Context

One extraordinary event recurs in nearly all of Claude Simon’s seventeen books: his own escape from certain death when, as a cavalryman defending French borders—at the outbreak of the Second World War—he was forced to participate in an attack launched, into Belgium, against German tanks. Miraculously enduring the slaughter, the future novelist (born in 1913) later found himself in the company of three other survivors: two officers and one fellow cavalryman.

As Simon’s writing evolves over the years, the ever more graphic and gripping descriptions of this at once farcical and suicidal attack—the massacre of his comrades, the author’s risky fleeing between shell-firing tanks, his intense "waiting for death to come at any minute," his eventual discovery of a strangely open estaminet at which he finds drink, his ultimate capture by the Germans, and his subsequent escape from the Stalag IV B prisoner-of-war camp in Mühlberg an der Elbe—have confirmed the French novelist as one of the most penetrating and innovative war memorialists of our time. His harrowing battlefield descriptions rival any in world literature, including those of Tolstoy, with whom he shares a resolution to probe an individual’s relationship to the political contingencies of his day and to the sweeping forces of history. His rich and varied work has several other dimensions to it, but, to simplify matters, if James Joyce is forever associated with the fictional Bloomsday, then Claude Simon should eternally be celebrated for his uncompromising endeavor to recollect the all-too-real "tragicomical" days of May, 1940. He defines this spectacle of horsemen pitted against tanks as "more absurd than any novelist could invent," and much of his literary labor has been devoted to examining the grave political, epistemological and aesthetic implications of that key epithet.

Although writerly inspiration defies analysis (think of Cervantes losing his arm at the Battle of Lepanto, his love of romanticized knightly exploits, and the day-by-day chore of composing Don Quixote de la Mancha), it is necessary to insist on this "realistic," "autobiographical," and "recollective" aspect of Simon’s prose in order to dispel the misleading impressions persistently conveyed by his association with the French "New Novel." Even a 1985 Nobel Prize for Literature has been insufficient to detach Simon from the famous group photograph in which he, Nathalie Sarraute, Samuel Beckett, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Robert Pinget and Claude Ollier pose outside the offices of the Éditions de Minuit. A larger perspective on modern French writing reveals, however, that the literary problems rightly obsessing several of these authors—narrative point of view, temporality, the relation between "subjects" and "objects," factual indeterminacy, the justification of "characters"—are symptoms of much deeper philosophical mysteries to which several other French novelists or poets have also been acutely sensitive. Simon’s writing of course responds to some of these same doubts, obstacles and irritations, and certain critics might contend that his "solutions" remotely resemble those adopted by, say, Robbe-Grillet or Ollier; or even that the skewed syntax marking some of Simon’s work—such as in several passages of his underrated The Battle of Pharsalus (1969)—vaguely recall Beckett’s How It Is. Yet it is essential to keep in mind the more representative extent to which Simon has refused the stern "do’s" and "don’ts" of the New Novel theorists and, instead, charted his own path. In his latest "memoir" (as opposed to "novel"), Le Jardin des plantes (1997), Simon notably recounts scenes from a colloquium in which thinly-disguised writer-and-critic protagonists discuss whether to "excommunicate" him from the group because of his use of "real" archival documents and because his combat descriptions have been corroborated by a colonel who eye-witnessed the same events. (This colloquium actually took place.) Instead of considering Simon as a member of a group to which he never asked to belong, it is much more stimulating to think of him as a dauntless innovator in a long line of French realists interested in war, history, nature, manual labor, and eroticism.

Indeed Simon, even as he questions the tenants of realism (as an aspiring writer, he closely studied the resourceful Balzac), remains allured by the supreme challenge of the genre: "rendering" reality—on whatever level it might be defined—with words. In this respect, his approach is two-fold, even internally antithetical. On the one hand, he attempts to fine-tune his style(s) as closely as possible to the incessant, simultaneously multifarious, processes of human thought, this "mirroring effect" prolonged even at the expense of logicality, coherence, or clarity. On the other hand, he seeks to maintain firm artistic control over his sentences as they unfold, an attentive craftsmanship not necessarily implying "revisions" into greater transparency, but simply that his over-riding aim becomes that of creating a "work of art" (as opposed to reflecting reality).

In the process, Simon by no means rejects all the trappings of the so-called "traditional novel"—and this artistic liberty is salutary. For example, as a coming-of-age novel involving an adolescent pregnancy, the possibility of an illegal abortion, a stolen ring and various shady dealings, Le Sacre du printemps (1954) develops a plot so genuinely "suspenseful" that it recalls the twists and turns of a detective novel. The Grass (1958) likewise employs "full-rounded characters," albeit brought to life through an absorbing, sometimes inner, sometimes exteriorized monologue (which moreover embraces the voices of the other characters). As this narrator, Louise, addresses her lover, the vivid characters—especially the dying old woman around whom the tale is spun—pale in nowise when compared to the familial portraits drawn in the first two volumes of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. Surely the respective narrative techniques diverge, yet Simon’s most characteristic prose style nonetheless takes off from the paradigm of Proust’s serpentine sentences—their ever-enveloping quest, their ever-refining focus. Simon combines direct discourse, indirect discourse, stream-of-consciousness and even quotation from accounting ledgers "whose very insignificance, indeed pettiness . . . give them a sort of strange grandeur and majesty." Yet the plot of The Grass—based on extramarital affairs, an imminent inheritance, the fate of an old family mansion, and the life of the old self-sacrificing woman—establishes this novel as a genuine example of the provincial family chronicle (not to mention its structural resemblance to Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying).

Thus, if Simon’s work is preeminently "literary," its scope extends far beyond any accusation of "art for art’s sake." And his narrative ambitions, perhaps beginning above all with The Flanders Road (1960) and continuing beyond The Georgics (1981), are of epic proportions. The Georgics develops a theme both searingly personal and shared by some of the greatest works of literature: an individual caught up in a war that sweeps him far from home and what he loves. Simon portrays a composite hero comprising an autobiographical figure and a petit noble, L.S.M., who sides with the Jacobins during the French Revolution and rises to the rank of general in the Napoleonic army during the turbulent years that ensue.

Simon weaves disparate historical sites and periods together, combining his own near-fatal adventures as a cavalryman with fictional—or rather, plausible—episodes based on archives concerning this distant ancestor. (The word "fiction" is inappropriate to Simon’s books written since the 1980s, the preferable term being "memoir" or perhaps récit, which means "account," "narrative," and, etymologically, "recitation.") The author’s discovery of his ancestor’s documents and correspondence in an abandoned mansion also enters into the multilayered plot. Faithful in this regard not so much to a typical ploy of the New Novel as to an ancient literary conceit, the novel reveals the very process by which its narrative is being fabricated. This is also true of The Battle of Pharsalus, which blends scenes from past wars—including, especially, the combat designated by the title, in which Julius Caesar defeated Pompey—with accounts of a trip taken through Greece during which the narrator seeks out the battleground so that he can write about it (when he is not making love, in hotels, with his female travel companion—the descriptions of which are explicit and moving). Simon thereby simultaneously investigates the teeming present of individual minds and of representative portions of the "outside world" while conveying the extraordinarily dense history underlying them. One title of course summarizes par excellence this quest: Histoire (1967), which means both "History" and "Story."

Latin quotations and allusions to Roman literary classics are, by the way, not uncommon in Simon, a high point being reached in The Battle of Pharsalus, where passages of Caesar’s memoirs are quoted in the original and struggled through by a pupil doing a translation exercise. This boy-character splendidly incarnates Simon’s overarching literary aim: the translation of experience, especially but not exclusively military. Virgil’s Georgics, itself influenced by the Greek poet Hesiod’s Works and Days, celebrates the virtues of agriculture while offering practical farming advice. Simon’s Georgics brilliantly innovates upon these themes. It cannot be said often enough how attentive he is to labor and its age-old ways and means. In Leçon de choses (1975), for example, one recurrent element in the strangely shifting collage or mosaic of scenes involves two masons building a wall, and the title of the book refers at once to how-to manuals and to a typical schoolroom exercise in which a child must precisely describe a common object. Throughout his writings, Simon shows an unusual respect, even gratitude, for tools and everyday objects—an attitude not without parallels to the "back to things" movement initiated in European literature principally by Rilke and perpetuated in France by several poets belonging to the generation preceding Simon’s (among whom the best-known mentors are Francis Ponge, Jean Follain and Guillevic). This same attitude characterizes his celebratory depictions of nature, often described as a miraculously beautiful yet thoroughly indifferent backdrop to the murderous inclinations of mankind.

Given Simon’s interest in and attention to the details of everyday life, it is not surprising that he alludes movingly in The Georgics to an ancient genre of pastoral and practical poetry. The character L.S.M., although constantly immersed in the waging of war, regularly writes detailed letters to Batti, the caretaker of his château, inquiring about the upkeep of his trellises or the planting of the new muscatel vines, about the removal of stones from the alfalfa fields or the covering up of the dung heaps. A profound emotion soon arises, for the general never finds time to return to his château and observe firsthand the results of the care and imagination he has put, from afar, into his property. The novel traces—especially in the passages where the general’s letters are cited—this sad, quiet tragedy. At the same time, Simon comments on George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia (1938), evoking both his and Orwell’s participation in the Spanish Civil War, then examining Orwell’s belated discovery that the Republican cause had been betrayed. Simon’s writing ever centers on this problem of discernment: how can one see clearly what is happening when one is caught up in what is happening?

His recourse to family archives conceals no literary strategy or ostentatious game-playing. The writer never knew his father, a career military officer who was killed in 1914 at the Battle of the Meuse—the same river at which the writer-cavalryman would find himself during the drôle de guerre. His mother died when he was eleven, an event recounted with poignancy in Le Jardin des plantes. Simon’s uncle, a retired cavalry officer, seeks the boy out at his Parisian boarding school (surely modeled on the Collège Stanislas in which Simon enrolled in 1924, specializing in mathematics). At first telling young Claude—he actually remains unnamed—that his mother "is not well and wants to see him," the uncle accompanies him on a train to the south of France. After long hours in the compartment, during which the uncle inquires about "insignificant things" (life at the boarding school, the teachers and newly made companions there) or expatiates on the recent "electrification" of the Paris-Vierzon train line, the boy finally musters his courage and inquires about his mother. "His uncle does not reply right away," recalls Simon, writing in the third person, then adds:

[The uncle’s] face now almost purple, flushed, remains turned toward the window behind which the shredded silhouettes of trees keep fleeing by. At the end, he turns abruptly and the boy can see tears brimming on the edge of his eyelids when he says, almost shouting: ‘Your mother is dead!’

Also substantially a memoir, The Acacia (1989) re-creates in several passages the highlights of the author’s parents’s lives. Simon not only recovers them from oblivion, but in a sense re-creates himself as well; and his overall approach is not dissimilar to that employed by his contemporary, Marguerite Yourcenar, in her three-volume memoirs, Le Labyrinthe du monde (1974-1988). The narrator emerges as a character not from what he confesses about himself (he discloses little) but rather from the manner in which he speaks about parents and relatives. Especially memorable is the first chapter of The Acacia, in which Simon recounts how he, his mother and two aunts traveled from village to village in 1919, searching for his father’s grave—a haunting, heartbreaking, scene. Today, every French village has its imposing First World War memorial, usually standing in the exact middle of the central square, and from the long list of the dead—a numbing litany engraved in marble—one easily imagines the decimated families. These are the brutal, traumatizing realities—both personal and more generally French—upon which The Acacia and so many other books by Simon are founded.

Simon thus masterfully selects from his own experience situations instantly recognizable as dramatic and universal. His true hallmark, however, is his style, the music of his prose. It is a prose that must be read with the utmost attention, especially when his notoriously long sentences, some several pages long, bind together seemingly unrelated perceptions. Knowing this helps one to be patient and to concentrate on every word, the condition sine qua non for appreciating his "orchestral" composition. Above all, one needs to seize the rhythmic undercurrent that slowly flows toward what is more aptly described as an end rather than a conclusion. It is not necessarily a linear "chain" of events that Simon describes, but rather a "mesh." His writing is intellectual only in the sense that the classical rhetorical techniques designed to facilitate communication and to affect readers more readily are conscientiously eschewed in favor of a style corresponding to his vision of the world. In The Grass, he sums up this vision—through a character’s voice—by maintaining that "reality’s peculiar trait is to appear irreal, incoherent . . . in perpetual defiance to logic, good sense." And several years ago, when interviewed by the Paris daily Libération, the author similarly remarked that in The Acacia he "sought to produce a verbal equivalent of a fog of somnambular impressions." He specified that he wrote "without using periods to cut up into sections a reality that . . . has no such separations." His disparate styles, at times coinciding, at times colliding, each represent, and seek to reflect, a different state of consciousness. Yet his reputation remains especially attached to those convoluted, digressive, densely-textured, oft parenthesizing, on-running sentences, full of present participles and precise qualifiers, which convey a state of semiconsciousness, as "after a sleepless night," in which "the senses perceive everything [as] separate, isolated one from the other, in a woolly unreality, vaguely unbelievable."

This fascination with the workings of the semiconscious mind and with the phenomenology of sense impression goes back to his earliest efforts. In Gulliver (1952), devoted to the Occupation and the Resistance movement, Simon refers to a crowd at a rugby match, for example, as a "swarming, shouting, shifting, contracting magma, similar to the surface of some gigantic fermenting liquid whose bubbling transports foamy heads along in a confusing stream traversed by currents and counter-currents." Magma—like fog—is a recurrent metaphor in Simon. His descriptions are often unabashedly metaphorical (another of the New Novel "no-no’s" that he ignores). Simon has admirably progressed from "naming" these impressions of "magma" or "fog" to increasingly intricate stylistic endeavors to reflect them—realities preceived as contourless, factually supersaturated, globally incoherent, ever changing (in the profound, at once physical and metaphysical sense given to this word by Heraclitus). Often Simon proceeds by association, but the connections are, tantalizingly, not always obvious. In The Battle of Pharsalus, for instance, the narrator observes a few feathers sticking out from the head of a large bird that he cannot identify; the sight (without transition) suggests the "pale swollen nipples of her breasts," after which he concludes in a confusing flurry: ". . . only slightly paler than the skin forcing this silken bark not an ibis either sinuous necks chrysanthemums blossoms as if combed out in dis-order."

This associative quality of Simon’s language is also reflected in his treatment of time. He does not disentangle past, present and future events. "Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future, / And time future contained in time past," writes T. S. Eliot in the opening lines of Four Quartets. Simon uses the lines—in turn drawn from the eleventh chapter of Saint Augustine’s Confessions—as an epigraph to The Acacia. He adopts Saint Augustine’s insight that "things past" or "things future" form an authentic "present" in the remembering or anticipating mind—in this respect, there is also a "present of things present"—and thus the writer justifiably orders events as they occur to consciousness, little matter their position on a hypothetical timeline. Presumably, the "autobiographer-as-craftsman" intervenes and "re-orders" passages to create certain narrative harmonies (or disharmonies), all while simulating the ways in which images, thoughts and sensations crowd through the mind. Simon thus aspires to a "realism"—language as the Stendhalian mirror borne down a road and held up to reality—from which his craft must, however, ultimately distance him (slightly). The lasting power of his work lies in this paradox—in the tense, studied irresolution of this dialectical movement.

CONTEXT is a triquarterly publication intended to create an international and historical context in which to read modern and contemporary literature. Its goal is to encourage the development of a literary community.

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