Raven Kennedy
Professor Borton
World Lit. II
11/11/15
Claude Simon
Claude Simon was a profound French author; his works touched and influenced many author of today. He was born to middle –classed parents he was the son of Louis and Suzanne in Tananarive, Madagascar on October 10th 1913. He was the only child to his parents he grew up in Perpignan in the middle of the wine district of Roussillon. Simon’s father died in First World War August 27, 1914 in the line of duty when Claude was less than a year old. He was a Captain in the regiment of colonial infantry. His mother was from a respected catholic family who was established in a town south-west of France and raised him with a catholic upbringing. Soon after his mother died of an agonizing illness while he was still a young boy. He lived with his mother’s family until he was orphaned by the age of eleven, he was later sent a boarding school in Paris but often spent has breaks with family. Simon had a happy and content childhood growing up even though he had to live in orphanage. He had the love of his cousins and uncles and other close family members that showed him love throughout his childhood which made it easier for him to cope with the loss of his parents at his young age. (Duncan, 102)
Simon attended Stanislas College, which is actually a grammar school in Paris. His mother was very pious and had wanted him to obtain a religious education. With him going to this institution eventually Simon becomes an atheist. Simon received a cultural base education; his studies included Latin, mathematics, sciences, history, geography, literature, foreign language. Simon’s education lacked in secondary instruction in France they ignored the arts, music, painting, sculpture, and architecture. He felt as though that was part of education and it was one sided with the arts aspect of learning. He was made to learn an extinctive amount of verses by Pierre Corneille which was a French playwright whose works were on tragedy and comedy. However they learned about him but didn’t get the opportunity to be taught about Nicolas Poussin a French painter who was one of the leading painters of the classical French baroque style of painting which Simon described as being more important than Corneille. (Eyle)
After studying at the College Stanislas he later went on to study at the Lycee Saint-Louis to prepare for an entrance exam to the Ecole Navale because his mother wanted him to either become a priest or a soldier. However he was growing to the naval academy but he got expelled from the school for absenting himself without leave. On the other hand, he persuaded his guardian to give him an allowance to study painting with Andre Lhote in Paris. Around the same time of this endeavor he was playing his hand in photography, he was pretty good some of his photos got published into a few professional magazines. The knowledge of his photography did not become public knowledge until the late 1980’s. (Duncan, 3)
Simon was soon over painting he abandoned that for the need to travel the world. He soon traveled extensively though Spain, Germany, the Soviet Union, Italy and Greece. He liked to experience the rush of waking up in a hotel in a new place, which was exhilarating to him. (Duncan, 3)
Right around the time he found himself in a place where he just wanted to write. He was put into the armed forces. In 1936 at the height of the Spanish Civil War he helped the Spanish Republicans smuggle a shipment of firearms from France to Spain. In that same summer Simon Became a member of the Communist party in order to simplify the journey to Barcelona. Nevertheless, he still remained a liberal in his social and political views. (Duncan, 2)Yet, his views of the republicans of the Spanish war had become dissatisfied with the idea of politics and other branches of service. His reasons for leaving the cause were the unhappy components of the Spanish civil war were its selfish motives, the hidden ambitions it served, the emphasis on hollow words used by both sides; it seemed to be a comedy terribly bloody but a comedy all the same. Still, given the degree to which the war was murderous and involved a great deal of treachery, I could not myself qualify it as a comédie. What drew me there? Naturally, my sympathy for the Republicans; but also my curiosity to observe a civil war, to see what was happening. (Eyle) In 1939 Simon was called to rejoin the military as a Corporal, the cavalry regiment where he served four year prior, he was back where he started. After a whole winter of inactivity his regiment went on, on horseback into Belgium in May 1940 only to be discovered by the enemy. Simon and his regiment were captured and sent to Germany. He along with others was sent to a P.O.W camp in Western France He escaped from the hand of the enemy in November 1940 he managed to get onto a train of prisoners the Germans were bringing to Frontstalag for the winter. The camp was badly guarded. Just after I arrived, I escaped in broad daylight by slipping between two German sentinels into the forest. From there, hiding along the way, I reached the line of demarcation and returned Perpignans where he grew up. (Eyle)
It was in 1940 when he returned back to Perpignans when he devoted himself into to the writing. Simon had received an inheritance, and at the close of the war, from his mother which put him in the position where he didn’t have to make a living off his writings. Which made it easier for him just enjoy writing. Claude wrote his most famous books on the events that occurred to him when he growing up from the loss of his two parents and so forth. He once said that he turned to writing because he imagined it would be easier than either painting or revolution. Claude Simon was asked the question of what made you write your first novel He answered The Ambition to write a novel. (Eyle) Before Simon did his second tour he was in the process of beginning his literary career on the eve of World War II with the novel Le Tricheur, but he was conscripted back into the military before he could complete the manuscript. Le Tricheur (The Cheater) was finally published in 1945. Simon writings weren’t well known in the states however he came up with quotes that made you think and question events around you. One famous quote “To begin with, our perception of the world is deformed, incomplete. Then our memory is selective. Finally, writing transforms”. One asked him, “Is this transformation therapeutic in anyway?” He answered with, “No. I write only for pleasure, for the sake of producing something, and naturally, in the hope of being read. Apparently this hope is not completely vain, since I now have, in many countries, thousands of readers.” Claude Simon has long denied that he writes his novels in the style of the French nouveau roman in fact he considers nouveau roman to be a misleading term. Which he feels that critics have incorrectly grouped the work of several French authors, including Nathalie Sarraute, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and Marguerite Duras, whose literary styles, themes, and interests are, according to Simon, quite diverse. The symbolism in his work has been widely analyzed, exceptionally so in the eyes of Simon he rejects almost all interpretation of his work, portraying himself as a straightforward writer who draws on the material that life provides him. What emerges, though, is challenging, baroque. Sentences continue for pages; passages contain no punctuation. Always, he is lyrical. Every so often than not, Simon depicts a reality of death and dissolution, with war a common presence. (Eyle)
He rejects the conventional novels of the nineteenth century and embraces Dostoyevsky, Conrad, Joyce, Proust, and Faulkner, whose highly charged, evocative use of language he draws upon. The works of Marcel Proust and William Faulkner are a clear influence. Simon's use of self-consciously long sentences often stretching across many pages and with parentheses sometimes interrupting a clause which is only completed pages later can be seen to reference Proust's own style, and Simon additionally makes use of certain Proustian settings in La Route des Flandres,(The Flanders Road) for example, the narrator's captain de Reixach is shot by a sniper concealed behind a hawthorn hedge or haie d'aubépines, a reference to the meeting between Gilberte and the narrator across a hawthorn hedge in Proust's A la recherché du temps perdu (In Search of lost Time). (Eyle)
The Faulknerian influence is evident in the novels' extensive use of a fractured timeline with frequent and potentially disorienting analepsis (moments of chronological discontinuity), and of an extreme form of free indirect speech in which narrative voices (often unidentified) and streams of consciousness bleed into the words of the narrator. The ghost of Faulkner looms particularly large in 1989's L'Acacia, which uses a number of non-sequential calendar dates covering a wide chronological period in lieu of chapter headings, a device borrowed from Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury. (Eyle)
Claude Simon was married to Yvonne Ducing in 1951 a little before Simon contracted Tuberculosis which was diagnosed just in time to save his life in 1951. Simon says, all my life I have been favored by incredible luck. It would take too long to enumerate all of the occasions. He was ordered to be bed-ridden for many months. While unable to become mobile he said this made him become more appreciative to the sounds and sighs that the outside gives you every day with the glimpse of sunshine that comes through his bedroom window. He quotes Paul Valéry wrote: “When everything is added up, our life is nothing but a series of hazards to which we give responses more or less appropriate.” While Simon was recovering the world outside hadn’t stop moving. Simon was just now hearing of encouraging reviews for his novel Le Trichuer on of his write novels published in 1945 a renowned critic Maurice Nadeau Compared his novel to Camus’s L’Etranger written around the same time but was published in 1942. It was something to be compared to other great author for your first novel. Later in 1978 he and his wife parted ways. He married Rea Karavas soon after. (Duncan, 4)
Claude Simon won the Nobel Prize in 1985. Prize Motivation "who in his novel combines the poet's and the painter's creativeness with a deepened awareness of time in the depiction of the human condition". In 1961 Claude Simon received the prize of l'Express for "La Route des Flandres" and in 1967 the Médicis prize for "Histoire". The University of East Anglia made him honorary doctor in 1973. Simon was nominated in 1983 to receive a Nobel Prize his works but failed to receive it. He was asked how he felt about winning in 1985. He answered with, “Extremely pleased. To be honest, others have had reactions of displeasure they cannot hide. In France, in literary circles, it was as though someone had made them swallow a hedgehog, whole, with all its needles. For example, a colleague, a “friend,” told The New York Times that he made me hold back every other chapter from one of my novels, thanks to which it had become more readable. But still, the Nobel. A great stroke of luck let me tell you! It’s lucky to have something like this happen when you are seventy-two years old, and when your head is solidly screwed on. Honors and money are suddenly heaped on you! An avalanche of invitations from all over the world! That can be stressful, can turn heads. After receiving a Parisian literary prize for much less, some writers have remained impotent for the rest of their lives. Lars Gillensten, the secretary of the Swedish Academy, told me at Stockholm: “Now—write, write! . . . Afterward, most laureates write nothing else.” And so, “afterward” I wrote a big novel, The Acacia, published last fall, which the critics, from the communists to the extreme right, including the Catholics, have called the best of my books.” (Eyle)
The winning of the Nobel Prize encouraged the new mood. Although it didn’t make Simon a public icon apart of France’s national heritage to the surprise, it generated more interviews and articles about his life, which in turn informed the reading of his novels. The most striking passage in Simon’s reception speech to the Swedish Academy is the few lines in which, summing up his early life, he simultaneously describes the material he uses in his novels. (Duncan, 93)
“I am now an old man, and, like many people in our old Europe, the first part of my life has been pretty hectic: I witnessed a revolution, I made war in especially deadly (I belonged to one of these regiments staffs sacrifice coldly in advance and that in eight days, it is practically nothing left), I was taken prisoner, I knew hunger, physical work to exhaustion, I escaped, I was seriously ill several times on the verge of death, violent or natural, I rubbed shoulders with the most diverse people, both priests as incendiary churches, of peaceful citizens as anarchists, philosophers illiterate, I shared my bread with mobsters finally I traveled around the world ... and I’ve have never yet, sixty-two, found no sense of it all, if not in the words, I believe, Barthes after Shakespeare, that "if the world means anything, it is that it means nothing "- except it is.” (Simon)
Simon has written over twenty successful novels ten successfully translated such as: Le Tricheur was nearly finished in the spring of 1941, well before Camus’s The Stranger. I met my first editor, Edmond Bomsel, during the war. He was Jewish. His publishing house, The Sagittarius, had been confiscated by the Germans. He was a refugee in the southern zone and asked me to wait until the end of the war to publish Le Tricheur. I agreed. There is, therefore, absolutely no link with or influence on the part of Camus. (Eyle)
Some have said that it was after you wrote Le Sacre du printemps translated to The Rite of Spring in the fifties that you became a “new novelist.” Since the majority of professional critics do not read the books of which they speak, mountains of nonsense have been spoken and written about the nouveau roman. The name refers to a group of several French writers who find the conventional and academic forms of the novel insupportable, just as Proust and Joyce did long before them. Apart from this common refusal, each of us has worked through his own voice; the voices are very different, but this does not prevent us from having mutual esteem and a feeling of solidarity with one another. (Eyle)
What distinguishes your voice from those of the other new novelists? Beginning with The Grass, my novels are more and more based on my life and require very little fiction—in the end, really none at all. Do you decide the point of view in your novels in advance, or does this emerge as you write? When I start a novel I see it as a very vague project that gets modified for the better in the course of my work, not because my characters dictate their conduct, as certain imbecile novelists pretend, but because the language unceasingly presents new perspectives. Many years ago I said in an interview, “The novel makes itself, I make it, and it makes me.” (Eyle)
For the characters in your novels sex is always emotionally empty or destructive. Yet your portrayal of the sex act is often very erotic. The great weakness of the majority of erotic novels is that they feature conventional characters, spineless puppets who have no depth—the inevitable marquesses or marquises, English lords, multimillionaires, valets, and gamekeepers—to whom these sexual acts just happen, and for this reason, seem disembodied . . . To describe erotic scenes inserted among other, nonerotic scenes (as it happens in life) interests me; I have attempted it several times. Sadly, so many taboos are attached to sex that it is very difficult to talk about it. It is necessary to find a tone, a distance. Things such as affectation, derision, or lyricism, that may flaw writing about other subjects, become completely intolerable in erotic writing. That which is private is rendered into something frankly ridiculous, as in the famous Story of O . . . And recall the passage in Dostoyevsky’s The Devils where, after Stavrogin recounts the highly erotic and metaphysical episode of the rape and the hoped-for suicide of the little girl, Tikhon asks him, simply, if he does not believe in the ridiculous. (Eyle)
What do you want your readers to learn from your books? They’ll learn nothing. I have no messages to deliver. I hope only that they will find pleasure. The nature of this pleasure is difficult to define. One part is what Roland Barthes has called recognition, the recognition of sentiments or feelings one has experienced oneself. The other is the discovery of what one had not known about oneself. Johann Sebastian Bach defined this sort of pleasure as “the expected unexpected. “You have often referred to yourself as an amateur writer. After producing fourteen novels, he was asked if he would still consider himself as an amateur. Writing novels is not a profession. One is not paid by the month or year by a boss. A professional is someone who has acquired a certain number of skills by which he can be assured of a calculable return. The butcher has learned how to cut meat, the doctor to diagnose illnesses, the mason to build a wall—all according to various rules. In art, there are no rules. To the contrary, often it’s a question of breaking them, with no guarantees. I am, therefore, always an amateur on whom, miraculously; money is bestowed from time to time. You have said that anyone can do what you have done, so long as they are willing to work as hard. Do you mean there is no room for innate talent in a writer—that persistence and hard work are all that are required? Apart from a certain level of elementary instruction, I think that in effect anyone can, by working hard, do what I do. Certainly there are tastes, predispositions . . . some for mathematics, for business, medicine or painting . . . or even laziness. (Eyle)

Work Cited "Claude Simon - Nobel Lecture". Nobelprize.org. Nobel Media AB 2014. Web. 12 Nov 2015. http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1985/simon-lecture.html
"Claude Simon - Facts". Nobelprize.org. Nobel Media AB 2014. Web. 12 Nov 2015. http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1985/simon-facts.html
Duncan, Alastair. "Claude Simon." Google Books. Manchester University Press, 2003. Web. 12 Nov. 2015.
Eyle, Alexandra. "The Paris Review." Paris Review. N.p., 2015. Web. 12 Nov. 2015. http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2096/the-art-of-fiction-no-128-claude-simon. Liukkonen, Petri. "Claude Simon." Claude Simon. Books and Writers, 2008. Web. 12 Nov. 2015.