Nobel Prize for Literature Awarded to French Novelist

The 1985 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded Thursday to French novelist Claude Simon, a champion of impressionistic novels who says he writes fiction “the way you paint a picture.”

Simon, an exponent of the nouveau roman or “new novel” movement of the late 1950s, became the first French author to win the prize since 1964, when the existentialist, Jean-Paul Sartre, refused to accept it, saying the Nobel corrupted its recipients.

Simon said he will go to Stockholm to accept with satisfaction the $225,000 prize in person on Dec. 10.

The Swedish Academy said Simon, who first wanted to be a painter and who idolizes the work of Paul Cezanne, “combines the poet’s and the painter’s creativeness with a deepened awareness of time and the depiction of the human condition.”

Published in France by Editions de Minuit and in the United States by George Braziller, Simon is a writer only somewhat better known in France than in the United States. Even within the circle of “new novelists,” his name is probably less familiar than that of Nathalie Sarraute, whose work was celebrated by Sartre, or that of Alain Robbe-Grillet, who was championed by the late influential French critic Roland Barthes.

Lars Gyllensten, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, indicated one reason for Simon’s relatively modest following. “It takes a lot of work to read him,” Gyllensten said. “You must have a good memory. You have to read him several times.”

“This is a courageous choice by the Nobel committee,” said Roger Shattuck, a professor of French at the University of Virginia. “Simon’s works are neither popular nor traditional. Simon has earned a place as a major writer working seriously to extend the relations between language, vision and the novel form.”

Simon, who was a painter and photographer before becoming a novelist, has said, “I write my books the way you paint a picture,” which to many readers has meant without a recognizable plot.

Like Violent Painting

The experience of reading a Claude Simon novel is rather like that of viewing a large, complex, violent painting, one too large to be taken in at a glance.

The path of the prose is the wandering path of the eye as it darts back and forth across the canvas, now pausing over a face, now changing focus to take in a group, perhaps referring repeatedly to some puzzling or frightening or erotic detail. This style, whose nearest equivalent in American literature might be that of William Faulkner, is called “fragmented.”

Discontinuous in its creation, a painting can be discontinuous in its appreciation. Claude Simon staked his career on the thesis that prose could work the same way, in long, unpunctuated, continuous sentences.

Born in Tananarive, Madagascar, on Oct. 10, 1913, to a French colonial officer and his wife, Simon was reared, after his parents’ death, by his grandmother in Perpignan in the south of France. He joined the Spanish Republicans in Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War.

During World War II, he served in a cavalry regiment, escaped from a prisoner of war camp and bought a vineyard in Roussillon in the unoccupied part of France. He continues to divide his time between the Latin Quarter in Paris and his Roussillon vineyards.

The Nobel Prize will not change his daily routine, he said Thursday at his home in Perpiganan. “I will continue to write every afternoon, just as before, with difficulty,” he said. “You know, we sometimes work for hours to produce only two lines but then, when we are home in bed at about 10 o’clock at night, it comes.”

He had little else to say, telling a group of reporters: “I have discovered that everything means nothing and that ultimately there is nothing to say. I have no message.”

‘The Flanders Road’

Simon’s first novel, “The Cheater,” was published in 1956, and he won some recognition when attention focused on the “new novel” movement. His best-known work was the strongly autobiographical, “The Flanders Road,” which shares recurring characters and incidents with three other novels, “The Grass,” “The Palace” and “Histoire.”

If painting and photography have much to do with Simon’s style, his wartime experiences have even more to do with his content. This is particularly true of the 1981 novel, “The Georgics,” which Gyllensten called “by far his most important” novel.

Classical References

War, especially civil war, has figured in most of Simon’s work. “The Battle of Pharsalus,” like “The Georgics,” combines a learned set of classical references--in this case references to Lucan’s history of the war between Caesar and Pompey--with memories, often erotic, of the Spanish Civil War. There are passages in “The Battle of Pharsalus” that would remind readers of American literature of William Burroughs rather than of William Faulkner.

Because of Sartre’s influence, the French “new novelists”--most of whom were in their 20s during World War II--have been associated in this country with French existentialism.

The association is not inaccurate. “The Road To Flanders,” an unsparing account of the collapse of France in 1940, was, like existentialism, a part of the French intellectual recovery in the post-war years and received a prize from the Parisian newspaper L’Express in 1961.

The more profound, artistically more decisive influence on this group, however, came from the philosopher Edmund Husserl. “Phenomenology,” Husserl’s attempt at a perception of things unclouded by convention and received opinion, was of great importance to the “new novelists.” The most distinctive feature of these novels for a reader coming to them for the first time is a sort of hypnotic intensity of description. In Simon, this intensity benefited from the eye of a painter.

“I am incapable of making up a story,” Simon once said. “All I write is taken directly from real life. I only copy reality.”

The words may seem surprising in the author of novels that seem at first so strange, so highly artificial, so unlike “normal” stories. Simon’s claim, now honored by the Swedish Academy, is, implicitly, that “normal” stories obscure the real process of human perception.