The Flanders Road by Claude Simon

First published:La Route des Flandres, 1960 (English translation, 1961)

Type of work: Romance

Time of work: From 1940 to 1945

Locale: Northeastern France, Nazi Germany, and Paris

Principal Characters:

• Georges, the narrator, a solider and prisoner of war who is obsessed with Corinne
• De Reixach, Georges’s commanding officer and Corinne’s cuckolded husband
• Corinne, de Reixach’s wife, the object of Georges’s desire, and Iglesia’s mistress
• Iglesia, a jockey employed by de Reixach and a member of de Reixach’s ill-fated military detachment
• Blum, Georges’s Jewish comrade and fellow prisoner of war

The Novel

The Flanders Road, the work for which Claude Simon, the winner of the 1985 Nobel Prize for Literature, is best known in the English-speaking world, is a brilliant and satisfying novel on a number of levels. The novel appeals to the reader not least because of its dazzling demonstration of the ways in which various facets of public, private, historical, and erotic experience can be associated, dissociated, unexpectedly and exhilaratingly combined, and tragically divorced. The germ of the novel’s inspiration is Simon’s own family history and, to a greater extent, his experiences during the fall of France in 1940.

The novel’s plot, though the least obvious and to some extent the least significant aspect of the whole work, deals with the narrator, Georges, and his reactions to the death from a sniper’s bullet of his military commander, de Reixach, during an ambush into which de Reixach has perhaps knowingly gone. This event leads to Georges’s capture by the advancing German troops and to his incarceration in a prison camp for the remainder of the war. During that time, Georges’s mind plays back and forth on de Reixach’s action, on the commander’s family history, and particularly on de Reixach’s wife, the alluring Corinne. The novel concludes with Georges’s erotic assignation with Corinne after the war is over.

The fabric of the novel is suspended between two climactic events, the first being the killing by sniper of the narrator’s commanding officer, and the second being a night of love shared by the narrator and that officer’s wife immediately after the liberation of France. Between these two events, the novel weaves its complex, exploratory texture, invoking memory, desire, varieties of history, and contemporary exigencies in what becomes an embarrassment of imagistic, symbolic, and philosophical riches. Readers familiar with the narrative methods of Marcel Proust, William Faulkner, and James Joyce—novelists whom Simon has acknowledged as his major influences—will have some inkling of what to expect, though added to the lessons of these masters in The Flanders Road is strong and arresting evidence of the author’s prolonged involvement with the visual arts, particularly painting. There are moments in this novel when the only word sufficient to describe the effects being created is “ravishing.” Given Simon’s preoccupation with repetition and the ambiguity which is the inevitable result of his narrator’s all-too-human instability of perspective, it is appropriate to consider ravishment itself as a double entendre expressing the impact of beauty and the effect of violence—a term applicable to the novel’s two definitive realities, love and war.

The interval between the death of de Reixach, under whom the narrator, Georges, has been serving, and the erotic encounter between Georges and Corinne, is spent, for the most part (in a physical sense), in a Nazi prisoner-of-war camp. Nevertheless, the obvious physical constraint of such a context, while periodically intruding on the narrative, functions also as a pretext for Georges’s inner life to assume preeminence. It is not the dehumanizing conditions of the prison that claim the reader’s most intense concern. Rather, it is to those elements of the individual’s makeup which are so uniquely and distinctively human to which the narrative and the narrator turn. In Simon’s terms, these elements are expressed by Georges’s twin capacities to remember and to desire, capacities which are given free rein by the novel’s stream-of-consciousness narrative technique.

Georges’s thoughts are largely consumed with de Reixach, to whom he is distantly related and who carries an ancient and honorable name. There is enough evidence from the incident in which de Reixach was killed to suggest that he went knowingly to his death and in effect committed suicide. A reason for his doing so is the disgrace he had sustained because his wife was having an affair with a lowly employee, Iglesia the jockey. The willfulness of Corinne’s behavior, its challenge to the politesse embodied by her husband’s name and heritage, is as much a source of ardent reflection for Georges as is de Reixach’s final act. Georges’s consciousness, which is the signature of his humanity and his means of sustaining himself in the dark days of imprisonment, has been authorized by, and seeks authentication in, the experiences of this couple. Thus, The Flanders Road attains its power not because of the dramatic nature of its narrative material but because of that material’s effect on a consciousness which is seduced by it.

This novel’s elevation of aftermath over motive, and of the mind’s rhythms over the body’s stagnation, is not given its most crucial expression by a character’s specific action or statement, since every action or statement in the novel exists in the shadow of its opposite. What gives The Flanders Road its characteristic priorities is its formal nature. The novel begins as if it were a complex, but nevertheless direct, reflective account of Georges’s wartime experience, but the reader soon realizes that it may be more accurately read as an explosion of memory ignited by Georges’s night with Corinne. The interchangeability and interdependence of these two narrative perspectives provide the reader’s potential, temporary disorientation, placing the experience of the text on the same provisional but engrossing level as Georges’s restless analysis of de Reixach and Corinne. In the enactment of the fundamentally tentative and experimental procedures of consciousness lies this novel’s unique reality.

The Characters

Despite the fact that the main characters, except Georges, are filtered through Georges’s consciousness, The Flanders Road conveys a strong sense of character. This is particularly true of de Reixach, who emerges as a formidable web of complex issues concerning human nature and historical destiny. Severe and punctilious to a fault in maintaining the social position which his name and heritage commands, de Reixach is also perceived to be inscrutable. Did he, or did he not, allow his death to occur in the ambush? What exactly was his attitude toward Corinne’s infidelity? De Reixach’s inscrutability—which seemingly exists between the folds of an ambiguity embraced by cowardice and its opposite, stoicism—can be readily seen to be the product of his aristocratic demeanor, all the more so since his own end parallels that of one of his eighteenth century forebears.

In the case of Corinne, however, Simon alters his approach, or rather gives Georges a different mode of perception. In contrast to de Reixach,Corinne is seen in glimpses, at a distance, posed, suggestive. She remains an object of desire, whereas her husband is an emblem of that desire’s defeat and of other defeats which ensue. In depicting Corinne, the author’s painterly training is seen to spectacular advantage. The pictorializing effects have a peculiar appropriateness in the portrayal of Corinne, however, as they release vividly and persuasively the sensuality which she embodies. While de Reixach, Corinne, and the state of their marriage were vaguely known to Georges prior to de Reixach’s death, Corinne is kept at a distance until the climax of her brief, troubling erotic encounter with Georges. Thus, it is not necessarily the physical reality of Corinne which is the object of Georges’s preoccupations. It is the potential for love, for beauty, for pleasure which she embodies for him which sustains him. She is the counterpart to her husband’s militarism. Her commitment to living in the present, typified by her affair with Iglesia, is the opposite of her husband’s historical inheritance. Yet the two are indissolubly linked, each inescapably implicated in the other’s fate.

Both de Reixach and Corinne are animated by the intensity of Georges’s quest for the truth about them. In contrast, therefore—or as a means of enacting through the cast of characters the sense of doubleness which pervades The Flanders Road—the reader is also provided with characters lacking in mystery. These are Iglesia and Blum. Both characters serve to remind Georges that the world is also a material entity. Blum performs this service in the prison camp; Iglesia performs it in the de Reixach household. The ability to face and accommodate a given reality, to exist within and abide by the opportunities of the here and now, are what both these characters personify, each functioning as an antidote to the more internalized reality represented by the central trio of characters.

The crucial figure of that trio is Georges. Not only do the actual physical realities of both de Reixach and Corinne affect him profoundly, but also the readings which he conjures up out of the unadorned fact of the physical being affect him just as much, if not more. It is these readings, however, insatiably scanning the spectrum of experience embraced by de Reixach and Corinne (war and love) in order to discern motivation, certainty, and understanding, which sustain Georges and which give him the authoritative reality of the novel’s narrator. Georges embodies the spirit and value of quest, of the mind’s invincibility, and of the salvific nature of desire. Because of his mind’s restlessness, Georges is the novel’s most changeable character, and the shifts in narrative perspective which he brings about and to which he is subjected underline his mutability. Yet the very openness which the mutability brings about places him at the human, problematical center of the novel.

Critical Context

Claude Simon is one of the foremost practitioners of the experimental fiction which came to the fore in France immediately after World War II, known as le nouveau roman (the New Novel). The basic objective of this approach to fiction, as set forth by the most noted theoretician among its practitioners, Alain Robbe-Grillet, was to create fiction which would eschew the debts to documentation and photography incurred by realist fiction. While none of the New Novelists necessarily agreed as to the specific direction such a development might take, their diverse works have had a considerable influence on contemporary fiction and narrative theory.

The fiction of Claude Simon is worthy of special attention, however, and will continue to command notice when the works of some of his fellow New Novelists have come to be regarded as literary curiosities. The lushness of his imagery, the passion of his attentiveness, his psychological suppleness and narrative flexibility, and his profound and unrelenting exposure of man’s existential frailty and persistence—these qualities mark Simon as a great writer.

Bibliography

Birn, Randi, and Karen Gould, eds. Orion Blinded: Essays on Claude Simon, 1981.

Gould, Karen L. Claude Simon’s Mythic Muse, 1979.

Levin, Martin. Review in The New York Times Book Review. LXVI (May 21, 1961), p. 5.

Loubere, J.A. The Novels of Claude Simon, 1975.

Mercier, Vivian. A Reader’s Guide to the New Novel, 1971.

Sturrock, John. The French New Novel: Claude Simon, Michel Butor, Alain Robbe-Grillet, 1969.