Louis Aragonπs Armoire

Gray Read

July, 2003

3500 words

In the 1920s, when modern architects called for clarity and light, surrealist poet Louis Aragon described essential architecture as darkness, defined by its interiors and its closures. In plays and prose poems, Aragon evoked the box, the coffin, the room, and objects themselvesãparticularly manufactured objectsã as containers that hold dark mysteries within. His prose lingers at doors, lids, and the visible surface of objects, exploring them as boundaries between light and dark where visible and invisible rub against one another. At these boundaries, Aragon gathered sparks of poetry in the friction between outside and inside, light and dark, and between words and substance. As formative Surrealist texts, much of what Aragon wrote in the early 1920s recognized ordinary buildings and things as thresholds to a kingdom of the marvelous.

Aragonπs play, ≥lπArmoire ‡ glace un beau soir,≤ published in 1923, and his novel, Paysan de Paris, of 1926, can be seen as complementary explorations of architectural thresholds between dark and light.[1] The play centers on a piece of furniture, an armoire, as a mythic architecture of enclosure that holds its interior darkness between a husband and wife. The novel is a stroll through Aragonπs favorite haunts in Paris: an aging commercial arcade slated for demolition and a nineteenth-century landscape park, the Passage de lπOpera and le Parc de Buttes Chaumont respectively. In both the play and the novel, Aragon describes architecture as atmosphere and as boundary, building a subtle poetry of perception that moves easily between fact and dream.

Aragon engaged architecture and objects not as metaphors, but as real spaces which one might enter and inhabit. He describes buildings twice, once as ordinary, matter-of-fact structures seen objectively, then again from a subjective point of view, as expanding realms that one experiences physically in gradations of shadow, limitless interiors, and strange artificial illumination. The most powerful architectural moments he found in openings where one might pause suspended between dark and light, inside and outside or any two opposing qualities. These thresholds he describes as points of friction where two realms are simultaneously present yet unresolved in their differences. They offer instances of paradox in the real world that escape definition to stand open to imagination. In Aragonπs writing, architecture is modern in so far as it is inscrutable, resisting the light of rational explanation, and offering flight to reverie.

Exploring darkness in opposition to light, Aragon developed a critique of rationalism based in a dialectic of opposing forces.[2] In Paysan de Paris he wrote, ≥light is meaningful only in relation to darkness and truth presupposes error. It is these mingled opposites which people our life, which make it pungent, intoxicating. We only exist in terms of this conflict, in the zone where black and white clash. And what do I care about white and black? Their realm is death.≤[3] Only in tension or in friction, are life and poetry generated as rubbing a rabbit fur along a glass rod generates sparks of electricity.[4]

From a broader point of view, the scintillation of darkness is an old romantic trope nurtured among the Surrealists in nighttime strolls and the half-light of dreams and drugs. If light is reason, then darkness is error, temptation and love. In the romantic tradition, night is woman, deepening into the little death of sexual pleasure. Aragon and AndrÈ Breton in particular appended Sigmund Freudπs theories of sexuality and Marxist materialism to this general romantic sensibility.[5] They found desire and dreams to be lights within darkness generated by contrasting images as they rub against one another setting both mind and body on edge and opening them to the uncanny. Breton adopted Isadore Ducasse, the Comte de Lautreamontπs definition of beauty as ≥the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella.≤ The sewing machine and the umbrella make love.[6]

Aragonπs interest in architecture and the physical experience of the city was an integral part of this romantic literary tradition. Ducasseπs definition of beauty is found in his novel, Les Chants de Maldoror, immediately following a description of the quality of darkness that befalls the Rue Vivienne in Paris at 8:00 PM when the shops close and the gas lights are extinguished. Ducasse describes luxurious shop window displays as sprays of dazzling light suddenly shuttered and dark ≥like a heart that stops loving.≤ Ducasse prowled the streets of Paris in the 1860s finding poetry in stark contrasts between the luxurious image of the city of light and its darker passions. In the 1920s, Aragon walked the same streets to find similar shops now aged and worn in the Passage de lπOpera, one block from the Rue Vivienne. In returning to Ducasseπs haunts, Aragon found new qualities of light and darkness, as well as suggestive friction at boundaries, thresholds and the enclosures. Aragon pursued his interest in architecture in both descriptions of existing places and in fiction where he could press spatial phenomena to their limit, actually designing places in words.

Aragon explored the emotional and sexual sparks generated at architectural thresholds most pointedly in his play ≥LπArmoire ‡ glace un beau soir.≤ The drama presents the armoire as a simple enclosure that serves as the underlying premise driving the action, then expands the implications of its architecture outward to engulf the audience. Initially the play leads the audience through three layers of enclosure from outside the curtain to a scene inside a room to the hidden interior of the armoire. Outside the curtain, several small nonsensical scenes take place: a mother and child encounter a soldier; the president and a black general grant permission for Siamese twin sisters to marry separately; a man with an extremely long nose rides by on a tricycle, and ThÈodore Fraenkel (one of the Surrealist group) announces that the play was about to begin. The characters exit as the curtain opens and stage hands bring a large armoire with a mirrored door onto the scene. A wife, Lenore, stands in front of the armoire with her arms crossed. Her husband Jules, holding a new hammer, returns from a journey to greet his wife warmly. She responds in fear, pleading with him not to open the armoire. The bulk of the play revolves around their overtures toward one another as their suspicions spin into elaborate loverπs games which test their affections. Is she concealing a rival in the armoire? If so, is her lover suffocating?

The armoire remains the central character of the drama, holding a mystery that opens the speculative imaginations of the couple and of the audience. The armoire shifts identity in the course of the play from refuge to tomb, to a partner in dialogue returning more questions than answers in its reflective gaze. At first, Lenore protects the armoire with her body such that a violation of the box would violate her.[7] Jules carries the hammer as a tool that ≥can drive nails and pull them out,≤ domestic and creative actions of a husband and a builder. Yet Lenore reads the hammer as a weapon that can force entry, harm her, and destroy the box. Jules says that has traveled the world yearning for home. ≥At the moment of return, the white walls offer great caresses≤ He returns to the house, the woman, and the armoire as embedded enclosures of marital intimacy, yet she resists. Initially, Jules interprets her protestations as a game of cache-cache that he is disinclined to play at the moment. He agrees never to open the armoire, ≥I will be happy to curl up as a dog before my Lenore at the gates of paradise.≤ She prods him to take a role of dominance and force his way into her closet, ≥Fool, I have a lover.≤ Jules plays his part reluctantly out of love and habit, ≥Whoever is hiding, surely the husband will kill him.≤ The armoireπs closed door focuses the intrigue, raising his ardor as he engages the game. Only when Lenore steps aside to allow him to open the armoire, does he stop short. When she demands that he open the armoire, he resists suddenly lost, as if Pandora has left him responsible for opening her box. Finding himself slipping outside of the game, he pleads with her to prevent him from opening the door.

Immobile before the armoire, both stand fixed in place by its mute presence. He approaches ≥The vertical lake separates you,≤[8] a reflecting surface above a unknown depth. Contemplating a possible rival within the mirrored armoire, Jules sees only himself. Is he then the lover and she the temptress in their doubled images? Their tensions encircle the closed box. Finally he breaks the glass with his hammer, she cries, he leads her offstage and the audience waits as dusk darkens the scene. He returns disheveled, from love-making or from murder? He opens the armoire and the characters from the prologue emerge like clowns from a car. In half-darkness, the door is opened, yet the riddles of the inner plot remain unsolved. When the characters of the prologue re-emerge, they return the play to its outermost layer, as if inside were outside all along. The president recites a love poem, then the lights dim to blackness. When the house lights rise, the curtain is still open yet the stage is empty.

At one level, the drama can be read as a parody of romantic comedy. The woman alternately guards and offers entry to her armoire as the man approaches and retreats. At this level, the play is corrosively funny, exaggerating the tropes of sexual parry to an audience familiar with each move in the game. In contemporary music hall skits, armoires usually contained lovers or at least voyeurs and the scene of a husband returning to an unfaithful wifeπs boudoir had been played a thousand times. In Paysan de Paris, Aragon commends nickel dramas with titles such as Saucy Springtime, and Flower of Sin. ≥This type of theatre whose sole aim, whose sole means, is love itself is without a doubt the only one offering us a truly modern dramaturgy free of all fakery.≤[9] He argues that the most obviously contrived dramas are the most modern in that they contain their own parody. Aragon also praised humor in the midst of a scurrilous diatribe hurled at contemporary literature, TraitÈ du Style, published in 1928. Humor, he writes, is the negative condition of poetry, the acid that strips away anti-poetry. ≥Humor can be found in all the great poetsähumor is what gives an image its force.≤[10] Aragon found humor in the same manufactured objects that he pressed for their surreal qualities. ≥Humor is what soup, chickens, and symphony orchestras lack. On the other hand, road pavers, elevators and crush hats have it.≤[11]

The armoire is likewise a ridiculous object, an errant house within the house, that modern architects tried to eliminate by designing built-in closets, integral to the wall. Independent of its surroundings, the armoire is a miniature that compresses the spatial features of architecture to an essence: an enclosure with a door that can open and close. ≥Armoire ‡ glas un beau soir,≤ presents this essential architectural situation as a premise and the scene plays out almost of its own accord. The armoire and two lovers (or perhaps three) engage one another in a friction generating sparks of passion that illuminate the power of architecture to conceal and reveal. The pettiness of the scene and the banality of the object only heighten its poignancy for the drama could be any couple confronting any door.

Aragon engaged the armoire with a long and inquisitive playfulness that teased out several possible readings of the object.[12] The armoire as a threshold between light and dark, inside and outside, shifts its identity in the course of the play. After the prologue skits, the story begins when the armoire is wheeled onto the stage as an independent, portable object, a box that is small compared to the stage and the hall. The actors are lit, the house lights dim and the interior of the armoire is presumably dark. As the play proceeds, the brightness on stage grows dimmer while light reflected in the mirror becomes comparatively brighter until the armoire appears as a source of light in the single photograph of the playπs performance.[13] (fig. 1) Toward the end of the play, the stage lights have dimmed to a tenebrous haze as if the audience is also inside a box. At this moment, the armoire opens and the prologue characters emerge. Suddenly, the armoire as no longer a container but a threshold leading out from the performance hall to a surrounding dark space backstage where the characters must have waited during the play. The lights then dim to black in both hall and stage leaving the audience in complete darkness so they no longer perceive the enclosure of the room. When the lights return, the characters of the play have retreated from the stage, perhaps passing back through the doorway of the armoire into an area beyond the view of the audience but open to the night of the city beyond. As the audience can again see their surroundings, the hall seems small and empty compared to the imaginative possibilities of the city into which the characters have escaped. This series of reversals, between light and dark as well as between inside and outside shifts the audienceπs perception of their position architecturally. At the end of the play, when the audience is making a mental transition from the story back to reality, Aragon moves the fictional space of the play out into the real space of the city at night. Aragon defined the marvelous as ≥the eruption of contradiction within the real.≤[14] He suggests that the city might be both fictional and real simultaneously, as experienced through its enclosures.

In his later autobiography, Je nπai jamais appris ‡ ecrire, Aragon recalled the early years of Surrealism as a time of creative uncertainty. In the book, Aragon presented a single painting by Henri Matisse, ≥The open window, Collioure,≤ in which a window swings open as a threshold to depthless black (fig. 2). In Paysan de Paris, he described the power of this darkness in contrast to light:

There exists a black kingdom which the eyes of man avoid because its landscape fails signally to flatter them. This darkness, which he imagines he can dispense with in describing the light is error with its unknown characteristics, error which demands that a person contemplate it for its own sake before rewarding him with the evidence about fugitive reality that it alone could give.[15]

Darkness is a kingdom or a landscape, suggesting that its territory that may extend well beyond the limits of light and reason. The French errer means to wander or roam. In Paysan de Paris, Aragon released himself into the city at dusk in the first flush of spring to find, ≥strange flowers of reason to match each error of the senses.≤ If light is reason and darkness error then only where the two are matched does one glimpse fugitive reality as if at a threshold.

While ≥Armoire ‡ glas un beau soir,≤ plays around the outside of an architectural threshold between light and dark, testing the emotional tension of enclosure, Paysan de Paris enters the shadows of the dark kingdom of material substance that resists the light of reason. ≥The gateway to mystery swings open at the touch of human weakness and we have entered the realms of darkness.≤ In the embrace of the crepuscular Passage de lπOpera other kinds of light appear to emerge slowly from the darkness of material itself as dim lights appear to brighten as the eye accommodates. This solid light, Aragon describes as glaucous, ≥the whole fauna of human fantasies, their marine vegetation, drifts and luxuriates in the dimly lit zones of human activity, as though plaiting thick tresses of darkness.≤[16] Light within the passage has substance like water or like hair that sweeps against the body as one moves. Then quickly the darkness of the passage is lit with the ≥quality of pale brilliance of a leg suddenly revealed under a lifted skirt.≤[17] In Aragonπs prose, gas lights and desires flash within the air of the passage as phosphorescent sea creatures that glow when touched. The passage is an urban aquarium that contains its languid atmosphere to sustain its creatures, shape their bodies, and carry their light.

The quality of this light generated by material darkness becomes more tangible at a threshold where the poet finds himself suspended in a double light, between reality and dream. In the Passage de lπOpera he finally arrives at an opening to another street:

Where the grotto gapes deep back in a bayä in the farthest reaches of the two kinds of daylight which pit the reality of the outside world against the subjectivism of the passage. Like a man at the edge of the depths, attracted equally to the current of objects and the whirlpools of his own being. Let us pause at this strange zone where all is distraction, distraction of attention as well as inattention, so as to experience this vertigo.[18]

At the grotto, he pauses between two kinds of daylight, one from outside and one from within. The light from outside the passage draws him out of the depths of poetic rumination, to take stock of his own position both architecturally and as a writer. At this threshold, he is illuminated twice: by light cast from real objects outside and by light emanating from his own subjective reveries within the passage. Two kinds of light, objective and subjective, balance one another in equal measure for one fragile instant. ≥Like a woman adorned with all the magic spells of love when daybreak has raised her skirt of curtains and penetrated the room gently.≤ Such disorientation also marks the moment after a play has finished and before the actors take their bows, when the story and the city are present simultaneously.

Outer light and inner light correspond with two contemporary descriptions of the phenomenon of vision. Scientists such as Thomas Young and H.L.F. Helmholtz accepted Newtonπs description of light as a wave that enters the eye from outside. In 1802, they posited that the eye has three color receptors that simply respond to wavelengths of the light that they receive. On the other hand an Aristotelian tradition, embraced by artists and rendered somewhat scientific in Goetheπs Treatise on Color, holds that the eye itself generates light.[19] Goethe investigated colors that appeared when eyes were closed, in afterimages and illusions, observing that these phenomena must be produced by the eye itself. He concluded that light and color are created within the eye and mind rather than outside. Aragon notes, ≥scholarly men have taught me that light is a vibrationä but do not account for what is important to me about lightäThings which are the stuff of miracles.≤[20] Dreams, hallucinations and sexual desire constituted for the surrealists, sources of an inner light generated out of corporeal darkness, that is not received from outside but perceived within. The atmospheres and thresholds of architecture offer moments of spatial suspension between light and dark that give way to this dual experience.

The architecture that Aragon created in his prose: the armoire, the Passage de lπOpera, the grotto, and other places not considered here, can be seen as an alternate description of modern architecture.[21] Although Aragon wrote about buildings and places rather than design them, his words construct a series of images that specify an approach to architecture. If we accept Aragonπs conviction that vision and imagination were indivisible then we can read his descriptions even of existing buildings such as the Passage de lπOpera as new constructions that bear some weight as design. The character of Aragonπs buildings is clear. They are not seen from above but from within; their form is unknown, but their light is finely tuned. Each space holds its light or darkness as a container holds a fluid or an atmosphere to support a particular kind of life within. In Aragonπs architecture, thresholds between different atmospheres are moments of suspension and distraction, open to unforeseen possibilities generated in the friction between two realms. The more distant those atmospheres and the more powerful their interaction, the stronger their poetic potential as they touch. Thresholds offer a position both outside and inside simultaneously, where one may read a place objectively and experience it subjectively at the same time. In this scenario, architectural design would not be a process of composition but of alchemy, rubbing atmospheres and/or things together to see what sparks they produce. The surrealist modernity that Aragon described was sensuous, caressing the body in half-light, merging human and object and open to the possibilities of darkness.