Claude Simon was born inTananarive on the isle ofMadagascar. His parents were French, and his father was a career officer who was killed in the First World War. He grew up with his mother and her family inPerpignan in the middle of the wine district ofRoussillon.[2] Among his ancestors was a general from the time of the French Revolution.[citation needed]
After secondary school atCollège Stanislas in Paris, he took courses in painting atAndré Lhote's academy.[2] At 21, Simon inherited a small fortune that made him economically independent.[2] In 1935-1936 he made his military service at the 31stcavalry regiment inLunéville. In 1936 he went to Barcelona and volunteered in theInternational Brigades during theSpanish Civil War.[2] This experience as well as those from theSecond World War show up in his literary work.[3] Simon began writing in 1936. In 1937 he travelled extensively through Spain, Germany, the Soviet Union, Italy, Greece, and Turkey.[2]
Claude Simon was called up by the French army in August 1939, just before the outbreak of the Second World War. In 1940 he took part in the battle of theMeuse and on 17 May escaped a massacre on his cavalry squadron. He was taken prisoner by the Germans, but managed to escape in October 1940 and joined theresistance movement. As a refugee inPerpignan he became friends with the paintersRaoul Dufy etJean Lurçat. 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. In 1944 he returned to Paris and the resistance movement.[2]
Claude Simon published around 20 books written in a dense,autobiographical style. His 1960 novelLa Route des Flandres, in which he recalled his experiences in the Second World War, is often considered his finest achievement.[4] In1985 he was awarded theNobel Prize in Literature with the citation "who in his novel combines the poet's and the painter's creativeness with a deepened awareness of time in the depiction of the human condition."[5]
Claude Simon lived inParis and used to spend part of the year atSalses in the Pyrenees.[citation needed] To the end of his life Simon insisted on that his profession should be recorded as that of aviticulteur and not a writer, thinking grape farming was a more genuinely remedial trade than writing novels, and toning down the act of writing as no different to what manual workers do.[4]
Most of Claude Simon's writing is autobiographical, dealing with personal experiences fromWorld War II and theSpanish Civil War, and his family history. His early novels are largely traditional in form, but withLe vent (1957) andL'Herbe (1958) he developed a style associated with thenouveau roman.La Route de Flandres (1960), which tells about wartime experiences, earned him theL'Express prize and international recognition. InTriptyque (1973) three different stories are mixed together without paragraph breaks. The novelsHistoire (1967),Les Géorgiques (1981) andL'Acacia (1989) are largely about Simon's family history.[6]
Simon is often identified with thenouveau roman movement exemplified in the works ofAlain Robbe-Grillet andMichel Butor, and while his fragmented narratives certainly contain some of the formal disruption characteristic of that movement (in particularHistoire, 1967, andTriptyque, 1973), he nevertheless retains a strong sense of narrative and character.[7]
In fact, Simon arguably has much more in common with his Modernist predecessors than with his contemporaries; in particular, the works ofMarcel Proust andWilliam Faulkner 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 (inLa Route des Flandres, for example, the narrator's captain de Reixach is shot by a sniper concealed behind a hawthorn hedge orhaie d'aubépines, a reference to the meeting between Gilberte and the narrator across a hawthorn hedge in Proust'sÀ la recherche du temps perdu).
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 offree indirect speech in which narrative voices (often unidentified) andstreams of consciousness bleed into the words of the narration. The ghost of Faulkner looms particularly large in 1989'sL'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'sThe Sound and the Fury.
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 inL'Acacia (which also takes into account the impact of war on the widows of soldiers), theFrench Revolutionary Wars and the Second World War inLes 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 byMarguerite Duras), 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 ofLa Route des Flandres andLes 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') inLes Géorgiques, which are frequently seen through the uncomprehending eyes of childhood. Simon's use of family history equally attempts to show how individuals existin history—that is, how they might feel implicated in the lives and stories of their ancestors who died long ago.
La Separation (1963; play, adapted from the novelL'Herbe).The Separation
Femmes : sur 23 peintures deJoan Miró (1966; republished asLa Chevelure de Bérénice, 1984).Berenice’s Golden Mane, trans. Simon Green (Alyscamps, 1998)
Tome I (Gallimard, 2006), includingLe 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), includingL'Herbe,Histoire,Les Corps conducteurs,Leçon de choses,Les Géorgiques,L'Invitation,L'Acacia,Le Tramway, and other writings.
Bernard Luscans,La représentation dans le nouveau nouveau roman, Chapel Hill, Université de Caroline du Nord, 2008.[13]
Ilias Yocaris : « Vers un nouveau langage romanesque : le collage citationnel dans La Bataille de Pharsale de Claude Simon »,Revue Romane, 43, 2, 2008, p. 303–327.
Mireille Calle-Gruber,Claude Simon, une vie à écrire, Paris, Ed. du Seuil, 2011.
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