Claude Simon, rencontres ed. by Anne-Lise Blanc and Françoise Mignon. (review)

This book originates in a series of cultural events (study days, exhibition, readings from selected novels) that took place in 2013 in Perpignan to mark the centenary of Simon’s birth. As befits a celebratory publication, the volume (published with a CD of the readings) is characterized by high production values and thoughtful design. The collection comprises two sections: the first consists of scholarly essays by Jean-Yves Laurichesse, David Zemmour, Ilias Yocaris, Bérénice Bonhomme, Cécile Yapaudjian-Labat, Patrick Longuet, Nathalie Piégay-Gros, Pauline Rives, and Catherine Rannoux. Focusing on the exhibition, the second reproduces manuscript pages, archival documents, and photographs by Claude Nourric and Roland Allard. A brief biography and selective bibliography of French publications close the volume. Given that Simon’s work remains underappreciated by the French reading public, the theme of the rencontre is particularly apt for a publication that both commemorates and introduces. In Part One, the theme is pursued with varying degrees of latitude across three subsections exploring fictional encounters in La Route des Flandres (1960), Les Géorgiques (1981), and L’Acacia (1989), cultural encounters and aesthetic affinities (Simon’s engagement with burlesque film, with Germany and German art and thought, with Cézanne’s work), and the role of various sorts of convergence in the writing process (encounters with the archive and the fictional exploration of its interstices; sensation as point of intersection among reality, emotion, memory, and virtuality; the tension between lexical association and syntactical digression that allows narrators both to avoid and to reveal the indicible). While the style and argumentation of the articles are accessible to a broad audience, their tight focus ensures sufficient new insights to hold the specialist’s interest. In Part Two, the selected manuscript pages offer fascinating perspectives on Simon’s working methods at different stages of textual production. They give a strong sense of the role played by graphic and quasipictorial methods in the elaboration of the structure of a novel or section, the exploration of the associations generated by a word or expression, or the transition from one fictional series to another, while the marginal drawings offer access to the ways in which certain scenes were played out in his mind’s eye. The photographs give glimpses of Simon the man: the writer at work or in conversation with his publisher Jérôme Lindon, the nobéliste at a suit fitting, the private citizen walking in the countryside around Salses or absorbed in a driftwood assemblage. I have two reservations about the volume. Firstly, the absence of captions for some photographs limits their documentary and citational value. Secondly, while the emphasis on regional connections and national reception is understandable in the context of the exhibition and colloquium, and while it gives the volume a distinctive niche position within the centenary publication list, it is a pity that, with some exceptions, the essays give little sense of the international impact of Simon’s work, and of its very positive critical reception by scholars in the US, the UK, Germany, the Netherlands, Scandinavia, and elsewhere from the mid-1960s onwards. However, overall, this is an imaginatively conceived and well-edited tribute.