HISTORY AND FORMALISM IN THE WRITING OF CLAUDE SIMON

In general terms, criticism of Simon's works (Sykes 1985) can be divided into three major phases, each dominated by a particular critical mode. During the first phase, the phenomenological approach, as exemplified by Michel Deguy, held the upper hand. At the beginning of the seventies, Ricardou's formalist approach imposed itself. Finally, David Carroll's The Subject in Question, published in 1982, ushered in what, for lack of a better term, can be called the poststructuralist phase. The present paper will be concerned with a particular episode in the development of the relationship between theory and Simon's fiction, namely the undermining of the formalist approach developed by Ricardou and its replacement by a poststructuralist approach. I will be especially interested in the sharp distinction that is now drawn between Simon's "historically-oriented" and "formalist" texts. Since the most persuasive of the proponents of this distinction is Carroll himself, he will be at the focal point of my discussion. What will be at stake here is the place of Simon's so-called formalist novels (Les Corps Conducteurs, Triptyque and Leçon de Choses) within the ensemble of his writing.

Carroll's reflections on the question of formalism in Simon's texts can best be understood in the context of his critique of Jean Ricardou's notion of the self-generating text. For Ricardou, fiction should engender itself relying solely on the internal resources of language. Such fiction would close itself off from the world outside the text and be entirely self-referential. From this perspective Ricardou conceived the evolution of Simon's work as a gradual discovery of the productive potential of language that culminated in a decisive victory of self-generation over mimesis in his novels of the early seventies. The novel that marked the transition between these two conceptions of literature was La Bataille de Pharsale; Simon's earlier fiction held an interest for Ricardou only to the extent that it showed signs of progress toward the goal of pure, self-generation. Carroll's assessment of Simon's writing departs from Ricardou's scenario in two major ways. First of all, his readings of the novels preceding La Bataille de Pharsale reveal that, rather than constituting early, awkward steps along the royal road of self-referentiality, as Ricardou would have it, these novels stand clearly on their own by dint of their problematizing of notions such as the Truth of the letter, the transcendent subject and the end(s) of history. Thus Carroll revalorizes Simon's early works by bringing to light what Ricardou neglected to see. Secondly, in his treatment of a self-generating novel like Triptyque, Carroll (1982 161-200) sharply criticized the notion that a text could, by merely following Ricardou's prescriptions, cut itself off from outer reality and become a self-contained entity. According to Carroll, one of the major problems with Ricardou's conception of fiction is that it assumes that the problem of representation can be resolved by simply multiplying the formal relations that link the elements of the text and by actively undermining referential illusions. Furthermore, in his reading of Triptyque, Carroll demonstrates that this text exceeds the frame imposed upon it by Ricardou's theory. This point is important because it gives us reason to suspect that Simon's writing in his formalist novels is not totally constrained by the premises of self-generation and that therefore it does not sever all ties with the question of representation.

The revised view of the development of Simon's writing that Carroll offers clearly restores Simon's early novels to the place that they deserve, thereby undoing the pernicious effects of Ricardou's account. Carroll is certainly to be commended for having restored the luster to works that Ricardou had failed to appreciate. While recognizing Carroll's contribution, we need to ask whether he simply establishes a balanced view of Simon's work or whether his reversal of Ricardou's scenario entails a rejection of the very novels that Ricardou had privileged. In his study of Triptyque (161-200) Carroll, in addition to attacking Ricardou's notion of the self-generating novel, criticizes Simon for naively following Ricardou's model. It is in this context that he contends that "the writing of (in) the novel is much more complex than the program Simon claims he followed and the one that is most visible in the text." (192) Though condemning the theory and the writer, this remark leaves open the possibility that Simon's attempts at writing self-generating novels could indeed have something valuable to offer. However, Carroll does not elaborate on this idea so that, in The Subject in Question, his view of Simon's formalist fiction remains ambivalent.

In a more recent study of Simon, Carroll's position takes on clearer definition. In this essay Carroll salutes Simon's Les Géorgiques “as a ‘turning away' from the extreme formalist or ultra-textualist (Ricardouian) poetics of the novels that immediately preceded it and a ‘return’ to the style and explicit historical thematics of earlier novels such as L'Herbe, Le Palace, La Route des Flandres, Histoire, and La Bataille de Pharsale. “(51)

Here the evaluation of Simon's formalist novels is largely indirect; they are evoked only insofar as they lack the merits of Simon's historically-oriented fiction. The import of these formalist novels would seem to be extremely limited because they fail to link "formal, narrativist problems to broader historical, cultural, and political questions." (51) The criterion that is invoked to differentiate Simon's texts is the presence or absence of an explicit attempt to raise questions of history, to be construed in a broad way as referring to the social and political implications of the literary work. For Carroll, this questioning is of capital importance because it seriously undermines all views that consider history to be "a or the grounds from which to determine all other fields . . . " (52) and thereby offers active resistance to any attempt to resolve the contractions inherent to narrative by appealing to a unitary principle. Simon's formalist novels (Les Corps Conducteurs, Triptyque, and Leçon de Choses), on the contrary, would seem to rely on the possibility of formal coherence as the grounds for unity. On this basis, Carroll sets these novels apart from the remainder of his work. Simon's period of intense formal experimentation is thus deemed a "flight from history" with the publication of Les Géorgiques marking a welcome "return to history" (51).

However, in this very same essay, there is a passage that would seem to clear the way for a different reading of Simon's formalist novels. While commenting on Lyotard’s view on Simon, Carroll writes:

From a perspective such as Lyotard's, Simon's return to history' should thus not be considered as the return to any historical or metahistorical (or formalist, for that matter) pre-text, but rather as the critical and unending search for possible modes of linkage (53).

The plural form of the expression "possible modes of linkage" commits neither the text nor the reader to a single, privileged form of linkage in the manner that the notion of an explicit questioning of history does. It allows us to entertain the possibility that not only might the mode of linkage of Les Géorgiques be a perfectly legitimate one, but that the mode of linkage of Leçon de Choses might be equally valid. Indeed if we adopt the notion of modes of linkage between texts and reality, the very distinction between history and formalism in Simon's work would seem to lose its force. Moreover, the expression "modes of linkage," as Carroll and Lyotard use it, invokes, in albeit a more neutral fashion, the question of representation, conceived in the broadest sense as the set of relations that hold between discourse and the world. When we pose the general question of representation, we are asking how history, the plastic arts, culture, ideology, and literature link up with the "real." Any claim to truth or to legitimacy that these practices might make is ultimately grounded on their capacity to represent accurately. To adopt Carroll's terms, the function of the principle of accurate representation would be to combat contradiction and heterogeneity within each mode of linkage and to maintain internal coherence.

Perhaps we can now begin to see that novels like Leçon de Choses do possess significant implications for questions of history, society, and culture. Brian McHale's (1987) recent work on the poetics of postmodernist fiction can provide, I believe, some useful distinctions for this line of inquiry. McHale's principal theoretical contribution is his formulation of the differences between modernist and postmodernist texts. Drawing upon Jakobson's concept of the dominant, McHale argues that the dominant of the modernist novels of Proust, Woolf, Faulkner, and others is a concern for epistemological questions, such as "What is there to be known? Who knows it? How do they know it and to what degree of certainty? . . . " (9). McHale views the passage from modernist to postmodernist fiction as a shift from "problems of knowing to problems of modes of being" (10). Thus, according to McHale, postmodernist fiction is not so much concerned with the limits of our knowledge, but rather it probes the very nature of the worlds that texts give rise to. Among the many ontological questions that McHale proposes to illustrate his notion, the ones that seem most relevant to the study of Claude Simon are "What is the mode of existence of a text and what is the mode of existence of the world (or worlds) it projects?"(10) It is important to recognize that these are not questions to which writing seeks to provide simple and decisive answers. Rather than constituting an attempt to determine the nature of fictional texts and the worlds they project, postmodernist fiction resists all efforts to attribute to them a stable, unproblematic essence.

Let us now reinterpret Carroll's assessment of Simon's writing in terms of this distinction. Roughly speaking, it would seem that in Simon's historically-oriented novels epistemological questions occupy center stage and that his formalist novels are concerned more directly with questions of being. This formulation allows us to see that both types of novels can be characterized by a particular manner of undermining the various principles that would seek to make fiction "a secure, constituted subject. . ." (Carroll 1982 200). Carroll was quite correct in recognizing the importance of Simon's novels that explicitly problematize history. However, we should now be willing to read his formalist novels as a profound questioning of the very notion of an adequate representation of experience. From this perspective, the retreat from history that Simon's formalist period is thought to constitute would only be apparent. When fiction begins to doubt the transparency of its own representations, it is difficult if not impossible to limit these doubts to the realm of literature and to prevent them from challenging the legitimacy of any discourse, be it historical, ideological or scientific, that would pretend to "mirror" reality. The broader relevance of a novel like Leçon de Choses would then be seen to reside in its questioning of the ontological foundations of fiction and representation in general.

One of the important ways that Leçon de Choses explores these types of questions is by bringing distinct worlds or modes of representation together and by displaying the frames that are thus erected and the perturbations that take place at their borders (Derrida 1979, 1986). Indeed this text can be read as a constant working of borders, the borders between text and reality, the borders dividing the spaces of the represented world, the borders between literature and painting. Rather than erasing such borders, as other postmodernist fiction does, Simon's writing sketches these borders quite clearly in order to foreground its own movements, its own passages from one side of a border to the other.

To illustrate this problematic and its implications for the question of representation, I will examine the tension between writing and painting in this novel. In the following, I will use the term "painting" as a shorthand way of designating all forms of pictorial representation. There are a number of reasons that make this study indispensable. First, whenever writing chooses to describe paintings, the questions of framing and representation are immediately posed. Since paintings are framed objects par excellence and constitute the primary model for all reflections on the question of framing, their introduction within a literary text foregrounds not only the frame that painting draws around itself but also the additional frame that writing imposes on painting. We will examine shortly the special delight that Simon's writing takes in exploring the tensions and conflicts that this double framing gives rise to. Furthermore, the intrusion of painting leads to a confrontation between two modes of representation within the text; in describing a painting literature assumes the burden of representing an object that is already a representation. To use McHale's terms, descriptions of paintings within written texts bring into contact and conflict two seemingly distinct manners of projecting possible worlds. In traditional texts that describe paintings, this confrontation is generally neutralized or naturalized, resulting in a sort of repression that forces the tension between writing and painting into a subterranean existence (Meltzer 1987). We will now see that, in a postmodern text, like Leçon de Choses, this tension becomes a domain to be explored and to be openly displayed. We will be especially alert to the intrusion of the figurality of writing into descriptions of paintings within this text.

A particularly fascinating example of this interplay can be found in "Générique" (7-11), the opening section of this novel. This section presents a description of a room under construction and contains many of the thematic and formal elements that will be developed in the remainder of the text. In the second sentence of this section, a "galon" that serves as a borderline between the plinth and the rest of the wall is described. In addition to introducing the theme of frames and borderlines, the description of the galon also presents a pictorial representation.

Immédiatement au-dessus de la plinthe court un galon (ou bandeau?) dans des tons ocre-vert et rougeâtres (vermillon passé) où se répète le même motif (frisé?) de feuilles d'acanthe dessinant une succession de vagues involvées (9).

Although aesthetically unpretentious, the acanthus leaf motif raises a series of questions concerning the relations between painting and writing. In addition to its role as borderline between the upper and lower parts of the wall, this motif is framed by the writing that describes it. What is, however, more important is that the description of this motif is disturbed by the figurality of writing in the form of the metaphorical assimilation of the leaves to "vagues involvées." This intrusion of writing forms an invaginated (Derrida 1986) pocket of heterogeneity within the description of the motif. However, writing extends its domain a step further. Not only does the figurality of writing intervene in this description, but also the object described, i.e., the motif of leaves as "vagues involvées" running along the four walls of the room, evokes the pattern of handwriting placed on a line. To the extent that the "galon" traces the entire circumference of the room, writing, in this figure, encloses and frames the total space to be described. That which lies outside the frame of writing would be relegated to the domain of the indescribable.

This "galon" then disappears from the description of the room, only to reappear several sentences later.

Au-dessous du minuscule et immobile déferlement de vagues végétales qui se poursuivent sans fin sur le galon de papier fané, l'archipel crayeux des morceaux de plâtre se répartit en îlots d'inégale grandeur comme les pans détachés d'une falaise et qui se fracassent à son pied. Les plus petits, de formes incertaines, molles, se sont dispersés au loin après avoir roulé sur eux-mêmes. Les plus grands, parfois amoncelés, parfois solitaires, ressemblent à ces tables rocheuses soulevées en plans inclinés par la bosse (équivalent en relief du creux - ou d'une partie du creux - laissé dans le revêtement du mur) qui en constitute l'envers et sur laquelle ils reposent. Sur leur face lisse adhère quelquefois encore un lambeau de feuillage jauni, une fleur (10).

The metaphor of the previous passage also reappears but with a crucial difference: the two terms of the original figure are reversed with the term "vagues" now occupying the central position and the leaf motif being evoked by a qualifying adjective ("végétales"). Thus, we have gone from leaves that resemble waves to waves that possess a certain vegetal quality. The figurality of writing has engulfed the original pictorial representation, leaving only an adjectival residue to remind us of the leaf motif. Furthermore, the maritime theme that, in its initial appearance, was tightly contained within the "galon," now exceeds its original borders and, by metonomy, spills out into the description of the wall just above it. In a movement similar to the metonymic generation of metaphors that Genette (1973) observed in the work of Proust, the maritime theme gives rise to two figural transformations of the patches of plaster on the wall. First, these patches become an archipelago of small islands ("l'archipel crayeux des morceaux de plâtre"). The theme of writing is evoked by the adjective "crayeux" that is linked etymologically to certain instruments of inscription, i.e., "craie" and "crayon." And, then, the introduction of the simile ("comme les pans . . . ") doubles the metonymic transfer of the maritime theme, with the vegetal waves crashing at the foot of the plaster cliff. This passage then closes as it opened with an explicit reference to the vegetal motif ("un lambeau de feuillage jauni, une fleur.")

Let us try to summarize the relation between writing and painting in this passage. As in any description of a pictorial representation by a literary text, writing in this passage frames the leaf motif it describes however, at the same time, it problematizes this frame by a double movement. First, by means of the metaphorical evocation of the "vagues involvées," writing enters the space occupied by pictorial representation within the frame, thereby foregrounding its graphic powers. But, in addition to this initial intrusion of writing, the figure of the "vagues involvées" introduces the image of a line of handwriting stretching along all four walls of the room. This movement of writing from the outside of the frame to the inside is doubled by a movement from the inside to the outside. The metaphor of the "vagues involvées" exceeds the frame of the description of the leaf motif to invade the description of the wall surrounding the "galon." With this displacement, figurality returns to the outside of the frame. Yet this return does not imply a simple restoration of the original state of affairs where writing was located on the outside and painting on the inside of the frame. In that this metaphor is constituted by its appearance within the space of painting, it carries the mark of painting with it when it moves outside of the frame. This double movement, first in across the frame and then back over it, thus creates a series of perturbations around the borderline that separates writing and painting.

The relevance of the relationship between painting and literature for the general question of representation can and should be pushed further. What I would like to consider now is the profound logic that would seem to underlie theories that consider art to be an imitation of nature or reality. As has been pointed out so often in recent years, the imitation of reality by literature is, strictly speaking, impossible. Imitation supposes the possibility of resemblance between what is imitated and that which imitates it. But as semioticians tell us, words are linked to the things that they represent by an arbitrary relation and not by one of resemblance. Thus, a profound ontological gap separates words from things, a gap which literature can never truly close. All this is quite familiar and I won't dwell on it inordinately. The question that I would like to address is, given this gap, how have critics and writers for centuries keep the dream of literature imitating nature alive? What metaphors have given substance to this dream? I would suggest that at least a partial answer is to be found in the relationship between literature and painting. Unlike words, pictorial representations are thought to resemble the things they evoke. Hence, painting would seem to possess the quality of resemblance that imitation requires and that writing lacks. For literature to imitate reality in a literal sense, words would have to be endowed with the same sort of relationship that seemingly links pictorial representations to things. When literature attempts to imitate reality, it is, at a profound and unconscious level, striving to emulate painting and its relationship to the world. Postmodern writing, in its urge to escape from the subordination of fiction to mimesis, would seem to be engaged in a struggle to resist the seductive powers of the principle of ut pictura poesis.

The above discussion suggests what is at stake when a text like Leçon de Choses describes and transgresses the borders of pictorial representations with such frequency. In her extensive study of role of the painted portrait in literary texts, Françoise Meltzer (1987) contends that the depiction of portraits by writing is especially perturbing for literary mimesis because it confronts the text with the "other," that is, with an irreducibly distinct form of representation. I would suggest that this relationship is actually much more complex and problematic because the "other" that writing confronts is at the same time the model that it is trying to imitate. Meltzer's view of this confrontation tends to conceive the painting represented by the text as an "outsider," a "foreign body" that suddenly intrudes into what had been an homogeneous space. I agree that its distinct mode of representation makes painting a "foreign body" in the text, but I would add that it is a "foreign body" that has been at the center of the literary enterprise from its very beginnings but that has never been assimilated. The depiction of a painting merely accomplishes in an explicit fashion what had long been the case implicitly. In relationship to the literary text, painting is neither exclusively exterior nor interior; it is both foreign and central to writing. What constitutes the originality of Leçon de Choses is that it does not attempt to repress the problematic relationship between painting and writing. In the passage we read, Simon's writing permits no stable ordering of these two modes of representation. While the conflicts that arise at their borders would preclude any suggestion that painting and writing represent reality in the same fashion, Simon's text does not allow us to determine exactly where the differences might lie. Nor would it seem to justify subordinating one mode of representation to the other. Of course, in the passage in question writing does enjoy a certain privilege in that it frames the pictorial representation that it describes. Yet the different transgressions of this frame that were observed should make us reticent to conclude that writing possesses some ultimate mastery in these matters.

If we had the time, we could continue to trace the questioning of the nature of representation as it perfuses this novel with conflict and heterogeneity at virtually every level. Our reading of Leçon de Choses can and should continue, but we need to accept closure at least provisionally. Let us do so by returning to our starting point. We began with Carroll's gesture of privileging certain of Simon's novels for their problematization of history, something which he finds lacking in so-called formalist texts. The latter were thought to possess the fatal flaw of having, in their quest for liberation from mimesis, taken formal coherence as an ultimate ground for fiction. The promise of self-generation merely substituted one form of determination for another. However, insofar as this novel portrays representation not as an unquestionable principle that would legitimatize our quests for truth and power but as the site of unresolved conflicts, the claim that this novel constitutes "a flight from history" needs to reexamined. Simon's writing in Leçon de Choses is not a quietist retreat from important questions; it is simply an attempt to pose these questions in a manner that locates the source of conflict and contradiction at a more profound level.

Works Cited

Carroll, David. The Subject in Question. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982.

___. "Narrative Poetics and the Crisis in Culture: Claude Simon's Return to History." L'Esprit Créateur 27, 4 (1988): 48-60.

Derrida, Jacques. La Vérité en peinture. Paris: Flammarion, 1978.

___. Parages. Paris: Galilée, 1986.

Genette, Gérard. "Métonymie chez Proust." in Figure III. Paris: Seuil, 1972. 41-63.

McHale, Brian. Postmodernist Fiction. New York: Methuen, 1987.

Meltzer, Françoise. Salome and the Dance of Writing. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987.

Simon, Claude. La Bataille de Pharsale. Paris: Minuit, 1969.

___. Les Corps Conducteurs. Paris: Minuit, 1971.

___. Triptyque. Paris: Minuit, 1973.

___. Leçon de Choses. Paris: Minuit, 1975.

___. Les Géorgiques. Paris: Minuit, 1981.

Sykes, Stuart. "Parmi les aveugles le borgne est roi. A personal survey of Simon Criticism." in Claude Simon: New Directions. Ed. Alastair Duncan. Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1985. 140-155.