Claude Simon

Celia Britton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317896982
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria

This is a major study of the Nobel prize-winning French novelist Claude Simon. Simon is a complex figure: for all that he writes in a distinctively modern fictional tradition (exemplified by Proust, Joyce, Beckett and Robbe-Grillet), his novels contain strong elements of visual representation alongside a very different king of free-floating, anti-realist writing.

Part One

Contemporary Reactions and Reviews

1 Remembrance of Things Passing*

JACQUES GUICHARNAUD

This, apart from short reviews in the press, is one of the earliest critical articles on Simon’s work. The fact that it appears in an American literary journal gives some indication of the speed with which his novels became popular in academic circles in the United States. They did so as part of the Nouveau Roman as a whole, although the term itself is not used here; instead, the number of Yale French Studies which contains Guicharnaud’s piece on Le Vent and L’Herbe is entitled ‘Midnight novelists and others’, grouping together articles on Michel Butor, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Marguerite Duras, Nathalie Sarraute and Simon himself under the umbrella of the Editions de Minuit, and introducing them to the American readership very much as a collective phenomenon. Thus Guicharnaud himself is concerned to place Simon in a wider literary context, comparing him firstly with his fellow nouveaux romanciers, but then with Proust and the major French novelists of the 1930s and 1940s: Sartre, Malraux, Camus. He also stresses the differences between Simon’s writing and the popular novels of the 1950s such as those by Françoise Sagan (whose Bonjour tristesse, for instance, was a best-seller at the time). American novelists who, as Guicharnaud points out, were also extremely popular in post-war France, are also part of the context; Simon’s early work had been criticized as a mere imitation of William Faulkner, and Guicharnaud argues that Le Vent marks a development away from this.

According to Aragon¹ the proliferation of novels in recent years can be described as ‘a gigantic enterprise comparable to Science’. In other words, the modern novel is essentially experimental (‘… budding in manifold rival laboratories’) and the experiments are not suspended in a vacuum. While unique in themselves, they are directed as a whole towards the discovery or invention of the novel, just as the specialized work of various scientists contributes, as a whole, to the development of science. Aragon sees the enterprise as carried along by an evolution, ‘a principle of constant acceleration’, comparable to that of scientific research and discovery, and as such, inevitable.

Indeed during the past few years novelists as diversified as Butor, Robbe-Grillet, Marguerite Duras, Nathalie Sarraute and Claude Simon have contributed their own discoveries, the results of their own research – each one seemingly unique and outside any particular school or genre – to the creation of one and the same thing: the French novel of today.

As one of the group, Claude Simon has not reached the magnitude of Butor or Robbe-Grillet, despite the fact that his last two books, Le Vent and L’Herbe,² were generally praised by the critics and translated into German, English, Italian, Portuguese and Swedish. There is no doubt that his technique is not as geometrically defined as Robbe-Grillet’s, nor has he invented a gimmick as striking as that of Butor’s La Modification, nor can any one of his works be summed up in a term as clear-cut as that of ‘subconversation’, used to describe Nathalie Sarraute’s Le Planétarium.

At the same time, Simon’s dense pages might well discourage those readers used to the liberal paragraphing of Françoise Sagan and the popular novelists à l’Américaine. His paragraphs often run to twelve pages or more, his sentences may continue on for three pages. Within his sentences, ordinary syntax is not respected, subordinate clauses and parentheses abound, the subject or main clause gets lost on the way. And even when the sentence finally falls back on its feet, the reader’s grammatical memory is too short and his attention too often distracted for him to realize it. Even more disturbing to the French reader is the fact that all the rules of good style, as it is taught in school, are rejected: parentheses within parentheses, cascades of ‘que’s, conjunctions and adverbs, occasional cacophony, an overabundance of present participles. Du coté de chez Swann was refused by the NRF for much less. However, Proust’s overlong sentences were quickly found to be essential to his art. It was only a question of plunging in. Relatively speaking, the same can be said for Simon’s works, and in the words of André Rousseaux,³ ‘whoever plunges in with confidence, finds himself comfortably floating’.

Claude Simon has something to say and, without bothering about established rules, has developed the necessary technique and style for saying it the best way possible. Were he to write differently, he would say it badly or would say something else. Which is in fact somewhat the case with his first novel, Le Tricheur.⁴ There he used prefabricated techniques: the stream of consciousness and pointillism, as developed by the American novel, resulting in that mixture of Faulkner, Hemingway and Steinbeck in translation so popular with young French writers in the 1940s. The technique emphasized a story which in itself is not terribly interesting. Simon’s real ‘message’ came through more by way of the book’s failings than in its better pages. What it primarily shows is an original writer trying to break through a fashionable technique.

By the time Simon’s Le Vent was published, the French novel had itself broken away from the fashion and Simon had developed along his own lines. Le Vent tells a story, a story objectively stated and without ambiguity (a necessary explanation since the novels of Robbe-Grillet), dealing with an inheritance, the attempt to trick the heir, a jewel theft, an assault, blackmail, a denunciation, a murder, etc. The setting is a city in the south of France, similar to Perpignan, where Simon spends much of his time. There are many traditional elements of the novel on provincial life (a shady lawyer, a respectable family, the rebellious daughter) and the populist novel (a cheap transient hotel, a tired waitress, sandwiches eaten on a park bench, a sordid crime, moustached policemen): a traditional naturalist foundation with a plot which unfolds in time and three-dimensional characters. As a ‘mirror of life’, combined with suspense, it might well recall the content of a Georges Simenon novel.

But what matters in Le Vent is the way in which the story is told, giving it not only its meaning but determining its nature. Le Vent answers the question: What is the nature of a story that might be used as the subject of a novel? The title itself gives a double explanatory metaphor: Le Vent, Tentative de Restitution d’un Retable baroque. Several times in the novel, events, scenes, the coming and going of characters are compared to certain Spanish dramas, to the torment of baroque theatre, to its paroxysms and finally useless acts of extravagance, whose flow and rich mixture of noises, colours, movements are in fact life. The wind, which blows from one end of the book to the other, is a

force unleashed, aimlessly, condemned to exhaust itself unceasingly, groaning out by night in a long wail, as if it lamented, envying men asleep, those transitory and perishable creatures, their possibility of forgetfulness, of peace: the privilege of dying.

And so the novel ends. The story, or rather the reconstruction of a story, fades out of itself, because many of the characters are dead, others have disappeared. Although the hero and a few others continue to live, the story is ended – the story, that is, a certain arrangement of beings and things, a certain series of situations, a structure with its own passing existence. The structure is rather similar to a cloud, formed by the wind, which at a given moment takes on a recognizable – or at least noticeable – shape, then changes into another, and perhaps still another, finally becoming shapeless, lost in the greyness of a clouded sky. Just as, in the fluid, heterogeneous and constantly moving substance of life, there forms a kind of ephemeral coagulation, a vague nucleus distinguishable for a short while, yet without any break in continuity with the rest.

To begin with, the nucleus has a centre. In Le Vent the hero, Montès, has the gift of intensifying the life around him, at least in the space-time of the story. With a bit more magic, a bit more romanticism or surrealism, he might be called an ‘homme fatal’. He is interesting more in his actual presence and function as a center than in his psychological make-up. Not that he lacks psychological truth or depth: Montès’ behaviour – a mixture of discretion, bad manners, eccentricity, kindness, timidity and awkwardness – is perfectly credible but makes him an intruder, different from the others, imposing his presence, his very existence, the fact that he is there. He is outside any social conventions, he is quite simply himself and therefore both attracts the confessions of others and acts as an obstacle. He creates a Whirlpool of contradictory forces, embodied in greedy relatives, a blackmailer, a gypsy, etc., who all cluster around him and live a common adventure for a period of several weeks. The subject of the novel is that ephemeral pattern, that temporarily heightened fragment of life, that absurd adventure through which the features of life are accentuated and hence made more visible. On the other hand, given its fluidity, the nucleus might be compared more to a nebula than to a slice of life – a nebula which forms and then dissolves. What counts is the way life is intensified more than the way it is sliced.

On the surface, Claude Simon tells us nothing very new. His attitude towards many things is common to the non-militant left: he criticizes a certain bourgeoisie, rebels against poverty, has contempt for cowards, emphasizes the stupid brutality of the police, is anticlerical, and refuses religion. Such, as it were, is his ethical world. But the novel has no political or social message; its vision is metaphysical. Claude Simon is hungry for reality, a concrete reality, the raw material of experience, which he tries to reconstruct in both its fixity and its fluidity in (or with) the space-time which is its form and flesh.

There is no question but that such an attempt calls for the use of the senses, and above all, that of sight. Whereas Robbe-Grillet sees like a draftsman or a surveyor, Simon has the vision of a painter, a sincere painter, a painter who refuses to fake:

I have no need of marvelous illusion … For the moment I want to see … To keep my eyes open, wide open, under penalty of never being able to open them again …⁵

He adds that the universe of Cézanne’s paintings is

so totally denuded of everything except truth and cohesiveness that for the first time the visible world offered itself in its entire magnificence and without any commentary or limitation and, via the visible world, quite simply, the world.

Similarly, the novel (just like all painting between the Renaissance and Cézanne) generally fakes the real universe (masterpieces being those works which attain reality despite the ‘trucage’), that is, replaces or tries to replace the vision of reality by a ‘marvellous illusion’, made up of false reorganization, deceptive reconstruction, and the artificial focus of spotlights ‘exactly like they do in the music-hall, to make the nude women more exciting’.

Through intensifying the sense of sight (and not through derangement), the artist must grasp

something else, something even more perfect which excludes every notion of intervention, of harmony or fixity, the undulatory ascent of the air along the stove, the ceaseless vibration of the atmosphere above sun-baked expanses and the uninterrupted palpitation of the leaves. Not even the faces, not even the objects, not even the empty spaces, more than all that …

Simon’s comments on Cézanne and Picasso in La Corde raide and the fact that painters such as Dufy and Lurçat were among his friends indirectly clarify his fictional works, which can be considered as a searching attempt at relearning to see the world. And the process of seeing is indeed complicated. It implies love for the object seen. It consists in apprehending not only the present thing (or form, Gestalt), but in a different mode and simultaneously, its absent or possible counterparts. It does not mean establishing a distinction between the thing seen and the person who sees, but on the contrary means grasping the synthesis of the two in space and time. For the novelist, the same process is necessary in respect to all the senses and results in a constantly moving, protoplasmic fusion comparable to that which ends La Corde raide:

The branches pass through me, and emerge through my ears, my mouth, my eyes, dispensing them from observing, and the sap flows in me and spreads, fills in me with memory, with the recollection of the days to come, submerging me in the tranquil gratitude of sleep.

Fusions, fluid and approximate comparisons, projections in time (retractable like the beams of the aurora borealis), all contribute to closing in upon that undoubtedly concrete essence – present, one might even say tangible – called Reality. In that sense, Simon’s device is poetic, in much the same way as Proust’s.

What then, on a practical level, are the consequences of such an attitude...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• General Editor’s Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Note on Translations
• Introduction
• PART ONE: CONTEMPORARY REACTIONS AND REVIEWS
• PART TWO: CRITICAL READINGS
• Glossary
• Notes on Authors
• Bibliography
• Index