The Adventures of Telemachus - Softcover

Louis Aragon

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1878972235 ISBN 13: 9781878972231

Publisher: Exact Change, 2004

Synopsis

This is the first paperback edition in English of one of the most important and entertaining works of Surrealist fiction. Aragon’s 1922 novel boldly appropriates the title and plot of a didactic seventeenth-century epic, recounting the adventures of Odysseus’ son Telemachus; but the moralistic underpinnings of the original are replaced by a Surrealist’s dedication to the strange, the beautiful and the erotic. Though a classic of Surrealism, this is not automatic writing; on the contrary, it is a wryly self-conscious book, full of the kinds of intertextual games associated with writers such as Borges and Calvino. As the Huberts comment in their Introduction, “Aragon did not have to liberate his mind through automatic exercises; but by mastering and playing with the narrative... he succeeded in freeing himself from the constraints of mimeticism... descend[ing] into the diabolical nirvana of Dada.”

About this title

Language Notes:

Text: English, French (translation)

From Publishers Weekly:

Poet and novelist Aragon (1897-1982) helped launch the dada and surrealist movements. In Telemachus, written in 1922 and newly translated for this first English edition, he does an irreverent spoof of the 17th century moralist Fenelon, who rewrote Homeric epic as a guide for princes and schoolboys. Along with MentorMinerva in dragTelemachus quests for his father Ulysses, who is dawdling amorously on the way back from Troy. But where Fenelon warns against women, Aragon indulges Telemachus in the erotic delights offered by petulant nymphs Calypso and Eucharis. Minerva and Calypso have a lesbian interlude. An amusing sequence takes place in Neptune's underwater brothel. Instead of fleeing temptation by diving in the sea to seek wisdom on a distant shore, Aragon's Telemachus tastes pleasure and wrestles with his identity in the here-and-now of Calypso's isle. His final act is Aragon's invention. The highly academic introduction discusses Telemachus as a dada/surrealist document, with its fracturing of language and bourgeois values. Most non-specialist readers will skim over the novel's tortured talkiness, savoring Aragon's passages of sensuous lyricism, his playful tactics with myth and his obvious delight in the power of words.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Exact Change
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 1878972235
• ISBN 13: 9781878972231
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 144