Claude Simon (Independent)
Hyfler/Rosner
Leading exponent of the nouveau roman best known for 'The
Flanders Road'
Published: 11 July 2005
Claude Simon, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in
1985, is considered by some other writers and by many
academics to be one of the most significant authors of our
time, but he was never popular with the general reading
public, even in France.
He was a principle member of the group which became known
for the nouveau roman (the "new novel") and sought to break
away from the conventions of the traditional novel. With
Nathalie Sarraute and Alain Robbe-Grillet, Simon was one of
its most-admired exponents. He worked mostly in isolation
and in his Nobel speech contrasted the solitude necessary to
the writer to achieve his best work with the pomp that
celebrity brings.
Simon was born in 1913 in Tananarive (now Antananarivo) in
Madagascar, then under French control. His family returned
to France at the beginning of the First World War (during
which his father was killed) and he grew up in Perpignan,
studied in Paris and spent a short time in Oxford and
Cambridge universities to learn English. Simon studied
painting with André Lhote and continued to paint all his
life, but, as with other French writers like Eugène Ionesco
and Robert Pinget, his reputation as a painter was dependent
on his fame as a writer.
Visits to pre-war Germany and Russia turned Simon
politically to the left and he visited Spain during the
Civil War, declaring his solidarity with the Republic, but
never actually becoming a combatant. His observation of that
blood-bath affected him strongly and in his eighth novel Le
Palace (The Palace, 1962), he recalls the inefficiency of
the left, the struggles and in-fighting between different
Republican elements, and the waste and desolation of war,
emphasising that revolutions nearly always fail because they
lack the right leaders.
Having done his military service in France during the
Thirties, Simon returned to the army at the outbreak of the
Second World War and served in the 31st Dragoons, a cavalry
regiment. Wounded at the battle of the Meuse in May 1940, he
was taken prisoner, but escaped from prison-camp the same
year. The spectacle of French cavalry charging German tanks
stayed in his mind and became part of the subject matter of
his most famous novel, La Route des Flandres (1960,
translated as The Flanders Road, 1962). During the rest of
the war, he fought against the German occupation in the
underground.
In 1945 he published his first novel Le Tricheur ("The
Cheat"), which was heavily influenced by Camus. This was
followed by a sequence of novels that increasingly moved
away from normal narrative and tried to find a new style
that would enable him to re-evaluate the lessons of history
and imitate the way the mind works, shifting the emphasis of
thought, moving away from and then back towards its major
preoccupations, going off on tangential associations and
filtering observation through the lens of thought and
memory.
His fifth novel Le Vent (1957, translated as The Wind, 1959)
and L'Herbe, which followed it the next year (and in
translation as The Grass, 1960), are both packed with a
language that moves with the force of a hurricane,
juxtaposing images and happenings to give a picture of small
and large events, witnessed by a mind trying to understand
them and carrying all these fragments in its wake.
Once established by The Flanders Road, Simon continued after
The Palace with Histoire ("Story", 1967), La Bataille de
Pharsale (1969: The Battle of Pharsalus, 1970), Les Corps
conducteurs (1971: Conducting Bodies, 1975), Triptyque
(1973: Triptych, 1977) and Les Géorgiques (1981: The
Georgics, 1989). After the Nobel Prize his writing slowed
down, partly because of the numerous invitations to speak at
conferences and to travel around the world to lecture at
universities. His last novel was Le Tramway (2001: The
Trolley, 2002).
Simon's style owes something to both Proust and Faulkner and
he has often been compared to them. He condenses and
lengthens time according to the thought-patterns of his
hero-observers: it is always the observing, thinking mind of
his protagonist that tells the story and that mind can be
diverted by a thought or provoked by a memory or an
association for many pages before returning to the main
theme.
His narratives are full of interruptions and sometimes
different minds and wave-lengths cross, but he is trying to
explain the grand patterns of history, especially its
repetitions, as well as the small miseries and joys of
ordinary individuals; erotic incidents and thoughts occur
frequently in his work, especially in the novels written
after 1960. Usually, some historical event is the trigger
for a book, or sometimes the description of a painting that
comes to life as its details start the mind associating and
comparing.
Simon's work is deliberately constructed on cinematic
principles, moving pictures that can run forward and
backward, cut into other places and times, shift between
centuries and locales, either with a clean break or a
fade-in and fade-out. They have a logic of their own which
derives from the way the mind works, not an objective
sequence of events. The other art beside the cinema which is
evident in his work is painting, both as a metaphor and in
his use of technique. There is an element of brushwork about
his writing.
Indeed, Simon himself compared criticisms of his work with
early reactions to the work of the Impressionists:
. . . reproaches have always been levelled at any artist who
even to the slightest degree upsets acquired habits and the
established order of things. Let us wonder . . . at the way
in which the grandchildren of those people who in
Impressionist paintings once saw nothing but shapeless
(i.e., illegible) daubs today form endless queues outside
exhibitions and museums to admire the works of those very
same daubers.
John Calder
Claude Henri Eugène Simon, writer: born Tananarive,
Madagascar 10 October 1913; Nobel Prize for Literature 1985;
married 1951 Yvonne Ducing, 1978 Réa Karavas; died Paris 6
July 2005.