Background

Claude Simon was born in Madagascar, but is clearly French through and through. His family was part of the colonial service in Africa and returned to France after his father’s death for his education. Simon showed a great aptitude and studied in Paris, Oxford, and Cambridge. But not being satisfied with an academic life, Simon travelled to Spain to fight in the Spanish Civil War, and then joined the French Army at the outbreak of World War II.

His experiences with war and death deeply affected and influenced his writing. He is often cited as a prime example of the French Nouveau Roman (or new novel) which emphasized clear chronological story telling with distinct narrators. (That influential style has garnered a sizeable number of awards and multiple Nobels.) Simon’s Nobel citation specifically mentioned how he, “combines the poet’s and the painter’s creativeness with a deepened awareness of time in the depiction of the human condition.”

Works

I read his most popular novel: The Flanders Road (or La Route des Flanders) a hefty tome with Simon’s trademark “1,000 word sentences” (That’s not an exaggeration…maybe its an understatement). Here were a few pieces that stood out.

“..war and commerce had always been–one as much as the other–merely the expression of [people’s] rapacity and that rapacity itself was the consequence of the ancestral terror of hunger and death, which meant that killing robbing pillaging and selling were actually only one and the same thing a simple need the need to reassure onesself, like children whistling or singing loud to keep their courage up crossing through the woods at night…”–p. 40

“The turf was speckled and soiled by thousands of betting tickets lost like so many tiny stillborn corpses of dreams and hopes (the marriage not of heaven and earth but of earth and man, leaving it soiled by the persistence of that residue, of that kind of giant and fetal pollution of tiny furiously torn scraps of paper), long after the last hose had kicked up the last clod of turf and had left”—p. 159

Message

It’s been awfully hard to understand much of Simon’s writing as it dwelled on parentheticals and prepositions so much that Flanders Road seems to mostly consist of digressions about how cool horses are. But mixing that with the absurdity of war and more than a little reflection on relationships (both familial and romantic) I’d say he’s taking a position that: attempts to control (others, nature, war) are futile.

(Hopefully he would appreciate the parenthetical in my answer there.)

Position: #3 Left Back

Claude Simon is another entry in an increasingly common trend that I’ve noticed in these reading assignments: chaotic energy and the fullback position.

Like Elfriede Jelinek, he is prone to the mass of text shoveled together, and a combination of ruthless aggression and aimless meandering that would suit a player who pushes up with the attack and charges back when needed. The biggest difference I see between Simon and others like him (including Frederic Mistral and Johannes Jennsen) is that his moments of brilliance are more random and less coherent, while his other work seems more likely to induce disbelief and confusion rather than joy or appreciation.

So let’s hear from our Nouveau Roman afficianados. What makes Simon so stellar? Am I right to see him as a more random Samuel Beckett, or is there a method to his madness? Oh and fullbacks of the world, you can also chime in to tell me if I’ve misunderstood your position…or you’d rather be compared with some traditional poetry instead of the chaos agents I’ve assigned you thus far.

Next Time, 2005 Honoree: Harold Pinter