Claude Simon in the School of Proust

Proust stands as the great fact of twentieth-century French fiction, unignorable by any subsequent novelist whether in homage or in revolt. One might say of him, as Basil Bunting said in his poem "On the Fly-Leaf of Pound's Cantos":

They there are, you will have to go a long way roundIf you want to avoid them.It takes some getting used to. There are the Alps,

In a similar vein, Claude Simon (1913–2005), who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1985, compared Proust to the Himalayas and Mount Kilimanjaro, with foothills surrounded by jungle which one must "en quelque sorte débrousailler ou (pardonne-moi ce mauvais jeu de mots) 'déproustailler'" (Mireille Calle-Gruber, Claude Simon, une vie à écrire, 2011, p. 434: the pun is untranslatable but "uproot" / "upProust" might be an approximation). In the second part of this essay I shall focus on Simon, but before that I want to look briefly at other major figures of modern French fiction as pupils in the school of Proust.

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Reading A L'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs in 1924, the young Nathalie Tcherniak (later Sarraute) was stunned: "It seemed to me that from that moment a new pathway was opened for literature; one could no longer write as one had written before." Even in her early nineties she was still insisting that Proust, along with Joyce and Woolf, had given her "the impression of discovering a new world." Sartre, who seems at the furthest remove from Proust artistically and politically, discovered him as a lycéen and included him, along with Bergson and Freud, in a dissertation on "The Image in Psychological Life" submitted for the diplôme des études supérieures in 1927. Even the writers of the nouveau roman could not avoid that mighty shadow, with Robbe-Grillet explaining that Proust "wrote the nouveau roman of 1910" (Pour un nouveau roman). In the trilogy of what he variously described as romanesques or autofictions, Robbe-Grillet is just as preoccupied as Proust with the nature of time and memory (and incidentally just as artful as Simon in blurring autobiography and invention). The same is true of Sartre's La Nausée, conceived as a "factum [a work of unspecified genre] on contingency." And Beckett had paid his idiosyncratic tribute explicitly in Proust (1931) and implicitly in his creative work. Nicholas Zurbrugg's Beckett and Proust (1988) is a good survey up to the date of its publication.

The classic novelist which the modernists had in their sights was the Baron de Charles's beloved Balzac. "The happy days of Eugénie Grandet" are sarcastically evoked in Sarraute's essay of 1950 "L'Ère du soupçon" and that novel is a presence in the hinterland of her own first novel Portrait d'un inconnu (1948). Robbe-Grillet sees the narrative continuity of the "traditional Balzacian novel" as in denial of the fact that "our memory, on the contrary, is full of holes" (Les derniers jours de Corinthe). Simon, again with Balzac in his sights, declared his impatience with the causal logic of traditional plotting in which the godlike novelist predetermines the fates of the characters. In his Nobel acceptance speech, having flatly declared that the novel as written in the 19th century was dead, he expressed distaste for grandiose titles such as Malraux's La Condition humaine or Sartre's Les Chemins de la liberté which seemed to offer a privileged insight into the human condition. The convention of the omniscient narrator, and the orderly chronology of the realist novel, are both objects of soupçon for these writers; when one collapses, the other does too, and narrative becomes a process of reconstruction rather than recall, mosaic rather than perspective picture. A veracious representation of the reality of individual experience in an external world becomes impossible if the concepts of truth, personality, and externality are judged inadmissible.

Proust did not go this far, but he did invent, perhaps not wholly intentionally, something like the concept of the mobile text. "C'est une grande nouvelle," he...