Claude Simon: allées et venues — Actes du colloque international de Perpignan, 14–15 mars 2003

Abstract

Études réunies par Jean-Yves Laurichesse. Presses universitaires de Perpignan, 2004. 266 pp. Pb €15.00. Like so many conference proceedings, this edited volume offers a very focused collection of angles on the subject in question — Claude Simon's most recent novel Le Tramway (2001) — and as such provides a useful introduction to this work. In the prefatory remarks, Jean-Yves Laurichesse pinpoints the rich resonance of the title of Simon's latest novel as ‘à la fois machine mémorable et riche métaphore […] le fil conducteur du colloque’. Indeed, the three sections of the volume entitled ‘mobiles’, ‘passages’ and ‘histoires’ take up this resonance to cover various aspects of Simon's Le Tramway. Whether literal or figurative ‘transports’, narrative passage or digression, whether movement or circular stasis, familial or universalizing image of death of the generations who have gone before, all these are central preoccupations of the novel and its critics in this volume. Where the collection's focus is a strength, its weakness is uneven critical quality and depth. Although there is some range and effort to connect Le Tramway to Simon's œuvre (for example, in the last essay by Didier Alexandre, ‘Du Tricheur au Tramway, d'un événement l'autre?’, or Alastair Duncan's ‘Allées et venues familiales chez Claude Simon’, the first essay in the section ‘Histoires’), comparison is more commonly to wider issues, theories and fields. Wolfram Nitsch's opening essay explores forms of transport in the modernist novel with Le Tramway then read in the heritage of Huysmans, the Goncourts, Proust, Aragon, Leiris and so on, while Jean Duffy uses Simon's latest work to illustrate a small (and arguably rather arbitrary) selection of anthropological texts on rite and rites of passage. Metka Zupančič's essay, entitled ‘Hermès psychopompe: le “comme” des palimpsestes’, continues her interest in mythocritical approaches to reading text, but is probably the worst offender of the volume for its over-reliance on theory as a grille imposed on Simon's text in ways which many will find highly questionable. Given that most of the contributors here have a track record of publication on Simon, the lack of secondary critical reference to the many previous articles on Simon treating the themes and formal elements covered in this volume may be a particular disappointment to researchers on Simon. In all, then, this is an energetic, but rather superficial, collection of essays in unanimous critical agreement that Le Tramway is indeed representative of the concerns of Simon's œuvre.