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
1 - Thinking History Otherwise: Fiction and the Sites of Memory in Claude Simon
- 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
Ce qui constitute [les lieux de mémoire] est un jeu de la mémoire et de l'histoire, une interaction des deux facteurs qui aboutit à leur surdétermination réciproque… Seuls d'entre les livres d'histoire sont lieux de mémoire ceux qui se fondent sur un remaniement même de la mémoire… Même chose des Mémoires, qui sont des lieux de mémoire… parce qu'ils compliquent le simple exercice de la mémoire d'un jeux d'interrogation sur la mémoire elle-même.
Pierre NoraNous avons fait de quelques livres… comme la Recherche du temps perdu, des lieux de mémoire essentiels, parce que ce sont eux, c'est la littérature, qui nous aide à penser la mémoire autrement que sur le modèle de l'histoire.
Antoine CompagnonIn his multi-volume collection, Les Lieux de mémoire, Pierre Nora describes the contemporary period as having at the same time both a deficiency and surplus of memory. Surplus of memory in the sense that never before has it apparently been so easy to inscribe, store and retrieve memories of all sorts, both private and official, individual and collective. And never before have there been so many different types of archives and so many different forms of memory being stored. Also, and more important, never has there been such a demand for memories, such a determined will to remember, or such a broad consensus concerning the need for memory, the need not just for the ‘great men and women' of history but for all individuals, no matter how insignificant, to gather, record and store their memories and family histories for themselves, their families and posterity. As Nora puts it, ‘produire de l'archive est l'impératif de l'époque’.
Such a surplus of memory may not, however, be as positive a contribution to the diversification and expansion of history as it might at first appear, for even though the decentralisation and democratisation of archives might be considered a positive development, Nora fears that the storage of information has increased so prodigiously and without reason that we now suffer as much as benefit from what he calls ‘le gonflement hypertrophique de la fonction de mémoire’.
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- Claude SimonA Retrospective, pp. 22 - 38Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2002