This collection of essays celebrates the work of the French Nobel prize-winning novelist Claude Simon. Scholars reconsider the fifty years of Simon's fiction in the light of his large-scale autobiographical novel, 'Le Jardin des Plantes' (1997). From a variety of perspectives - postmodernist, psychoanalytic, aesthetic - chapters reflect on the central paradox of Simon's work: his writing and rewriting of an experience of war so disruptive and traumatic that words can never be adequate to communicate it.

This book introduces novels by the Nobel Prize for Literature author, Claude Simon, giving emphasis to peaks in his literary achievement.

Claude Simon: Fashioning the Past by Writing the Present considers the aesthetic, cultural, and philosophical facets of a temporal paradox in the works of French novelist Claude Simon (1913-2005), and its broader implications for the study of narrative, and for cultural and post-modern theory. This paradox emerges from the problematic representation of the past through an aesthetic rooted in an exclusive valorization of the present. In his 1985 Nobel speech, as well as on other numerous occasions, Simon expressed a fascination with simultaneity through the provocative claim that he never wrote about the past, but attempted to capture only what was happening during the writing process, that is, in the “present of writing,” as he put it. Simon’s seemingly unambiguous claim raises significant issues and contradictions that become extensively apparent when the statement is considered in the light of his fictional works, since these must be construed, for the most part, as explorations of the past. In this study Alina Cherry propose to look at the tensions that arise from this paradox, and examine the present of writing holistically—that is both as a stylistic device and within the thematic context of Simon’s works—in order to assess its capacity for becoming an instrument of ontological and epistemological inquiry that can also intervene powerfully in the decisive philosophical and socio-political debates that have animated the cultural landscape of post-World War II France. Simon’s vivid portrayals of suffering and devastation open new ways of understanding the impact of some of the most traumatic historical events of the twentieth century: the two World Wars and the Spanish Civil War. This impact is necessarily connected with a need to tell these events, and to tell them in highly innovative ways, namely by creating a distinctive style that revolutionizes the outworn narrative traditions of a world whose very foundations have been shattered by the chaos of war and effectively undermines various institutions and dominant socio-cultural structures, revealing implicitly and explicitly, a strong ethical vein.

This is a major study of the Nobel prize-winning French novelist Claude Simon. Simon is a complex figure: for all that he writes in a distinctively modern fictional tradition (exemplified by Proust, Joyce, Beckett and Robbe-Grillet), his novels contain strong elements of visual representation alongside a very different king of free-floating, anti-realist writing.

Reputed to be a conservative group, the Nobel Prize committee astonished the world in 1985 by giving its prize to Claude Simon, one of the most adventurous and challenging of modern authors whose writing defies easy classification. This study shows exactly how inventive and challenging he is. Simon’s works run the gamut from first-person narratives to narratives without a stable perspective. His novels deal with minute details of the grand stages of history—world war, for instance—and with the historical dimensions of everyday life. Mária Minich Brewer demonstrates that Simon has reformulated the standard forms of fiction to expose the logic of narrative, a complex and powerful legacy populated with stereotypes too easily accepted as natural. Her book brings into focus the cultural legacies embedded in narrative as well as the narrative dimensions of culture and history. Simon has voiced suspicion of narrative order. He never underestimates, however, either its pervasiveness or its powers. In his novels, he never dismisses narrative order as being “merely” a matter of formal conventions. On the contrary, he reveals narrative representation to be a powerful agent of some of the most violent events to which an individual is subject.

This lucid and illuminating study traces the development of an extraordinary experimental writer from his earliest work of the 1940's to his most recent fiction. Ms. Loubère assesses Simon's aims and achievements, and parallels his development as a novelist to the development of the modern novel itself, showing how both moved from traditionalist forms and material toward the highly idiosyncratic "New Novel." After discussing his early works, she devotes a chapter each to Le Vent, L'Herbe, La Route des Flandres, Le Palace, Histoire, La Bataille de Pharsale, Les Corps conducteurs, and Triptyque. Step by step, she points out the changes in technique and focus that occur in each succeeding novel as Simon rejects conventional forms and introduces new ones.

Simon's works run the gamut from first-person narratives to narratives without a stable perspective. His novels deal with minute details of the grand stages of history - world war, for instance - and with the historical dimensions of everyday life. Maria Minich Brewer demonstrates that Simon has reformulated the standard forms of fiction to expose the logic of narrative, a complex and powerful legacy populated with stereotypes too easily accepted as natural.