Satire, burlesque and comedy are not primary characteristics of Simon's work. The subject matter of his novels derives not least from the trials and traumas of personal experience: the absence of his father, killed at the Front in 1914; the death of his mother when he was still a boy; early rejection of the Catholic faith in which he was brought up and of its secularised substitute, Marxism, which seduced so many young intellectuals of the inter-war years; above all, his personal experience of the debacle of 1940: eight days advancing then retreating on horseback before the German tanks, the annihilation of the regiment, the death in ambush of its colonel, Simon's own unaccountable survival. Hence flow many of the themes that dominate his fiction: war, death, grief and grieving, disillusionment, the meaning – if there is one – of history, and the fragmentary, haunting survival of experience in memory. Yet there is another side to Simon's work. The tragic tone of his novels is relieved not just by recurring delight in the sounds, smells, tastes and, above all, sights which the world offers in varied abundance. There are also moments of scrutiny of others and of the self, when judgements are passed, severe or clement, or when, from a distanced perspective, irony or humour lighten the load of history.

Since the publication of Les Géorgiques and L'Invitation critics have increasingly commented on Simon's sometimes stinging critique of linguistic usages, aesthetic principles, monolithic ideologies of progress and their flawed champions. Not until the mid-1990s, however, did critical reflection begin to respond to Stuart Sykes's plea for a ‘developed essay on parody, satire and irony’. Mária Minich Brewer set parody in the context of postmodernism, while Pierre Schoentjes studied situational and verbal irony in Les Géorgiques. Sykes's own remark that the tone of La Route des Flandres is ‘à mi-chemin entre la comédie et le tragique’ was taken up in two 1997 articles. Alexandre Didier used Bergson and Freud to analyse techniques of irony and humour in La Route des Flandres; Nathalie Piégay-Gros studied how parody and competing narrative voices in that novel tip epic into burlesque. Simon's own comments on this approach to his work have been few and relatively discouraging. He has expressed a distaste for verbal irony which, in the French tradition, as Schoentjes remarks, he tends to associate with the idea of mockery.

By the turn of the century Claude Simon had written fourteen novels and published a variety of shorter works including two volumes of photographs. His production spanned nearly sixty years, from Le Tricheur, begun in 1941 and published in 1945, to Le Jardin des Plantes (1997). Like Les Géorgiques and L'Acacia, which preceded it in 1981 and 1989, Le Jardin des Plantes is a work on a grand scale, at once a personal memoir and a sweeping historical fresco. Like them, it recapitulates many of the main themes of his oeuvre, reworks familiar incidents and motifs, and rewrites his literary and personal past. It also offers new insights into Simon's own conception of the relationship between autobiography and fiction, of that between his novels and the nouveau roman, and of his place in literary history. Thus Le Jardin des Plantes invites Simon's readers and critics to reflect anew on the whole turning constellation of his work in the light of this bright new star. In this spirit was the present collection of essays conceived: contributors were invited to look back over Simon's work and to open new avenues suggested by Le Jardin des Plantes. A number of the essays in this volume were given their first airing at a conference held in London in May 1999. It had been hoped that Claude Simon would attend the conference. In the event he was unable to do so; the trace of his intention is to be found in the encouraging and very generous message that precedes this introduction. The bearer of that message was Madame Simon, whose acute questioning sharpened the focus of various contributions and who in turn answered questions about just how in practice many of Claude Simon's later novels have been written, from manuscript, through successive typescripts – typed and discussed with her – and on to the correction of proofs. The purpose of this introduction is to set the volume in the broader context of Simon criticism and to give an outline of its contents.

Consideration of how in practice Simon's novels are written has not always been a characteristic of criticism devoted to his work. Indeed this focus contrasts sharply with the critical orthodoxy of earlier years. Within France, Simon's novels were for long seen in the context of the nouveau roman.