealists, Lois Aragon wrote this parody of Francois Fenelon's Telemachus, in which he sets out to separate words from their meaning and identity from any likeness. If you expect humorous juxtapositions, syntactical anarchy, unexpected hookups, and house parties of the Gods, then I don't think you'll be disappointed.

Calypso was tracing emblems in the sand. Mentor took his mistress's hand:
"Calypso, your eyes are black.
-My eyes?
-Yours.
-That, Mentor, is a figment of your imagination.
-Could it be, Calypso, that you have malicious designs?
-Me? What do I know about evil?
-You draw very poorly; that feathered heart looks suspiciously like a flight of fly specks. And that dove? It has no wings.
-My, I no longer thought about them.
-Then what do you think about?
-About destiny, about glances that drown in ink, about the dust on garden paths.
-You're doing yourself harm, child, by counting the bars of heaven. You are not of an age to play with light effects.

[Jesse K · Rating 2 out of 5]

In terms of who did what when, this is an impressive book. It makes much of Burroughs seem pointless, decades before he picked up a pen. However, it wasn't very readable, and I tend to place the tangible above the conceptual when picking what to read. I will still probably give his more famous work, Paris Peasant, a go, at some point in the next couple years.

[Georgia · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wish I could read the ending for the first time over and over and over again fuck.


— Then we agree. We would be wrongheaded if we did not take words literally. A slip is never really a slip. Words do not fail* us as long as they do not betray us: misnomers clearly reveal our hidden thoughts.

*. Trahir can mean fail, insofar as words fail to express our thoughts, or betray, in the sense that our words can reveal more than we intended. Translator's
Note

[A L]

Like a Rosetta Stone of 20th century literary theory, which is kinda scary.