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ABSTRACTS Angela Kimyongur (University of Hull, UK) ‘Fais de cela un monument’: Louis Aragon, war, memory and commemoration Louis Aragon is arguably best known as a poet of the French Resistance. The poetry he produced during the Occupation of France is, however, not his only word on war. Indeed one might claim that the major part of his multi-faceted work, poetry, prose fiction, journalism and criticism, is permeated by his views on war and his memories of war. Serving as a médecin auxiliaire from 1917-1918, he experienced at first hand the slaughter of World War I, and in 1939 he was again called up to fight in World War II. Both of these experiences were to mark his writing profoundly. There are two separate strands to Aragon’s critique of war: the ideological voice of Aragon the communist examines and promotes the policies of his party on war, while another more subjective voice expresses the experience of war in terms of memory and loss, reminding the reader of the cost of war in terms of human suffering. This paper will focus on the representation of the experience of World War II, and more particularly the role of memory in this representation. Memory operates on a number of different levels in Aragon’s writing of war. In his resistance poetry, Aragon is writing for the moment, but nonetheless calls upon a shared cultural, national memory of traditional verse forms and myths as a focus for resistance. His novel Les Communistes, published between 1949 and 1951, was conceived as an exercise in memory. On the subjective level, it looks back on World War II as a source of painful memories which the author struggles to voice. On the ideological level, the novel constructs a memory of war in which the French Communist party, politically marginalised in the cold-war period during which the novel was published, as it was during the drôle de guerre it represents, is remembered as a patriotic party which represented the best interests of the French nation by refusing to accept defeat in 1940. This emphasis is also seen in a number of texts conceived as written memorials to fellow communists killed during the war, memorials which again stress communist heroism and patriotism.

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