ABSTRACT
Louis Aragon's enemies are the august members of the French literary establishment, both the leading writers and the fashionable critics, those "poor souls burdened with the weight of their watch chains [who] do not always make the effort necessary to maintain their status as thunderstruck archangels." To wit, this catalogue of how the author "tramples syntax like grapes", in Alyson Waters's translation: "Such is my character," concludes Aragon, not without humor. In the history of French surrealism, Rene Crevel is a mythical figure whose reputation perhaps owes as much to his meteoric life and curiously disturbing name as to the arresting qualities of his fiction. Born in 1900, Crevel published this aggressive assault on capitalist and Catholic hypocrisy in the fateful year of 1933, just two years before his suicide. In a radical departure from the standard French fiction of his day, Crevel brilliantly renews the force and the farce of Petronius' Satyricon.
