[It] has remained quite easy to treat Simon as a naturalist, as a novelist who insists on writing about something and has never wholly accepted the generalities or the austerity of the nouveau roman's extremists.

The fact remains, however, that in his mature novels Claude Simon has moved very close to the theoretical standpoint of the other New Novelists. He has not strayed from or diluted the ideological position which he held when he started out as a novelist, with Le Tricheur…. But he no longer conveys this position in the same way; he has gone over, in fact, from being an explicit writer, ready to conceptualize his philosophy in an abstract language, to being an implicit one, whose philosophy must be deduced from its objective configurations in the minds of his fictional narrators. This important transition from one narrative mode to the other can be dated convincingly to the mid-1950s, between the publication of Le Sacre du printemps in 1954 and that of Le Vent in 1957. (p. 43)

[There] is one intimate and disturbing conviction that Claude Simon has never sought to keep secret and which quite dominates his fiction: the conviction that the human individual and the world are both in process, that they are irredeemably subject to transience or molecular exchange. In his novels Simon holds fast to his sense of the instability of matter to the point where he is led to undermine the fictitious stability which the order of a work of art imposes on the flux of experience.

The picture of matter which he proposes is a mercantilist one, from which the notion of increase has been excluded, no doubt because it might be held to mirror an optimism that is quite alien to Claude Simon….

There is evidence from his novels that Claude Simon is a lapsed and disappointed revolutionary; by denying us, as he does, any hope of an ultimate transcendence of the human condition along the plane of history, he is perhaps defining himself as a man who still accepts Marxian prescriptions about the reifications endemic to a market economy while now doubting man's will to re-humanize them. (p. 44)

But Simon is not limited by class considerations; he is attacking the foundations of everybody's world, including his own, and salvation, such as it is, depends not on the adoption of some handy creed, but on the brave acknowledgement that this is the way things are.

'Reality' then has two degrees of intensity in Simon's novels: there is 'everyday' reality, with its consoling intimations of immortality, and 'real' reality, which reinstates all the constituents of our world and our experience in time. Real reality is a disturbing and an aggressive order of things, that few people will be strong enough to live with….

The achievement of Cézanne, so far as Simon is concerned, is to have been able to paint the external world from, as it were, the standpoint of nature itself, and to strip it of all those human and, more particularly, those aesthetic associations that generally obscure its integrity and its independence of consciousness. (p. 46)

The parallel with what Simon himself attempts is a close one; description is no longer, as it was once thought to be, primarily illustrative in purpose, it is creative. The writer does not use the expression he wants to convey as a starting-point but instead works towards it as a goal. A state of mind thus comes to be expressed by a full and detailed configuration of its elements.

Simon has always known what picture of reality it was which he needed to present in his novels, and as his technique has grown more assured and consistent so the force of the confrontation for his readers has increased, to the point where exposure to his insistently shifting world has become a suitably uncomfortable experience. At the same time, there is a limit to this discomfort, because the poles of Simon's unshrinking materialism are not creation and destruction, but disintegration and reintegration. Some sort of solace is therefore to be had from the undeniable presence of the phenomenal world as a whole. As Merleau-Ponty puts it ['there is absolute certainty of the world in general but not of any one thing in particular'.] (pp. 46-7)

What Simon tries to do, like Cézanne, is to make us aware that … isolated manifestations, or things in the widest sense of that word, are a relative and artificial stasis of a substance constantly in flux….

In Simon we become conscious of just how inadequate a weapon language is, in the battle to immobilize a fluid reality. What he is trying to carry out is the task prescribed by the phenomenologists of re-situating objects in the flux, in the immediate certainty of their first appearance in the conscious mind. (p. 47)

The traditional road to timelessness has always led vertically upwards into the sky, our most convenient symbol for the void, molecularly speaking. But in Simon's novels things happen in the sky as well. La Route des Flandres for example is dominated by the rain, slanting endlessly down on the scene …, and frequently invisible until it can be seen against some suitable background, like a roof or a wall, the change of viewpoint being the device whereby the mind moves inward from appearance to reality.

In this novel Simon makes many comparisons between the rain and the destructive processes of time itself, and the analogy becomes blunter still once the rain has been transformed—another sign of substantial continuity—into the mud that slowly engulfs the bodies of men and animals along the Flanders road…. (pp. 47-8)

In the same way the most potent symbol for the withering and impersonal passage of time in Le Vent, a novel set in south-west France, is the wind itself, which blows through the town for two hundred and sixty-five days in the year. Like the Flanders drizzle, the wind does not remain an invisible force, but is continually filled with spiralling clouds of dust and detritus, whose frantic, futile motions are an apt epiphany of History itself.

Perhaps the subtlest and most surprising of all the ways in which Claude Simon has set about denying us the consolations of vacancy is in [Le Palace], where the air is full not of dust but of pigeons…. The restless, circular flights of the pigeons in Le Palace are one of this novel's several symbols for the circularity of the historical process itself, which is the main theme of the book…. (pp. 48-9)

Without ever for a moment having to warp the processes of nature for his own didactic ends, Simon has turned the pigeons into the humble but menacing messengers of his philosophy…. [The] use of the pigeons as a [curtain or veil] is crucial, because they form an obstacle interposed between reality and the eye; at such moments we have the illusion of immobility because memory replaces perception, and it is only when the pigeons again settle that things return to what they actually are, or what they have become. (pp. 49-50)

It is clear that Claude Simon is obsessed by time in its negative, regressive role. The movement he detects within the substantial scene is one extremely hostile to all human pretention. Time regarded as a possible agent of progress or improvement in the individual or common lot does have a part to play, but this part, too, is a discouraging one. The favoured 'heroes' of Simon's novels are men who have made a crushing discovery: that time operates independently of human aspiration, so that progress, when it comes about, does so in a wholly fortuitous manner which is a further bitterly ironic comment on the optimism of reformers. (p. 50)

The two periods of architecture and design from which he likes to choose his examples are the Baroque, and its more domestic relation, the Rococo, together with the Art Nouveau movement of the turn of this century. The resemblance between these styles lies, broadly speaking, in the fact that they abandon the straight lines and plain surfaces of more functional styles for a great amount of ornamentation and tension between structural elements. It is common for art historians to describe the Baroque as a painterly style of architecture, and Claude Simon can equally well be described as a painterly novelist. (p. 51)

[Simon's] preoccupations are very close to those of Baroque architects, as summarized by that style's first great analyst, Heinrich Wölfflin: 'Unlike the contour, which gives the eye a definite and easily comprehensible direction to follow, a mass of light tends to a movement of dispersal, leading the eye to and fro; it has no bounds, no definite break in continuity, and on all sides it increases and decreases.'

Simon in his mature novels has certainly suppressed all but the barest suggestion of contour….

Simon sees the Baroque as the aesthetic expression of minds obsessed with transience. It is in the Baroque that we are made acutely conscious of the instability of forms, which appear to be forever on the point of disintegration; it is a style that lacks altogether the rectilinear confidence of the early Renaissance…. [Wölfflin said]: 'The baroque never offers us perfection and fulfilment, or the static calm of "being", only the unrest of change and the tension of transience.'

These are precisely the implications of the term as it is found in Claude Simon. (p. 52)

There is one manufactured object in particular which acts as a memento mori in our lives, and that is a clock. Paradoxically, it is not the passage of the hands around the clock-face which Simon uses as a reminder of transience but the simple presence of the object itself. The clocks he describes are stopped; what he conveys is that it is our own intimate temps vécu that is under the threat of cessation, not impersonal or cosmic time, which we must suppose to continue without us. The clock in fact will survive those who consult it. (p. 54)

This perdurability of the inanimate, which Claude Simon makes so much of, represents, in relation to novelistic tradition, a reversal of values; the presence of human beings is here guaranteed, as it were, by the presence of their artefacts. As physical survival comes to dominate the ethical philosophies of the modern world it is probable that the underlying resentment that Simon expresses, that objects should outlast their creators, will become a more potent force in people's attitudes….

Simon does not attempt to make the isolated object or fact stand out from the surrounding fictions with anything of the geometrical fervour of Robbe-Grillet, but he is making the same point; objects are irreducible facts and any attempt to turn them into permanent possessions is doomed. (p. 55)

With Claude Simon perception constantly stimulates memory, and one memory stimulates many more. Thus the articulation of his novels must often seem involuntary, and the feeling is strengthened that their narrators are helpless victims, in danger of being crushed by the weight of their own past. (p. 56)

One important distinction needs to be made here between sequences of perceptions of the external world and sequences of memories. The first are aligned in cosmic or public time, the second are a-temporal in respect of cosmic time and aligned only in the private time-scale of individual consciousness. In the memory what took place fifteen years before may, indeed will, lie alongside what happened yesterday, and the contiguity, which plays such an important part in a psycho-analysis or in a psycho-analytical interpretation of a dream, is what finally enables us to evaluate our own past and present.

The discontinuity of remembered experience is made very evident in Claude Simon's novels. One of his favourite expressions of it is the old silent picture, with its jerky movements and its abrupt cuts from one sequence of images to another. In Histoire he writes of the 'shattering discontinuity' of these films, so underlining the powerful emotional effect that a similar technique of presenting images can have in a novel, where the narrator, apparently unable to stem the flow of memories, finds his most disturbing secrets being revealed by the contiguity of apparently heterogeneous scenes from his past. Not that the tempo of this representation ever matches that of the actual human mind; Simon frequently allows a single such scene to extend for twenty or more pages before there is a transition to another, brought into being because it shares the same emotional tone or some physical constituent with the previous one.

This discontinuity of the memory is paralleled by the temporal and spatial discontinuity of our perceptions. Because we are prisoners in time and space, the amount of direct evidence we can have of other lives and places is severely restricted…. [We] are forced to project our own obsessions into the gaps in our knowledge, if we are to turn a number of isolated facts into a coherent pattern. Claude Simon has been aware of the implications of this right from the start of his career. (pp. 58-9)

Simon makes things doubly problematical in [his novels] by introducing more than one perspective on the events he is involved with…. [If] we accept Simon's multiple perspectives at their face value, as independent imaginings provoked by the same set of phenomena, then their effect is to show up the relative nature of all such reconstructions—the presence of other perspectives in fact prevents us from attributing too much finality to the central one.

The obvious difficulty with this sort of structure concerns the choice of the original facts, the necessary elements in and out of which the fiction will weave its insubstantial thread. In Simon's case there is clearly a large element of autobiography involved in the selection of the facts, as well, presumably, as of the emotions that lend them significance…. He has drawn heavily and directly on his own life; his books have clearly involved him in a lot of self-exploration.

But this self-exploration is conducted in accordance with the precepts of the nouveau roman, in a succession of mental pictures and not in the abstraction of a conventional analysis of mental states. Simon has no conception of the self as somehow independent of its experiences. It is nothing more than the sum of its past…. (pp. 60-1)

Writing, for Claude Simon, is a prolonged act of retention, as he tries to keep a hold on the thoughts that have passed through his head since the moment he began writing. The pattern that characterizes his later novels therefore, where his technique has reached maturity, is a circular one, as the memories spread like ripples, out from the moment of composition. Once the process is under way the narrative line, the line that is to say of cosmic time, advances hardly at all. (p. 61)

What we have to deal with … is not the unity and equilibrium of perception, but the often gross and melodramatic distortions of a reality that has dissolved into a collection of images. The importance of the image that has survived is achieved at the expense of all that has not survived, all that we might have been able to call on to fill the gaps that now exist in our picture of past events. The unity of the flux can never be restored to our individual past; our attempts to set it in motion again must remain at a level of derisive artificiality. (p. 64)

With Claude Simon it is time that always turns out to be the enemy, time that undermines the very basis of our existence. He is concerned to show that every person and thing is trapped inescapably within the flow of time, and also to show how it is time that prevents us from making more than a token effort to recuperate our past. There is no such thing as stability or certainty in Simon's world…. Simon will establish no definitive sequence of cause and effect, because to do so would involve playing the role of God. Like Robbe-Grillet or Butor he will limit himself to the play of the individual mind, presented in all its uncertainty and necessary relativity. He is not, as we shall see, without positive recommendations as to how we can best face our inevitable fate, but the foundations of his books, like the foundations of his philosophy, are rigorously negative. He will not allow the shadowy compensations of agnosticism to mitigate his severity….

As Simon's novels have become more explicitly confined within a single mind so they have also become more theatrical, and the human figures that jerk and gesticulate across the screen of consciousness are presented like actors in a poorly synchronized film, sometimes grotesque, sometimes imposing, but never wholly authentic presences. (p. 65)

The central theme of Claude Simon's fiction is certainly [the] recognition that chance wins in the end, and that to try and fight it is a foolish waste of our short time on earth…. All attempts to shape the future come unpleasantly unstuck in Simon's books, especially in those cases, like Le Tricheur, where the protagonist's aims are achieved in a quite different way from that which he had intended. Cause and effect, the arrogance of ratiocination, may be applied to the past, inaccurately as we know by reference to the complexity of the present, but to apply it to the future is the height of absurdity. (p. 70)

It would be dishonest … to stress exclusively the negative side of Simon's novels; they are not an attempt to show us (despite Le Palace) that the logical way to acknowledge necessity is to commit suicide. What he wants us to do is simply to live in the constant presence of death, so that our awareness of the world we live in may be heightened and more truly personal. This of course is the Romantic ethic of so many twentieth-century writers, and has a religious dimension that gives it a very medieval ring…. Claude Simon could be said to present us with a world that it would be simple to redeem, by a single irrational gesture, but this he has so far shown no signs of making.

The point where he parts company from the religious view of life's vanity is in his treatment of death. No trumpets sound for the departing hero in Simon because there is no other side for him to go to. The sky, as we have seen, is liable to be full of dust, or rain, or pigeons…. (p. 74)

Death is simply a cessation in time, perhaps violent, perhaps not, it is in no sense a fitting or a holy conclusion towards which all life gracefully moves. If it endows a life retrospectively with significance then this can only be for other people, since we cannot live through our own death. From Simon's own experiences it would seem that the last contents of consciousness will be as heterogeneous as those of any other moment of life, but that their emotional tone will have changed: they will be more clamant and more intense. (p. 75)

The sexual act, described with some frenzy and great frequency in Simon's novels, is an especially provocative reminder of mortality…. For the act of sex involves an illusion of timelessness and of escape from our unwanted solitude, but because, in our post-coital return to the limits of self, we are made aware of the final frustration of our hopes of a definitive communion; the act as a whole is a metaphysical one…. (pp. 76-7)

Simon's view of society,… like his view of matter, is a bleak one. Society represents a tension between the warring telluric forces of order and anarchy, and it is the forces of anarchy that are given the upper hand. The final victory will be theirs because we inhabit a Heraclitean universe in which all coagulations of matter, institutions as well as individuals, are destined for dissolution. Law and order are at best a convenient fiction, invoked to serve an immediate need, but without any lasting validity in times of stress. (pp. 79-80)

What Simon has to set out to achieve … [in his characterization] is a large degree of depersonalization, because what concerns him is not our differences … but our underlying equality as members of the same race, confronted by the same ultimate fate. With his technique of casting systematic doubt on whatever evidence he is offering us about the past he can surround any human figure with a nimbus of uncertainty that effectively isolates him in one set of circumstances and one function. The one reasonably stable piece of evidence we have is his recurring presence in the field of consciousness, and it is this, paradoxically, that confers on the figure in question an air of unreality…. (p. 83)

[There is] a fundamental doubt as to Claude Simon's intentions as a novelist; is he using the novel to give us an authentic view of the world or not? In his later novels at least his vision of the cosmos is refracted through the consciousness of his narrators and one is left with the old problem of how closely one should identify this narrator with the novelist himself. The memory, he acknowledges, is a grossly distorting mirror of reality, but it is by studying these distortions that we can reconstruct the preoccupations which generate them. It would seem inevitable, therefore, that we should identify Simon's narrators absolutely with himself, for it is hard to believe he is proposing that we should take his world-view as wholly relative…. (p. 84)

Simon shares the common human desire to rescue the past from oblivion but he refuses to share the illusion that it can ever be finally satisfied. There is thus a profound contradiction, or tension, in his novels, between the urge to reconstruct the past as densely and plausibly as possible and the perpetual recognition that any sort of certainty dies with the event. (p. 86)

The one great act of sympathetic communication that takes place within the novels … is that between the different incarnations of the Wise Old Man and the idealistic young one. This communication, explicit in an earlier book like Le Sacre du printemps, but more subtly conveyed in the language of things in L'Herbe or Le Palace, is … a miniature reproduction within the text of what Simon sees as the purpose of his own books. This purpose is undeniably a moral one. Simon's morality is based of course on a thoroughgoing materialism, and he might himself shrink from applying the term 'morality' to anything except artificial codes of behaviour based on a certain idealism. (pp. 92-3)

Unlike Robbe-Grillet Simon does not exaggerate the distinctions between images that are to be construed as facts and those that are to be construed as fiction. He is determined to avoid what to him would be an illusion of stability. Yet certain elements of his novels can be distinguished as co-ordinates, round which the narrator's, or the novelist's, imagination can play with freedom, and betray to us its intentions. It is only in Simon's more mature novels, starting with Le Vent, that these co-ordinates take on their true importance, trapped as they now are in the quicksands of systematic doubt and repetition. But he has never allowed any of his novels to unfold simply in the traditional pattern, where cosmic time and phenomenological time can be taken as one. The facts even of Le Tricheur are not presented in the order in which they happen. The form of this novel, like that of the one that followed it, Gulliver, is very close to that of the detective story…. But in these early novels the reconstruction of what we might call the invisible reality, the elements that have to be invented to fill in the gaps of the 'visible' reality, are given straightforwardly and not swathed in uncertainty. Hearsay evidence would seem just as valid as direct evidence. In the later novels this is not so. (pp. 94-5)

[A] possible conclusion about Simon's modulations of … point of view is that he wants to stress the ultimate solipsism of the novelist who can only, since he is alone as he writes, explore the virtualities of his own being at the same time as he records the actualities of other people's. The action of another individual may be accurately registered, but its nimbus of intention is a projection by the observer. (p. 97)

To preserve the impression of stasis it is clear that the key to Simon's narrative technique must be his use of the verb, and the most striking and most commented-on feature of his books is their obsession with the present participle, which is no doubt why he has so often been compared with William Faulkner. Granted Simon's preoccupations, the present participles are inevitable, for only by using them can he prevent the narrative from going somewhere, and from giving us an unwanted impression of logical succession….

By stringing together sequences of present participles, Simon conveys a succession of movements in which one movement merely replaces the other, divorced from any external temporal reference and its implications of a narrow, non-dynamic causality.

Moreover, the present participle also has the effect of diminishing the importance of the agent in any action. By using it Simon withdraws the primacy from the agent and gives it to the act, which is thus partly depersonalized…. (p. 101)

Like all such doomed efforts to overcome time Simon's style is essentially baroque, in its restless refusal to draw straight lines or to recognize some ultimate point of stability. His is a literary structure frozen miraculously at the moment of collapse, an ephermeral moment of equilibrium between the forces of order and the forces of chaos. Like a seventeenth-century architect he introduces light to remind us of the dark, and he patterns small details to remind us of the pattern of the whole. This is a painterly style and it suggests that Simon believes more in pictures than in words….

By deciding, after Le Sacre du printemps, to change from an explicit to an implicit way of writing, Simon qualified himself to be discussed in terms of the nouveau roman. It was the same decision that has enabled him to make us share more fully his own experience of the flux. The number of indications in his later novels that stop us identifying absolutely with the narrator are reduced to a minimum; we can fill our own field of vision with the disturbing contents of his. (p. 103)

John Sturrock, "Claude Simon," in his The French New Novel: Claude Simon, Michel Butor, Alain Robbe-Grillet (© Oxford University Press 1969; reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press), Oxford University Press, London, 1969, pp. 43-103.