Claude Simon et l’improbable récit de l’histoire

Abstract

Reconstitutions, hypotheses, corrections, conjectures, analogies, speculations…: these are the forms of an improbable account of History in the work of Claude Simon. Starting from snippets, traces, fragments, received accounts, and scattered documents, writing attempts to say what it does not know, what it knows it will never know, and from this very un-knowing all writing proceeds, against any positivism, against every certainty. What are the strategies deployed? What implicit forms of historiography are mobilized or rejected? How does the book's very organization circumvent the impossibility confronting it? From one book to the next, Simon solicits the traces, documents, archives, and other “remains” of the History placed in fragments in his narrative investigation. Always finding his own techniques insufficient, his methods evolve throughout his work.