Claude Simon (1) (1913–2005)

A first, unprepared, reading of Claude Simon’s novel “The Flanders’s road" makes you invariably close the book after a few pages and wonder: “What the heck have I been reading?”

Abnormal long, unpunctuated sentences, stretching across many pages, regularly interrupted by parentheses; their meanings redirected, rephrased, re-explained with a constant “c’est à dire” (that is, that is to say), interweaving and mixing the subjects in a flow of streaming consciousness, are so many show more hurdles to take, before one can come to a semblance of an understanding of what is going on in the pages of the book.

“La route” is indeed of such complexity, that you need something like an operating instruction to make any sense of its 200 pages. And truly, such a color –coded, explicative notice, unlocking the book’s secret code, does exist. Simon, like Faulkner before him, established it when he was writing his book and Mireille Calle – Gruber included this 4 page conception plan in her recent Simon biography for the benefit of the interested reader.

But, it was not Simon’s primary concern that the reader would make any sense of his book. At least not in a first reading, for what he was trying to do, was to capture and to convey to his reader, what happened before one made sense of something, that elusive moment before one realized what was going on, eons before one started to understand what had happened.

Simon’s ambition was nothing less than to recreate in his writing that Ur-building block of human experience: the emotion.

In “The road”, we are in fact reading an attempt to recreate in words, the experience of that split-second “emotion”, and one can only appreciate its success by persevering until the last line. Like most of the books belonging to the “nouveau roman”, there is an epiphany, an “AHA – erlebnis” at the turn of the last page, a sudden understanding of the genius of the Author’s craftsmanship.

The emotion, Claude Simon, translates into his book, is accurately documented. On 16 May, 1940, Claude Simon, a brigadier with the 31st Dragoons, a French cavalry unit, scandalously anachronistic against German Panzers, falls into an ambush. There is some panic; the men first get the order to dismount and then immediately following, a counter - order to attack. At the moment Simon pushes himself up in the stirrup, the girth slips and he falls backwards under his horse. And at that precise moment, when his companions get in the saddle and the officer raises his sword to command the attack, a German automatic gun, its deadly salve sweeping at men’s height, cuts down riders and horses. Simon who is already down, fumbling with the horse gear, escapes from under the dead bodies and is one of a handful that get away ( for the moment ) unscathed.

His ordeal however was not over and a few days later, he would be captured and transported to a German Work Camp. Simon would manage to escape, return to France and even fight for some time in the “Resistance”.

After the war, Simon would often revisit that famous Flanders’s road, telling family and friends, what happened and how, by chance, he escaped that fatal moment. Understandably Simon, a man who had already more than his part of infortunes – an orphan at an early age, the suicide of his young wife - pondered over the occurrences, trying to answer the “why”, “why me” and the “what if”?

And so it came that on the bus, on his way back from a visit to his publisher, he had the emotion that became the core of the book…

“Oui, d’un seul coup tout m’est sauté à l’esprit, je peux dire tout ensemble, dans une bouffée violente…” (Yes, suddenly everything came into my mind, all together you can say, in a violent puff)

Now, how do you reproduce an emotion? How could Simon tackle the problem he had set himself, to, in the words of Paul Klee, make visible the invisible? In Simon’s work, the Emotion is a singularity of experience, made up of a complex blend of numerous memory fragments. And that is why he renders this one emotion, he experienced when coming back from the place where he nearly died, as a cloud of simultaneous fragments diversely connected with each other. In his book that Emotion branches out, with no beginning and no end, in an explosion of valid and invalid associations, real and unreal memories, sensatory perceptions, ideas, guesses, assumptions…

Simon, who had during his younger years, dabbled in graphic artwork (paint, photography and collage) and had often interacted with other artists about Art and their trade, came to the conclusion that for a faithful rendering of Reality, one had to go beyond the description, the impression or the expression.

In an interview he says: “If it is true that we perceive the exterior world in fragments, (then) the canvases of the cubist “synthetic” period are realistic… and the assemblages of Schwitters, Rauschenberg and Nevelson (even) more realistic…

If you look at these artworks, if you study for instance a collage by Kurt Schwitters, you understand immediately Simon’s creative process. Indeed, after a closer reading of the text, we start to recognize repetitive patches, fragments, lines, word which branch out, connect between themselves through loose associations and reassemble in new meanings. And, because it is an emotion, it all happens simultaneously. We are a dimension further than the associative remembrance flow triggered by the taste of a madeleine, dipped into a cup of tea…

Suicide is a theme for instance: the ridiculous attack on horseback with sword drawn against a highly efficient and modern German army is nothing more than a (collective) suicide. But the officer should, (would) have known it and maybe it was his way out. And this suicide echoes another one, that of Simon’s wife who killed herself and also that of an older ancestor, also a military man who shot himself because of the shame of a defeat.

Horses are everywhere in the book, dead horses, war horses, race horses and suddenly the cavalry doubles up as a multicolor swarm of jockeys preparing for a race. One of the jockeys, a professional rider of the dead officer’s racing stable, was rather close to the officer or was he closer to the officer’s wife. Was he not only riding his horses but also riding his wife? From the buttocks of horses we get to the buttocks of woman, riding what, riding who?

“How was it?” Simon asks himself, “How to know?” and ”What to know?”

It is our task, as responsive readers, to collect all these fragments, knead them together into a unit of simultaneous feelings, which is then the closest we can come to that intense Emotion, Claude Simon so genially wanted to bring over.

He earned himself a Noble price with his attempt. As far as I am concerned more than deserved ! show less

A movement arose among French writers in the 1950s and early 1960s that has come to be known as the nouveau roman (new novel). The nouveau roman style was not uniform except in the underlying intent to move its focus away from conventional aspects of the novel such as plot, character, action, narrative and ideas. Some novels from this era have become cult classics of sorts, but most people can happily pass them by.

The Flanders Road, true to form, has dispensed with plot, narrative and show more action. It concerns itself with an incident that took place in 1940 in northeastern France where the French cavalry — mounted on horseback, you understand — were tasked with stopping a division of German tanks! The weather was foul and the scene was of utter carnage. During a lull in the action and quite unexpectedly, a French officer is killed by a sniper, and this becomes the central event of this novel which, through a stream-of-consciousness reportage, is rehearsed again and again in the context of other memories and associations that come to mind.

The book is not easy to stay with because it goes absolutely nowhere, and the long unpunctuated sentences that run endlessly together have a disorienting effect. Which is probably what the author intended, because the reader comes away with powerful visual impressions, if nothing else.

I read this book mostly out of curiosity and didn't really expect to like it, so I was not disappointed. But all is not lost: there is nothing like going to a primary source to understand something about a defunct literary movement. Now I know. show less

One of the main points of this novel (considered one of the most important of Simon's work) by the Nobel prize winning French author is to deconstruct George Orwell's 'Homage to Catalonia'--a memoir type of work dealing with Orwell's participation in the Spanish Civil War for the Trotskyist inspired POUM. Simon was also a participant and fought with the Communists--a participation of which he seems to have repudiated not much later on. Reading Simon calls for some concentration--his tendency show more to write his sentences and paragraphs as long, labyrinthal constructs can be daunting forcing the inattentive reader to either go back a ways to try to pick up the thread again or to forget about it and just try to forge ahead. In this sense the part of the book about Orwell's book is one of the easier of Simon's sections to read at least if you've read Orwell's book as Simon's critique while maybe not the nicest thing one writer has ever done to another--he does at least reframe it and put it in a realistic perspective for the time and the event it describes. So it is fair at least to me. Beyond that Simon seems to dig back into his own family's history (a constant theme of his work) going back to Napoleonic times and reaching ahead of the Orwell book into the first days of the Second World War. Comparisons are often made to Faulkner--one difference being that Faulkner maps out a plot line much more coherently than Simon. Humor is also a device that Faulkner has an advantage at though Simon can be very subtly sarcastic. Having said all that I like this book better than most of Faulkner's works that I've read. Probably just a matter of personal taste--one thing I can say about Simon is he always looks at things objectively and despite those long labyrinthal sentences his manner is surprisingly blunt. show less

Truthfully the French nobelist Claude Simon is not the easiest writer to read. Oftentimes he eschews punctuation--he runs sentences together and sometimes a paragraph will go on and on for page after page inside of which might be a number of offhanded digressions usually in parentheses that can be diverting, distracting and even occasionally maddening. One needs to read Simon with concentration. He has often been compared to another nobelist William Faulkner--one major difference though show more being that with Faulkner there usually emerges (at least eventually) some kind of coherent plot line that which when one looks back at the novel as a whole one sees a thread from beginning to end. Not so much with Simon. Like all the best writers Simon is the GOD of his own work. He does what he does and he does it very well and despite the WF comparison Simon's writing is unique to Simon and not something that having read it you will mistake for someone else's. Afterwards it is your turn to play GOD in deciding whether you like it or not. Histoire is one of his better works IMO. Like much of his fiction it is taken from his own personal history. We have some of his usual itinerary. The large dilapidated manor in the countryside with the portraits of his dead ancestors. We have the reminiscing over their lives and deaths--the World War II calvary colonel deliberating walking into the ambush--we return briefly to Spain during the Civil War--we view Barcelona from the deck of a warship and in random--sometimes violent street scenes. The story of his parents romance is told through a collection of postcards that his father (a soldier?--a diplomat?) sends back home to his mother from all over the world. Simon details many of these postcards--the pictures as well as the messages they contain. Much of this can be painful--the suicide of his girlfriend-Helene-throwing herself out of a 4th story window after he goes off to Spain to fight for the republic--his mother's drug abuse. Here Simon is maybe at his most personal and maybe at his most personable. That being said not everyone will like it. For someone who had never read Simon I would recommend one of his shorter works first--The Invitation or Triptych for instance. But even so I thought that this was very good. show less