The great Dadaist novel

Anicet is, as its cover proclaims, a Dadaist novel, reissued on the centenary of its composition. Louis Aragon would doubtless have been delighted to learn that it is almost impossible to review.

An art critic, with his ‘little gadgets… called criteria’, is satirised in these pages as a kind of ‘policeman’, whose

mission is in fact to seek out artists whose theories and works might disturb the peace… At the slightest threat of disorder the critic must set things right by exposing fraud and anarchy.

Here, in pre-emptive defiance, is a ‘novel’ which is nothing but ‘fraud and anarchy’: a work in which there is no coherent plot, no illusion of character, written in a style riddled with self-mockery.

The extraordinary root-and-branch nihilism of the Dadaist and Surrealist movements makes sense as a reaction to the extreme horrors of the first world war — though one can imagine the howls that would have greeted such a statement, since the movements proclaimed that nothing ‘makes sense’. Aragon began writing Anicet as a 20-year-old medical orderly in a field hospital on the Western Front. He was buried in shell explosions three times in one day, and was awarded the Croix de Guerre. There is nothing, however, about the war in his book: ‘Being a war veteran was frowned on by our group and… we considered the wish to write novels to be as tasteless as the Croix de Guerre that I had to hide in shame.’

This novel-which-is-not-a-novel is hardest work in the opening couple of chapters. A young man, Anicet, who does not believe in concepts of time or space, meets a stranger called Arthur, whom he recognises as equally liberated because he is enjoying his meal without actually eating it.