Paris Review - The Art of Fiction No. 128

13/11/2020 Paris Review - The Art of Fiction No.
128
Claude Simon, e Art of Fiction No.
Interviewed by Alexandra Eyle
ISSUE 122, SPRING 1992
C L AU D E S I M O N , C A . 1 9 6 7.
Claude Simon has long denied that he writes his novels in the style of the French
nouveau roman—in fact he considers nouveau roman to be a misleading term under
which critics have falsely grouped the work of several French authors, including Nathalie
Sarraute, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and Marguerite Duras, whose literary styles, themes, and
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13/11/2020 Paris Review - The Art of Fiction No. 128
interests are, according to Simon, quite diverse. But it was nevertheless as a “new
novelist” that Simon was known best until he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in
. Literary critics and academicians have attributed to him everything from an
obsession with the philosophy of the absurd to a penchant for nihilism. e symbolism
in his work has been extensively analyzed, excessively so in the eyes of Simon—he rejects
almost all interpretation of his work, portraying himself as a straightforward writer who
draws on the material that life provides him. What emerges, though, is challenging,
baroque. Sentences continue for pages; passages contain no punctuation. Always, he is
lyrical. More o en than not, Simon depicts a reality of death and dissolution, with war a
common presence. He rejects the conventional novels of the nineteenth century and
embraces Dostoyevsky, Conrad, Joyce, Proust, and Faulkner, whose highly charged,
evocative use of language he draws upon. Objects and scenes echo each other, are
repeated, turned over and examined in minute detail from many angles; time ows
backward, forward, and back again with changing points of view.
Claude Simon was born in in Tananarive, Madagascar and raised in Perpignan,
France. His father died in battle when Simon was less than a year old. Orphaned at age
eleven, he was sent to boarding school in Paris, but spent summers with relatives. As a
young man, he brie y studied painting and traveled to Spain during the civil war there,
where he sided with the Republicans. He once said that he turned to writing because he
imagined it would be easier than either painting or revolution. Simon began his literary
career on the eve of World War II with the novel Le Tricheur, but was conscripted into
the military before he could complete the manuscript. He narrowly survived his tour of
duty with an anachronistically out tted squadron of the French cavalry, which faced
German panzers on horseback, armed with sabers and ri es. Le Tricheur was nally
published in . Simon had received an inheritance, and at the close of the war, was
able to devote himself entirely to writing.
His works have been widely translated, ten of them into English, including the novels
e Grass ( ), e Flanders Road ( ), e Palace ( ), Histoire ( ),
Conducting Bodies ( ), Triptych ( ), Georgics ( ), e In itation ( ), and
e Acacia ( ).
Simon now lives in Paris, where he has spent most of his adult life. He summers in the
south of France, near the town of Perpignan where he grew up. is interview was
conducted primarily by mail, during the spring and summer of . A brief nal session
was held in the bright and spacious living room of Simon’s modestly furnished Paris
apartment, an airy h- oor walk-up in the h arrondissement. e white walls were
hung with artwork; the environment bore little resemblance to the dark world Simon
depicts in his ction.
I N T E RV I EWE R
Would you describe yours as a happy childhood?
C L AU D E S I MO N
My father was killed in the war, in August of , and my mother died when I was
eleven years old, a er which I was sent, as a boarding student, to a religious institution
with very severe discipline. Although I was orphaned at a young age, I regard my
childhood as having been rather happy—thanks to the a ection that my uncles and aunts
and cousins showered on me.
I N T E RV I EWE R
What was the name of the boarding school?
SIMON
Stanislas College, which is actually a grammar school in Paris. My mother was very pious
and had wanted me to receive a religious education.
I N T E RV I EWE R
Did this institution have any e ect on you emotionally or intellectually?
SIMON
I became an atheist. at, it seems to me, is evident in my books.
I N T E RV I EWE R
How did your formal education shape you?
SIMON
I received what one would call a cultural base—Latin, mathematics, sciences, history,
geography, literature, foreign language. A huge defect in secondary instruction in France
is that one practically never speaks of art—music, painting, sculpture, architecture. For
instance, I was made to learn hundreds of verses by Corneille, but one never spoke of
Nicolas Poussin, who is much more important.
I N T E RV I EWE R
You fought alongside the Republicans in the Spanish civil war, but became disillusioned
and le the cause. Why?
SIMON
I did not ght. I arrived in Barcelona in September “trying to be a spectator more
than an actor in the comedies that play in the world.” at’s one of the principles set
forth by Descartes. When he wrote that, the word comédie designated every theatrical
representation, comic as well as tragic. For Descartes, who lived austerely observing the
weakness of human passions, this word had a slightly pejorative and ironic sense. Balzac
also used the word in the title of a group of books, La Comédie humaine, that is actually
given up to tragic episodes. e most woeful ingredients of the Spanish civil war were its
sel sh motives, the hidden ambitions it served, the emphasis on hollow words used by
both sides; it seemed to be a comedy—terribly bloody—but a comedy all the same. Still,
given the degree to which the war was murderous and involved a great deal of treachery, I
could not myself qualify it as a comédie. What drew me there? Naturally, my sympathy
for the Republicans; but also my curiosity to observe a civil war, see what was happening.
I N T E RV I EWE R
Your life has been touched a great deal by luck: You were one of the few French
cavalrymen to survive the Battle of the Meuse in , which took place on the eld
where your father died. Taken prisoner by the Germans, you escaped a er six months and
then worked in the resistance. A er this period you retired to your family’s country
estate, where an inheritance has enabled you to devote yourself exclusively to your
writing.
SIMON
All my life I have been favored by incredible luck. It would take too long to enumerate all
of the occasions, though one example stands out among all the others: In May , my
squadron was ambushed by German tanks. Under re, the foolish order was given to
“ ght on foot,” followed almost immediately by the order, “on horseback, at a gallop!”
Just as I put my foot in the stirrup, the saddle slipped. Just my luck, I thought, in the
middle of the battle! But that’s what saved me: On foot, I found myself in a dead zone, a
level crossing where I couldn’t be hit. e majority of those who had remounted were
killed. I could tell you about ten or twelve occasions when I had similarly good luck.
O en, as in the case of the ambush, what one thinks is bad luck turns out to be the
opposite. Paul Valéry wrote: “When everything is added up, our life is nothing but a
series of hazards to which we give responses more or less appropriate.”
I N T E RV I EWE R
How did you escape the German prison camp?
SIMON
I managed to get onto a train of prisoners the Germans were bringing to Frontstalag for
the winter. e camp was badly guarded. Just a er I arrived, I escaped in broad daylight
by slipping between two German sentinels into the forest. From there, hiding along the
way, I reached the line of demarcation.
I N T E RV I EWE R
What work did you do for the resistance?
SIMON
I was not in the heart of it. e Center for Military Intelligence of the National
Liberation Movement, directed by Colonel Vauban, was installed in my apartment, at
boulevard du Montparnasse. is was from April until the liberation. My role
was passive: that of the host. A er the Second World War, I lived in Paris; during the
summer I lived in Perpignan, in the eastern Pyrenees. I owned a small number of
vineyards, which were managed in Salses, een kilometers north of Perpignan. I have
sold this land, but still have a house in the village where I spend my summers.
I N T E RV I EWE R
When did you rst start writing?
SIMON
I’m not really sure. During my military service, I think.
I N T E RV I EWE R
What made you write your rst novel?
SIMON
e ambition to write a novel.
I N T E RV I EWE R
You’ve said that “our perception of the world is deformed, incomplete . . . our memory is
selective. Writing transforms . . .” Is this transformation therapeutic in any way? Do you
see writing as a form of therapy?
SIMON
No. I write only for pleasure, for the sake of producing something, and naturally, in the
hope of being read. Apparently this hope is not completely vain, since I now have, in
many countries, thousands of readers.
I N T E RV I EWE R
Did the writings of Sartre and Camus have a great in uence on your own work?
SIMON
I consider the writings of Camus and Sartre to be absolutely worthless. Sartre’s work is,
above all else, dishonest and malevolent. If I have admitted to any in uences, they have
been those of Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Joyce, Proust, and Faulkner. All my writing comes
from personal experience.
I N T E RV I EWE R
e hero of your rst novel, Le Tricheur, has been described as being very close to
Meursault in e Stranger.
SIMON
Le Tricheur was nearly nished in the spring of , well before Camus’s e Stranger. I
met my rst editor, Edmond Bomsel, during the war. He was Jewish. His publishing
house, e Sagittarius, had been con scated by the Germans. He was a refugee in the
southern zone and asked me to wait until the end of the war to publish Le Tricheur. I
agreed. ere is, therefore, absolutely no link with or in uence on the part of Camus.
I N T E RV I EWE R
You mention the in uence of Faulkner, Joyce, and Proust on your writing. Does it bother
you that some critics view your work as imitative?
SIMON
ose who write more or less stupid or malevolent criticism leave me largely indi erent.
If I had given them my attention, I would not have done the work that won me the
Nobel Prize.
I N T E RV I EWE R
Some have said that it was a er you wrote Le Sacre du printemps in the ies that you
became a “new novelist.”
SIMON
Since the majority of professional critics do not read the books of which they speak,
mountains of nonsense have been spoken and written about the nouveau roman. e
name refers to a group of several French writers who nd the conventional and academic
forms of the novel insupportable, just as Proust and Joyce did long before them. Apart
from this common refusal, each of us has worked through his own voice; the voices are
very di erent, but this does not prevent us from having mutual esteem and a feeling of
solidarity with one another.
I N T E RV I EWE R
What distinguishes your voice from those of the other new novelists?
SIMON
Beginning with e Grass, my novels are more and more based on my life and require
very little ction—in the end, really none at all.
I N T E RV I EWE R
If you had to attach a label to your type of writing, what would it be, if not nouveau
roman?
SIMON
Labels are always dangerous. You oblige me to repeat myself: if there is anything new in
the novel, a er the abandonment of the fable, it began in this century with Joyce and
Proust.
I N T E RV I EWE R
You once said you were bored by nineteenth-century realism. Did you choose your style
of writing in reaction to this, to write a novel you felt was truly representative of reality?
SIMON
ere is no such thing as a “real” representation of “reality.” Except, perhaps, in algebraic
formulae. All the literary schools pretend that they are more realistic than their
predecessors. Who knows what reality is? e impressionists stopped pretending to
represent the visible world and presented the public with the “impressions” they received
from it. If it’s true that we only perceive the exterior world in fragments, the canvases of
the cubists’ “synthetic” period are realistic. More realistic still are the “assemblages” of
Schwitters, Rauschenberg, or Nevelson.
I N T E RV I EWE R
Why did you choose the style of writing that you did?
SIMON
I did not choose it. I write as I can.
I’ve had the luck to have a genius of a publisher—Jerome Lindon. He owns one of the
smaller publishing houses in Paris, Les Editions de Minuit, with only nine employees. I
came to them through Alain Robbe-Grillet, whom I met on vacation. He asked to read
the manuscript of e Wind, which I was then nishing. He liked it and encouraged me
to publish with Les Editions de Minuit, which I agreed to do because they had published
writers for whom I have a great deal of esteem, such as Beckett, Butor, Pinget, and
Robbe-Grillet himself. In recent years Les Editions de Minuit has had two Nobel prize-
winners—Samuel Beckett and myself.
I N T E RV I EWE R
Do you write quickly?
SIMON
No. Very slowly.
I N T E RV I EWE R
Do you take notes, keep a journal?
SIMON
I take very few notes. I have never kept a journal. My memory is visual above all else.
I N T E RV I EWE R
What do you want your readers to learn from your books?
SIMON
ey’ll learn nothing. I have no messages to deliver. I hope only that they will nd
pleasure. e nature of this pleasure is di cult to de ne. One part is what Roland
Barthes has called recognition—the recognition of sentiments or feelings one has
experienced oneself. e other is the discovery of what one had not known about oneself.
Johann Sebastian Bach de ned this sort of pleasure as “the expected unexpected.”
I N T E RV I EWE R
How do you work?
SIMON
I write with a ballpoint pen (Stabilo-Stylist ), a er which I use a typewriter. I write
with a great deal of di culty. My phrases construct themselves little by little, a er many
erasures, which prohibits the use of a typewriter.
I N T E RV I EWE R
Do you follow a regular writing schedule, setting aside a certain amount of time to work
every day?
SIMON
Each a ernoon I start at around three-thirty and work until about seven-thirty or eight.
I N T E RV I EWE R
You once said, “It’s the moment when I begin to battle with words that something comes
to me.”
SIMON
Exactly. Each time I have a vague project in mind that gradually modi es itself for the
better as I work.
I N T E RV I EWE R
Is it true that you color-code your manuscripts with colored pencils in order to keep track
of each narrative strand?
SIMON
e composition of my books gives me great problems. While working on e Flanders
Road, I gave a color to each of the themes and characters. Doing this, I could visualize the
whole, modify it, improve the placement of the fade-ins, the alterations of scenes, the
rehearsals, the curtain calls. One day the composer Pierre Boulez told me that my biggest
problem must be that of periodicity, which in music is the frequency of repetitions of one
theme or refrain in a composition, o en subject to variations or changes of tone. Boulez
was exactly right. He did not nd too many repetitions in my books, but understood that
one of my problems was arranging them well.
I N T E RV I EWE R
If you have trouble remembering the order of these strands, how can you expect the
reader to do so?
SIMON
If he’s not capable of following the course of the book and it bores him, why shouldn’t he
throw it out? It’s that simple. at’s what I always did when a book did not give me
pleasure. We live in a democracy. We can choose to read what pleases us.
I N T E RV I EWE R
In your early novels, such as e Grass and e Flanders Road, you wrote in long and
complex sentences. More recently, your sentences have become simpler, and you have
abandoned the paragraph altogether. What caused you to change your style?
SIMON
My project is di erent every time. To repeat the same things is of no interest.
I N T E RV I EWE R
Do you decide the point of view in your novels in advance, or does this emerge as you
write?
SIMON
When I start a novel I see it as a very vague project that gets modi ed for the better in
the course of my work, not because my characters dictate their conduct, as certain
imbecile novelists pretend, but because the language unceasingly presents new
perspectives. Many years ago I said in an interview, “ e novel makes itself, I make it, and
it makes me.”
I N T E RV I EWE R
Critics have said you have two types of heros—one who ghts against order and one who
accepts it—and that the con ict between these two types is at the center of your books.
SIMON
One must pose this type of question to philosophers. I am a novelist. One last time: what
interests me is not the why of things but the how.
I N T E RV I EWE R
So you don’t consider yourself a philosopher?
SIMON
Certainly not. I did not even take philosophy in high school. I studied mathematics. In
general, I distrust philosophy. Plato recommended chasing poets from the city; the
“great” Heidegger was a Nazi; Lukács was a communist, and J. P. Sartre wrote: “Any
anticommunist is a dog.”
I N T E RV I EWE R
Do you think it is possible or idiotic for human beings to nd happiness in their lives?
SIMON
No, it’s not idiotic. It’s human. But was it Flaubert who said, “ e idea of happiness has
caused many tears to ow”?
I N T E RV I EWE R
When are you happiest in your own life?
SIMON
In numerous ways . . . in loving or sexual relationships, reading a good book—Proust
always throws me into a state of rapture—contemplating a picture, enjoying architecture,
listening to music . . . it would take too long to list them all . . .. Maybe my happiest days
were during that autumn when I was escaping from the prison camp . . . living outside the
law.
I N T E RV I EWE R
For the characters in your novels sex is always emotionally empty or destructive. Yet your
portrayal of the sex act is o en very erotic.
SIMON
e great weakness of the majority of erotic novels is that they feature conventional
characters, spineless puppets who have no depth—the inevitable marquesses or
marquises, English lords, multimillionaires, valets, and gamekeepers—to whom these
sexual acts just happen, and for this reason, seem disembodied . . . To describe erotic
scenes inserted among other, nonerotic scenes (as it happens in life) interests me; I have
attempted it several times. Sadly, so many taboos are attached to sex that it is very
di cult to talk about it. It is necessary to nd a tone, a distance. ings such as
a ectation, derision, or lyricism, that may aw writing about other subjects, become
completely intolerable in erotic writing. at which is private is rendered into something
frankly ridiculous, as in the famous Story of O . . . And recall the passage in Dostoyevsky’s
e Devils where, a er Stavrogin recounts the highly erotic and metaphysical episode of
the rape and the hoped-for suicide of the little girl, Tikhon asks him, simply, if he does
not believe in the ridiculous.
I N T E RV I EWE R
Your novels repeatedly deal with the inevitability of death, with the dissolution of all
things, with the futility of life. If life is really so empty and meaningless, why write about
it?
SIMON
André Malraux, for whom I do not otherwise have much appreciation, has said: “Man is
the only animal who knows that he is destined to die.” Life is not “futile” for all of that.
Really, on the contrary, it is to be valued because of that. Why write? To write. To make
something. e best response to this question was given by Samuel Beckett: “ at’s all
I’m good for.” If life is sometimes di cult, full of misfortune, su ering—I know
something of this: I fought in war, was a prisoner, constrained to forced labor, scarcely
nourished, much later gravely ill—I also know life carries many joys, satisfactions.
I N T E RV I EWE R
Well then, what is the role of the writer in society?
SIMON
To change the world. Each time a writer or an artist “tells” the world in an ever so slightly
new fashion, it is changed. “Nature imitates art,” Oscar Wilde said. And this is not a
witticism. Apart from touching it, man only knows the world through representations
given of it . . . through painting, literature, algebraic formulae, and so forth.
I N T E RV I EWE R
Do you concern yourself with national or international politics?
SIMON
I take an interest in politics, but without passion. Today politics seem more than ever to
be controlled by economic constraints; political leaders are reduced to the role of
administrators. It is not for ideological reasons that Gorbachev was looking to make a
political structure di erent from his predecessors’, but because he faced an economic
disaster in the Soviet Union. When events cross the threshold of what is tolerable (as, for
example, the repression and the war led by France in Algiers during the ies) I show my
opposition.
I N T E RV I EWE R
You were twice a runner-up for the Nobel Prize for Literature. ere was a public outcry
when you failed to receive it in . How did you feel when you got it in ?
SIMON
Extremely pleased. To be honest, others have had reactions of displeasure they cannot
hide. In France, in literary circles, it was as though someone had made them swallow a
hedgehog, whole, with all its needles. For example, a colleague, a “friend,” told e New
York Times that he made me hold back every other chapter from one of my novels, thanks
to which it had become more readable. But still, the Nobel. A great stroke of luck, let me
tell you! It’s lucky to have something like this happen when you are seventy-two years old,
and when your head is solidly screwed on. Honors and money are suddenly heaped on
you! An avalanche of invitations from all over the world! at can be stressful, can turn
heads. A er receiving a Parisian literary prize for much less, some writers have remained
impotent for the rest of their lives. Lars Gillensten, the secretary of the Swedish
Academy, told me at Stockholm: “Now—write, write! . . . A erward, most laureates write
nothing else.” And so, “a erward” I wrote a big novel, e Acacia, published last fall,
which the critics, from the communists to the extreme right, including the Catholics,
have called the best of my books.
I N T E RV I EWE R
You have o en referred to yourself as an amateur writer. A er producing fourteen novels,
do you still call yourself an amateur?
SIMON
Writing novels is not a profession. One is not paid by the month or year by a boss. A
professional is someone who has acquired a certain number of skills by which he can be
assured of a calculable return. e butcher has learned how to cut meat, the doctor to
diagnose illnesses, the mason to build a wall—all according to various rules. In art, there
are no rules. To the contrary, o en it’s a question of breaking them. With no guarantees. I
am, therefore, always an amateur on whom, miraculously, money is bestowed from time
to time.
I N T E RV I EWE R
What is your de nition of a professional writer, then?
SIMON
A journalist, a critic, charged with regular assignments in a publication for a
predetermined salary. Also, the authors of best-sellers who write in order to please the
public at large and to receive constant remuneration.
I N T E RV I EWE R
Several passages in e Flanders Road describe words as being useless. Do you believe
this?
SIMON
It’s necessary to put that in context. e character in Flanders Road who says those words
is a prisoner in a camp, exhausted, famished, covered with lice. Under these
circumstances, words do not appear to have great value. But this is nothing new. “ e
hungry stomach has no ears” is an old French proverb. Fortunately, today I don’t live in a
prison camp but in a relatively civilized society. But that said, I continue to think the
abominations that have marked this century—Auschwitz, the Gulag—have shown that
human life counts for exactly nothing, and that a “humanist” discourse is no longer
acceptable. From this comes my predilection for description, and my distrust of
qualitative adjectives, or similarly, commentary or analysis, psychological or social; or, if I
dare try to use these, I qualify them with an abundance of “maybes,” “without doubts,”
and “as ifs.”
I N T E RV I EWE R
You have said that anyone can do what you have done, so long as they are willing to work
as hard. Do you mean there is no room for innate talent in a writer—that persistence and
hard work are all that are required?
SIMON
Apart from a certain level of elementary instruction, I think that in e ect anyone can, by
working hard, do what I do. Certainly there are tastes, predispositions . . . some for
mathematics, for business, medicine or painting . . . or even laziness . . .
I N T E RV I EWE R
Do young people ask your advice about how to become a writer?
SIMON
Not o en, happily.
I N T E RV I EWE R
If they do ask, what do you tell them?
SIMON
To go out in the street, walk two hundred meters, go home again, and then attempt to
write (and describe) all that they have seen (or thought, dreamed, remembered,
imagined) during this walk.
I N T E RV I EWE R
In you published e Blind Orion, which has been called your literary manifesto.
SIMON
It’s not. At the request of the publisher, in a small preface I put down some of my ideas
about writing. But it’s very brief. Scarcely eight pages.
I N T E RV I EWE R
What is the signi cance of the title?
SIMON
In Stockholm I said that the writer was the image of blind Orion groping through a
forest of signs toward the light of the rising sun. It is important to note that Orion is a
constellation: as soon as the sun rises in the sky, he will be obliterated. It’s the subject of a
painting by Nicolas Poussin.
I N T E RV I EWE R
Symbolism seems important in your writing. In e Grass, for example, a T-shaped
shadow grows and shrinks as it passes across the room in which Marie lies dying,
representing the passage of time and the inevitability of death. How do you decide on
such images?
SIMON
I am not a symbolist. I saw the light drawing a T that moved slowly across the oor and
the furniture of a room. e T suggested to me the word temps and the march of time. It
seemed like a good image.
I N T E RV I EWE R
Trains appear o en in your novels—what do they symbolize?
SIMON
Nothing but trains.
I N T E RV I EWE R
Boxes with illustrated lids—the cigar-box label in La Corde raide, for example, and the
cookie tin in e Grass. What is their signi cance?
SIMON
Nothing. I like to describe things. As others like to paint. Nothing else. Shakespeare
wrote: life is “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” at’s
also my way of thinking. Except that for me life is not only full of sound and fury. It also
has butter ies, owers, art . . .
I N T E RV I EWE R
Do you read your novels once they are published?
SIMON
No.
I N T E RV I EWE R
What are your plans for the future?
SIMON
None. I only make short-term plans. I am seventy-seven years old. I can die tomorrow. I
wish only to be able to write.
—With translation assistance om Magali Saporito

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13/11/2020 Paris Review - The Art of Fiction No.

Claude Simon, e Art of Fiction No.

Interviewed by Alexandra Eyle

ISSUE 122, SPRING 1992

Well then, what is the role of the writer in society?

—With translation assistance om Magali Saporito

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