Triptych by Claude Simon

First published:Triptyque, 1973 (English translation, 1976)

Type of work: Antistory

Time of work: The 1970’s

Locale: A farm valley, a Riviera beach resort, and a northern city in France

Principal Characters:

• Corinne, a middle-aged baroness
• Lily, a twenty-year-old barmaid
• The Groom, a young man on his wedding day
• The Boys, two young farmboys
• Lambert, an Englishman, Corinne’s friend

The Novel

Triptych is one of Claude Simon’s most difficult novels to read, yet it is also a fascinating creation. The only true means of organizing Triptych comes from its three place settings: the farm, the beach, and the city. These locales interlock intriguingly. For example, Simon has a city theater showing a film that is the story of Corinne at the beach. While the actress playing Corinne takes a break from the filming, she reads a book that is about the young groom in the city. Similarly, the two young farmboys find discarded pieces of film from the motion picture about Corinne at the beach. Toward the end of the novel, Lambert completes a jigsaw puzzle that depicts the farm valley, and the two boys are in that bucolic scene. These are merely a few examples of how Simon encloses one story within the mechanisms of another. The effect of this constant shifting is a mild shock to the reader, who is being shown constantly that what he mistook for the real story of Triptych is but a section contained in another story that itself may be the true one. These shifts of focus, while perhaps annoying to some readers, do support Simon’s theory that all fictions are false and unreliable, and that the reader should never take them to be accurate depictions of reality.

Simon reiterates the theme of the falseness of art in other ways. As the novel begins, Simon describes a postcard of the beach scene lying on a table in a farmhouse. He explains to the reader about how poorly reproduced the colors are on that postcard. Similarly, during the showing of films (which occurs often), the projector breaks down more than once. At one point, after showing a very sensual love scene, the projector actually burns a hole in the film, one example of Simon’s infrequent humor.

Although it is scattered in jigsaw like pieces throughout Triptych, a semblance of a plot or plots does gradually emerge. In the farm sequences, two young boys go fishing, swim at a waterfall, spy on a couple making passionate love in a barn, try to reconstruct a story from small pieces of discarded motion-picture film, and let a little girl who had been left in their care drown.Also appearing in the farm scenes is an old dog-faced woman who has killed and skinned a rabbit for her supper. In this setting, too, there is a schoolboy at his desk at home gazing out of the window. He is bored and a bit frustrated with a difficult geometry problem. The reader sees his repeated but futile efforts to solve this problem, mixed in with his daydreams, interruptions from his family, and the changing view from window. This nameless boy’s inability to finish his homework is analogous to the reader trying to fit together the various elements of Triptych.

A second set of scenes woven throughout the novel tells Corinne’s story. She is a wealthy widow staying at an exclusive beach resort. Her friend Lambert is called to her aid when she learns that her teenage son has been arrested for drug dealing. Lambert pays a bribe to a Mr. Brown, who sees to it that the youngster is released from jail. In order to accomplish this act successfully, Corinne has had to give sexual favors to Lambert, but the reader is never actually shown the sexual encounters of these two.

The third sequence of scenes found within Triptych depicts the groom on his wedding day. His friends bring him to a city tavern to celebrate. There he makes sexual advances to the barmaid Lily, who accepts him; the two awkwardly make love standing in the rain in an alley behind the bar. Later, a man on a motorcycle follows the groom and attacks him, supposedly because of jealousy over Lily.

One constantly interrupting subplot comments on the action in these three settings. A clown in a circus ring performs his antics, sometimes with a partner or a monkey; he mimics the actions of the characters in the main scenes. For example, when the groom has trouble making love to Lily because of his drunken state, the clown stumbles around the ring as if drunk. This clown is usually introduced into the action of the novel by the same device; in this example, his face is on a poster on the barn wall where the two farm boys watch through a crack as a couple make love.

The reader of Triptych can only discern these elements of a plot by a close reading of each scene; as in a puzzle or game, clues are given each time that a piece of plot is repeated. Simon does not introduce these sets of scenes in any chronological order; instead, he purposely mixes events into random sequences. By the end of the novel, however, an alert reader will know a fair amount about each of the three settings and their characters.

The Characters

Simon only sketchily depicts the few characters in this novel. The reader finds that Corinne is actually an actress who plays a wealthy widow in the resort scenes. The young actor who portrays her son also appears in a film in which he is the groom at the bar. Lily the barmaid seems to have had a previous relationship with the man on the motorcycle who later assaults the groom. Meanwhile, a sad young bride awaits the drunken groom in a nearby hotel room.

Some of the characters that Simon creates do appear to have symbolic roles. The dog-faced, elderly farm wife may represent Cerebus, who guarded the gates of Hell in mythology. This old woman is an eerie figure, dressed mostly in black, and she reappears often in the farm scenes. She usually pushes an old baby carriage that is filled with grass to feed her caged rabbits. Similarly, Lambert at the beach resort may represent an author. When the novel closes, he is finishing a jigsaw puzzle, much as Simon creates and completes the puzzle of scenes in Triptych. The two young boys in the farm village remain unnamed and seem to represent all youth. They are healthy and exuberant and have an early adolescent interest in learning about sex; they not only spy repeatedly on the couple in the barn but also watch a young girl disrobe to swim, and the bits of film that they treasure mainly show the actress Corinne nude on a bed.

Simon’s primary depiction of women in Triptych is as sexual objects available for men’s enjoyment. Yet the author often has women gain the advantage over men in personal and sexual matters. Lily is unscathed after her liaison with the groom, but he is beaten severely for his interest in her. Corinne uses a sexual encounter with her friend Lambert to get him to help free her son from jail. The female farm servant in the barn sequences appears to enjoy thoroughly her sexual acts with her virile partner.

Simon does not provide the reader with characters that are at all as psychologically complex or minutely documented as those created by authors of traditional novels. The figures that the reader finds in Triptych represent all ages and classes of people. In this way, Simon shows the diversity of humanity, but he does so while he comments on the uniformity of experience. Sexual interests are common to almost all these characters, as are the pleasures of eating, drinking, and seeking amusement in films, books, puzzles, and drugs.

Critical Context

Triptych is one example of the New Novel in France. Simon and other avant-garde writers, such as Michel Butor and Alain Robbe-Grillet, have been attempting to stretch the boundaries of the traditional novel since the 1950’s. While Simon’s Triptych is one of the boldest and most innovative of the new novels, it has not found favor with all literary critics; critical reaction ranges from rather positive to fairly negative. While finding it to be a unique creation by a highly talented author, critics also question whether such an avant-garde book plays a positive role in the development of the novel. In his efforts to introduce a new direction for fiction, Simon has actually done away with many of the fundamental elements of the novel, especially plot and characterization. Whether what he provides is enough to compensate the reader for the struggle to interpret this novel correctly is a question left unanswered by most critics. As Simon wishes, each reader must judge the value and importance of Triptych for himself.

Bibliography

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

Jimenez-Fajardo, Salvador. Claude Simon, 1975.

Loubere, J.A. The Novels of Claude Simon

Roudiez, Leon S. French Fiction Today: A New Direction, 1972.

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