Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris profoundly moved Benjamin and shaped the Passagen work

Evidence

Benjamin mentioned, in a letter to Adorno of May 1935, that he had read the book at the start of his work on the Passagen, and that he had not been able to read more than two or three pages in bed each night, because the pounding of my heart became so strong that I had to put the book down'. In the book's two main sections, Le Passage de l’Opéra’ and The Sense of Nature in the Buttes-Chaumont', Aragon had written about a city-dweller who wanders about in the rather shabby shops, bars and other establishments adjoining the Passage de l'Opéra, which was threatened with demolition. Undistracted by any definite intentions, free of any aims or interests, he discovers the shores of the unknown, of eeriness’, the doors to the infinite that are hard to shut', the face of the infinite’as do three surrealist writers, who are feeling weary on a dismal, foggy spring evening, far from the familiar tourist haunts, in the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont, with its Suicides’ Bridge leading across an artificial lake to a natural cliff-face. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 822

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth chasing the full Benjamin-Aragon correspondence for how directly Le Paysan de Paris shaped the Passagen-Werk’s method of wandering and image-capture.
• XREF: connects to: The surrealists shaped Benjamin’s sense of modern literature and his lifelong Passagen-Werk project. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 362; Benjamin’s Passagen-Werk notes pursued contradictory research intentions simultaneously. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 799; Aragon’s 1926 work inspired Benjamin’s Passagen project as a modern mythology — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 822 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Aragon’s 1926 work inspired Benjamin’s Passagen project as a modern mythology #corroborates (0.95) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 822