Claude Simon

Biography

Born with Tananarive with Madagascar from a military father, who will die a few months later the August 27th 1914 at the time of the First World War close to Verdun, it will be high with Perpignan in France, by his mother. The latter dies in 1924 of the continuations of a Cancer. Its education will then be taken of load by his/her grandmother and one of her uncles, under the supervision of a first cousin.

In 1931, it is devoted to painting and photography. Besides it follows courses to the academy of painting André Lhote.

In 1934 - 1935, it carries out its military service with the 31 {{E}} Régiment of Dragons of Lunéville.

In 1936, whereas it starts to write, it goes to Barcelona to join the republican who are opposed to the pro-Franco troops at the time of the Guerre of Spain. It will return, in 1938, France where it launches out in the writing of a first novel: the Cheater , who will be published in the Libération.

In 1939, at the beginning of the Second world war, it is mobilized to be used 31 {{E}} Régiment as Dragons. It is made prisoner by the German S, but will escape from its prison camp in Saxony in 1940.

It joined the free Zone and settles with Salses where he becomes member of the Résistance.

At the end of the war, he becomes wine grower in the Bordelais with his own exploitation and begins the drafting of several works. Published by the Editions of Midnight, its works classify it, for many criticisms, in the mobility of the Nouveau Novel.

In 1967, it obtains the Prix Médicis for one of its most known novels: History . In 1985, the Nobel Prize of literature comes to crown and return justice to a major work of the contemporary French literature, last under silence by the whole of a press omnubilée by the heads of prows " médiatiques" New Novel, namely Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute and Michel Butor.

At the end of his existence, the author lived between his wine field of the South-west and his apartment of the street Monge, in the Latin Quarter with Paris.

Claude Simon wrote several novels which he regards as pertaining to one probationary period and not very convincing: the Tightrope (1947), GULLIVER (1952) and the Rite of Spring (1954), period completed by the publication of the Wind (1957).

Here an extract of its speech of thanks for at the time of the ceremony of handing-over of the Nobel Prize to Stockholm, the December 9th 1985: I am now an old man, and, like much of inhabitants of our old Europe, the first part of my life was animated enough: I was pilot of a revolution, I made the war under particularly fatal conditions (I belonged to the one of these regiments as the staffs coldly sacrifice in advance and of which, in eight days, it is practically nothing remained), I was made prisoner, I knew the hunger, physical work until exhaustion, I escaped, I was seriously sick, several times at the edge of death, violent or natural, I côtoyé the most various people, as well of the priests as of the flamers of churches, of peaceful middle-class men that anarchists, philosophers that the illiterate ones, Imy bread with gangsters, finally I divided travelled a little everywhere in the world… and however, I never still, with soixante-douze years, discovered any direction with all that, if it is not like said it, I believe, Barthes after Shakespeare, that “if the world means something, it is that it does not mean anything” - except that it est.

Its work

Comparable to the New Novel, its literary work gives the feeling of a deep unity set of themes and stylistics. It includes/understands in particular certain lived episodes (the Guerre of Spain, engagement on the face of 1940) which nourissent several successive fictions. Those present to the reader recurring figures such as the mother, quickly missing, the grandmother and the uncle who raised the writer and the two aunts who had sacrificed themselves to allow the father to make his studies. With that the files simoniennes are added: family photographs, conventional papers of a grandfather and postcards that the father, posts some in the colonies, wrote with the mother during their long engagement. The novels of the author are crossed by the topics of the erotism, the war, the History perceived like an eternal restarting and time conceived like motionless trampling. Inspired initially by Marcel Proust or William Faulkner (from which it borrows the form " ing" , retranscribed in French by the repeated use of the present participles), the writing of Claude Simon is characterized by a formal work of importance. The organic perception of the lived History is illustrated by the presentation of apparently unimportant details, inflecting the account in layers of a multiple fiction, dictated by the chaotic movement of imagination, superimposed on esthetic considerations or a reflexive and métatextuelle dimension of the literary language. The “magma of words and emotions” (metaphor employed by Simon in the Speech of Stockholm in 1985 to qualify its work) comes to break the linearity of an omniscient or focused narration which is seen stripped of all logical transitions. The traditional romantic structures, governing the various concepts of space and time, are destroyed: the heritage of the literary model at the 19th century is thus abused. The various references to the places and the times are simultaneously seized, in an apparently anarchistic way, by a dense language and prolix which tries to solidify the duration given thanks to the utlisation of periphrases (“motionless Achilles with great step”) or on the contrary seeks to animate the motionless images which nourish the account in various places (paintings, photographs, postcards, postage stamps…).

The romantic matter is enriched by the contribution by a perpetual work by recollection. Time is reconstituted in its lived duration, under its multiple sensory dimensions. This is particularly sensitive starting from the novels the Wind and the Grass , first works published with the Éditions of Midnight. Thus in the Road of Flandres , Simon pushes this work of mémorielle exploration as far as possible, by taking the history of a family and some of her members hustled in the rout of 1940 in a network of memories, evocations, visions and images which emerge from the subconscious and emergent of chaos to register the parameters of a sharp memory in the order of the language.

the De luxe hotel tells “its” War of Spain. Then many novels will follow where Claude Simon looks further into and personalizes his experiment either of a concrete historical episode or of personal biographical events. Thus, History , the Battle of Pharsale , the conducting Bodies , Triptych or Leçons of things are the demonstration of a creative great power guided by a demanding and persevering writing associated with a formalism particularly thought. Among his last books, one counts in particular Géorgiques and the Acacia , published in the Années 1980 which are true masterpieces, concentrating all the characteristics of a released style of literary conventions without sinking in the tiresome experimental exercise to convene the history of the literature and to question the writer in the bases of his artistic company, its work on language and its ethics of creator.

If this style can point out that of Proust, it moves away from there by simplicity from the language, even if that does not appear. Many criticisms brought closer besides, wrongly, the esthetic and literary aspirations of the two authors: contrary to the model proustien which seizes negligible flows of conscience and the vestiges of an olfactive perception conditioned in involuntary memory in the Recherche , which the narrator the general image of a disappeared company, unified by the eternity of the poetic act, Simon uses to recompose diffracts the mémorielle thought in fragments of memories, fuzzy figures or irreconcilable bits of space times between them, come to disturb a narration haunted by the physical marks of the lived History.

The auquelle principal difficulty runs up any reader of Simon lies rather in full syntax, where sentences often run out on pages without any punctuation, and in the general construction of works. The writer employs the word right, and it is this accumulation of words, these juxtapositions of comparisons, sentences, periphrases inside a general sentence which make all the richness of it.

The writing simonienne is particularly plentiful and sinuous, tying around words of multiple associations which buckle in infinite networks, unceasingly exploiting principle of random combinations. All works of the author appear to be only extracts of an immense account which one never takes at the beginning and which does not have any end: an image of our place in the novel of the life?

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