The Wind by Claude Simon

First published:Le Vent: Tentative de restitution d’un retable baroque, 1957 (English translation, 1959)

Type of work: Antistory

Time of work: The 1950’s

Locale: A small town in the south of France

Principal Characters:

• Antoine Montès, an outsider who inherits a vineyard
• Rose, a waitress at the hotel where Montès lives
• Jep, Rose’s husband, a gypsy
• Maurice, a fertilizer salesman and would-be blackmailer
• Cécile, the tomboyish daughter of Montès’ cousin
• Hélène, her sister
• The Notary, the spokesman for the town
• The Narrator, a teacher and writer who befriends Montès

The Novel

Antoine Montès arrives in a small town in the south of France to claim the vineyard bequeathed to him by a father he has never known. Thirty-five years earlier, his mother left his father after learning of his infidelity. She did not tell her husband that she was pregnant, declined to divorce him or accept money from him, and never allowed him to see his son. Montès is expected to sell his father’s property, for which he is offered a large sum of money, but shocks the town by announcing that he intends to stay.

When Montès attempts to fire the bailiff who oversees the vineyards, the man, whose daughter was his employer’s mistress, refuses to leave and sues Montès. Living in a shabby hotel nearby, Montès becomes attached to Rose, a waitress, and her two young daughters. Because the town thinks that he is going to be rich, he also attracts the attention of a well-to-do cousin and his two daughters, Hélène, an aloof, pregnant wife, and Cécile, a rebellious tomboy.

Rose’s husband, Jep, a gypsy, has stolen some jewelry but does not know how to get rid of it. Because Rose wants Montès’ help, Jep assaults the outsider for interfering in his life. Nevertheless, Montès takes the jewels and hides them in his hotel room. Maurice, a young fertilizer salesman who lives in the hotel, attempts unsuccessfully to blackmail Montès about Rose and the stolen jewels. Finding a note from Cécile, who is strangely drawn to the slovenly Montès, Maurice offers to sell it to her father only to have Hélène trick him into giving it to her.

Maurice has told Hélène all about Montès and Rose, and she informs the police that Jep has stolen the jewelry. As the officers arrive, Jep, who thinks that his wife has betrayed him, kills Rose and is shot to death by the police. The shattered Montès wants to adopt Rose’s girls, but nuns give them to someone else and will not tell him where they are. Meanwhile, he loses the suit brought against him by the bailiff, and the vineyards are damaged by a hot, dry summer. Montès is forced to sell his property for less than it was worth six months earlier. He is more devastated by the loss of Theresa, Rose’s older daughter, however, and is haunted by memories of “her impassive Inca mummy’s face.”

The Characters

Antoine Montès has no clear identity since all that is revealed is what the other characters think about him, and they see primarily what is on the surface: unkempt appearance, tattered raincoat, beret, camera always hanging from his neck. Montès looks older than his age and is said to resemble someone who has just escaped from a concentration camp or “one of those characters that seem to have stepped out of Daumier: dusty, heron like and threadbare.” Montès is a walking contradiction, seeming both apelike and aristocratic. His gentle nature makes him seem almost saintly, but he is also dangerously naive. (Claude Simon has acknowledged the influence of Fyodor Dostoevski’s 1868 novel The Idiot, English translation 1887.) Montès has a “catastrophic gift of attracting trouble the way other people attract dogs or money” and has a “fundamental inaptitude for being aware of life, things, events except by the intermediary of his senses, his heart.”

Montès affects people by making them, without any effort on his part, think that he has qualities belying his appearance. He works an “incomprehensible spell” on people—especially women and children, those considered weak by his society. When Cécile asks why he pretends “to be such a fool,” he is unaware of any pretense. Rose has a similarly mysterious effect on him, making him “sense the secret pulsation of her blood.” The only lengthy conversation they have involves “perhaps the only words of love he had ever heard and spoken in his whole life...though the subject of love had not come up once (in words).” Montès’ single avowed passion is taking pictures of everything—though he photographs Rose but once. It is almost as if he is seeking stability by capturing details on film. According to the unnamed narrator of The Wind, “He loves things that don’t move.”

Montès is frequently compared with the wind which blows throughout his stay in the town. Both display “the same willful stubbornness, as if the gale also contributed to the tacit conspiracy of men and elements that seemed to have brought him, driven him, forced him back to where he had come from.” Like the wind, he is simply there, purposeless, waiting to die—death being the only possible solution to his struggle. Also like the wind, Montès cannot be understood. Both the town and the reader are conscious of him without truly knowing him.

Two other characters are important as sources of information about Montès. The notary with whom he does legal business is the spokesman for the town. Seeing profit as the primary human motive, he thinks that Rose is interested solely in Montès’ money, and he cannot understand what Cécile sees in the stranger since she has a higher social position. He is considered “a sort of ancient chorus” by the narrator, to whom the notary relays accounts of his meetings with Montès. Montès’ only friend, the narrator (who is a teacher and writer) understands passion as a motivation. Since Montès describes more than he explains, it is up to the narrator to decipher this enigmatic figure, finding in him much greater depth than does the notary. The narrator tries to penetrate the mind of Montès, conveying “what I sensed, what he himself must have actually known.” He sees Montès as a drowning man but does not consider himself to be a lifesaver: “I had merely passed within arm’s reach and he had clutched at me.” The narrator views his task as uniting the seemingly unrelated fragments of Montès’ story.

Critical Context

The Wind began what Simon’s critics have identified as the middle period of his career as a novelist. The style in his earlier fiction was inconsistent, artificial, and occasionally confused. With The Wind, he relied more upon descriptions, reflecting the influence of paintings and photographs. It was the first of his novels not to take a conventional approach to fiction; fewer conventional elements appeared with each succeeding novel.

After The Wind, Simon began to be grouped with the French New Novelists, who reject the importance of plot, character, and verisimilitude while emphasizing confusion, illusion, and the faulty way in which reality is perceived. More than any of the other New Novelists, Simon uses language unconventionally: distorted syntax, pronouns with unclear, multiple antecedents, missing punctuation. He explores the possibilities of language while asking what the novel can communicate and how it can do so.

Bibliography

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

Fletcher, John. Claude Simon and Fiction Now, 1975.

Jimenez-Fajardo, Salvador. Claude Simon, 1975.

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

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