"O reason, reason, abstract phantom of the waking state, I had already expelled you from my dreams, now I have reached a point where those dreams are about to become fused with apparent realities: now there is only room here for myself"
About this Quote
Aragon opens by putting “reason” on trial, then dismissing it with the contempt reserved for a bad roommate: an “abstract phantom” that haunts waking life the way superstition haunts sleep. The doubled address - “O reason, reason” - is mock-solemn, half incantation, half sneer, and it announces a Surrealist coup. If reason is only a ghost, it has no jurisdiction over what Aragon prizes: the dream as a rival mode of truth.
The line turns on a provocation that still feels modern: the boundary between the interior world and “apparent realities” isn’t stable; it’s negotiable, even conquerable. Aragon isn’t merely praising imagination. He’s describing an escalation, a point of no return where dreams don’t just interrupt reality but fuse with it, contaminating the supposedly objective with desire, fear, and private myth. “Apparent” does heavy lifting here: reality is already a performance, and the dream is simply a more honest script.
“Now there is only room here for myself” is the most unsettling clause because it’s both ecstatic and authoritarian. It’s the liberation of the self from rational policing, but also a flirtation with solipsism: the world reduced to a stage for the “I.” In the Surrealist context of the 1920s - postwar disillusion, Freud in the air, avant-garde impatience with bourgeois logic - that swagger reads as insurgent. It’s a manifesto in miniature: not a retreat from reality, but a hostile takeover.
The line turns on a provocation that still feels modern: the boundary between the interior world and “apparent realities” isn’t stable; it’s negotiable, even conquerable. Aragon isn’t merely praising imagination. He’s describing an escalation, a point of no return where dreams don’t just interrupt reality but fuse with it, contaminating the supposedly objective with desire, fear, and private myth. “Apparent” does heavy lifting here: reality is already a performance, and the dream is simply a more honest script.
“Now there is only room here for myself” is the most unsettling clause because it’s both ecstatic and authoritarian. It’s the liberation of the self from rational policing, but also a flirtation with solipsism: the world reduced to a stage for the “I.” In the Surrealist context of the 1920s - postwar disillusion, Freud in the air, avant-garde impatience with bourgeois logic - that swagger reads as insurgent. It’s a manifesto in miniature: not a retreat from reality, but a hostile takeover.
Quote Details
| Topic | Reason & Logic |
|---|---|
| Source | Unverified source: Le paysan de Paris (Louis Aragon, 1926)
Evidence: Preface: "Préface à une mythologie moderne" (page 13 in the edition cited below). The quote is from the opening of the Preface section titled "PRÉFACE / A UNE MYTHOLOGIE MODERNE" in Louis Aragon’s book Le paysan de Paris. The French original appears as: "Raison, raison, ô fantôme abstrait de la v... Other candidates (1) Walter Benjamin and the Antinomies of Tradition (John Joseph McCole, 1993) compilation97.6% ... O reason , reason , abstract phantom of the waking state , I had already expelled you from my dreams , now I have... |
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