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Laure Lévêque
Dans ce roman qui, au dire de la critique, acterait un changement de manière chez Aragon entre le cycle du Monde réel que marquerait un réalisme que l’on dit – un peu vite – socialiste, et la dernière période, reconnue comme métaromanesque, les procédures d’énonciation entrent pour beaucoup dans l’élaboration diffuse d’un sémantisme. Sémantisme d’autant plus incertain qu’il est confié au monologue intérieur, voire, plus largement, au style indirect libre, soit à des procédés caractéristiques de la subjectivité. Pour ne pas dire de l’intersubjectivité, tant il est difficile de ne pas voir que l’histoire romancée de Géricault est aussi celle d’Aragon, qui retrace le parcours d’un artiste affronté aux tourmentes de l’Histoire et son éveil à la conscience, tant politique que morale. À ce titre, la performance et l’efficace de ce roman stéréoscopique, kaléidoscopique, passent aussi par la mise sous tension énonciative des blocages dont, en 1958, on ne peut plus ignorer qu’ils travaillent le monde réel et, partant, par l’abandon d’un certain messianisme.
According to the critics, Aragon's Semaine sainte was a turning point in his work. While the series known as The Real World was allegedly – and, perhaps, hastily – defined as a form of (Socialist) realism, Aragon then went beyond the strict boundaries of the novel as a genre in his late period. In this novel, the rules of enunciation play a major part in the building-up of a blurred semantic structure. The structure is all the less stable as it relies on internal monologue – as well as on free indirect speech and other literary devices giving free range to subjectivity. The term “intersubjectivity” might even be more appropriate, as it is quite obvious that the fictionalised biography of French painter Théodore Géricault is closely intertwined with Aragon’s own life. It relates the career of an artist struggling with the torments of History, as well as the awakening of his political and moral conscience. In this respect, the achievements and the effectiveness of this stereoscopic, even kaleidoscopic novel owe much to the strained enunciative devices used when describing the key issues that, in 1958, were at play in the real world – no one could ignore them at the time – the consequence being relinquishing a certain form of Messianism.
