The Flanders Road by Claude Simon
The great French postwar novel in a new translation by Richard Howard
By Claude Simon, translated from the French by Richard Howard, introduction by Jerry W. Carlson
208 pages. NYRB Classics. $16.95.
Is The Flanders Road a nouveau roman?1
To answer that question, of course, one would have to know what a nouveau roman is, and that itself is quite the puzzle. A few years ago, the commendable book blogger Obooki defined a nouveau roman as anything which belonged to one or more of these five categories (I quote):
A French novel written post-1950, commonly understood to be a nouveau roman.
A French novel written post-1950, commonly misunderstood to be a nouveau roman, or which could be argued as such.
A precursor of either 1) or 2)
Anything French, post-1950, which has been translated by either a) Dalkey Archive, or b) John Calder
Julio Cortázar
The Flanders Road belongs not just to category 1) but also to category 4), as it first appeared in English via the publishing house John Calder. The edition I’m reviewing in this newsletter comes courtesy of New York Review of Books Classics and was translated by Richard Howard (I do not know who translated the John Calder version).
The nouveau roman was once at the center of literary culture. As a recent essay by Ben Libman informs us, “the term "Nouveau Roman" appears in more than 70 Time review articles” in the 1960s and 70s.2 Before you take this as a straightforward example of a lost era of mass popularity for avante-garde culture, consider that Time magazine most often derided the nouveau roman, as Libman recounts, for its “depthlessness.” Libman also informs us that the nouveau roman has been incorporated into American universities’ curriculum of “French Theory.”
Whatever The Flanders Road is as a novel, it is not without depth, and it is certainly not a novel which prioritizes theory. It is a novel full of life: dirty, grimy, surprising, depressing, hilarious, confusing, erotic, violent human life. It has very long sentences, where the accumulation of sensory details, stray thoughts, and curious digressions all combine to form impressions, rather than descriptions - and yet the experience is a much realer one than if the novel were told via an omniscient third person narrator.
Through a non-chronological narrative, The Flanders Road presents us with three distinct threads that are unwound in the narrative’s tangled plot: the wartime experiences of Georges, a member of a cavalry regiment during France's fall to the Nazis in 1940; the pre and postwar events surrounding the wife and eventual widow of de Reixach, who fights alongside Georges during the war; and the possible suicide of one of de Reixach's ancestors, an 18th century nobleman. Georges is himself a distant relative of de Reixach, though not of so high a class and not as high-ranking in the military. When de Reixach dies in a foolhardy military maneuver, Georges wonders whether suicide is something that runs in the de Reixach family. He also, because this is a French novel, seduces de Reixach's widow.
For a war novel, there is very little killing or brutality, and a lot of discomfort and confusion. The characters are all afflicted with various psychic wounds, though they do not quite have what we would today call post-traumatic stress. It is more that they are suffering from pre-traumatic stress - the trauma here being not the specific trauma of war but rather the universal trauma, the trauma of death. Late in the novel, Georges decides that the reason de Reixach’s 18th century ancestor was driven to suicide is “not war not the classical destruction or extermination of one of the two armies but rather the disappearance the absorption by the primal nothingness or the primal All of what a week before were still regiments batteries squadrons of men.” Death, not violence, is what haunts the characters.
That being said, The Flanders Road can be very funny. At one point, de Reixach strides on his horse in an open field near enemy positions in a manifestation of his suicidal world-weariness. But a nearby officer, thinking that de Reixach is merely adopting the "ne plus ultra of elegance and chic for a cavalry officer," slavishly imitates him. Such misapprehensions are woven into the novel, where nothing is portrayed “objectively” and everything is distorted by the bias and preoccupations of at least one character. Instead of actual depictions of events, we get characters debating - within themselves and with others - what actual events mean.
The contrast between the infinity of interpretations and the finality of death is reflected by the style of The Flanders Road. Its extended sentences are marvels of ingenuity, which produce inventive, surprising phrases after every comma, yet the effect of all this accumulation of language is one of contraction rather than expansion. Like matter circling a black hole, ideas are stretched and inverted and broken apart, but cannot escape their inevitable endpoint. It is part of Simon's genius that he can make these obsessive repetitions always seem fresh, as when, lying on a hotel room bed after having sex with de Reixach’s wife, Georges makes out in the darkness the closet mirror “doomed never to hold anything except its own dusy void, the dusty coffin of the reflected ghosts of thousands of lovers [...] thousands of embraces absorbed, mingled in the glaucous depths of the cold, unalterable and virginal mirror.”
Having previously asserted that The Flanders Road was not reliant on theory, you might think that the paragraphs I just wrote belie that assertion. But one need not have read Spinoza, Blanchot, or Sarte in order to experience The Flanders Road to its fullest. The novel's pleasures are as palpable as those of a novel of Dickens. Though I do not know French, I will say that Richard Howard's translation is magnificent. Many of the passages, if they appeared in a novel written in English today, would crown their author as one of the finest prose stylists of their generation.
I will conclude with one more example of Simon’s transfixing prose and Howard’s skill at putting it into English: "Then Georges no longer listening to her, no longer hearing her, sealed again in the stifling darkness with that thing on his chest, that weight which wasn't the warm female flesh but merely air as if the air was lying there too lifeless with that tenfold hundredfold weight of corpses, the heavy corpse of the black air stretched out at full length on top of him it's mouth pressed to his own…"
There is also the question, “should the words nouveau roman be capitalized?” From my brief research, you could find plenty of people both capitalizing it and not capitalizing it, though capitalizing it seems to be the more popular option. Jerry W. Carlson doesn’t capitalize it in his introduction to The Flanders Road, so that is how I’ll write it for this review.
By contrast, a search for the term “autofiction” on the website of the New York Review of Books provides you with only 29 results - though you get about 70 results for the New Yorker and 21 for Time Magazine.