A Sense of game - Aragon between literature and politics (1958-1968)

Contrary to the 1950s, when the Cold War led communist writers to multiply the signs of their break with the literary field, the 1960s destalinization eased the political pressure and authorized a ''return'' to the field. This article focuses on Louis Aragon, the most gifted of the communist writers, whose itinerary and work legitimize the highest ambitions in the literary field, as shown by the success of his 1958 novel La Semaine sainte. Rejecting an approach that postulates the aberration for a writer of a communist engagement, the author of this article attempts to show the difficulties and the possibility of belonging to both the literary and the communist worlds. By withdrawing into the Lettres francaises, which he edited and whose intermediary position accurately reflects his own, and by the both political and literary use of the theory of ''realism'', Aragon negotiated a slippery path and succeeded in occupying a central position in the field while conserving his responsibilities in the Parry. After 1965, he seems to have won recognition while rejecting the systems of opposition constructed by the history of the field: poet and novelist, popular and avant-garde novelist, national and surrealist poet... The sudden renewed relevance of politics, linked with the 1968 events in Paris and Prague, threatened the fragile balance he had constructed between literature and politics. The case of Aragon in the 1960s shows just how confining this double affiliation was, while revealing the way in which he was freed to write by what was also a twofold exteriority.