SOURCE: Scaldini, Richard J. “Les Aventures de Télémaque, or Alienated in Ogygia.” Yale French Studies, no. 57 (1979): 164-79.

In the following essay, Scaldini examines modernity in Aragon's Les Aventures de Télémaque.

In Je n'ai jamais appris à écrire, ou les incipit Aragon informs us that he learned to read from Fénelon's didactic novel Les Aventures de Télémaque.¹ He also tells us that his own Dadaist Aventures de Télémaque, published in 1922 and “correcting” (in the Ducassian sense of the term) Fénelon's original, could only evolve “insofar as, in the decor of the Odyssey, my life, my modern preoccupations, could disrupt its development.”² Under the auspices of Ducasse's Poésies, Aragon opposes his disruptive iconoclastic text—product of what he calls the “lyric of the uncontrollable”—to one of the most tradition-bound, voluntarily derivative texts in the French canon.³ The two works...