Before psychogeography, the Situationists and dream urbanism, there
was Paris Peasant, a pioneering Surrealist excavation of the twentieth
century's capital city
Paris Peasant (1926) is one of the central works of Surrealism, yet
Exact Change's edition is the first US publication of Simon Watson
Taylor's authoritative translation, completed after consultations with
the author. Unconventional in form--Aragon consciously avoided
recognizable narration or character development--Paris Peasant is, in
the author's words, "a mythology of the modern." The book uses the city
of Paris as a stage or framework, and Aragon interweaves his text with
images of related ephemera: café menus, maps, inscriptions on monuments
and newspaper clippings. A detailed description of a Parisian arcade
(nineteenth-century precursor to the mini-mall) and another of the
Buttes-Chaumont park, are among the great set pieces within Aragon's
swirling prose of philosophy, dream and satire. André Breton wrote of
this work: "no one could have been a more astute detector of the
unwonted in all its forms; no one else could have been carried away by
such intoxicating reveries about a sort of secret life of the city...."