IS CLAUDE SIMON A POSTMODERN WRITER

The general question that I will be raising in this paper is how does Claude Simon, the contemporary French novelist, fit into the major intellectual and literary developments of the latter third of the 20th Century. To pose this question as baldly as my title does subjects this endeavor to a number of difficulties. The most obvious of these is inherent in the general quest to establish clearly defined periods within literary history. As Jonathan Kramer has warned, “It is simplistic to make generalities about art, label these generalities, and then go on to assume that a unified movement (or its demise) exists because there is now a label.” (1984) The periodization of the past is no doubt problematic, but the dangers that Kramer evokes are raised to a higher power when we attempt to classify the literary movements of our own time. In the former case, our knowledge of subsequent developments provides us with somewhat reliable criteria for assigning authors and their works to particular periods or movements. However, matters are quite different when the movements under study are in constant flux, and when the very intellectual tools that are put into play can not be clearly and consistently demarcated from the phenomena we are hoping to grasp. These difficulties are further complicated in the case at hand because the term “postmodern” itself has been the center of considerable controversy. Since it was first coined to designate particular innovations within the field of architecture, one can legitimately question the validity of its application to literature. Moreover, there is some doubt whether the suffix “post” accurately reflects the relation between contemporary developments and our modernist heritage. A third source of difficulties is to be found in the perfusion of conceptions of the postmodern that currently enjoy favor. As one peruses the literature of the postmodern, one is drawn to Umberto Eco’s conclusion (1984: 65) that “the term is applied today to anything the user of the term happens to like”. It thus would seem the very notion of “postmodern” is subject to the same sort of indeterminacy that it was intended to conceptualize.

Given these difficulties, one can certainly question the wisdom of pursuing the question of the relation of Simon’s writing to something so nebulous as the postmodern. What legitimate purpose could possibly lie behind such inordinate obstinacy? Why attach so much attention to whether a given author, such as Simon, could be said to participate in the postmodern movement? The reason that there is certain urgency to address this question is that Simon has been absent from recent discussions of postmodernism in literature. In the past few years three excellent studies of postmodern fiction have appeared: Ihab Hasaan’s The Postmodern Turn (1986), Linda Hutcheon’s A Poetics of Postmodernism (1988) and Brain McHale’s Postmodernist Fiction (1987). Each of these studies surveys a wide range of authors and movements, however in neither of the three is Simon’s work studied. One plausible explanation for this exclusion would be that the three authors are particularly interested in American manifestations of the postmodern and, if this exclusion were due solely to considerations of academic specialization or time, one could certainly extend their theoretical reflections to authors, such as Simon. However, in the case of Hutcheon, the exclusion of Simon and the other writers that were grouped under the heading of the Nouveau Roman responds to a conscious and explicit decision. It is her contention that these texts constitute little more than belated reminders of high modernism. At this point we can bring into sharper focus what is at stake here. The question that I wish to raise here is not whether we can legitimately speak of a unified aesthetic movement, postmodernism, and whether the novels of Claude Simon can be recognized as examples of this general movement, but whether Simon’s texts come to grips with the questions that the best minds of our culture find both puzzling and essential or whether they are best viewed as vestiges of the past with little or no bearing on contemporary problematics.

Since Linda Hutcheon presents a conception of postmodernism that explicitly puts into doubt Simon’s place within contemporary developments, let us briefly examine her views. Hutcheon links postmodernism in literature to what she calls “historiographic metafiction”, a type of fiction that combines the self-reflexivity that we have come to expect in contemporary literature with a return to history. In her view postmodernism rejects the aestheticism and formalism of modernism and “reinstalls historical contexts as significant and determining, but in so doing, . . . problematizes the entire notion of historical knowledge” (1989: 58). Thus the return to history brought on by postmodernism is not a naive one, for it takes the form of a profound questioning of the grounds of history. On this view postmodern literature “reminds us that, while events did occur in the real empirical past, we name and constitute those events as historical facts by selective and narrative positioning.” (1989: 97) Hutcheon connects this tendency of postmodernism with what, in the wake of the work of Foucault, Hayden White and others, has come to be known as the “New Historicism”. What both these movements have in common is their view that the facts of history are nothing more than our interpretations of past events. Having said this, it is useful to point out that one obvious reason for Hutcheon’s valorization of historiographic metafiction is to counter the claim of ahistoricity that many detractors of postmodernism make. Against such critics, Hutcheon is making the claim that not only does postmodern fiction address the question of history, but that it does so in a radical fashion. I would agree with Hutcheon that the problematizing of history is an important form of postmodernism in literature, but I strongly object to her attempt to limit the postmodern to it. In my view the problematization of historical discourse is one particular manifestation of postmodernism’s tendency to question the capacity of any discourse to provide an adequate or “true” representation of “reality”.

One way of establishing the claim that Simon should figure among the writers designated as postmodern would be to demonstrate that some of his novels do indeed meet Hutcheon’s criteria for historiographic metafiction. Les Géorgiques, I believe, would serve quite well in this capacity. Simon’s intertextual critique of George Orwell’s narration of the Spanish Civil War constitutes just one element of the problematization of history in this novel. Although such a demonstration could be made, I will resist the temptation of a relatively easy defense of my claim for two reasons. The first is that such a strategy would merely reinforce Hutcheon’s attempt to limit postmodernism to historiographic metafiction, a position that, as I have just indicated, I find questionable. My second reason has to do with the critical reaction that Simon’s work has received and most particularly the tendency of some critics to differentiate between what are known as his historically-oriented and his formalist novels. The criterion that is invoked to make this distinction is the presence or absence of an explicit attempt to raise questions of history, which is construed in a broad way to refer to the social and political implications of the literary work. For a critic such as David Carroll, this questioning is of capital importance because it seriously undermines any view that would consider history to be “a or the grounds from which to determine all other fields . . .” (182: 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, are thought to rely on the possibility of formal coherence as a unitary principle. Thus there is a tendency on the part of readers of Simon to invoke the same criterion as Hutcheon does to question the import of Simon’s writing. It is this very position that needs to challenged in order to attain a more balanced view of Simon’s works.

III

I am not totally convinced that Simon’s work can be written off so expeditiously and the remainder of this essay will attempt to show that Leçon de Choses, one of Simon’s formalist novels, does indeed raise issues of some significance. A thorough defense of this position would require a critique of the view that equates a resolute attention to questions of form with intellectual and aesthetic sterility, but such a critique would lead us to exceed the present limits of time. I will therefore limit my discussion to the broader implications of Simon’s treatment of the problem of representation in Leçon de Choses. When I speak of the problem of representation, I am of course alluding to the questions raised by traditional debates over realism and mimesis. However, I wish to adopt a somewhat less emotionally and historically charged formulation of these questions by conceiving representation simply as the ensemble of relations that link the literary text with the world. Literary texts, whether they be narrative, descriptive, or lyrical, rely at least to some extent on the propensity of language to provide a representation of the relevant aspects of the world that lies beyond the text. This is no doubt a well-worn theme, but it is one that is absolutely crucial to the study of Simon for throughout its many moments and developments Simon’s writing displays a fascination with the problem of representation. This fascination is tightly linked to Simon’s incessant critique of conceptual constructs—be they aesthetic, political or epistemological—that present the arbitrary arrangement they impose on reality as natural, universal or absolute. During the period that interests us here Simon’s writing was, in the words of the author, informed by a “projet de faire un roman irréductible à tout schéma réaliste” (1977:424), a project which would lead him to probe the limits and the aporias of our conceptions of the relations between words and things.

From the particular point of view adopted in this essay Leçon de Choses provides two diametrically opposed paths for the reader to follow. The first is suggested by the title of the novel that would appear to promise the reader some privileged access to things-in-themselves, the referential tone of this title being even apparent in the English translation The World Around Us. Furthermore, for the French reader, the title recalls the elementary school manuals whose pedagogical function was to teach children about practical things. This association is clearly not gratuitous since Simon’s text includes passages where one of his characters reads such a manual. Thus the title leads the reader to expect a faithful depiction of reality in this novel. However, the reader who is familiar with Simon’s texts and is aware that Simon is more interested in words than in things can not avoid reading this title in an ironic mode as well, a reading that, as we soon shall see, receives significant support from the text itself. However, for the moment, let us continue to examine how this text supports a referential reading. One way to grasp this is by comparing Leçon de Choses to an earlier novel, La Route des Flandres.

Published in 1960, La Route des Flandres retells the story of the French defeat at the hands of the German army in the spring of 1940. The events are told from the point of view of a young French soldier, Georges, who recalls his experiences years later. The narration of these events follows the tortuous path of Georges' reconstruction of them. The narration is further complicated by Georges' attempts to reconstruct the death of an 18th century ancestor. In each instance the events are presented to the reader in a markedly mediated form. For the present purposes, it is important to note that the perturbations of a coherent representation that characterize this novel are due to the narrator’s difficulty in recalling and reconstructing the past. As David Carroll and others have demonstrated this text contains a powerful critique of history and, as an aside, we can add that it would constitute an example of Hutcheon’s historiographic metafiction. However, I would argue that the questioning of representation in La Route des Flandres is an essentially modernist one (McHale 1987) in that it takes the form of a substitution of the representation of an objective reality for a subjective one. In La Route des Flandres the critique of the notion of an unmediated representation of reality consists largely of foregrounding the subject’s role in the construction of representations.

In Leçon de Choses Simon’s probing of the question of representation takes a radically different form, which is obvious from its opening lines.

Les langues pendantes du papier décollé laissent apparaître le plâtre humide et gris qui s'effrite, tombe par plaques dont les débris sont éparpillés sur le carrelage devant la plinthe marron, la tranche supérieure de celle-ci recouverte d'une impalpable poussière blanchâtre. 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 (frise?) de feuilles d'acanthe dessinant une succession de vagues involvées.

Whereas the events told in La Route des Flandres are filtered through the memory and imagination of a character of the novel, the dominant style of Leçon de Choses is one of seemingly objective and detached description. This style could be thought to entail a complete disappearance of the thinking and writing subject from the text and would seem to respond to a certain nostalgia for a totally transparent language that would afford unmediated access to things in their pristine presence. In Simon’s earlier novels the filtering of events through the mind of one of the characters worked to keep the reader at a distance from the “world” being represented; in Leçon de Choses this distance would seem to have disappeared. However, before we conclude that the subject is totally absent from Leçon de Choses, one can not help but notice the narrator’s presence in the text’s hesitations over certain words, i.e, “un galon (ou bandeau?)”, “le même motif (frise?)”. Although these hesitations do draw attention to narrator’s role in the construction of the “reality” presented to the reader, they do not seriously question the capacity of language to faithfully represent because the quest for the exact word would seem to hold out the possibility of a perfect representation. However, the narrator’s hesitations take on greater significance later in the same passage.

La description (la composition) peut se continuer (être complétée) à peu près indéfiniment selon la minutie apportée à son exécution, l'enchaînement de métaphores proposées, l'addition d'autres objets visibles dans leur entier ou fragmenté par l'usure, le temps, un choc (soit encore qu'ils n'apparaissent qu'en partie dans le cadre du tableau) sans compter les diverses hyptothèses que peut susciter le spectacle.

Instead of feigning to provide an unmediated apprehension of the real, Simon’s writing foregrounds here its participation in the constitution of reality. It is no longer the “object” of description that occupies center stage, it is description itself, and the order that it, like any any discursive practice, imposes on “reality”, that becomes the object of our attention. Moreover, in the rather oblique allusion to the frame of a painting, Simon takes his critique one step further by suggesting that what the reader assumed to be the description of actual things is really the description of a painted scene. Thus what the reader might have taken for an unmediated view of reality is really a representation of a representation. The possibility that any discursive representation that we should encounter could turn out to be a representation of a prior representation compells us to consider that what we take to be “reality” is but one phase of an infinite series of such representations. Nothing could be further removed from the unmediated access to things that the “objective” style of Leçon de Choses seemed to promise us.

I could go on to discuss many other passages from Leçon de Choses where we find similar questioning of the notion of representation. Instead I would like to examine a less obvious aspect of this text. What I find most interesting is that after each passage that exposes the illusory nature of the representation of reality by language Simon’s text reverts back to its “objective” style. This is significant because it shows that this novel not only features a movement that questions the notion of representation, it also displays a tendency to restore reference. Certainly, as the reader becomes familiar with the way Simon’s writing questions the powers of language, he or she becomes more conscious of the referential spell that writing casts. Yet no amount of skepticism of the part of the reader can prevent the characters and events that the text describes from materializing. It is all an illusion, but it is a powerful and ultimately pleasurable one. Simon’s text reveals representation for the illusion that it is, yet demonstrates the difficulty if not the impossibility of escaping from representation.

The question that now needs to be addressed is what implications does Simon’s exploration of the question of representation have for contemporary debates. One way of answering this question would consist in pointing out that all claims to truth or to legitimacy that are made by discursive practices, be they philosophical, scientific, ideological or literary, are ultimately grounded on the capacity of language to provide accurate representations of reality. Thus, the questions that Simon’s writing raises are tied to the problematization of the notion of truth begun by Nietzsche. I will pursue this line of discussion by examining the implications of Simon’s writing in Leçon de Choses in light of the radical opposition that separates what are commonly called the Continental and the Anglo-American traditions in philosophy. Although there are some recent signs (Dasenbrock 1989) that this opposition has undergone some erosion, these two traditions are deeply divided over their conceptions of language and its ability to represent reality accurately. Although this is a broad generalization that leaves aside some important nuances, language is for the Anglo-American tradition a relatively unproblematic vehicle for the transmission of meaning and knowledge. In general, analytic philosophers are more concerned with understanding how language is able to do refer than with questioning the notion of reference. Within this tradition there is indeed a strain of thought, best exemplified by the logical positivists, that is acutely aware of the imperfections of ordinary language, but these imperfections, it is argued, can be overcome by either by submitting language to the appropriate analytic therapy or by being recast in the terms of a rigorous formal calculus. Hence, whatever obstacles may stand in the way of the flawless transmission of meaning, they are not thought to vitiate language’s power to refer.

In stark contrast, one of the principal thrusts of Continental philosophy for the past hundred years has been to challenge this view. The Continental position on language has taken the form of what Mark Taylor has called “the crisis of the word” (1987), a crisis spawned by an awareness of the unbridgeable ontological gap that forever separates words from things. This gap is not some accidental feature of language that could be dissolved by the patient analysis practiced by thinkers of the Anglo-American tradition, but it is one that emerges at the very moment when language constitutes itself. The analytic view of language does not necessarily lead to the assertion that nothing separates words and things, but it is thought that this gap does not generally prevent words from performing their habitual functions. When Continental philosophers critique this line of reasoning, the point that they are urging is not that we somehow deceive ourselves into thinking that our everyday conversations succeed in communicating our intentions and beliefs to others when it fact such communication is impossible, but rather they question the tendency to think that the relative success of our everyday use of language can provide a solid foundation for the elaboration of ambitious ontological or epistemological theories. Another way of putting this argument is to say that the contemporary avatars of Continental thought take exception when philosophy, and especially a philosophy that claims to be a philosophy of language, does not pay sufficient attention to the role that language plays in the constitution of reality.

To provide just one example of this opposition, let us briefly examine how these two traditions view fictional discourse. Within the analytic tradition, fictional reference of the sort that we find in literature has been problematic, while the reference we make use of in everyday discourse or that scientists and properly disciplined, i.e, analytic, philosophers engage in can be adequate treated in terms of the truth or falsity of the propositions being instantiated. Thinkers of the Continental tradition question our ability to rigorously differentiate fictional from ordinary reference and argue that the difficulties that analytical philosophers perceive so clearly in the former are also present in the latter.

Returning now Simon’s writing, I want to suggest that the fundamental opposition between these two conceptions of language can be detected in Leçon de Choses. I am proposing that we read Simon’s use of an “objective” style as an inscription of the analytic ideal of a perfectly transparent instrument of communication, and his techniques for dissipating the illusion of representation as an inscription of the Continental position. However, the reader desirous of a resolution of the conflict between these two views of language will not find one in Leçon de Choses. On the one hand, Simon installs in this text a seemingly objective representation of things only to demonstrate the impossibility of such a representation. But, before we conclude that this text privileges the Continental view, we must remember that, as we have just seen, Simon’s text demonstrates just as decisively the impossibility of escaping from representation. In my mind, what constitutes the most interesting feature, and arguably the most postmodern one, of Leçon de Choses is that at no level of this text are the differences between the two views of language overcome and no criteria can be found that would authorize their reconciliation. Thus Simon’s writing in this text clearly posits thesis and antithesis but resolutely rejects their dialectical sublation. What Leçon De Choses ultimately reveals is that the dispute between Anglo-Saxon and Continental philosophers over the powers of language constitutes what Jean-François Lyotard (1983) has called a “différand”, a dispute where there is no neutral ground from which to adjudicate the claims of the litigants.

We can now return to the question raised by the title of this paper. As I have been arguing, it does not matter, in the final analysis, whether the term “postmodern” can be legitimately use to classify Simon’s writing. For that matter the term itself could disappear from our vocabulary and not diminish what I am claiming to be the import of Leçon de Choses. My reading of this novel suggests that it not only takes up the issues that are at the center of contemporary debates, but that it makes an original contribution to them. This finding should give us cause to reconsider a conception of the postmodern, such as Hutcheon’s, that would exclude Simon’s reflections on the question of representation from its scope.

Works Cited

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

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

Dasenbrock, Reed Way Redrawing the Lines. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989.

Eco, Umberto. Postscript to The Name of the Rose. trans. William Weaver, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984.

Hasaan, Ihaab. The Postmodernist Turn. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1987.

Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism. New York: Routledge, 1988.

Kramer, Jonathan. “Can Modernism Survive George Rochberg “ Critical Inquiry. 11, 2: 341-54.

Lyotard, Jean François. Le Différend, Paris: Minuit, 1983.

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

___. “Claude Simon à la question.” La Nouvelle Critique, 105, 1977.

___. Les Géorgiques. Paris: Minuit, 1981.

Taylor, Mark. Altarity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.