The Review of Contemporary Fiction
The Trolley by Claude SimonAlan Tinkler
Claude Simon. The Trolley. Trans. Richard Howard. New Press, 2002. 109 pp. $22.95.
The epistemological and ontological rubric established by two epigraphs provides the formal foundation for The Trolley, a wonderful novel that is a splendid addition to Claude Simon’s oeuvre. In the second epigraph, Nobel Prize winner Simon appropriates Proust: “. . . since an image is the essential element, a simplification entirely suppressing real characters would be a decisive improvement.” Yet even with Simon’s reputation for novelistic innovations, usually thought of in terms of the French new novel, he cannot eschew the importance of character, which the first epigraph (by Conrad) makes clear: “. . . for him the meaning of an episode is not to be found within it, as inside a nut, but outside, enveloping the tale which has generated it as a light generates a vapor . . .” (emphasis added). Sections within The Trolley oscillate between the narrator’s recollections of childhood adventures and accounts of the narrator’s confinement within a hospital. As the narrator gains access to his life by way of his memories, he focuses attention on particulars, and one omnipresent image is the trolley—both as a container of humanity as well as a mode of transport through humanity. While he manages ontological concerns of existence and being, Simon, like other innovators of the new novel, places language and formal concerns at the fore. In one wonderful moment, the narrator describes his mother, who has been prescribed a diet of raw meat, which she eats rolled into pellets: “she seemed a macabre caricature of voracity, thrusting (as if paradoxically famished) her head forward in a fierce movement which, with that shriveled bony nose of hers, bore a certain resemblance to the two captive eagles in the municipal gardens tearing at some rotten carcass in their cage.” Simon has not lost a step; The Trolley is a wonderful novel. [Alan Tinkler]