Repetition, recapitulation, textual departures

Faithful readers of Claude Simon's extensive fictional oeuvre will sense, at first, that they are in familiar territory as they begin to peruse Le Jardin des Plantes. Not only does the central traumatic event of the novelist's life – his strange participation/non-participation in the rapid defeat of the French army in the Second World War – occupy centre stage here, as it did in the Reixach cycle, but the overarching theme of order versus disorder inhabits the pages of this 1997 work with the same intensity as in the earlier writings. The liminary quotation for Le Jardin des Plantes, taken from Montaigne, seems, at first glance, to be a repetition, with a slight tonal variation, of the liminary passage, taken from Rilke, which frames Histoire (1967):

In both passages the emphasis is on the difficulty, perhaps even the futility, of finding or creating a ‘design' in one's life, of bringing forth some kind of unity out of fragmentation. Montaigne's words ‘lopins’ and ‘parcelles’ remind one, inevitably, of Rilke's ‘en morceaux’, and Montaigne's evocation of the human being's constitution as being fundamentally ‘informe et diverse’ echoes Rilke's generalisation of our falling to pieces in our very attempt to organise that enigmatic ‘cela’ which submerges us: in each case, we have difficulty putting both ourselves and that ‘cela’ exterior to ourselves which we attempt to mould and form, together. There is, in the creative process, a strain towards unity that comes up against our own fragility as humans, our own tendency to (in all senses of this expression) fall apart.

I am suggesting, therefore, that the reading habits we have gained in analysing novels such as La Route des Flandres, Histoire and Les Géorgiques, can be put to good use as we encounter Le Jardin des Plantes, that the thematic centrality of the war experience and of the order/ disorder polarity as well as the temporal fragmentation and dispersion that characterise Simon's writing in general have as a first effect that of familiarity.