Figuring the mortal coil: Claude Simon's Le Tramway and pierrette fleutiaux's Histoire du tableau

Forum for Modern Language Studies

Volumn 41, Issue 4, 2005, Pages 386-395

  Orr, Mary ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHAMPTON   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 27744587502     PISSN: 00158518     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/fmls/cqi026     Document Type: Note

References (19)

1. C. Simon, Le Tricheur (Paris, 1945), p. 88. Simon has since disowned this work.
2. Paris, 1977; henceforth HT. The interview with Pierrette Fleutiaux is by Eric Orsenna and Pascal Bruckner, Les Nouvelles Littéraires, no. 2607, 20-26 October 1977, p. 7 (in italics in the original).
3. Although St Augustine's Confessions are arguably the precursor of the genre, standard works on autobiography and autofiction, such as Philippe Lejeune's Le Pacte autobiographique (Paris, 1975), or more recently Michael Sheringham's French Autobiography: Devices and Desires (Oxford, 1993), launch from Rousseau.
4. Paris, 2001; henceforth Tram. For the much-debated classification of Simon's œuvre as autofictional or autobiographical, see for example M. Calle-Gruber, Le Grand temps: Essai sur l'œuvre de Claude Simon (Villeneuve d'Ascq, 2004), chapter 6, "Une autobiographie de l'écriture", and with respect to Tram,
5. see A. Duncan, Claude Simon: Adventures in Words (Manchester, 2003), chapter 8.
6. As examined by Jean-Yves Laurichesse in his "A la poursuite du 'fatidiqAe tramway'" in: Claude Simon: allées et venues (Actes du colloque international de Perpignan, 14-15 mars 2003), ed. J.-Y. Laurichesse (Perpignan, 2004), pp. 41-58 (p. 47).
7. See the essays by A. Duncan, "Allées et venues familiales chez Claude Simon" and P. Mougin, "La mère, la mère toujours recommencée", in ibid., pp. 171-81 and pp. 183-96 respectively.
8. See in particular Tram, pp. 19-24.
9. In an interview as early as 12 December 1960 with André Bourin in Les Nouvelles littéraires, Simon noted at some length the importance of this childhood illness: "Je dus rester couché assez longtemps. Je crois que ce fut là un événement très important dans ma vie. Il m'était interdit de lire; pourtant durant les cinq mois que dura mon immobilité, je ne m'ennuyais jamais. C'était à Toulouse. De mon lit, par la fenêtre, je voyais les toits, des maisons magnifiques, et, nuit et jour, je regardais ce qui se passait en face de la chambre que j'occupais [...]. Comme à la guerre, lorsqu'on croit qu'on va mourir dans une minute qui suit, j'éprouvais le désir de tout saisir d'un coup, de ne rien laisser perdre."
10. Mária Minich Brewer's "(In)Commensurabilities: The Childhood of Events and the Shock of Encounter in Claude Simon" and Celia Britton's "Instant Replays: The Reintegration of Traumatic Experience in Le Jardin des Plantes", in: Claude Simon: A Retrospective, ed. J. Duffy & A. Duncan (Liverpool, 2002), chapters 2 and 3 respectively, begin to touch on the importance of childhood and trauma in Simon's works, but not with respect to exploring childhood illness.
11. See for example Tram, pp. 113-16.
12. If "je ne parvenais pas, à travers ma cloche de verre, à situer exactement les choses dans le temps, mon cerveau restant sous le coup de l'accouplement des deux mots: Fleurs et mort" (Tram, p. 116) ends this three-page single sentence, this syntactic last "gasp" is an effect visible at the end of many of the long fragments which constitute this text.
13. An overt reference to Albertine (Tram, p. 53), the Proustian narrator's jealousy and the opening of Sodome et Gomorrhe (Tram, pp. 58-60) offer intertextual counterpoints to the "je ne souffirais pas/plus" in the quotation from Le Tricheur opening this essay and in Tram (for example p. 126).
14. An example is Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale (London, 1987).
15. The only (and rather descriptive) monograph to date, Bettina Knapp's Pierrette Fleutiaux (Amsterdam, 1977) touches on the Jungian aspects. For a more detailed study of the feminist gothic and Pierrette Fleutiaux, see R. Munford, "Re-visioning the Gothic: A Comparative Reading of Angela Carter and Pierrette Fleutiaux" (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Exeter, 2003).
16. It lies outside the scope of this essay to draw more detailed comparison, but Portrait d'un inconnu (Paris, 1956), Tropismes (Paris, 1957), and Le Planétarium (Paris, 1959) respectively resonate in many interesting ways with HT.
17. Shortly before she is sectioned, the narrator almost "murders" the painting by seizing a knife as if to cut into the very entrails of the canvas (HT, pp. 95-6). This is not the moment when the "real" persona emerges through the false as in Wilde, but the onset of her "anéantissement", the stark awareness of "un crime indicible [...] au milieu d'une intense lumière blanche qui virerait au noir aussitôt, toutes couleurs mêlées dans une horrible précipitation." The narrator draws back from this edge by the desire to vomit. Her submersion into this colourlessness of all colours, as her real and figurative experience of "précipitations" of all kinds, will become manifest in subsequent events.
18. See HT, pp. 72-3, of which the paragraph commencing "La toile m'avait emprisonnée" leads to images of drowning, an inexorable and inescapable connection with it "jusqu'au bout", which translates into "Mes pensées m'emprisonnaient comme ses carreaux et m'irritaient comme les vibrations de ses couleurs" (HT, pp. 95-6), leading into the near-murder scene.
19. References to the boy's two ward companions offer a telling parody of the young Marcel's liking for, and aesthetic prioritisation of, pink food, flowers and the famous strawberries crushed in "fromage à la crème". The young woman with "cette chevelure floue, ce masque flou et rose" (Tram, p. 26) merges with the key description of disgust (Tram, pp. 62-8) concerning the "Vieil homme, donc, pour ainsi dire goyesque", triggered not so much by his person but by what he leaves in the shared bathroom: His "gluante savonnette rose", and two spongebags "décorées de fruits, de feuilles et de fleurs dans une fade symphonie d'orangés, de verts et d'une couleur qui n'était pas le rose mais comme un vieillissement, une sorte de sénilité du rouge" (Tram, p. 64).