The Novel as Textual Wandering: An Interview with Claude Simon

Abstract

This interview began without a premeditated topic. I have known Claude Simon for some twenty years and we met again by chance in Paris in May 1985. I took this occasion to discuss with him his writing and art in the intellectual climate of 1985. I was particularly interested in his reactions to a number of reservations that had appeared in the French press on the New Novel and Claude Simon's own production. Robbe-Grillet had just observed in The Mirror That Returns that the eighties are characterized by a strong reaction ... against every attempt to break free from the norms of the traditional expression-representation model, adding that innovation could only recede in the face of a wave of 'back to the past' that surges on us from everywhere (Le Miroir qui revient [Paris: Minuit, 1984] 9). Where did Claude Simon see himself in this new atmosphere? How was he affected by it? How had his perspective on his work and on literature evolved with the passage of time? At times the line of questioning offered Simon a resistance from which he could calibrate his answers to give them the desired weight. In this interview Simon presents, in precise and sharp lines, the conception of an object-book, or rather a combine-novel, just as Robert Rauschenberg endowed us with the combine-painting. Although this interview took place as a live and spontaneous exchange, I gave Simon the opportunity to revise the transcription. His revisions have been extensive in some instances, but any resulting gap between question and answer is easily offset by the depth that the answers have gained. Claude Simon, who had been on the Nobel Prize Committee's short list for the past few years, became the laureate for the 1985 Nobel Prize in Literature.