Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Message from Claude Simon to Participants at the Conference held in May 1999
- Introduction: The Critical Reception of Claude Simon since the 1960s
- 1 Thinking History Otherwise: Fiction and the Sites of Memory in Claude Simon
- 2 (In)Commensurabilities: The Childhood of Events and the Shock of Encounter in Claude Simon
- 3 Instant Replays: The Reintegration of Traumatic Experience in Le Jardin des Plantes
- 4 The Dynamics of Conflict in the Novels of Claude Simon
- 5 Satire, Burlesque and Comedy in Claude Simon
- 6 The Garden of Forking Paths: Intertextuality and Le Jardin des Plantes
- 7 A partir du Jardin des Plantes: Claude Simon's Recapitulations
- 8 Supplementary Organs: Media and Machinery in the Late Novels of Claude Simon
- 9 One Step Further: Claude Simon's Photographies 1937–1970
- 10 Truth, Verbiage and Ecriture in Le Jardin des Plantes
- Bibliography
- Notes on Contributors
9 - One Step Further: Claude Simon's Photographies 1937–1970
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Message from Claude Simon to Participants at the Conference held in May 1999
- Introduction: The Critical Reception of Claude Simon since the 1960s
- 1 Thinking History Otherwise: Fiction and the Sites of Memory in Claude Simon
- 2 (In)Commensurabilities: The Childhood of Events and the Shock of Encounter in Claude Simon
- 3 Instant Replays: The Reintegration of Traumatic Experience in Le Jardin des Plantes
- 4 The Dynamics of Conflict in the Novels of Claude Simon
- 5 Satire, Burlesque and Comedy in Claude Simon
- 6 The Garden of Forking Paths: Intertextuality and Le Jardin des Plantes
- 7 A partir du Jardin des Plantes: Claude Simon's Recapitulations
- 8 Supplementary Organs: Media and Machinery in the Late Novels of Claude Simon
- 9 One Step Further: Claude Simon's Photographies 1937–1970
- 10 Truth, Verbiage and Ecriture in Le Jardin des Plantes
- Bibliography
- Notes on Contributors
Summary
[C]ette connaissance fragmentaire, incomplète, faite d'une addition de brèves images, elles-mêmes incomplètement appréhendées par la vision, de paroles, elles-mêmes mal saisies, de sensations, elles-mêmes mal définies, et tout cela vague, plein de trous, de vides, auxquels l'imagination et une approximative logique s'efforçaient de remédier par une suite de hasardeuses déductions […] (Le Vent, p.10)
Si, bien sûr, photographier, c'est fixer au moyen d'une image quelque chose qui s'est produit à un certain endroit et à un certain moment, cette image en soi a sa propre existence, indépendante de toute fonction mémorisante ou de conservation. (Photographies 1937–1970)
Published in 1992 and presenting prints of photographs taken between 1937 and 1970, Claude Simon's book Photographies 1937–1970 is itself a kind of retrospective. Moreover, the themes of Photographies are related to those which can be found in the novels of the period, particularly Le Vent, La Route des Flandres and Histoire. This essay will demonstrate that Simon's methods as a photographer offer a retrospective understanding of his art as a novelist and, in particular, of his treatment of the themes of reminiscence and the acquisition of memories. Retrospection is one of the fundamental procedures of his work. Album d'un amateur (1988), the second collection of photographs published by Simon, like the folio he recently assembled for the review Du, are splendid examples of this theme, as are the novels, Les Géorgiques, L'Acacia and, in particular, Le Jardin des Plantes, a masterly retrospective of his oeuvre by the author himself. In the preface to Photographies, Simon insists less on the commemorative power of photography than on its capacity to present concrete reality: ‘seule, à ma connaissance du moins, la photographie peut saisir et garder une trace de ce qui n'avait encore jamais été et ne sera plus jamais'.
The pages which follow will analyse the way in which the writer works with the photographs and the gaps between them, in order to build the structure of a book that makes sense by putting the viewer's observational powers to work. The importance of the notion of construction is revealed in a ‘diptych’ which figures in Photographies (pp. 86–87): the left panel is composed of a photograph of a wall made up of alternate rows of pebbles and bricks (Page d'écriture), while to the right we see a wall of undressed stone (Mur à Salses).
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- Information
- Claude SimonA Retrospective, pp. 168 - 182Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2002