Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
…
T.S. Eliot
A first, unprepared, reading of Claude Simon’s novel “La
route des Flandres” (The Flanders’s road) makes you invariably close the book
after a few pages and wonder: “What the heck have I been reading?”
Abnormal long, unpunctuated sentences, stretching across
many pages, regularly interrupted by parentheses; their meanings redirected,
rephrased, re-explained with a constant “c’est à dire” (that is, that is to say),
interweaving and mixing the subjects in a flow of streaming consciousness, are
so many hurdles to take, before one can come to a semblance of an understanding
of what is going on in the pages of the book.
“La route” is indeed of such complexity, that you need
something like an operating instruction to make any sense of its 200 pages. And
truly, such a color –coded, explicative notice, unlocking the book’s secret code,
does exist. Simon, like Faulkner before him, established it when he was writing
his book and Mireille Calle – Gruber included this 4 page conception plan in
her recent Simon biography for the benefit of the interested reader.
But, it was not Simon’s primary concern that the reader
would make any sense of his book. At least not in a first reading, for what he
was trying to do, was to capture and to convey to his reader, what happened
before one made sense of something, that elusive moment before one realized
what was going on, eons before one started to understand what had happened.
Simon’s ambition was nothing less than to recreate in his
writing that Ur-building block of human experience: the emotion.
In “The road”, we are in fact reading an attempt to recreate
in words, the experience of that split-second “emotion”, and one can only
appreciate its success by persevering until the last line. Like most of the
books belonging to the “nouveau roman”, there is an epiphany, an “AHA –
erlebnis” at the turn of the last page, a sudden understanding of the genius of
the Author’s craftsmanship.
The emotion, Claude Simon, translates into his book, is
accurately documented. On 16 May, 1940, Claude Simon, a brigadier with the 31st
Dragoons, a French cavalry unit, scandalously anachronistic against German
Panzers, falls into an ambush. There is some panic; the men first get the order
to dismount and then immediately following, a counter - order to attack. At the
moment Simon pushes himself up in the stirrup, the girth slips and he falls backwards
under his horse. And at that precise moment, when his companions get in the
saddle and the officer raises his sword to command the attack, a German
automatic gun, its deadly salve sweeping at men’s height, cuts down riders and
horses. Simon who is already down, fumbling with the horse gear, escapes from
under the dead bodies and is one of a handful that get away ( for the moment )
unscathed.
His ordeal however was not over and a few days later, he
would be captured and transported to a German Work Camp. Simon would manage to
escape, return to France and even fight for some time in the “Resistance”.
After the war, Simon would often revisit that famous
Flanders’s road, telling family and friends, what happened and how, by chance,
he escaped that fatal moment. Understandably Simon, a man who had already more
than his part of infortunes – an orphan at an early age, the suicide of his
young wife - pondered over the occurrences,
trying to answer the “why”, “why me” and the “what if”?
And so it came that on the bus, on his way back from a visit
to his publisher, he had the emotion that became the core of the book…
“Oui, d’un seul coup tout m’est sauté à l’esprit, je peux
dire tout ensemble, dans une bouffée violente…” (Yes, suddenly everything came
into my mind, all together you can say, in a violent puff)
Now, how do you reproduce an emotion? How could Simon tackle
the problem he had set himself, to, in the words of Paul Klee, make visible the
invisible? In Simon’s work, the Emotion is a singularity of experience, made up
of a complex blend of numerous memory fragments. And that is why he renders
this one emotion, he experienced when coming back from the place where he
nearly died, as a cloud of simultaneous fragments diversely connected with each
other. In his book that Emotion branches out, with no beginning and no end, in
an explosion of valid and invalid associations, real and unreal memories,
sensatory perceptions, ideas, guesses, assumptions…
Simon, who had during his younger years, dabbled in graphic
artwork (paint, photography and collage) and had often interacted with other
artists about Art and their trade, came to the conclusion that for a faithful
rendering of Reality, one had to go beyond the description, the impression or
the expression.
In an interview he says: “If it is true that we perceive the
exterior world in fragments, (then) the canvases of the cubist “synthetic”
period are realistic… and the assemblages of Schwitters, Rauschenberg and
Nevelson (even) more realistic…
If you look at these artworks, if you study for instance a
collage by Kurt Schwitters, you understand immediately Simon’s creative process.
Indeed, after a closer reading of the text, we start to recognize repetitive patches,
fragments, lines, word which branch out, connect between themselves through
loose associations and reassemble in new meanings. And, because it is an
emotion, it all happens simultaneously. We are a dimension further than the
associative remembrance flow triggered by the taste of a madeleine, dipped into
a cup of tea…
Suicide is a theme for instance: the ridiculous attack on
horseback with sword drawn against a highly efficient and modern German army is
nothing more than a (collective) suicide. But the officer should, (would) have
known it and maybe it was his way out. And this suicide echoes another one,
that of Simon’s wife who killed herself and also that of an older ancestor,
also a military man who shot himself because of the shame of a defeat.
Horses are everywhere in the book, dead horses, war horses,
race horses and suddenly the cavalry doubles up as a multicolor swarm of
jockeys preparing for a race. One of the jockeys, a professional rider of the
dead officer’s racing stable, was rather close to the officer or was he closer
to the officer’s wife. Was he not only riding his horses but also riding his
wife? From the buttocks of horses we get to the buttocks of woman, riding what,
riding who?
“How was it?” Simon asks himself, “How to know?” and ”What to know?”
It is our task, as responsive readers, to collect all these
fragments, knead them together into a unit of simultaneous feelings, which is
then the closest we can come to that intense Emotion, Claude Simon so genially
wanted to bring over.
He earned himself a Noble price with his attempt.
As far as I am concerned more than deserved !
As far as I am concerned more than deserved !
