Claude Simon: Œuvres (review)

With this publication, a year after his death, of a Pléiade edition of a selection of his novels and other writings, the slow process of Claude Simon's consecration as one of France's most distinguished twentieth-century writers has reached its culmination: twenty-one years after his international reputation was secured by the Nobel prize for literature in 1985 but only eight years after the French academic establishment indicated its approval of him by putting La Route des Flandres on the agrégation programme in 1998. As this suggests, Simon was for a long time more highly regarded outside France than within it. The decision to entrust this prestigious edition to the two foremost British specialists on his work could perhaps be seen as a further sign that Simon has tended to receive more serious critical attention from the international community of researchers into French literature than from the French themselves. It is also, however, a decision that is abundantly justified by the quality of the edition. The multifaceted richness of Simon's writing (excellently brought out in Duncan's introduction) means that annotations of his texts have to supply an unusually large amount of very diverse types of information: the novels are based on his own life and family background, necessitating detailed biographical information; in addition to this, however, the complex formal procedures which structure his novels also need to be given explicit consideration; the prominence of the theme of war requires a great deal of historical explanation; there are many intertextual references to be identified, both to his own earlier novels and to a wide range of other writers; and his interest in the visual arts and unannounced use of paintings as 'generators' of his written texts result in the need for a substantial amount of art-historical expertise. In all these areas, Duncan and Duffy have succeeded admirably in providing an enormous amount of precise and helpful information. The Introduction to the volume gives an overview of Simon's entire literary and critical production, organized into chronological sections which elucidate the different phases of his work while also emphasizing its continuity: as Duncan remarks, 'Les romans de Simon sortent tous les uns des autres' (p. xxix). Each of the texts published here is then given a more detailed 'Notice', outlining its critical reception as well as its particular thematic and formal characteristics. Simon himself was involved in the preparation of the edition, and was responsible for the choice of texts: Le Vent, La Route des Flandres, Le Palace, Femmes, La Bataille de Pharsale, Triptyque, Discours de Stockholm and Le Jardin des Plantes. (An Appendix also reprints the preface from Orion aveugle and 'La Fiction mot à mot'.) The reproduction of the 'textes, plans et schémas' of the novels is particularly fascinating, allowing the reader to appreciate Simon's uniquely 'spatialized' approach to generating a written text. Overall, this edition is a monumental achievement which will be invaluable to both specialists and general readers of Simon.