Claude Simon

By Alastair B. Duncan, scientific advisor to the exhibition; lecturer at the University of Stirling.

A colossus in 20th century French literature, Claude Simon was also a photographer and intellectual in dialogue with the leading artists of his time, from Dubuffet to Miró. The exhibition devoted to his work in the Bibliothèque Publique d’Information (BPI) for the centenary of his birth, and the simultaneous exhibition of his photographs in the Centre Pompidou collections convey the scope and ambition of his writing and artistic thinking.

The novels of Claude Simon, awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1985, made him a 20th century classic. Reading La Route des Flandres (1960) for the first time is a physical shock. Simon saw the massacre of the cavalry squadron in the rout of 1940. Readers are immersed in the chaos of war and the dissolution of the beliefs underlying Western culture: the Christian faith and the humanism of the Age of Enlightenment. But at the same time, there is a sense of the huge, admirable, indomitable attempt to impose some form on this chaos, a profound attachment to the sensuous and sensual life, and the writer's compassion for the victims of History: women, ordinary soldiers and horses.

There is nothing extraneous about the form of Simon's novels. A long learning process as a novelist – with four books published between 1945 and 1954 – and considerable familiarity with his illustrious predecessors, Dostoyevsky, Proust, Faulkner and Céline, taught him to distrust the plot and its alleged logic of cause and effect, characters with fixed outlines and ordered, hierarchised syntax. And yet his novels are based on key figures, stories and episodes. But rather than a chronological order of events, Simon juxtaposes similar or contrasted scenes. He moves seamlessly from one to another, introducing a wealth of resonances and correspondences: three stories of the same war in La Route des Flandres, three different stories of war and revolution in Les Géorgiques (1981), and three different sites and episodes in Triptyque (1973).

Simon did not write his novels on preconceived scenarios. Each time, he set out to conquer a new form through an assembly of fragments. He thought visually, as witness his mastery of the art of photography. His studies as a painter left him with the ambition of reconciling the simultaneous character of a visual work with the linear nature of writing. In his novels, he often gives colours to characters and themes so that he can spread them over the canvas of his work: Le Vent (1957) is subtitled Tentative de restitution d’un retable baroque ("An attempt to reconstruct a Baroque altarpiece"). The exhibition at the BPI invites us into the studio of this painter-writer, who drew on biographic and family material to transform whole sections of the history of modern France into fiction.