ANTHONY C H E A L PUGH | The University of Durham England (original) (raw)
Papers by ANTHONY C H E A L PUGH
France 1940: Literary and historical reactions to defeat., 1991
A paper given at a colloquium in Durham organised by the author and published in the series Durha... more A paper given at a colloquium in Durham organised by the author and published in the series Durham French Colloquies, no. 3.
The Second World War in Literature, 1986
'Le désastre ou l'invérifiable, l'impropre' Maurice Blanchot La Route des Flandres,' de Claude Si... more 'Le désastre ou l'invérifiable, l'impropre' Maurice Blanchot La Route des Flandres,' de Claude Simon, se détache de l'ensemble des romans qui ont pour arrière-plan la défaite militaire de la France comme une oeuvre dont l'intégrité intellectuelle et artistique atteint un niveau rare. Le roman se concentre sur quelques épisodes de la retraite qui a suivie les combats de la région de Namur et de Dinant, où les stratèges alliés avaient souhaité que le front se fixe, sur un secteur le long de la rive ouest de la Meuse défendu par la neuvième armée française, commandée par le Général Corap. La chaotique marche en arrière des rescapés du 31e régiment de Dragons (que l'on avait envoyé en avant combattre à cheval aviation et blindés n'est cependant pas directement décrite : le lent recul de la petite bande de survivants qui tentent de revenir en arrière vers une ligne française déjà inexistante, suivant les traces des V et VIIe divisions blindées du XVe régiment de Panzers du Général Hoth (ce dernier sous le commandement d'un Général Rommel encore inconnu) est dépeint comme ayant lieu dans un paysage printanier étrangement normal.2 La guerre semble déjà finie ; elle n'est perceptible qu'en termes d'effets: cadavres d'hommes et de chevaux, restes de véhicules carbonisés, et une odeur persistante de décomposition et de caoutchouc brûlé. Seul un duel d'artillerie intermittent, au lointain, indique que la bataille continue ailleurs. Le lecteur de La Route des Flandres est placé dans une situation quelque peu semblable à celle des cavaliers: il n'y a aucune référence spatiale ou temporelle sûre dans le texte; aucun des noms célèbres que j'ai mentionnés à l'instant n'y figure non plus. Le roman se présente davantage comme un commentaire sur la guerre en général que comme le récit, en forme de fiction, d'un évènement spécifique. En effet, ce qui fait de La Route des Flandres beaucoup plus qu'un autre roman "authentique" sur la guerre, basé sur les souvenirs personnels d'un écrivain, c'est la façon dont il se focalise sur des questions cruciales qui, à la lumière de nos préoccupations modernes avec les structures narratives et le fonctionnement du langage figural, se trouvent centrales à notre compréhension de la façon dont s'écrit l'histoire et se fabrique la connaissance historique.
Je n'ai pas le projet d'écrire ma vie. Ceci dit, qu'est-ce que je peux écrire en dehors de ce que... more Je n'ai pas le projet d'écrire ma vie. Ceci dit, qu'est-ce que je peux écrire en dehors de ce que j'ai senti, subi, imaginé ? Même l'imaginaire est autobiographique. 1 As well as being notoriously scornful of the claims made for the 'realism' of narrative forms representing time in terms of a continuous chronological sequence (as opposed to descriptions of 'fragments' of phenomenally apprehended experience), Claude Simon has a marked aversion for novels that rely upon the concept of the 'character'. The mobilisation of 'des types sociaux ou psychologiques' within the deterministic causal framework of a 'plot' can only produce, he says, species of moral fables. 2 As a reader, Simon prefers works of a 'biographical' kind, a broad category in which he includes Rousseau's Confessions, Chateaubriand's Mémoires d'outre-tombe, Stendhal's Vie de Henry Brulard and above all A la recherche du temps perdu. Real lives, when written-that is, transformed into texts rather than simply 'narrated'-'présentent mille fois plus de complexité, de richesses et de subtilités fascinantes que les vies fictives mises en scène dans les soi-disant romans d'imagination'. 3 Chateaubriand and Proust are, for Simon, 'les plus somptueux prosateurs de la langue française' 4 not only because their writings reveal the complexities and the contradictions of 'experience', when remembered and transformed by writing, but because the work on language-in language-also reveals the part played in biography and autobiography by the formal requirements of narrative and rhetoric common to all the narrative arts. Simon's observations on (auto)biography are the fruit not only of many years of reading, but above all of his own experience as a novelist increasingly ready, in recent times, to allow that the majority of his novels are themselves 'practically autobiographical'. 5 It is therefore increasingly urgent to examine, within the terms of the renewed critical and theoretical debate over the relationship between autobiography and other narrative forms, the apparently conflicting claims of a concept of writing based upon the notion of fictional 'production', to which Simon still adheres, and one that remains in contact with 'experience' and its historical contexts. 6 It is not, however, a question of simply filling in, around a corpus of fictional writings, a framework of facts, references, or anecdotes, for as several recent studies show, Simon's novels raise a series of problems concerning the status of the very discourses-of 'history', of 'science', of 'theory'-that we appeal to in order to make the distinctions that separate 'fact' from 'fiction'. 7 What is more, while much critical attention has been given to the theoretical and aesthetic implications of this aspect of Simon's work, it has been difficult, through lack of biographical evidence or more detailed autobiographical statements, to put the texts and their 'contexts' together and assess how the autobiographical dimension might affect our reading of what remain, nevertheless, 'novels'. In the first part of this article I shall consequently look at some of the ways in which Simon's early novels confront the key issue of the narrative representation of time, since the opposition between 'fiction' and 'autobiography', if it supposes distinctions between fictional facts and true ones, clearly depends upon a prior distinction between fiction and history which is itself dependent upon the assumption that we can distinguish between representations of 'real' and 'unreal' (or invented) temporalities. Making use of autobiographical material generously provided by Claude Simon, I shall then examine a passage from Leçon de choses that appears to me to highlight these problems in a particularly acute way. Finally, I shall indicate why, in the light of what these comparisons between fictionalized autobiography and direct autobiographical statements reveal, we should examine carefully the assumptions concerning the representation of temporality conveyed by the proposition that it is 'natural [...] to think of the self in narrative mode' 8 Already, in Le Tricheur, Gulliver, Le Sacre du printemps or Le Vent narrative and 'thought' about the self are shown to combine in a far from 'natural' way; indeed what some critics have referred to as Simon's 'obsession' with passing time, change and death in these novels is demonstrably linked to a persistent doubt concerning the possibility of representing time at all, let alone understanding its role in the constitution of a 'self'. I shall indicate latter on how this might key in with the specific problematics of autobiography as a genre, but for the moment it is enough to note that the overburdened plots of the early novels, with their loose ends, and the gloomy metaphysical commentary which gave Simon the reputation of a pessimist also constitute an analytical and
Books by ANTHONY C H E A L PUGH
The Second World War in Literature, 1986
Several months after La route des Flandres appeared, Claude Simon received a letter from a fellow... more Several months after La route des Flandres appeared, Claude Simon received a letter from a fellow-survivor of the disaster of 1940. The letter came as a considerable surprise to Simon because it was immediately evident that it had been written by an officer whom Simon was convinced he had seen killed, together with the Colonel leading the remnants of his cavalry squadron, when they were ambushed near Sars-Poteries, on the road between Solre-le-Château and Avesnes-sur-Helpe, during the morning of 17 May. The author of the letter, the former Commandant Cuny, now a retired Colonel, was enthusiastic in his praise for the novel, despite an obvious reluctance to engage in a personal correspondence with someone who had been but a humble brigadier. However, despite chiding Simon for a minor inaccuracy concerning equestrian terminology, Colonel Cuny had clearly been impressed by the description of the final ambush, and some other scenes. The novel as a whole had caused him to relive a period in his past; he had been literally "stupefied" by it.1 When a critic tentatively raised the question of this letter during a discussion following the first paper given at the 1971 colloquium on the nouveau roman, alluding to it as evidence of the inadequacy of approaches to Simon's novels which concentrated exclusively upon what the theoretical spokesman for the movement called the "literal dimension" (meaning the text as a space within which material signs are organised), the suggestion was derisively dismissed as further proof of gullible readers' inveterate habit of projecting themselves into what the same theoretician had baptised " the referential illusion" .2 The possibility that certain sequences in La route des Flandres "referred" to "quelque chose de réel" having thus been vetoed, the discussion moved on to the consideration of the problems involved in analysing descriptions of more obviously fictional entities, notably the wedding cake in Flaubert's Madame Bovary. It was clear from remarks made by Alain Robbe-Grillet, however, that the issues raised by the letter were potentially troublesome for the theoretical camp, for while he maliciously profited from Simon s absence from the first discussion to classify him as a writer who needed the support of references of various kinds more than the other writers whose work was to be examined, he also admitted that all were to differing degrees "tempted" by what he called "un certain passé référentialiste" .3 Clearly, not only "referents", but the past in both its collective and personal dimensions were areas with which the "New Novel" should not concern itself, since their evocation would threaten the anti-realist thrust of the new writing, and endanger the ideal of totally self-referential fictions to which it seemed, at the time, to be committed. Since the ...
Conference Presentations by ANTHONY C H E A L PUGH
Lecture de Roger Vailland, 1990
Cette lecture du roman de 1964 démontre au niveau du texte toute sortes de mécanismes de producti... more Cette lecture du roman de 1964 démontre au niveau du texte toute sortes de mécanismes de production scripturale chers aux théoriciens du nouveau roman, et révèle une dimension intertextuelle parfois surprenante. La dimension référentielle de la fiction se double aussi d'une dimension imaginaire assez étrange, presque surréaliste, qui ouvre la voie à une lecture psychanalytique.
France 1940: Literary and historical reactions to defeat., 1991
A paper given at a colloquium in Durham organised by the author and published in the series Durha... more A paper given at a colloquium in Durham organised by the author and published in the series Durham French Colloquies, no. 3.
The Second World War in Literature, 1986
'Le désastre ou l'invérifiable, l'impropre' Maurice Blanchot La Route des Flandres,' de Claude Si... more 'Le désastre ou l'invérifiable, l'impropre' Maurice Blanchot La Route des Flandres,' de Claude Simon, se détache de l'ensemble des romans qui ont pour arrière-plan la défaite militaire de la France comme une oeuvre dont l'intégrité intellectuelle et artistique atteint un niveau rare. Le roman se concentre sur quelques épisodes de la retraite qui a suivie les combats de la région de Namur et de Dinant, où les stratèges alliés avaient souhaité que le front se fixe, sur un secteur le long de la rive ouest de la Meuse défendu par la neuvième armée française, commandée par le Général Corap. La chaotique marche en arrière des rescapés du 31e régiment de Dragons (que l'on avait envoyé en avant combattre à cheval aviation et blindés n'est cependant pas directement décrite : le lent recul de la petite bande de survivants qui tentent de revenir en arrière vers une ligne française déjà inexistante, suivant les traces des V et VIIe divisions blindées du XVe régiment de Panzers du Général Hoth (ce dernier sous le commandement d'un Général Rommel encore inconnu) est dépeint comme ayant lieu dans un paysage printanier étrangement normal.2 La guerre semble déjà finie ; elle n'est perceptible qu'en termes d'effets: cadavres d'hommes et de chevaux, restes de véhicules carbonisés, et une odeur persistante de décomposition et de caoutchouc brûlé. Seul un duel d'artillerie intermittent, au lointain, indique que la bataille continue ailleurs. Le lecteur de La Route des Flandres est placé dans une situation quelque peu semblable à celle des cavaliers: il n'y a aucune référence spatiale ou temporelle sûre dans le texte; aucun des noms célèbres que j'ai mentionnés à l'instant n'y figure non plus. Le roman se présente davantage comme un commentaire sur la guerre en général que comme le récit, en forme de fiction, d'un évènement spécifique. En effet, ce qui fait de La Route des Flandres beaucoup plus qu'un autre roman "authentique" sur la guerre, basé sur les souvenirs personnels d'un écrivain, c'est la façon dont il se focalise sur des questions cruciales qui, à la lumière de nos préoccupations modernes avec les structures narratives et le fonctionnement du langage figural, se trouvent centrales à notre compréhension de la façon dont s'écrit l'histoire et se fabrique la connaissance historique.
Je n'ai pas le projet d'écrire ma vie. Ceci dit, qu'est-ce que je peux écrire en dehors de ce que... more Je n'ai pas le projet d'écrire ma vie. Ceci dit, qu'est-ce que je peux écrire en dehors de ce que j'ai senti, subi, imaginé ? Même l'imaginaire est autobiographique. 1 As well as being notoriously scornful of the claims made for the 'realism' of narrative forms representing time in terms of a continuous chronological sequence (as opposed to descriptions of 'fragments' of phenomenally apprehended experience), Claude Simon has a marked aversion for novels that rely upon the concept of the 'character'. The mobilisation of 'des types sociaux ou psychologiques' within the deterministic causal framework of a 'plot' can only produce, he says, species of moral fables. 2 As a reader, Simon prefers works of a 'biographical' kind, a broad category in which he includes Rousseau's Confessions, Chateaubriand's Mémoires d'outre-tombe, Stendhal's Vie de Henry Brulard and above all A la recherche du temps perdu. Real lives, when written-that is, transformed into texts rather than simply 'narrated'-'présentent mille fois plus de complexité, de richesses et de subtilités fascinantes que les vies fictives mises en scène dans les soi-disant romans d'imagination'. 3 Chateaubriand and Proust are, for Simon, 'les plus somptueux prosateurs de la langue française' 4 not only because their writings reveal the complexities and the contradictions of 'experience', when remembered and transformed by writing, but because the work on language-in language-also reveals the part played in biography and autobiography by the formal requirements of narrative and rhetoric common to all the narrative arts. Simon's observations on (auto)biography are the fruit not only of many years of reading, but above all of his own experience as a novelist increasingly ready, in recent times, to allow that the majority of his novels are themselves 'practically autobiographical'. 5 It is therefore increasingly urgent to examine, within the terms of the renewed critical and theoretical debate over the relationship between autobiography and other narrative forms, the apparently conflicting claims of a concept of writing based upon the notion of fictional 'production', to which Simon still adheres, and one that remains in contact with 'experience' and its historical contexts. 6 It is not, however, a question of simply filling in, around a corpus of fictional writings, a framework of facts, references, or anecdotes, for as several recent studies show, Simon's novels raise a series of problems concerning the status of the very discourses-of 'history', of 'science', of 'theory'-that we appeal to in order to make the distinctions that separate 'fact' from 'fiction'. 7 What is more, while much critical attention has been given to the theoretical and aesthetic implications of this aspect of Simon's work, it has been difficult, through lack of biographical evidence or more detailed autobiographical statements, to put the texts and their 'contexts' together and assess how the autobiographical dimension might affect our reading of what remain, nevertheless, 'novels'. In the first part of this article I shall consequently look at some of the ways in which Simon's early novels confront the key issue of the narrative representation of time, since the opposition between 'fiction' and 'autobiography', if it supposes distinctions between fictional facts and true ones, clearly depends upon a prior distinction between fiction and history which is itself dependent upon the assumption that we can distinguish between representations of 'real' and 'unreal' (or invented) temporalities. Making use of autobiographical material generously provided by Claude Simon, I shall then examine a passage from Leçon de choses that appears to me to highlight these problems in a particularly acute way. Finally, I shall indicate why, in the light of what these comparisons between fictionalized autobiography and direct autobiographical statements reveal, we should examine carefully the assumptions concerning the representation of temporality conveyed by the proposition that it is 'natural [...] to think of the self in narrative mode' 8 Already, in Le Tricheur, Gulliver, Le Sacre du printemps or Le Vent narrative and 'thought' about the self are shown to combine in a far from 'natural' way; indeed what some critics have referred to as Simon's 'obsession' with passing time, change and death in these novels is demonstrably linked to a persistent doubt concerning the possibility of representing time at all, let alone understanding its role in the constitution of a 'self'. I shall indicate latter on how this might key in with the specific problematics of autobiography as a genre, but for the moment it is enough to note that the overburdened plots of the early novels, with their loose ends, and the gloomy metaphysical commentary which gave Simon the reputation of a pessimist also constitute an analytical and
The Second World War in Literature, 1986
Several months after La route des Flandres appeared, Claude Simon received a letter from a fellow... more Several months after La route des Flandres appeared, Claude Simon received a letter from a fellow-survivor of the disaster of 1940. The letter came as a considerable surprise to Simon because it was immediately evident that it had been written by an officer whom Simon was convinced he had seen killed, together with the Colonel leading the remnants of his cavalry squadron, when they were ambushed near Sars-Poteries, on the road between Solre-le-Château and Avesnes-sur-Helpe, during the morning of 17 May. The author of the letter, the former Commandant Cuny, now a retired Colonel, was enthusiastic in his praise for the novel, despite an obvious reluctance to engage in a personal correspondence with someone who had been but a humble brigadier. However, despite chiding Simon for a minor inaccuracy concerning equestrian terminology, Colonel Cuny had clearly been impressed by the description of the final ambush, and some other scenes. The novel as a whole had caused him to relive a period in his past; he had been literally "stupefied" by it.1 When a critic tentatively raised the question of this letter during a discussion following the first paper given at the 1971 colloquium on the nouveau roman, alluding to it as evidence of the inadequacy of approaches to Simon's novels which concentrated exclusively upon what the theoretical spokesman for the movement called the "literal dimension" (meaning the text as a space within which material signs are organised), the suggestion was derisively dismissed as further proof of gullible readers' inveterate habit of projecting themselves into what the same theoretician had baptised " the referential illusion" .2 The possibility that certain sequences in La route des Flandres "referred" to "quelque chose de réel" having thus been vetoed, the discussion moved on to the consideration of the problems involved in analysing descriptions of more obviously fictional entities, notably the wedding cake in Flaubert's Madame Bovary. It was clear from remarks made by Alain Robbe-Grillet, however, that the issues raised by the letter were potentially troublesome for the theoretical camp, for while he maliciously profited from Simon s absence from the first discussion to classify him as a writer who needed the support of references of various kinds more than the other writers whose work was to be examined, he also admitted that all were to differing degrees "tempted" by what he called "un certain passé référentialiste" .3 Clearly, not only "referents", but the past in both its collective and personal dimensions were areas with which the "New Novel" should not concern itself, since their evocation would threaten the anti-realist thrust of the new writing, and endanger the ideal of totally self-referential fictions to which it seemed, at the time, to be committed. Since the ...
Lecture de Roger Vailland, 1990
Cette lecture du roman de 1964 démontre au niveau du texte toute sortes de mécanismes de producti... more Cette lecture du roman de 1964 démontre au niveau du texte toute sortes de mécanismes de production scripturale chers aux théoriciens du nouveau roman, et révèle une dimension intertextuelle parfois surprenante. La dimension référentielle de la fiction se double aussi d'une dimension imaginaire assez étrange, presque surréaliste, qui ouvre la voie à une lecture psychanalytique.