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Claude Simon (1913-2005) |
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French writer, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1985. Claude Simon described in several works with photographic objectivity his own family history. He became known as a major representative of the nouveau roman that emerged in the 1950s, although Simon's ideas of metaphor, history, and storytelling were rejected by the purists of the movement. "Claude Simon's narrative art may appear as a representation of something that lives within us whether we will or not, whether we understand it or not, whether we believe it or not – something hopeful, in spite of all cruelty and absurdity which for that matter seem to characterize our condition and which is so perceptively, penetratingly and abundantly reproduced in his novels." (from 'Presentation speech' by Lars Gyllenstein, Nobel Lectures: Literature 1981-1990, edited by Sture Allén, World Scientific, 1993, p. 59) Claude Simon was born in Tananarive, on the island of Madagascar,
off the east coast of Africa. At that time Madagascar was a French
colony. Simon's father, Captain Louis Antoine Simon, was stationed
there as an officer in the colonial regiement. He was killed in action
in August 1914. His childhood Simon spent in the city of Perpignan,
France, near the Spanish border. He was raised by his mother, Suzanne
Denamiel, in the strongly Catholic atmosphere of her family home. She
died of cancer when Simon was eleven. Simon attended Collége Stanislas in Paris, and Lycée Saint-Louis for naval career, but was dismissed. He also studied at Oxford and Cambridge and took courses in painting at the André Lhote Academy. His mother would have liked him to be a priest or a soldier. From 1934 to 1935 Simon served with the French army's Thirty-first Dragoons. As a reaction to the aristocratic values of his mother's family, he joined the Communist Party, which faciliated his journey to Barcelona. During the Spanish Civil War, he became involved in gunrunning to the Republicans. At the height of Stalin's purges in 1936-38, he travelled in the Soviet Union and subsequently became disillusioned with politics. With the outbreak of World War II, Simon rejoined the Dragoons, and took part in the Battle of Meuse in 1940. "I belonged to one of those regiments that are cold-bloodedly sacrificed in advance by the staff headquarters, and of which, after eight days, there was practically nothing left," Simon said in an interview in Les Nouvelles in 1984. (Claude Simon, edited and introduced by Celia Britton, 2014, p. 3) Following the disorderly retreat of the French army, he was captured by the Germans, and sent with his fellow prisoners to a prison camp in Saxony. On the transition to a P.O.W. camp in Western France, he escaped and by November 1940 he had made his way back to Perpignan. At home, he was active in Resistance activities for the remainder of the war. After the war Simon divided his time between his Paris apartment, and country estate near the village of Salces, earning his living as a wine producer and writer. He also tried his hand as a photographer. Some of his pictures were published in photography magazines. In 1951 he contracted tuberculosis and lay bed-ridden for many months, looking out of his bedroom window, observing the minute details of all objects around him. Later he recalled how the experience sharpened his appreciation of the sights and sounds of the everyday. Simon's literary career lasted over 50 years. "I am a difficult, boring, unreadable, confused writer," he mocked his critics. ('Claude Simon, Champion of New Novel and Nobel Laureate, Dies at 91' by Marlise Simons, The New York Times, 10.7.2005) His final novel was the autobiographical Le Tramway (2001). Claude Simon died on July 6, 2005, in Paris. He was married twice, first to Yvonne Ducing in 1951. His second wife was Réa Karavas, whom he married in 1978. Simon began to work on his first novel, Le Tricheur, just before the beginning of the war. It was completed by the end of the war and published in 1945. The critic Maurice Nadeau compared it to Camus's L'Etranger, which had appeared a few years earlier. Simon's other early novels include the autobiographical La Corde raide (1947), Gulliver (1952), and Le Sacre du printemps (1954). These novels are largely traditional in form – they have plots and identifiable characters. International fame Simon gained when his novel Le Vent (1959, The Wind) was translated into English. Adopting ideas from the nouveau roman, Simon started to develop the style in which the plot is little more than one main event seen from different angles. Above all, his novels are concerned with vision, imagination, and memory. In his Nobel Lecture Simon said that those who reproach my novels for having "neither a beginning nor an end" are perfectly correct. (Nobel Lectures: Literature, 1981-1990, edited by Tore Frängsmyr, Sture Allén, 1993, p. 65) The new novel developed in France in the mid-1950s. Writers rejected the traditional framework of the fiction – chronology, plot, character, the narrator – and offered texts that are open to several interpretations and demand more attention of the reader. Over the years, as Alain Robbe-Grillet, Jean Ricardou, and others exchanged ideas, their narration in some respect – the use of the present tense, objective description of the physical things, attention to surface, etc. – took a similar form. In addition, the new novel was open to influence from the New Wave filmmakers and vice versa; Alain Robbe-Grillet and Marguerite Duras wrote also film scripts. The emphasis on visual perception came to the fore in Simon's work from L'Herbe (1958), set in the year 1940 when German invaded France. The book, an attack on the traditional writing of history, borrowed its title from Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago (1957): "History is not made by anyone. You cannot make history; nor can you see history, any more than you can watch the grass growing." (Ibid., translated from the Russian by Max Hayward and Manya Harari, The Harvill Press, 1996, p. 406) Nothing actually happens in the story of an old woman, Marie, who is dying. Marie represents the unknown side of the past. History is everyday occurrences, filled with descriptions of houses and gardens. The sequel, La Route des Flandres (1960), tells about Marie's nephew Georges and his wartime experiences. After the war Georges becomes sexually involved with the beautiful Corinne. Scenes of Georges lying in a field as a prisoner are juxtaposed with scenes of postwar sex with Corinne. La Route des Flandres earned Simon the L'Express Prize in
1961. In spite of being a work of fiction, a retired colonel of cavalry
verified in a letter addressed to Simon, that the account of the four
horsemen in the book was portrayed exactly how he remembered it. In
1977, Simon wrote a script for a screen adaptation of the novel, but it never advanced to the production stage. Triptyque
(1973, ) dealt with a wedding party, the drowning of a boy and a scene in
a hotel room. These narratives – brutal, tragic, monotonous, and
anguished – are mixed together, running concurrently and without
paragraph breaks. "In using the title Triptyque,
Simon was not merely alluding to the books three interwoven fictions,
but seeking tom evoke the "mode de lecture" that such a work invites or
even necessitates: the search for the relations between the two." (Fragmentation in the Middle Novels of Claude Simon: Le Vent to Histoire by Ann Margaret Dybikowski, thesis University of London, 1965, p. 145) Much of Simon's fiction is autobiographical. Histoire (1967), Les Géorgiques (1981), which was very loosely connected to Virgil's Georgics, and L'Acacia (1989) are about the author's father and mother, as well as their ancestors. The 'George' in Les Géorgiques
referred to George Orwell, whose account of the Spanish Civil War Simon
dismissed in an interview as "faked from the very first sentence." (The Cambridge Companion to War Writing, edited by Catherine Mary McLoughlin, 2009, p. 192) All three of The Georgics' plots concern wars from the campaigns that followed the birth of the French Republic to World War II. General L. de St. M. writes letters to his fellow generals, speeches and instructions for the upkeep of his estate. In the Spanish Civil War section the reader meets the Republican volunteer O. When Simon rewrote the adventures of George Orwell in the Spanish Civil War (1936-39), the events were relayed non-chronologically, sentences were packed with parentheses that themselves contain parentheses. In L'Invitation (1987), based on the author's journey to the Soviet Union in 1986, the nouveau roman was merged into the reality of totalitarianism. Simon's firiendship with the painter, sculptor, and writer Jean Dubuffet was recorded in Correspondance, 1970-1984 / Jean Dubuffet & Claude Simon (1994). References to the author's own novels and other texts are an
essential part of Simon's writing. Family tales, memorablia from the
past, personal
experiences, are interspersed with fragments of 20th-century history.
Simon's style is a mixture of narration and stream of consciousness.
His prose frequently lacks punctuation, and is densely constructed,
sometimes with 1 000-word sentences, typical is also the use of
parentheses. This example is from Leçon de choses (1975):
"La description (la composition) peut se continuer (ou être complétée)
a peu prés indéfiniment selon la minutie apportée à son exécution,
l'entraînement des métaphores proposées, l'addition d'autres objets
visibles dans leur entier ou fragmentés par l'usure, le temps, un choc
(soit encore qu'ils n'apparaissent qu'en partie dans le cadre du
tableau), sans compter les diverses hypothèses que peut susciter le
spectacle. Ainsi il n'a pas été dit si (peut-être par une porte ouverte
sur un corridor ou une autre pièce) une seconde ampoule plus forte
n'éclaire pas la scène, ce qui expliquerait la présence d'ombres
portées très opaques (presque noires) qui s'allongent sur le carrelage
à partir des objets visibles (décrits) ou invisibles – et peut-être
aussi celle, échassière et distendue, d'un personnage qui se tient
debout dans l'encadrement de la porte. Il n'a pas non plus été fait
mention des bruits ou du silence, ni des odeurs (poudre, sang, rat
crevé, ou simplement cette senteur subtile, moribonde et rance de la
poussière) qui règnent ou sont perceptibles dans le local, etc., etc." (Ibid., Éditions de Minuit, 1975, pp. 10-11) The essay Orion Aveugle
(1970) threw a good deal of light on Simon's literary methods. On the cover of the book is Nicolas
Poussin's painting 'Blind Orion Searching for the Rising Sun' from 1658. According to Simon
the artist do not have a special gift to see beyond or behind our
everyday reality. The painting symbolized his own work, "the writer
advancing blindly in his language, groping in the midst of a forest of
signs toward something he will never attain." (Orion Blinded: Essays on Claude Simon, edited by Randi Birn and Karen Gould, 1981, p. 27) While the influences of William Faulkner, Marcel Proust, and James Joyce have undoubtedly been great, Simon's works basically reflect his own personal visions: "Everything
is autobiographical, even the imaginary." ('Simon, Claude (Claude Eugéne Henri Simon)' by Douglas King, in The Facts on File Companion to the World Novel: 1900 to the Present, Michael Sollars, 2008, p. 747) For further reading: Claude Simon: être peintre by Mireille Calle-Gruber (2021); Claude Simon: Fashioning the Past by Writing the Present by Alina Cherry (2016); Dictionnaire Claude Simon, edited by Michel Bertrand; preface by Dominique Viart (2013); Claude Simon: A Retrospective by Jean H. Duffy and Alistair Duncan (2002); Claude Simon by Mária Minich Brewer (1995); Claude Simon: Adventure in Words by Alastair Duncan (1994); Understanding Claude Simon by Ralph Sarkonak (1990); Claude Simon by Lucien Dällenback (1988); Claude Simon: Writing the Visible by Celia Britton (1987); Sur Claude Simon by Jean Starobinski (1987); Claude Simon by Alastair Duncan (1987); Orion Blinded, ed. by Randi Birn and Karen Gould (1981); Claude Simon's Mythic Muse by Karen L.Gould (1979); The Novels of Claude Simon by J.A.E. Loubére (1975) - Nouveau roman: Alain Robbe-Grillet, Michel Butor, Marguerite Duras, and Nathalie Sarraute. See also Henri Bergson's concept of time. Selected bibliography:
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