Spotlight on … Claude Simon Conducting Bodies (1970)

 

‘I read an awesome book and I want to tell you about it. Originally written in French by Claude Simon, and titled Les Corps conducteurs, the translation I read (by Helen R. Lane) is titled Conducting Bodies. It was originally published in 1970, but my version was published by Grove Press in 1974. Sadly, it appears to now be out of print — but used copies are out there.

‘I stumbled across it a few weeks ago at a used bookstore here in Tallahassee. It wasn’t like I saw it on the shelf and went “Oh yes! Oh my god, I can’t believe I found this.” It was more like, “Claude Simon sounds vaguely familiar…wasn’t he associated with Alain Robbe-Grillet and the Nouveau Roman movement?” I picked it up and did as I always do: I read the first sentence and prepared to put it back on the shelf if that sentence was not exceptional:

In the display window a dozen identical female legs are lined up in a row, feet up, the thighs lopped off at the hip joint resting on the floor, the knees slightly bent, as though the legs had been removed from some chorus of dancers at the precise moment that they are all kicking in unison, and put there in the window, just as they were, or perhaps snipped out, in monotonous multiplicity, from some advertisement showing a pretty girl in her slip pulling on a stocking, sitting on a pouf or on the edge of an unmade bed, her torso leaning backward, with the leg that she is pulling the stocking over raised up high, and a kitten, or a curly-haired puppy gleefully standing on its hind legs, barking, with its pink tongue sticking out.

‘Okay, talk about badass opening sentences. This one does much of what I look for: it creates mystery, it builds on tangents, it avoids introducing character, and it avoids setting up a story. Basically, it conveys to me that this writer is more interested in sentences than stories – which is what I look for in literature. I had to buy it. I paid $3.95.

‘For those unfamiliar with the Nouveau Roman (or, as it’s been translated, The New Novel) basically it was a predominantly French experimental literary movement in the 1950s-60s that sought to challenge the Aristotelian approach to novel writing. To get the full scoop, check out Robbe-Grillet’s slim little firecracker For A New Novel (which I would argue – aside from being informative re: the Nouveau Roman — is one of the most important works of literary theory ever written).

‘Anyway, this book, Conducting Bodies, is most definitely written in the Nouveau Roman style – you can tell after about two pages because of the strange camera-eye narrative p.o.v, overemphasis on physical details, the absence of any kind of interiority, the meticulous almost mathematic obsession with objects in space, the continual repetition of particular words or phrases with slight deviations: the way words get recycled in various arrangements as if you are reading something through a kaleidoscope, the way the narrative breathes akin to how a camera lens breathes: it moves in and out of focus, it shifts from foreground to background, from the insides of someone’s body to the landscape that person is inhabiting. Here is a cool example, from page 16-17):

She is a young woman with blond hair pulled back into a bun at the nape of her neck, dressed in a blouse with the ends tied in a knot below her breasts, her hips, buttocks, and thighs imprisoned in a pair of tightfitting Bermuda shorts in an apple-green and lemon-yellow flower print. A leather bag dangles from a long strap slung over her shoulder. Between the knotted blouse-ends and the waistband of the Bermuda shorts a patch of bare skin is visible, tanned a tawny gold. Situated beneath the diaphragm and weighing between 1500 and 2000 grams, the liver is approximately 28 centimeters wide, 16 centimeters thick, and 8 centimeters high. It occupies all of the right hypochondrium, and extends a short distance over into the left hypochondrium. It is reddish brown in color; its consistency is firm but friable. It is marked with the imprint of contiguous organs. The hepatic artery (carrying oxygenated blood) and the portal vein (carrying blood from the digestive tract and nutritive elements which the liver chemically converts) feed into the pedicle located on its lower surface, from which the hepatic veins arise, carrying off bile to the choledoch and then to the intestine. The tall silhouettes of the skyscrapers are all of a uniform color, a dark, almost solid brown.

‘Such a wicked movement from observing the woman’s body to discussing her internal organs to observing the objects in the landscape. And this is the way the entire novel moves. There are no paragraphs and no chapters. The text is a 191 page block of text.

‘I’m not the kind of person who is interested in what a book is about, I’m much more interested in how something is written, but for those of you who are interested in what a book is about all I can tell you is that there is a sick man and there is a telephone and there’s a convention in which Spanish speakers are discussing magical realism. Oh, and I think the color yellow is pretty important, too.

‘This is the first book by Claude Simon I’ve ever read, but I’d be interested to read more. Dude won the Nobel prize in 1985. Here is a quote from his fantastic acceptance lecture:

“If (…) someone were to ask me”, wrote Paul Valéry, “if someone were to worry himself (as happens, and sometimes intensely) about what I’ve meant to say (…), I reply that I haven’t wanted to say anything, but wanted to make something, and that it’s this intention of making which has wanted what I’ve said.” I could take up this reply by point. If the writer’s array of motivations is like a wide-open fan, the need to be recognized, which André Lwoff speaks of, is perhaps not the most futile, demanding as it in the first place does a self-recognition, which in turn implies a “making”, a “doing” (I make – I produce – therefore I am), whether it is a question of building a bridge, a ship, of bringing in a harvest or of composing a string quartet.

— Christopher Higgs, HTML Giant

 

_______
Manuscript pages

 

_____
Further

Association des Lecteurs de Claude Simon
Obituary: Claude Simon
Claude Simon, The Art of Fiction No. 128
Claude Simon @ goodreads
Philippe Sollers – Claude Simon, prix Nobel d’évasion
L’ancêtre révolutionnaire : le cas Claude Simon
Claude Simon: Narrativities Without Narrative
Claude Simon: We missed his centenary — don’t miss his books!
Language, the Uncanny, and the Shapes of History in Claude Simon’s The Flanders Road
Myth and Historico-Primordial Memory in Claude Simon’s “La Route Des Flandres”
Buy ‘Conducting Bodies’

 

_____
Extras

Prix Nobel Claude Simon

Extraits d’entretiens avec Claude Simon sur la littérature et le cinéma (1966)

Claude Simon : Entretien avec Alain Veinstein, en 1988 (France Culture)

Claude Simon : extrait du Discours de Stockholm (1985)

 

_______
Interview
from The Review of Contemporary Fiction

 

ANTHONY CHEAL PUGH: Claude Simon, a remark you made during our conversations in Dublin a year or so ago particularly interested me. You said that you did not consider that French writers were very strong in the field of the novel, but that they excelled, on the other hand, at autobiography. You spoke not only of Proust, whose A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs you were rereading at the time, but of Rousseau and Chateaubriand. Could I begin by asking you to comment upon this observation, from a reader’s point of view?

CLAUDE SIMON: Andre Gide says somewhere in his Journal that France is most definitely not the home of the novel. And in fact, if one compares the works of nineteenth-century French novelists and their inferior contemporary imitators (Mauriac, Sartre, Camus, etc.) with for example those of Dostoevsky, whose characters, as in life, are eminently ambiguous and contradictory, incarnating at once good and evil, torturers and victims at one and the same time, then the French “realist” novel, deriving from the fable, the comedy of manners, or the philosophical tale with its didactic intentions, appears desperately flat, putting on stage univocal social or psychological types, bordering on caricature. It was Strindberg who noted in his preface to Miss Julie, not without irony, that Harpagon is avaricious and nothing else, whereas he could at the same time be a great financier as well as a miser, a perfect father, an excellent public official. . . . Personally, this kind of novel has always produced in me a boredom only attenuated by the descriptive passages (and this is something I experience more and more). For example, it was only because during the Occupation I bought the complete works of Balzac second-hand from a bouquiniste (books were hard to find then through lack of paper) that I read my way through La Comedie humaine, and what is more, despite several attempts, I have never been able to get to the end of a novel like L’Education sentimentale. In works of a biographical kind, a character reveals himself, deliberately or otherwise, in all his rich complexity, with all his contradictions, and without any manner of teaching standing out at all from his adventures. Anais Nin said somewhere that the everyday world seemed to her so devoid of interest that she preferred to take refuge in “the imaginary” and “the marvelous.” No doubt she never took the trouble to look at the incredible marvels all around us, a simple leaf, a bird, an insect. She really should have meditated upon Picasso’s remark: “Kings do not have their most beautiful children with princesses, but with shepherdesses,” for if ever you apply yourself, as Proust did, to examining attentively the life of anyone in your entourage, it’s not long before you notice that it presents a thousand times more complexity, richness, and fascinating subtleties than the fictive and summary lives and the spectacles staged in so-called “imaginative” novels.

Thus, Rousseau, who never stops moralizing, and acts with great meanness, if not with great brutality, devotes himself lovingly, for example, to the problem of the education of children, even writes a complete work on the subject, and abandons his own, without a second thought, to the state orphanage. Chateaubriand, although he is a sincere Royalist (he will prove his fidelity to the royal cause right into exile) and a sincere liberal as well, gambles away, as quickly as he can, the sum of money his family had collected, with great difficulty, in order to allow him to join the emigre army, and what is more “mislays” the wallet containing the little money he had remaining in the carriage bringing him back home, none of which prevented him from nevertheless going off to fight for his king and getting severely wounded. . . . In the same way, L.S.M., who risks his life for the Revolution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man, finds it quite normal that his wife be given a negro as a present; a fervent Jacobin, he contrives to get an ardent Royalist out of prison and marries her—and what author of fictions would ever have unleashed his imagination to the extent of inventing the episode of the heart cut out of the General’s corpse!!!

Finally, and as a corollary to this, container and contained being, in art, one and the same thing, the form of these works (let’s say, for simplicity’s sake: their style) is always admirable. It is not a matter of chance that Chateaubriand and Proust are the writers of the most sumptuous prose in French literature.

ACP: What is it that one is looking for when reading a text calling itself an “autobiography?”—an imaginary identification with an author (or with someone else, quite simply)?—or does the special pleasure of the reader not come from the loss of a stable identity, to the extent that autobiographical writing seems to lead to a dissociation of the writer’s “self” and to the production of “doubles”?

CS: Certainly not, as far as I am concerned, an “identification” with an author, but other than the pleasure of the text itself, a pleasure whose nature you have just defined quite well.

ACP: Is not the reader of an autobiographical text in search of echoes from the past, echoes of experiences he might himself have lived, perhaps at an unconscious level?

CS: Perhaps.

ACP: Do you think it important for a novelist to establish a genealogy for his characters, whether real or fictional, or a series of historical relays, from father to son?

CS: No.

ACP: But I gather that in the novel you are now writing, you have gone back to some of the scenes in your first novel Le Tricheur (The Cheat) where the central character recalls being taken, as a boy, to the cemeteries of World War I battlefields, as his mother searches for her husband’s grave. . .

CS: Those are quite simply my first memories. My parents came from Madagascar when I was barely one year old, and my father was killed almost immediately, during the second battle into which his regiment was sent, on 22 August 1914. It is not surprising that it marked me. But if I am now writing about my father’s death—it may seem shocking to some for me to put it this way—it is because the subject is a “stimulus” to me: it is “writing matter” again.

ACP: When your narrator in The Georgics lifts his hand from the page and stops writing, doubting the possibility of communicating to a reader what it feels like to be under enemy fire- unless, as he says, the reader has experienced something similar—are you expressing there a doubt concerning that particular experience, or a more radical doubt over the relationship between what is lived and what is written?

CS: A doubt over the relationship between what is lived and what is written. In The Idiot, Dostoevsky says that the experience of a man who has thought for twenty minutes that he was going to be shot is uncommunicable.

ACP: I wonder if “experience,” in the sense of states of mind, is ever “communicable”: Merleau Ponty wrote that it was “inevitable that consciousness be mystified, inverted, indirect: its principle is to see things round the other way; its principle is not to know the nature of Being, and to prefer the object”.

CS: We would have to see the context of that remark, and what Merleau-Ponty meant by “Being.” For me, there is no object without a subject. As for the “unknowable,” we are, and always will be, grappling with it.

ACP: It has been claimed that in The Georgics “Nature” was “the main character”. As I see it, History has the principal role, especially since it is regularly personified. But History is defined in so many ways in the novel, in contradictory ways even, that one might be tempted to see in it a figure standing for the Absurd. Is History for you the repetition—in the life of every individual—of certain experiences which could be seen as so many “rites of passage”?

CS: Why do people always want to make what is “contradictory” into the same thing as “the Absurd”? Is it not rather absurd to consider the world and human beings who are in their very essence made up of contradictions, as “absurd”? Is that not to fail to see that the very salt of the earth comes out of conflicts between contradictions?

ACP: If History is characterized by repetition, do you see this as tragic, or as farcical—in the way Marx described certain historical cycles?

CS: It seems to me that there is never any “repetition,” but rather that History unfolds like a spiral whose definition is a curve rising progressively as it winds itself round a cylinder and which always passes over the same generating lines but with a greater or lesser degree of slippage. As for considering these “repetitions” (I use the word for the sake of convenience) as farcical, that is equivalent to forgetting that they take place amidst blood and tears. But of course one can laugh at everything—if one is a philosopher.

ACP: I was thinking, amongst other things, of the feeling of political impotence which is characteristic of the present period.

CS: Yes, the period of great political figures is over; there are just administrators now. We are at the end of an epoch.

ACP: May I ask you, in conclusion, what you think of the following remark by Blanchot: “The writer never reads his work. It is, for him, unreadable, a secret before which he cannot dwell14”?

CS: It is a perfect image of the position of the writer in relation to his work. The expression “before” appears particularly pertinent. He finds himself indeed always “behind” (I have myself compared the work of the writer to that of an artisan embossing copper or bronze, beating it out from behind, condemned to never being able to contemplate the result from the other side).

 

___
Book

Claude Simon Conducting Bodies
Grove Press

‘Claude Simon’s “Conducting Bodies” is an uncommonly puzzling, frustrating, and potentially rewarding novel–if it is a novel at all.

‘The “conducting bodies” of the title are several: the principal character’s ailing body, for which he visits a doctor; the contentious body of delegates at the writers’ conference he attends; bodies in minutely described medical diagrams, newspaper advertisements, and artistic reproductions; bodies eating, drinking, sleeping, walking, sitting, or in erotic poses; celestial bodies, such as the constellation Orion, whose myth seems to underlie the book.

‘But above all, it is the shifting images and whirling sentences of the text to which the title refers, as the objects of the impersonal narrator’s focus evolve into one another and scenes recur repeatedly, modified by new juxtapositions. A sentence might, for example, begin with the image of disembodied legs modeling stockings in a store window and end with a description of anatomical prints in a doctor’s office, or with the image of a meandering river that somehow turns into a snake coiled around a tree.’ — LA Times

 

______
Excerpt

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Your mom is so cool. Those are very strange in the best way. Not just a balcony, but a huge one? Oh, man. Love took the unimaginative solution and got the elevator back in service, but I’m not complaining, mind you. Love placing the winning bid on the edibly painted young ‘Duality’ guy/artwork in the upper left hand corner, G. ** _Black_Acrylic, Us too. Ours is supposed to end on Friday. But who can trust the sky’s prognosticators these days. I think I read that France got a draw in the Euros yesterday, but I’m not sure if that’s good enough. I will see ‘Christine’! Today will be my PTv2 day, lucky me. ** Cletus, Hey. I for one would thrust my arms in the air in surrender if a meat gun took aim at me. ** Malik, Hey! Oh, that’s interesting, 10 minutes is kind of a good length. And a monologue. You’re okay with your assigned performer? I write theater works for the French director Gisele Vienne, and it’s super fascinating to write for living, autonomous bodies. Excited for the link to your story. Do you think your play might be videoed and uploaded anywhere? Have a productive yet serene next 24 hrs. ** Misanthrope, Because they can. For the same reason that Madonna and Springsteen and Swift do. There seems to be some logic going on that if a show’s ticket prices don’t borderline bankrupt you, it can’t possibly be great. Little Show is one of those kinds of guys that made those programs where they dumped incorrigible teens in the middle of nowhere with a flashlight and box of matches so popular amongst parents for a while. ** R🪜, You’re consolidated. I’m a disaster movie addict, and, yes, I severely think a disaster movie bent would’ve helped that movie to at least some degree. But, yes, there were moments. The ecology ‘terrorist’ kids getting devoured en masse in the flooded Catacombs had its charms. Hm, favorite vampire movie … Maybe ‘Near Dark’ (1987)? What’s yours? I have not seen those videos, but hyper realistic image cakes is another fetish of mine, so off I go in that direction. Thanks, pal. ** Nika Mavrody, Interesting take. ** Harper, Hi. Virginia Woolf’s house, cool. I live near Stendhal’s house, which is now Hotel Stendhal, but that’s not as cool. Anyway, whew, that’s out of the way, and a few weeks seems like a lot, but nationalised health does have its glitches, I guess. Right wingers are such control freaks. Bunch of loud mouthed scaredy cats. I.e. agreed. Here, there, everywhere. Good, I’m glad the patches are doing their soothing thing for you. And even gladder that you’re back into your writing. I’m inching forward with mine. Not a hugely productive time on that front, but my mind is locked into it at least. Frequencies much appreciated. If you have any temperature lowering frequencies, pass them along as well. I hope your today continues apace. ** Dom Lyne, Hi, Dom! Your candy book binding friend gets the DC’s stamp of approval, duh. I ate some foo-foo sushi recently too. Vegan, of course. It was way too foo-foo aka costly, but, boy, it was yum. Stuff’s mostly okay with me. Same old film shit going on, but otherwise, can’t complain except about the heat index. Take care, bud. ** chris dankland, Hey! You probably know this, but in Australia cotton candy is called fairy floss. The Australians like to give things icky cute nicknames. Like candy itself is called lollys (sp?). Or at least Michael Salerno says those things. Maybe it’s just him. Cool, I’ll be at ready here as soon as Topp’s book is similarly at the ready. Yeah, ‘Room Temperature’ is about a family that turns their house into a haunted house attraction. Well, it’s about other things too. I love haunted houses, or ‘home haunts’ as we call them in the specialist world, as much I love anything. The family effort, the over-ambition, the failure, the charm … don’t get me started. ‘Flunker’ is sold out already? Really? I’m sure they’ll print some more, or I’ll nudge them to. Huh. Morning seems okay. Yours? If you’re a morning reader guy? Big up, sir! ** Justin D, Thanks. I don’t eat meat, so including that one involved some bravery on my part. Meat eaters can be very complex people, it does seem so. Awesome that you watched ‘‘L’Argent’! Dude is my god, as I don’t need to tell you. Thanks for the link. As usual, I’ll zip out of here first and then click hard. My day wasn’t bad. I got to meet one of my formerly blog-only friends who’s here visiting Paris, and that was lovely. And nothing untoward happened other than it being too hot outside. Did your day toss up anything of note? ** Darb🐐, HAL in ‘2001’ sings that song as it dies, but it doesn’t do the ‘D-d-d-Daisy’ part. I’m more optimistic about the present and future than I am about the past, I guess. Yeah, it was like developing film. Exactly. Just white and large. Mm, I don’t think I was on drugs when I did that, or I didn’t do drugs to do that. There might have been some lingering drug aftermath going on. But, no, it was, honestly, rather tedious when you’re an impatient person like me. No promises, understood. Whatever’s good. Our pigeons are very polite about our open windows. Or they don’t think the apartment is very interesting, which it isn’t. Whatever you ate, it sounds yum. I’m going to eat rice tonight, but probably in a more basic form. ** Uday, Home sweet home? Svankmajer, nice. I don’t know that one. Nice! I’ll hit it post-here. Thank you! I like Czech surrealism, no worries. I read ‘The Memoirs of Hadrian’ in my first and only year of university, and I don’t remember a thing about it. Are you reading it? I think it’s quite respected? ** Right. Claude Simon is the only Nouveau Roman author to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. And yet he seems to be much less read and talked about than, say, Robbe-Grillet, Duras, Pinget, Butor, Sarraute, et. al. which seems strange to me since, technically, he’s the big dog as well as a really extraordinary writer. I think the novel I’ve spotlit today is one of his very best. So, I’m doing my little part to up his readership. There you go. See you tomorrow.