Cahiers Claude Simon: no. 1, 2005 (review)

The first of what is to be an annual publication under the aegis of the Association des lecteurs de Claude Simon, this wide-ranging number amply showcases the spirit and letter of the association's aims. A reprint of an early Simon text originally published by the review Minuit, 'Essai de mise en ordre de notes prises au cours d'un voyage en Zeeland (1962) et complétées', offers a metaphor for the volume and its future intentions. Chief among these is to bring together various cohorts of Simonists to allow more concerted collaborations and further dissemination of Simon studies from their multiform perspectives. Behind this agenda, however, lies a clear call to French academics and critics to engage more actively with the much more vigorous interest groups à l'étranger. The main critical contributions, focused around the intertextual reworkings of Conrad in Simon's works, are from three relative newcomers to Simon studies in France, Josyane Paccaud-Huguet, Stéphane Bikialo and Elzbieta Grodekand, and are complemented by the more long-standing Belgian contributor, Pierre Schoentjes. They all re-examine the familiar reference points in Simon's œuvre more widely, such as memory and the nodal importance of key events for the ensuing narrative. A final section then highlights the centrality of the non-French critical impact on Simon studies in two different ways. The first is a translation of an essay by Rainer Warning, 'Les espaces de mémoire de Claude Simon' (first published in German in 1991). This offers one panel of a triptych, the third being a bibliographical update on recent Simon studies in France and elsewhere. The middle panel is an interview with the author Richard Millet on the importance of Simon (and also the latter's influences, Proust, Dostoyevsky and Faulkner) in his own fictional production. In the end it is the handsome cover, entitled 'page d'écriture' from Simon's own Photographies 1937–1970 (Maeght, 1992), that may sum up the contribution of this series in the longer term as it jostles with the other dedicated publications on Simon such as those edited by Ralph Sarkonak with Minard. A part illustrating a whole, we have a detail of a wall made up of rows of diagonally aligned stones set in repeated strata between repeated rows of horizontally laid bricks. Is there a sense of some repetition of the same here, or is this Simon's own posthumous part in the Association's enterprise, the ongoing bricolage of his texts and their necessary public face? Perhaps only the second and subsequent numbers of Cahiers Claude Simon will tell the difference.