Claude Simon
Encyclopedia
Claude Simon was a French novelist and the 1985 Nobel Laureate in Literature
. He was born in Antananarivo
, Madagascar
, and died in Paris
, France
.
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
in the middle of the wine district of Roussillon
.
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
(1940) and was taken prisoner. He managed to escape and joined the resistance movement. 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 use to spend part of the year at Salses in the Pyrenees.
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 made him honorary doctor in 1973.
movement exemplified in the works of Alain Robbe-Grillet
and Michel Butor
, and while his fragmented narratives certainly contain some of the formal disruption characteristic of that movement (in particular Triptyque from 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
and William 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 own style, and Simon morever 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 A la recherche du temps perdu). The Faulknerian influence is evident in the novels' extensive use of a fractured timelime with frequent and potentially disorienting analepsis (moments of chronological discontinuity), and of an extreme form of free indirect speech
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
.
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
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
), 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 WWII (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.
Nobel Prize in Literature
Since 1901, the Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded annually to an author from any country who has, in the words from the will of Alfred Nobel, produced "in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction"...
. He was born in Antananarivo
Antananarivo
Antananarivo , formerly Tananarive , is the capital and largest city in Madagascar. It is also known by its French colonial shorthand form Tana....
, Madagascar
Madagascar
The Republic of Madagascar is an island country located in the Indian Ocean off the southeastern coast of Africa...
, and died in Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
, France
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
.
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
-Sport:Perpignan is a rugby stronghold: their rugby union side, USA Perpignan, is a regular competitor in the Heineken Cup and seven times champion of the Top 14 , while their rugby league side plays in the engage Super League under the name Catalans Dragons.-Culture:Since 2004, every year in the...
in the middle of the wine district of Roussillon
Roussillon
Roussillon is one of the historical counties of the former Principality of Catalonia, corresponding roughly to the present-day southern French département of Pyrénées-Orientales...
.
Among his ancestors was a general from the time of the French Revolution.
After secondary school at Collège Stanislas
Collège Stanislas
Collège Stanislas is the name of three schools:*Collège Stanislas de Paris, France*Collège Stanislas, with two locations in Quebec, Canada*Stanislas College, The Netherlands...
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
Meuse
Meuse is a department in northeast France, named after the River Meuse.-History:Meuse is one of the original 83 departments created during the French Revolution on March 4, 1790...
(1940) and was taken prisoner. He managed to escape and joined the resistance movement. 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 use to spend part of the year at Salses in the Pyrenees.
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 made him honorary doctor in 1973.
Style and influences
Simon is often identified with the nouveau romanNouveau roman
The nouveau roman is a type of 1950s French novel that diverged from classical literary genres. Émile Henriot coined the title in an article in the popular French newspaper Le Monde on May 22, 1957 to describe certain writers who experimented with style in each novel, creating an essentially new...
movement exemplified in the works of Alain Robbe-Grillet
Alain Robbe-Grillet
Alain Robbe-Grillet , was a French writer and filmmaker. He was, along with Nathalie Sarraute, Michel Butor and Claude Simon, one of the figures most associated with the Nouveau Roman trend. Alain Robbe-Grillet was elected a member of the Académie française on March 25, 2004, succeeding Maurice...
and Michel Butor
Michel Butor
-Life and work:Michel Marie François Butor was born in Mons-en-Barœul. He studied philosophy at the Sorbonne, graduating in 1947. He has taught in Egypt, Manchester, Salonika, the United States, and Geneva...
, and while his fragmented narratives certainly contain some of the formal disruption characteristic of that movement (in particular Triptyque from 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
Marcel Proust
Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust was a French novelist, critic, and essayist best known for his monumental À la recherche du temps perdu...
and William Faulkner
William Faulkner
William Cuthbert Faulkner was an American writer from Oxford, Mississippi. Faulkner worked in a variety of media; he wrote novels, short stories, a play, poetry, essays and screenplays during his career...
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 own style, and Simon morever 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 A la recherche du temps perdu). The Faulknerian influence is evident in the novels' extensive use of a fractured timelime with frequent and potentially disorienting analepsis (moments of chronological discontinuity), and of an extreme form of free indirect speech
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...
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
The Sound and the Fury is a novel written by the American author William Faulkner. It employs a number of narrative styles, including the technique known as stream of consciousness, pioneered by 20th century European novelists such as James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. Published in 1929, The Sound and...
.
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 IWorld War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...
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
French Revolutionary Wars
The French Revolutionary Wars were a series of major conflicts, from 1792 until 1802, fought between the French Revolutionary government and several European states...
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 Duras
Marguerite Donnadieu, better known as Marguerite Duras was a French writer and film director.-Background:...
), 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 WWII (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.
Works
- Le Tricheur/The Cheat 1945
- La Corde Raide/The Tightrope 1947
- Gulliver 1952
- Le Sacre du printemps/The Anointment 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/Women. Ill by Joan Miró. - 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
- Œuvres, Collection Pléiade, Gallimard 2006 [with Le Vent. Tentative de restitution d'un retable baroque (1957), La Route des Flandres (1960), Le Palace (1962), La Bataille de Pharsale (1969), La Chevelure de Bérénice (Reprise du texte Femmes, 1972), Triptyque (1973), "le Discours de Stockholm" (1986, texte prononcé à l'occasion de la remise du Prix Nobel) and Le Jardin des Plantes (1997)]