Christ Himself on Horseback
Claude Simon’s The Flanders Road and The Theology of Postwar Literary Studies
What follows is, will be, a review of Claude Simon’s The Flanders Road (recently republished by NYRB classics). Its republication is welcome for several practical reasons. Simon, a Nobel prize winner (1985) is out of print in English (the NYRB translation, by the late great Richard Howard, is not a new translation), yet his novels are the subject of a huge amount of anglophone literary criticism from the 80s and 90s. Some readers may recognise Simon from Frederic Jameson’s Postmodernism, or, the Logic of Late Capitalism in which his novels are the sole subject of an entire middle chapter, “Reading and the Division of Labour”.
This republication , however, not only brings a classic back into print, it also allows us to reexamine the question of what literature can and cannot do in the face of collective trauma. The novel follows the retreat of a French cavalryman after a disastrous offensive in May 1940. The novel’s sentence structure belies this simple summary. It is this fact that has lead to a large body of misguided academic criticism of the novel missing what Simon is doing and must be doing in The Flanders Road.
Let us begin, however, by discussing psychoanalysis. In Sigmund Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, first published in 1920, he remarks upon the reoccurring dreams of survivors of the Great War. They dream, over and over, of their most horrific moments on the battlefield. Yet is only when they dream that these images haunt them, their waking life is free from traumatic memories.
There are certain scenes in human life that we struggle to articulate. These scenes are often, but not always, traumatic. It is assumed that silence follows trauma, that we repress and cannot speak, or remember but do not speak, of the traumatic. Freud’s soldiers live their waking lives free from repetition, yet when they pass from consciousness into unconsciousness, they re-enter that abyss they have sealed off and of which, outside of the clinic, they do not speak.
The point of psychoanalysis is to make trauma speak. It believes that trauma is communicable but that the mind struggles to communicate it. This is a point forgotten by us culturally. We have become obsessed with the ineffable, the incommensurable, the incommunicable. As the twentieth century unfolded in Europe as a series of massive traumas, both collective and individual, a fascination with the limits of language and representation emerged in philosophy, in literature and in art. This is a classic story, that everything between 1914 and 1945 pushed us, culturally, to the realization of the failure of language. Particularly after World War II, and the revelation of the Shoah, a new skepticism around communicability emerged.
This skepticism, as I have noted, emerged most strongly in three fields: philosophy, academic literary criticism and literature/art. Or so the story goes. Literature, however, resists such skepticism. Despite the great theme of the failure of language clearly emerging in postwar literature, we should not confuse difficulty with impossibility. This confusion is at the heart of the legacy of Simon’s novel The Flanders Road and indeed all of Simon’s work, and the key to clarity lies in the book’s purposeful appropriation of psychoanalytic themes.
Those discourses that are associated with postmodernism are the fertile soil on which this skepticism bases itself. The (partial) critique of reason in Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, the investigations of alterity and difference in Jacques Derrida, the radical notion of the other in the work of Emmanuel Levinas all emerge in response to the horror and trauma of this moment in European cultural history. Levinas in particular pushes a radical line in this vein: the radical other is unthinkable. As A.J. Bartlett writes of Levinas’ Other: “That the Other is absolutely other however means that the impossibility of the relation to it is also absolute. In other words, the impossible cannot be thought, it cannot itself be an ontological or philosophical question; nothing can come to supplement – to use a psychoanalytic term - this impossibility because it cannot be conceived.”
More so than any of the thinkers above it is Jean-Francois Lyotard who takes the specific trauma of the Shoah and analyses it by saying it cannot by analyzed. It is this problematic that inspires his work on the “differend”, which identifies the incomprehensible in any given linguistic dispute, and it reaches his apex in his poorly titled book Heidegger and the jews, where he writes of art and the Shoah that “What art can do is bear witness not to the sublime, but to this aporia of art and its pain. It does not say the unsayable, but says that it cannot say it.” Lyotard takes this idea from Elie Wiesel, who once wrote that “to tell the story [of the Shoah] is to distort and diminish…a mystery [that should] be protected from the process of demystification.” Postwar, post Shoah literature moves around the subject, bears witness, says only that it cannot say.
We have then moved from the difficulty of speaking of horror (psychoanalysis) to the impossibility of speaking of horror (a theology, as we will see). Once this intellectual shift has occurred a new style of literary criticism emerges. No surprise then that Lyotard’s will characterize Simon’s work as: “the search for undetermined linkages among elements of phrases and among different families of phrases’, exemplary of a ‘general narrative condition in which not only the form of narrative but more important the “unphrased”, the “unnarrated”, or the “unpresentable” are the stakes of the search.” A narration of theunnarratable, a presentation of what cannot be presented, a phrasing of what must remain ‘unphrased.’ As meaningless as it is paradoxical.
The Flanders Road is a strange novel. Or, perhaps, it was. The first sentence runs the length of the first page. Punctuation is abandoned. Scenes fold into each other and repeat endlessly. Ostensibly The Flanders Road is the tale of Georges, who is part of a French Calvary unit who charges against a Panzer Division. In the ensuing loss and defeat, Georges makes his way across a countryside whose layout he does not know, and across his memories that wash in in from both future and past, altering the time and place of any given moment. Dialogue interrupts recollection and recollection interrupts dialogue.
This abuse of narrative flow looks something like this:
…I saw her by the light of the hall bulb but not her face: her hair, her back, silhouetted, black, then the door closed I heard her quick steps fading diminishing then nothing else and after a moment I felt the dawn’s coolness, pulling the sheet up over me, thinking that the autumn wasn’t far off now, thinking of that first day three months ago when I had been at her house and had put my hand on her arm, thinking that ager all she might have been right and that wasn’t her way, that is, with her or rather through her, that I will reach (but how can you tell?) perhaps it was as futile, as senseless as unreal as to make hen tracks on sheets of paper and to look for reality in words perhaps they were both right, he who said that I was inventing embroidering on nothing and yet you saw the same things in the papers too, so that you would have to believe that in between the shops with yellow imitation-wood fronts and the black signs and the cafes, or between midnight and six in the morning, or between two bolts of cloth, they sometimes found time enough and space enough to be concerned with such things – but how can you tell? How can you tell? I would have had to be the man hidden behind the hedge too, watching him advance calmly towards his death down that road, parading as Blum had said, insolent, idiotic, vainglorious and empty, or maybe not even having any idea of making his horse trot not even hearing the men screaming at him not to go on…
Georges’ memories move seamlessly from a lover leaving him on a cool summer morning to memories of the war. We can certainly see once again themes of trauma here and in a psychoanalytic formula: wandering association that returns to sites of pain, of an involuntariness that Simon’s breathless sentences and abrupt shifts in scenery invoke, of a constant repetition.
In making sense of this abuse of language critics look for a justifying gesture. Simon must explain his experimentalism. Early on in the novel the retreat from the Panzer division is describes as such: “in full retreat or rather rout or rather disaster in the middle of this collapse of everything as if not an army but the world itself the whole world and not only its physical reality but even in the representation the mind can make of it”.
Lynn Higgins interprets this sentence to be a remark uniting both the collapse of the French Army with the collapse of language and representation: “Collapsing along with belief in the objectivity of history and the possibility of heroism, then, are the traditional means to formulate the loss. Furthermore, history itself is seen as the cause of the collapse of representation.”
Likewise, Maria Minich Brewer thinks that incommensurability is the defining feature of not just a work like The Flanders Road but Simon’s oeuvre. The incommensurable here is, for Minich Brewer, related to shock and encounter. She writes:
In Simon’s work from L’Herbe onwards, an aesthetic of the incommensurable and shock emerges in the encounter between incongruous, anachronistic and even anamorphic realities. Simon has written about experiences of intense affect, exhaustion, hunger and fear, where there occurs a sense of being enclosed (Louise’s sensation of being in a diving-bell in L’Herbe) or radically separated from the outside.
The whole point of incommensurability is to invoke a strangeness, an extra element beyond cognition or representation. Minich Brewer makes the stakes of her terminology clear when she analyses a passage from Simon’s L’Acacia:
The description of a civilian train passing the convoy emphasizes the violent impact of two worlds crossing: the mobilized and the non-mobilized, that is, the present and another present which for the young soldiers has hurtled into an inaccessible past. Looking out of the window, the narrator corporal notices first a family armed with gas masks, then a traveler, a version of his former ‘travelling’ self. In a mute but telling gesture which deepens the corporal’s sense of irremediable abandonment, the man holds up a newspaper with the headline ‘MOBILISATION GENERALE’. The shock effect of the encounter enters consciousness directly, traumatically, without any form of defense… Refusing conventional representations of war, Simon’s writing stages the dynamics of phrase universes and spaces, bearing witness to their encounters and ways of traversing one another. In the scene described, no common idiom translates the meaning of general mobilization for both parties. The ‘I’ and the ‘you’ have no common ground or ‘we’, except the space where incommensurables collide and in which their lack of common measure is registered as trauma in the unconscious
The question here is to what extent Simon does and can believe that he is interested in unrepresentability, the incommensurable, the unnarratable, in short the impossibility of literature after trauma?
The psychoanalytic themes, of timelessness and repetition suggest otherwise. So does the fact of Simon’s writing. Unlike Wiesel who explicitly states his commitment to an impossible task, Simon makes no such claim. Can the difficulties of the book but just that, difficulties? Must we always reach for impossibilities?
Part of the problem here is a failure to separate out the macrolevel structure (plot, structure) of the novel from the microlevel structure (sentences, specific claims or things said). That the novel’s plot and structure are clear enough. Simon himself says the novel is structured like a clover: three sections and each leads back to the center. Georges and his compatriots cycle back around to the same dead horse as they beat a hasty retreat in each of the novels three sections.
The plot, too, can be easily summarized: the protagonist, Georges, is part of an ill fated French Calvary unit. The Captain, de Reixach, of this unit is some distant relative of his. He is shot off his horse by a sniper, the Calvary unit is routed, and George is wandering around the French countryside with Iglésia – a jockey and assistant to the captain – Blum and occasionally someone perplexingly named Wack. At times Georges wonders if De Reixach was not in some sense committing suicide with the charge. Jerry Carlson notes that the most obvious analogy for the plot is one of a detective novel: why would De Reixach lead such a foolish charge?
The simplicity of this plot is obscured by the microlevel structure of sentences, paragraphs and the transitions between scenes. This present tense scene consistently melds into a series of scenes from the past and future, as we have seen above. Georges’ past, the times he has meet Iglésia before ( Iglésia has an affair with the Captain’s wife) flow in and out of present tense scenes as do future scenes of Georges as a prisoner of war, of Georges after the war in the room of a lover. The flow of the scenes disrupts the sense of time; it is only fair to say the retreat in France is the present tense scene because it is the one that takes up the most time in the novel and thus appears as its central local. The novel, like the unconscious, is timeless.
What then is also the difficulty of the microlevel structure of the novel in service of, if not some impossibility? Let us return to Freud’s soldiers, and to psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis does not say that trauma cannot be spoken. It says that without restitution, without first attempting to speak of what one struggles to speak, we are forced into strange behaviours and repetitions. Yet it can be spoken, eventually. The initial impossibility gives way to a mere difficulty. Although Freud would probe the limits of analysis in his late essay Analysis Terminable and Interminable, what isn’t ruled out is the possibility of improvement. At the end of his essay Freud defines the task of psychoanalysis as such:
Our object will be not to rub off all the corners of the human psyche so as to produce 'normality' according to schedule nor yet to demand that the person who has been 'thoroughly analysed' shall never again feel the stirrings of passions in himself or become involved in any mental conflict. The business of analysis is to secure the best possible psychological conditions for the functioning of the ego; when this has been done, analysis has accomplished its task.
Analysis Terminable and Interminable is one of Freud’s final essays and is sometimes read as a moment of doubt as he looks back on his life’s work. Yet even here the possibility of psychoanalysis remains, despite the complications and difficulties, certain.
Let us return to Levinas. Bartlett, having explained Levinas’ strong conception of the other, now tells us this:
The key thing here is this notion that there exists – and already it is un-Levinasian to say ‘there exists’ in this manner – what cannot be thought. In Levinas, who is far from being an idiot, this impossibility has a rigorous framework – even if its irrefutability would lie in the real of God; which is to say, in his ineffability as purely Other. So, the approach to the other always has this religious dimension whose point really, is to reserve something from thought – to save God from the philosophers… Which is why Levinas is a theologian.
For Bartlett this is contra philosophy which holds that we can come to know all we cannot. What is at stake here is the seriousness and rigor which we need to bring to claims of the impossible. A novel that seeks to convolute language, to present trauma through an abuse of story telling, is not about the impossibility of our categories or of our experience. A novel modelled off the categories of psychoanalysis is not about the impossible. To confuse the difficult with the impossible gives criticism a gravitas, but it risks undermining the possibility of literature itself. Approaching literature with all the gloomy seriousness of a liturgy turns literary criticism into a theology.
The gap between Simon and his interpreters is then simply the gap between the philosopher – or rather those who believe in working through and coming to know - and the theologian. Simon presents the difficulty of trauma. The narration is convoluted, the sentences and scenes flow into each other, ignoring temporal dimensions. And yet we read it and see in it a cultural moment we have all come to know. Just as the cure, or improvement, is the background condition for psychoanalysis, so too is possibility and commensurability the possibility of the novel itself. Simon knew this, it is a shame his interpreters do not.