Berenice Bonhomme. Simon, la cinema. Villeneuve d'Ascq: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2011. Pp. 444. While a number of book-length scholarly works examine the influence of the graphic image, and of vision and visuality more generally, on the work of Simon, (1) the relationship between the Nobel prize-winning author's corpus and the has received comparatively scant attention. Over the last few years Berenice Bonhomme has effectively cornered this nascent sector of the Simon-studies market, publishing no less than four monographs, over 1,000 pages in all, on the place of film in the writer's oeuvre. In addition to a study devoted to the little-known cinematic adaptation of Simon's Triptyque ('Triptyque' de Simon: du livre au film, une esthetique du passage, Paris: Presses Universitaires de Paris-Sorbonne, 2005), a look at her subsequent publications might initially suggest that Bonhomme has written the same book three times over: Simon, l'ecriture cinematographique (Paris: L'Harmattan, 2005); Simon, une ecriture en (New York, Oxford, and Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2010); Simon, la (Villeneuve d'Ascq: PU du Septentrion, 2011). Thankfully, for Simon scholars and enthusiasts alike, this is not the case. Despite a number of inevitable redundancies that crop up between them--which might prompt readers to wonder why Bonhomme does not include references to her two previously published titles anywhere in the extensive bibliography that accompanies her most recent volume, not even under the section on Simon and le lien avec l'image--each part of this hermeneutic triptych ultimately merits its own reading. Where the first essay, Simon, l'ecriture cinematographique, likens the novelist to a filmmaker concerned with techniques like mise en scene and montage--suggesting that Simon's particularly cinematographic style, especially in La Route des Flandres and Triptyque, is greatly informed by the grammar of cinema--Bonhomme's 2010 monograph, Simon, une ecriture en cinema, turns its attentions more specifically to the author's filmic optics, on how the and cinematic spectatorship serve as models for Simon's take on perception, cognition, and ways of seeing. Bonhomme's latest (will it be the last?) volume focuses on the both as a thematic motif and as a generator of narrative. In lively, lucidly written prose, Bonhomme mines Simon's entire corpus for examples that illustrate how the novelist's interest in and for the nourish his writing. At the same time, she argues that Simon's fascination for film must be considered within the context of his personal experience with the movie-making business. Though the German production company that collaborated with Simon to craft a short film version of Triptyque succeeded in releasing it in 1975, just two years after the novel's publication, Simon was pleased neither with the process nor with final product. The earnest yet ultimately failed attempt to bring La Route des Flandres to the big screen--a venture that petered out after more than thirty years--proved even more frustrating, and helps to explain the sense of skepticism with regard to the industry that Bonhomme senses throughout Simon's work. As she suggests in Simon, la cinema, the novelist's disenchantment with the world of film production ultimately tempers and problematizes the underlying passion for the movies that subtends so much of his writing: Fascination, rejet, plaisir, mepris, espoir et deception, tout cela se mele en une tension cinematographique interne a l'oeuvre litteraire (416). The first of the book's three sections, Claude Simon spectateur, locates the origins of this mix of attraction and aversion for the in Simon's tendency to associate the medium with adolescence. Bonhomme posits that Simon was a child of the cinema whose celluloid memories would later make their way into his work. …
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Jan 11, 2024
Sri Wijayanti 
Open Access
