The Nobel Prize in Literature 1985
Claude Simon
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Swedish Academy The Permanent Secretary |
Press Release
October 1985
Claude Simon began to be noticed in earnest
at the end of the 1950s in connection with the great interest in
the so-called "new novel" in France. The term had been introduced
by the critic Roland Barthes and was effectively launched a few
years later by Alain Robbe-Grillet. The idea behind the term was
to collect a group of French prose writers with little else in
common except that they were against the more conventional
fiction and broke its rules that a novel should have a continuous
and realistic story and move along in a lucid and coherent way in
time. The new storytellers in France linked up with other
traditions, with patterns from poetry and the visual arts and
with forerunners such as Faulkner and Proust. Their prose works
had the appearance of linguistic montages or collages. They took
place in the dimensions of memory and the apparently arbitrary or
free association. Fragments from different times were closely
joined on the basis of their content or emotional correspondences
or aesthetic effects, but not on the basis of how they might have
followed each other in the ordinary course of time. Influences
from the visual arts were strongly in evidence. In a picture
everything is contemporaneous. The flow of things that follow
each other is brought about by the beholder's attention and
co-creative feeling moving over what actually exists as a single
coherent now. This abstract description can fairly well cover
what seemed to unite the advocates of "le nouveau roman". In its
general form it still applies to Claude Simon and his prose.
However, the writers who used to be included under this term were
very unlike each other, with very different aims and commitments
in their linguistic work. And they did oppose being lumped
together in a group as happened.
Claude Simon had begun with several partly autobiographical
novels from the middle of the 1940s up to the middle of the
1950s. These works, nowadays little read, nevertheless heralded
his later production, among other things in the feeling for the
tragic and absurd in the human condition. The narrative method
was however almost traditional, but influenced by Faulkner. The
change in Simon's author-character came with the novels Le
Vent, 1957, and L'Herbe, 1958. He himself counts the
latter as the turning point in his writing. Both stories take
place in the South of France, where Simon himself has his roots
and lives as a viticulturist. The principal character in Le
Vent is akin to the one in Dostoievsky's "The Idiot" - a
mysteriously complex man, at once confused and discerning,
exposed to the fascination and inquisitive provocations and
cruelties of his fellow men. He returns to the small town in the
South of France to take over a bequest, a farm - and is caught up
in absurd conflicts of various kinds, financial, erotic, and
those involving prestige and the struggle for power. And over it
all howls the hot mistral, the wind that fills the people with
its everlasting, parching, dusty indefatigability - an inhuman
element in which the people live as if, despite their activities
and meddling, they are imprisoned in conditions which are more
lasting and more powerful than themselves. In both these novels
the author weaves a close and evocative web of words, of events
and environments, of memories, thoughts, associations, with
glidings and joins of elements according to a logic different
from what the realistic continuity in time and space prescribes.
Here we perceive how Claude Simon's linguistic art and
peculiarity take shape, such as we shall recognize his prose in
later works. The language begins to live its own life. Each word
and description leads on to the next. Elucidations,
amplifications, developments of thoughts and memories and
pictures, nuances, corrections with the insertion of alternatives
and possibilities, etc. cause the text to grow as if the language
were an independently living organism which buds, puts out
tendrils and sows seeds of its own accord and as if the author
were a tool or a medium for its own creative force.
So too has Claude Simon himself described his way of working,
especially after his experiences when writing the book
Histoire, 1967 nothing short of a rapturous awareness of
the sensual life and charm in giving oneself up to linguistic
work and its surprises and seductions. The book is one of the
peaks in Simon's writing, perhaps the work in which his
linguistic peculiarity is most clearly evident.
It was preceded by two other novels, in which we can find some of
the basic themes that constantly recur in Claude Simon's novels,
also in Histoire - La Route des Flandres, 1960, and Le
Palace, 1962. The first of these two novels made Simon's name
internationally. It is a broad and complex description with
strongly autobiographical touches and with memories and
traditions from Simon's family. The story is thought to take
place during the night that "the hero", Georges, spends with his
mistress, Corinne - and this alone is a radical break with all
realist narrative methods. The profusely flowing narration, its
fragmentations and piling up of parallel actions and its
discontinuous joining of scenes and of stories within stories
burst the framework for every realistic narrative art in the
traditional sense. The novel takes the shape of a penetrating
description of the French collapse in 1940, when Simon himself
took part as a cavalryman - ending up in due course as a
prisoner-of-war. Simon's experiences during this war, like during
the Spanish Civil War in which he took part in 1936, have been of
immense importance to him, constantly recurring in his writings.
Cruelty and absurdity are the dominating things - unforeseeable.
What is apparently well-planned ends in confusion and
dissolution, in which each one lives through his hardships and
has to save himself as best he can. Simon's experiences from the
Spanish Civil War were similar, depicted in Le Palace and
his latest and most important novel, Les Georgiques, 1981.
For all the sympathies which he and others might have for those
faithful to the government who fought against the fascists, it
soon turned out that these government champions for their part,
could by no means follow any regular and intelligently planned
strategies and operations. On the contrary, the fighters were
split into factions and mutual strife, giving way to meaningless
and absurd foolhardiness, obstructions and hazardous enterprises.
In Les Georgiques George Orwell appears, thinly disguised.
Simon's picture of the Spanish Civil War and of the intellectual
idealists who like Orwell, and his English sympathizers, wanted
to find an ideologically clear reason in the fight against
oppression, shapes itself into a version, at once grotesque and
tragic, compassionate and ironic, of war's reality and of man's
inability to guide his fate and correct his conditions. La
Route des Flandres and Les Georgiques are richly
decorated compositions which, with sensuous perspicacity and
linguistic invocation, conjure up an extremely complicated
pattern of personal memories and family traditions, of
experiences during modern war and of equivalents from bygone
ages, to be exact the Napoleonic era. In other contexts Simon
goes still farther back - to Caesar's fight against Pompey in 43
B.C. (in the novel La Bataille de Pharsale, 1969). The
parallels are the same the cruelty, the violence and the
absurdity are common to all, likewise the painful compassion and
feeling that the author expresses in paradoxical contrast to the
fascination that these phenomena obviously have for him. A
similar feeling is characteristic of Simon's descriptions of
erotic relationships, more rightly the sexual. In these contexts
too there is a fascination or a fixation with violence and
violation. The sexual contacts appear as conquests, the taking in
possession, mountings which resemble what stallions and mares do,
or outrages resembling what occurs in battle. A tragic feeling of
life emerges also here - a picture of human loneliness and of how
people are exposed to destructive passions and selfish impulses,
disguised as vain striving for fellowship and intimacy .
Against these grim descriptions are contrasting elements of
another kind - of tenderness and loyalty, of devotion to work and
duty, to heritage and traditions and solidarity with dead and
living kinsmen. In particular there appears as a contrast of a
consoling or edifying kind the devotion to such as grows and
sprouts independent of man's lust for power and overweening
enterprise. There is a growth which lives by its own power,
despite what men can do. The best people in Simon's novels are
those who subordinate themselves to this growth and serve it. We
meet some old women, loyal to farm and family and traditions. We
even meet in the brutal and at last disillusioned warrior a loyal
love for his dead young wife. We meet a serving and a patient
endurance which, without any self-important airs, is reflected
within these people, which lives with them even if otherwise in
their ostentatious deeds and ways they seem filled with egoism
and brutality.
First and foremost we meet this growth, this vitality and this
creativeness and this viability in language and memory, in the
shaping, the renewal and the development of what is and was and
what rises again inspired and alive through the pictures in words
and story for which we seem to be more instruments than masters.
Claude Simon's narrative art may appear as a representation of
something that lives within us whether we will or not, whether we
understand it or not, whether we believe it or not - something
hopeful, in spite of all cruelty and absurdity which for that
matter seem to characterize our condition and which is so
perceptively, penetratingly and abundantly reproduced in his
novels.
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