Claude Simon (; 10 October 1913 – 6 July 2005) was a French novelist, and was awarded the 1985 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Biography

Claude Simon was born in

Tananarive Antananarivo ( French: ''Tananarive'', ), also known by its colonial shorthand form Tana, is the capital and largest city of Madagascar. The administrative area of the city, known as Antananarivo-Renivohitra ("Antananarivo-Mother Hill" or "An ...

on the isle of

Madagascar Madagascar (; mg, Madagasikara, ), officially the Republic of Madagascar ( mg, Repoblikan'i Madagasikara, links=no, ; french: République de Madagascar), is an island country in the Indian Ocean, approximately off the coast of East Africa ...

. His parents were French, his father being a career officer who was killed in the First World War. He grew up with his mother and her family in

Perpignan Perpignan (, , ; ca, Perpinyà ; es, Perpiñán ; it, Perpignano ) is the prefecture of the Pyrénées-Orientales department in southern France, in the heart of the plain of Roussillon, at the foot of the Pyrenees a few kilometres from the ...

in the middle of the wine district of

Roussillon Roussillon ( , , ; ca, Rosselló ; oc, Rosselhon ) is a historical province of France that largely corresponded to the County of Roussillon and part of the County of Cerdagne of the former Principality of Catalonia. It is part of the reg ...

. Among his ancestors was a general from the time of the French Revolution. After secondary school at Collège Stanislas in Paris and brief sojourns at Oxford and Cambridge he took courses in painting at the André Lhote Academy. He then travelled extensively through Spain, Germany, the Soviet Union, Italy and Greece. This experience as well as those from the Second World War show up in his literary work. At the beginning of the war Claude Simon took part in the battle of the

Meuse The Meuse ( , , , ; wa, Moûze ) or Maas ( , ; li, Maos or ) is a major European river, rising in France and flowing through Belgium and the Netherlands before draining into the North Sea from the Rhine–Meuse–Scheldt delta. It has a t ...

(1940) and was taken prisoner. He managed to escape and joined the

resistance movement A resistance movement is an organized effort by some portion of the civil population of a country to withstand the legally established government or an occupying power and to disrupt civil order and stability. It may seek to achieve its objective ...

. At the same time he completed his first novel, ''Le Tricheur'' ("The Cheat", published in 1946), which he had started to write before the war. He lived in Paris and used to spend part of the year at Salses in the Pyrenees. In 1960, he was a signatory to the

Manifesto of the 121 The Manifesto of the 121 (french: Manifeste des 121, full title: ''Déclaration sur le droit à l’insoumission dans la guerre d’Algérie'' or ''Declaration on the right of insubordination in the Algerian War'') was an open letter signed by 121 i ...

in favor of Algerian independence. In 1961 Claude Simon received the prize of ''L'Express'' for ''La Route des Flandres'' and in 1967 the Médicis prize for ''Histoire''. The

University of East Anglia The University of East Anglia (UEA) is a public research university in Norwich, England. Established in 1963 on a campus west of the city centre, the university has four faculties and 26 schools of study. The annual income of the institution f ...

made him honorary doctor in 1973.

Novels

Much of Claude Simon's writing is autobiograpichal dealing with personal experiences from

World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...

and the

Spanish Civil War The Spanish Civil War ( es, Guerra Civil Española)) or The Revolution ( es, La Revolución, link=no) among Nationalists, the Fourth Carlist War ( es, Cuarta Guerra Carlista, link=no) among Carlists, and The Rebellion ( es, La Rebelión, lin ...

, and his family history. His early novels are largely traditional in form, but with ''Le vent'' (1957) and ''L'Herbe'' (1958) he developed a style associated with the Nouveau roman. ''La Route de Flandres'' (1960), that tells about wartime experiences, earned him the ''L'Express'' prize and international recognition. In ''Triptyque'' (1973) three different stories are mixed together without paragraph breaks. The novels ''Histoire'' (1967), ''Les Géorgiques'' (1981) and ''L'Acacia'' (1989) are largely about Simon's family history.

Style and influences

Simon is often identified with the '' nouveau roman'' movement exemplified in the works of

Alain Robbe-Grillet Alain Robbe-Grillet (; 18 August 1922 – 18 February 2008) was a French writer and filmmaker. He was one of the figures most associated with the '' Nouveau Roman'' (new novel) trend of the 1960s, along with Nathalie Sarraute, Michel Butor and C ...

and

Michel Butor Michel Butor (; 14 September 1926 – 24 August 2016) was a French poet, novelist, teacher, essayist, art critic and translator. Life and work Michel Marie François Butor was born in Mons-en-Barœul, a suburb of Lille, the third of seven childre ...

, and while his fragmented narratives certainly contain some of the formal disruption characteristic of that movement (in particular ''Histoire'', 1967, and ''Triptyque'', 1973), he nevertheless retains a strong sense of narrative and character. In fact, Simon arguably has much more in common with his Modernist predecessors than with his contemporaries; in particular, the works of

Marcel Proust Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust (; ; 10 July 1871 – 18 November 1922) was a French novelist, critic, and essayist who wrote the monumental novel ''In Search of Lost Time'' (''À la recherche du temps perdu''; with the previous Eng ...

and

William Faulkner William Cuthbert Faulkner (; September 25, 1897 – July 6, 1962) was an American writer known for his novels and short stories set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, based on Lafayette County, Mississippi, where Faulkner spent most of ...

are a clear influence. Simon's use of self-consciously long sentences (often stretching across many pages and with parentheses sometimes interrupting a clause which is only completed pages later) can be seen to reference Proust's style, and Simon moreover makes use of certain Proustian settings (in ''La Route des Flandres'', for example, the narrator's captain de Reixach is shot by a sniper concealed behind a hawthorn hedge or ''haie d'aubépines'', a reference to the meeting between Gilberte and the narrator across a hawthorn hedge in Proust's ''

À la recherche du temps perdu ''In Search of Lost Time'' (french: À la recherche du temps perdu), first translated into English as ''Remembrance of Things Past'', and sometimes referred to in French as ''La Recherche'' (''The Search''), is a novel in seven volumes by French ...

''). The Faulknerian influence is evident in the novels' extensive use of a fractured timeline with frequent and potentially disorienting analepsis (moments of chronological discontinuity), and of an extreme form of

free indirect speech Free indirect speech is a style of third-person narration which uses some of the characteristics of third-person along with the essence of first-person direct speech; it is also referred to as free indirect discourse, free indirect style, or, in ...

in which narrative voices (often unidentified) and streams of consciousness bleed into the words of the narrator. The ghost of Faulkner looms particularly large in 1989's ''L'Acacia'', which uses a number of non-sequential calendar dates covering a wide chronological period in lieu of chapter headings, a device borrowed from Faulkner's ''

The Sound and the Fury ''The Sound and the Fury'' is a novel by the American author William Faulkner. It employs several narrative styles, including stream of consciousness. Published in 1929, ''The Sound and the Fury'' was Faulkner's fourth novel, and was not immedi ...

''.

Themes

Despite these influences, Simon's work is thematically and stylistically highly original. War is a constant and central theme (indeed it is present in one form or another in almost all of Simon's published works), and Simon often contrasts various individuals' experiences of different historical conflicts in a single novel; World War I and the Second World War in ''L'Acacia'' (which also takes into account the impact of war on the widows of soldiers), the

French Revolutionary Wars The French Revolutionary Wars (french: Guerres de la Révolution française) were a series of sweeping military conflicts lasting from 1792 until 1802 and resulting from the French Revolution. They pitted French First Republic, France against Ki ...

and the Second World War in ''Les Géorgiques''. In addition, many of the novels deal with the notion of family history, those myths and legends which are passed down through generations and which conspire in Simon's work to affect the protagonists' lives. In this regard, the novels make use of a number of leitmotifs which recur in different combinations between novels (a technique also employed by

Marguerite Duras Marguerite Germaine Marie Donnadieu (, 4 April 1914 – 3 March 1996), known as Marguerite Duras (), was a French novelist, playwright, screenwriter, essayist, and experimental filmmaker. Her script for the film ''Hiroshima mon amour'' (1959) ea ...

), in particular the suicide of an eighteenth-century ancestor and the death of a contemporary relative by sniper-fire. Finally, almost all of Simon's novels feature horses; Simon was himself an accomplished equestrian, and fought in a mounted regiment during World War II (the ridiculousness of mounted soldiers fighting in a mechanised war is a major theme of ''La Route des Flandres'' and ''Les Géorgiques''). Simon's principal obsession, however, is with the ways in which humans experience time (another Modernist fascination). The novels often dwell on images of old-age, such as the decaying 'LSM' or the old woman (that 'flaccid and ectoplasmic Cassandra') in ''Les Géorgiques'', which are frequently seen through the uncomprehending eyes of childhood. Simon's use of family history equally attempts to show how individuals exist ''in history''—that is, how they might feel implicated in the lives and stories of their ancestors who died long ago.

Seminars

Jean Ricardou and Claude Simon (Cerisy, France) - Philippe Binant Archives

Jean Ricardou (Director) : * ''Nouveau roman : hier, aujourd'hui'', Cerisy (France), 1971. * ''Claude Simon : analyse, théorie'', Cerisy (France), 1974. * ''Pour une théorie matérialiste du texte'', Cerisy (France), 1980.

Criticism

Essayist

Christopher Hitchens Christopher Eric Hitchens (13 April 1949 – 15 December 2011) was a British-American author and journalist who wrote or edited over 30 books (including five essay collections) on culture, politics, and literature. Born and educated in England, ...

criticised Simon's deconstruction of

George Orwell Eric Arthur Blair (25 June 1903 – 21 January 1950), better known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English novelist, essayist, journalist, and critic. His work is characterised by lucid prose, social criticism, opposition to totalitar ...

's account of the

, claiming that Simon had himself fought "on the side of the Stalintern forces." In a further reference to the literary honours bestowed on Simon, Hitchens added: "the award of the Nobel Prize to such a shady literary enterprise is a minor scandal, reflecting the intellectual rot which had been spread by pseudo intellectuals." Orwell's Victory. Penguin, 2003, , p. 144.

Works

* ''Le Tricheur'' (''The Cheat'') 1946 * ''La Corde Raide'' (''The Tightrope'') 1947 * ''Gulliver'' 1952 * ''Le Sacre du printemps'' (''The Rite of Spring'') 1954 * ''Le vent: Tentative de restitution d 'un rétable baroque'' (''The Wind: Attempted Restoration of a Baroque Altarpiece'') 1957 * ''L'Herbe'' (''The Grass'') 1958 * ''La Route des Flandres'' (''The Flanders Road'') 1960 * ''Le Palace'' (''The Palace'') 1962 * ''La Separation'' (''The Separation'') 1963; play, adapted from the novel ''L'Herbe'' * ''Femmes, sur 23 peintures de Joan Miró'' (''Women, on 23 paintings by Joan Miró'') 1966; new edition, ''La Chevelure de Bérénice'' (''Berenice's Hair'') 1984 * ''Histoire'' (''Story'') 1967 * ''La Bataille de Pharsale'' (''The Battle of Pharsalus'') 1969 * ''Orion aveugle: Essai'' (''Blind Orion: Essay'') 1970 * ''Les Corps conducteurs'' (''Conducting Bodies'') 1971 * ''Triptyque'' (''Triptych'') 1973 * ''Leçon de choses'' (''Lesson in Things'') 1975 * ''Les Géorgiques'' (''The Georgics'') 1981 * ''L'Invitation'' (''The Invitation'') 1987 * ''L'Acacia'' (''The Acacia'') 1989 * ''Le jardin des plantes'' (''The Garden of Plants'') 1997 * ''Le tramway'' (''The Trolley'') 2001

Collected edition

''Œuvres'' (

Bibliothèque de la Pléiade The ''Bibliothèque de la Pléiade'' (, "Pleiades Library") is a French editorial collection which was created in 1931 by Jacques Schiffrin, an independent young editor. Schiffrin wanted to provide the public with reference editions of the c ...

): * Tome I (Gallimard, 2006), including ''Le Vent: Tentative de restitution d'un retable baroque'', ''La Route des Flandres'', ''Le Palace'', ''La Bataille de Pharsale'', ''La Chevelure de Bérénice'' (''Reprise du texte Femmes''), ''Triptyque'', ''Le Jardin des Plantes'', and other writings. * Tome II (Gallimard, 2013), including ''L'Herbe'', ''Histoire'', ''Les Corps conducteurs'', ''Leçon de choses'', ''Les Géorgiques'', ''L'Invitation'', ''L'Acacia'', ''Le Tramway'', and other writings.

References

External links

About Claude Simon

Association des Lecteurs de Claude Simon (ALCS) website for readers of Claude Simon (articles in french and in english)
* * * {{DEFAULTSORT:Simon, Claude 1913 births 2005 deaths Burials at Montmartre Cemetery French Nobel laureates Nobel laureates in Literature People from Antananarivo Prix Médicis winners French Resistance members Collège Stanislas de Paris alumni Lycée Saint-Louis alumni French male novelists 20th-century French novelists French expatriates in Madagascar