Claude Simon. "Complément d'informations"

Context and Clarification

This text responds to Jean-François Louette's article "Claude Simon et Sartre : les premiers romans" (Cahiers Claude Simon, no. 3), correcting interpretive errors and clarifying Simon's literary influences, methods, and relationship to Sartre's philosophy.

Publication Timeline of Le Tricheur

• Manuscript completed in 1939; Simon, mobilized in August 1939, entrusted it to friends for posthumous publication
• Bomsel read the manuscript in 1942 and decided immediately to publish it
• After escaping in late 1940, Simon resumed and completed the work
• Final page bears the date April 1941
• Only published in 1945 because Éditions du Sagittaire had been seized by the Germans as a "Jewish enterprise"

Reading and Literary Influences

Simon's references extend well beyond the Parisian and Franco-French horizon.

• 1937: Patrick Walberg introduced him to American novelists—Faulkner, Caldwell (Tobacco Road), Steinbeck; also first read Joyce's Ulysses, which captivated him
• Winter 1940: Spinoza's Ethics attracted him through its "theorem-corollary-demonstration" form
• During the Occupation: Purchased all of Balzac, read Tolstoy's War and Peace, Luther's Table Talk, reread Ulysses
• 1951: Took note of Beckett's Molloy and Waiting for Godot
• 1952: Before Le Sacre du printemps and while Gulliver appeared, conducted a close analysis of Dostoevsky's The Adolescent, studying its narrative structuring, dialogic devices, and writing forms—admiring "the architecture, the lyrical progression of thought from sentence to sentence until its perfect conclusion closes the circle" (Archives Claude Simon)

Form and Composition

Simon's overriding concern is the composition of the work—not filling his narrative with "café waiters," "broken watches," or generalist clichés about "the disorder of the world and memory, contingency or chance, the problem of action..." (Louette).

• The claim that "the evolution of Simon's novelistic work moves toward chaos" (Louette) ignores what Simon repeatedly stated: "I do not seek to 'derange' anything at all [...] writing consists of bringing order, priorities (those that derive from the order of words in the sentence), establishing a hierarchy. [...] According to the chosen formulation, it is not the same thing that is said [...] yet the 'referent' is in each case the same..." (1993 interview with M. Calle-Gruber)
• Research into the form of the work is not "formalism" (Louette)—quite the contrary. It is a becoming-form without pre-established knowledge
• In 1957, upon the publication of Le Vent, Simon wrote to Emile Perez: "Contrary to Sartre, who claims that the novelist always knows more than he says, it seems evident to me that we always know much less than we say [...] and all the work consists precisely in distinguishing between what one really knows and what one believes one knows—that is, chasing from oneself everything that is acquired knowledge"
• He invokes the figure of blind Orion "discovering the world gropingly in and through writing"

Engagement and Readership

Simon expressed himself without ambiguity on "engagement" and writing "for the masses":

• "There is something supremely contemptuous toward what is called 'the people' in this perpetual discrimination between the intellectual aptitudes of the 'privileged classes' and those of others, whom one relegates to a veritable cultural ghetto" (L'Express, 28 May 1964)
• He recalled his visit to workers at the Hispano-Suiza factory, where he had been invited to speak about La Route des Flandres: "I was able to observe that the questions they asked me about this book were exactly the same as those asked by specialized journalists and students or their professors in French or foreign universities where I am invited"

Response to Sartre

Contrary to Louette's assertion that Simon was "very sensitive to Sartre's analyses in the 1930s" and should have "recognized" this:

• Simon commented on reading a 1940 issue of NRF (Sartre's article on Giraudoux): "pompous series of what one might call the 'peplums' of the École Normale—as in cinema one says 'spaghetti peplums'—inaugurated by Giraudoux ('La Guerre de Troie n'aura pas lieu'), combining Parisian preciosity with pedantic erudition, and whose docile and very pedantic continuators Sartre with 'Les Mouches' and Camus with 'Caligula' became, finding in them pretext to stir up worn-out moral or philosophical considerations" (Archives Claude Simon)

Where Sartre sees in Proust's or Simon's style merely "an arrangement" that changes nothing in the "content," and Louette sees only "technique," for Simon it is a decisive matter—and not without political dimension—of writing itself.