"A colleague from Lomonosov University in Moscow, unable to obtain this article 'The Author's Culture and the Reader's Competence in The Flanders Road', Contemporary Literatures, No. 3, ed. Klincksieck, 1997, pp. 207-227, I imagine he is not the only one encountering the same difficulty. Here it is, then, in two formats, to download as needed. Certainly, my thesis is provocative. No one has contested or denied it so far."

Henri Béhar

Truism: The Flanders Road is a difficult novel.

This evidence imposes itself for several reasons: either the work shocks the reader's habits with its singular technique, or its content does not immediately fit into their mental categories, as a narrative of an experience or as an experience of the world. I know how arbitrary such a distinction between content and form can be. However, one cannot escape it when observing the behavior of potential readers of Claude Simon and more particularly, in the present case, that of high school sophomores to whom agrégation candidates are supposed to address themselves.

Although this question is important, I will leave aside, for the occasion, the problems related to the reception of a radically new novelistic form, to focus only on the competence required of the reader by an author who is considered singularly demanding and of very high culture. This is evidenced by another artist among his friends, an informed reader, who is surprised:

Your knowledge in practices such as artillery or agronomy is astounding but it is equal in all other domains and at all scales, from the packaging of statues to dragonfly couplings[i].

It is not a question of drawing up here the catalog of the author's knowledge from, for example, the images he provides us in The Flanders Road[ii]. I will limit myself to considering the main cultural traits which, for lack of being known or recognized by the reader, suspend their reading, stop their understanding and, consequently, hinder their cooperation in the elaboration of meaning[iii].

In a pedagogical concern, I will outline the main lines of a common cultural substratum, then examine the references to the "humanities", always encoded in one way or another. Finally will come the lessons that the author draws from his total experience.

Implicit Culture

Let us suppose a young reader from the sophomore class, knowing of France only a state of peace. How will they perceive the novel's horsemen? There is a good chance they will place them during the 1914-1918 war, if only because of the presence of war horses. All the more reason, what will they think of their brief incursion into Belgium if they ignore the history of France during the Second World War? Beyond the basic knowledge of any reader, and like any novelist, Claude Simon assumes, without saying so, that he does not have to specify certain data that should be known to all. Before even designating the "holes in the text", to speak like Wolfgang Iser[iv], I would like to identify the cultural elements implicitly required by the author.

A Shared Culture

The latter acts as if every reader had the same education as him or, to put it quickly, as if they had a good knowledge of the civic instruction manual of the time, and especially as if they had the same experience as him of the French people.

The Army:

The action (for there is one, whatever one says) takes place at a time when conscription was compulsory, when mobilization had gathered young twenty-year-old recruits and older reservists (such as Iglésia), supervised by professionals. Largely from the nobility, the military hierarchy from the Grandes Écoles such as Saumur for the cavalry, formed a caste, with its customs, its principles, "the traditional traditions[v]" (12) as, for Captain de Reixach, the reflex of drawing his saber, in a hereditary gesture, when a sniper[vi] shoots at him.

This caste, which had found in the army a means of not derogating, was particularly present in the cavalry, so that Georges will quite naturally evoke, through Sabine's words about the Revolutionary ancestor, the goods of the nobility, its furniture and real estate, the portrait gallery, the paperwork (53). The symmetry he poses between this ancestor and the captain makes him allege the same code of honor: Reixach, a betrayed husband, endures and remains silent; he disguises his suicide as an act of bravery (13). This same code will lead the General to suicide, for more professional and no less hereditary reasons (191).

The postulated reader will also need to have some knowledge of the army instruction manual, be sufficiently aware of the conditions of the 1940 war not to be surprised that horsemen are sent against motorized elements. They will also need to be attentive to recognize the two enemy armies by the color of their uniforms, khaki for the French, green for the German (154) and by the shape of their helmets and vehicles, to understand this scene all the more since the enemy is (with one exception) never named:

arrived behind the woman and looking over her shoulder I saw the gray car disappear curiously bodied like some kind of coffin all in cut panels and four backs and four round helmets and me Good God but these are... Good God but you (196)

The People

In contrast to this fallen caste, the simple soldiers carry a popular culture, no less traditional, of which Rabelais once made himself the interpreter[vii]. I will mention, for the record, their trivial speech, what is said to be their coarseness, their double-meaning vocabulary: "climbing", "mounting", "jumping" (45) engendering the bifurcations of the narrative. And also popular customs, such as keeping a sheet to make a shroud (66), burial in the countryside:

advancing in the middle of the fields like some sacrilegious masquerade, scoundrelly and — like any masquerade — vaguely pederastic, (75)

the cut-out head decorations for photography (77); graffiti in toilets or on barracks walls (90, 260, 273); the Law repressing public drunkenness, posted in the bar (118). To this are added childhood images: children's toys, molds for stamping little soldiers (39-40), skirt horses to which racehorses are compared (158); oranges from which, as a child, one drinks the juice through a hole made in the skin (246).

Depending on the point of view one takes, from the breeders' or bettors' side, horse racing can appear as an aristocratic or popular entertainment. For a Parisian of the time, the PMU[viii] is part of popular leisure activities.

School Education

This knowledge of the equestrian milieu, which one acquires through practice, is at the limit of shared knowledge, deserving, as such, some explanations. On the other hand, the author assumes that his readership knows nothing of what is taught at school[ix], in primary or secondary education, secular or confessional. Thus, in his system of comparisons, most of the comparants belong to this knowledge, by virtue of a simple pedagogical principle, by which, to make oneself understood by an interlocutor, one must bring the unknown back to the known.

Object Lesson

I deliberately take up here the title of a work by Claude Simon, designating, in elementary education, the usual objects, natural productions, that children learn to discover. Thus, in The Flanders Road, the extreme cold evokes an allusion to polar expeditions (30) and the smell of rot to mammoths suddenly thawed (30). From another natural science lesson come the image of the moving glacier (263) or even the final image of the eye of the cyclone, which is said to be perfectly calm (296). The female sex is compared to sea anemones "these marine and carnivorous organisms" (39), and Corinne seems to trigger a reflex in Iglésia (46) similar to that of Pavlov's dog whose conditioning was studied in ninth grade. The engulfed horse is successively compared to reptiles and fossils, its position resembling that of a praying mantis (26). In the camp, the card players are adorned with an aura of violence, like cuttlefish projecting their ink (204). In the exhausted lovers' bodies, blood flows back like a tidal bore, a term taken in its primary sense, sufficiently specialized that it is followed by its explanation, captious it is true: "all rivers starting to flow in reverse going back towards their sources" (250).

History

Here again, I deliberately take up the title of a narrative by Claude Simon, emblematic of the knowledge he puts to work. It is not necessary to have been an excellent student of the good fathers to know that pagan cults required the sacrifice of young men to the gods (66), that hermits fed on acorns (244) or that, in old paintings, martyrs are always impassive (70). One wants to believe that naming the Mediterranean "this old pond" (205) is the work of an informed Latinist, so much so that it is not essential to have been to the theater, nor even to have read Marivaux's plays to understand that the groves of French gardens are conducive to:

love rendezvous for marquises and marquises disguised as shepherds and shepherdesses seeking each other blindly seeking finding love death also disguised as a shepherdess in the maze of paths (74)

Since Ernest Lavisse, the founder of our national history, all schoolchildren know that Charles Martel (10) defeated the Arabs at Poitiers in 732, just as they know the revolutionary sans-culottes (80). Like them, Blum can explain that the Revolutionary ancestor was twice a traitor: to his caste by taking the side of the Republic; to the revolution by opting for Bonaparte, which leads him to evoke Talleyrand through the portrait of "noble marquises, renegade bishops or ambassadors", clubfooted to boot (266).

One can therefore affirm that the culture solicited here by Claude Simon belongs at most to secondary education, no more (which does not mean that he does not have, for himself, a much broader and superior culture).

Clichés

The characters' imagination (Georges, the narrator, being part of it) carries the commonplaces of the middle class during the war, nourished by journalistic information, cinema, ideas which, for being received, are no less characteristic of an uncertain era.

Press, serial clichés

The parade of stereotypes begins when Georges compares the noble disguised suicide of the captain to the dirty self-destruction of a banker or a maid (13). It continues, not without macho humor, with the representation of these young women with particles frequenting equestrian clubs, keeping throughout their lives the imprint of horses:

(until they suddenly transform — around the middle of their thirties — into something a bit mannish, a bit equine (no, not mares: horses) smoking and talking hunting or equestrian competitions like men), and the light buzzing of voices suspended under the heavy foliage of chestnut trees, the voices (feminine or male) capable of remaining proper, equal and perfectly futile while articulating the stiffest or even guardhouse remarks, discussing breedings (beasts and humans), money or first communions with the same inconsistent, amiable and cavalier ease, (18-19).

The clichés unfold about Corinne represented as a luxury hen, who, like an Odette de Crécy, marries, at eighteen, an old and eager Reixach, deferring to all her desires, resigning from the army for her, buying a big black automobile, offering her a racing car (55-56). From there to the two prisoners talking about her imagining her, with great luxury of details, provoking the jockey of the stable she had her husband buy, to endure his brutal assaults (45-49), there is only the distance of a straw bale!

However surprising they may be, these facilities are explained: one must be careful not to attribute to the author what belongs to the characters' imagination, deceiving time in their barracks, trying to reconstruct the mundus muliebris of pre-war by mentally projecting images of feminine underwear (45) and glossy fashion magazines from which Corinne must have drawn inspiration for her toilette (130).

Spectacular clichés

Nourished by ready-made visual representations, the protagonists' imagination reproduces them in series. Such is the case of the tavern where the captain paid for the horsemen's drinks:

The courtyard of the old inn with the dark red brick walls with light joints, and the windows with small panes, the frame painted white, and the servant carrying the copper pitcher and the groom in yellow leather leggings with the buckle tongues turned up giving drink to the horses while the group of horsemen stands in the classic pose: arched back, one booted leg forward, one arm bent on the hip with the whip in the fist while the other raises a golden beer mug towards a first-floor window where one can see, glimpse half behind the curtain a face that looks like it's coming out of a pastel... (20)

Except that, as Georges specifies, it wasn't that at all: it was rather a farmyard, the brick walls were dirty...

The height of cliché is obviously cinema. The surprise is analogous to that old lady who realizes when examining her shoes that she hired her assassin that very morning (75). Blum makes his own cinema, if I may say so (he himself speaks rather of vaudeville, at the end of this sequence), when he imagines the impromptu return of the Ancestor (184-186), but he is disavowed by Georges (187). In the same register, we have a short scenario with the soldier with a criminal record look (205), the old general with a pharaoh's head or the child observing the battle in Spain (212-213), and the succession of the two armies refers to the chases of comic films (197).

In the era of mechanical reproduction of works of art (to speak like Walter Benjamin), it is quite naturally to cinematographic technique that the narrator refers to explain certain visual effects of the horsemen. Thus he sees again the first autumn of the war as a newsreel (65), refers to cinema trickery to account for movement on a road (68) and, further on, the way he grasps Corinne for the first time:

(as, in the cinema, the people in the balcony, near the projection booth, wave their arm, their hands, the five fingers open interposing in the luminous ray, projecting their immense and moving shadows on the screen as if to possess, reach, the inaccessible scintillating dream), (224)

Mentalities of 1940

Many scattered indications in the novel refer to specific traits of French mentality at the time of the war. I will distinguish two, concerning Arabs and Jews.

So this young reader born at a time when France no longer has colonies. How will they understand the presence of these strange prisoners: "bistre or olive, enigmatic contemptuous with their dazzling wolf teeth their guttural and raspy names" (245) who, moreover, eat dog? If this last trait can be put down to hunger, they will need, to properly integrate the phenomenon, to remember the French colonies and learn under what conditions the army had been able to call on troops raised in these countries. Claude Simon is so aware of the current reader's ignorance that he explains, in The Garden of Plants, that, "for propaganda reasons" (p. 245), the Germans brought these prisoners back to France.

In passing, this indication teaches us that the sequence showing the Arabs gathering acorns takes place near Bordeaux and not in Saxony, so that we finally understand Georges' escape (and Claude Simon's by consequence).

Everything concerning Jews is even more dated, reflecting the state of mind of the time. Let us first observe that in the avant-text[x] the Jewishness characterizing the character named Maurice was much more pronounced, as was the anti-Semitism of the other soldiers, so that in the circumstances, a Jew's skin was worth less than a kilo of horse. It would be interesting to know for what reasons the author felt obliged to attenuate in 1960 the remarks he made his characters hold in 1958!

In the novel therefore, Wack figures one of those peasants of deep France, naturally anti-Semitic, whom Blum incites to say openly what he thinks of him by ironically taking up the insulting label of the time: "dirty kike" (62, 116), "city kike" (258). But Georges systematically stops their quarrels.

Beyond this violent confrontation, it is certain that Claude Simon manifests a personal interest in the Jewish cultural fact, even a strange fascination, when he paints this character of a pied-noir pimp, qualified as a "royal Jew" who:

on Yom Kippur day, then, in the middle of a country where Jews were being massacred and burned by hundreds of thousands, got himself reported sick so as not to work, and not only remained all day without doing anything, closely shaved, without eating or touching a match, but was strong enough to force his fellows (those of this people where he would once have been — was still — king) to imitate him; (207)

One can question the behavior of this curious prisoner, but it is even more important to situate the context of enunciation, the narrator being there undoubtedly informed of the "final solution". Could he have known, in the stalag where he was in 1940-1941, the fate reserved for Jews, or does he speak of it to Corinne in the hotel room where they meet after the Liberation? The uncertainty of the narrative complicates, as one can imagine, its ideological analysis.

The Amalgam

If we believe the narrator, Reixach (of whom we are informed that the Ancestor had abandoned the particle, recovered later) would belong to the old French nobility, linked, in a certain way, to religion, which would authorize him, like his neighbors, to speak of His Cousin the Virgin; but he would have "something Arab in him" which would make him just as much akin to Mohammed (10). Such a blood and religious crossing is indeed the emblem of the amalgam of various cultural currents to which the narrator indulges for everything that belongs to the humanities, I mean what, formerly, was taught in high school.

Sacred History

Many references belong to sacred history, which it is all the more necessary to know since, often, the narrator pretends to have forgotten it, or rather that he confuses it with legends of other origins.

The Bible

Even if we ignored that Claude Simon followed the courses of a religious school[xi], we could not pass over in silence the biblical innutrition of his text. Having to deal with the incommunicability between beings, he immediately alleges the tower of Babel, referring to the deep meaning of the biblical image:

babelesque squawking, as under the weight of a curse, a parody of that language which, with the inflexible perfidy of things created or enslaved by man, turn against him and take revenge with all the more treachery and efficiency as they seem apparently to fulfill their function docilely: major obstacle, therefore, to any communication, any understanding, (56)

Before the carcass of the killed horse, the vision of spilled blood widens to the dimension of biblical legends, "water or wine gushing from the rock" (26), evoking at the same time Moses and Jesus. The specter of war inevitably evokes the horse of the apocalypse, and the four horsemen, those of the prophetic revelation in the last book of the New Testament.

Complex Allusions, Bold Glosses

In the chapter of intertextuality, Hubert de Phalèse[xii] has already signaled the important presence of the biblical theme, and particularly this story of bones:

"But, how is it again? A story of counted bones, numbered...", thinking: "Yeah. I'm there: they numbered my parts... Anyway something like that." (66)

like the heads of nails driven into my palms thinking They counted all the bones (247)

for which he refers to the Psalms (XXII, 18), the second citation doubly referring to Christ who on the cross pronounced the beginning of the psalm "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?", and was pierced with the nails of crucifixion, to which Georges compares, must one say sacrilegiously, Corinne's nipples. But one could relate these fragments to Daniel's prediction announcing to Belshazzar (Dn V, 25) at his feast that his days were "weighed, counted, divided". All this is singularly and voluntarily confused, as is the mention of Noah's sons, Shem, Ham and Japheth, about the horsemen come from all horizons, associated with an absent negro (159). If the Bible says nothing about the black race, two traditions collide, a medieval interpretation of the Bible, assigning to Ham the paternity of blacks, and the legend of the Magi according to which Balthazar would be a black king. To express the length of the combat, the mention of Joshua stopping the sun (199) belongs to the same biblical vein (Joshua X, 12-13).

Certainly, it is not necessary to have been baptized nor to have undergone an important religious education to refer to the image of Joshua, or to an ordination or taking of the veil ceremony (247), nor even to know that the Christians of the catacombs recognized each other by the sign of the fish (274), symbol of Christ according to the Greek acronym of Jesus[xiii]. But Georges' association of his penis with the mystical and cavernous fish only takes its full meaning in a context imbued with religion:

sometimes I moved away completely withdrew it being able to see it below me out of her shining thin at the base then swollen like a spindle a fish (it was said that they recognized each other by tracing on the walls of cities and catacombs the sign of the fish) (274)

The same goes, it seems to me, for the comparison of the martyr that Corinne makes Reixach endure to Christ's Mary Magdalene (13).

Mythology

Without referring to a text as determined as the Bible, mythology is the subject of similar treatment. From the origin of the narrative, the short story "The Horse", published in 1958, takes on a mythical and mythological dimension with these village Atrides, this obscure story of incest and these ancient mourners that we find, unchanged, in The Flanders Road (60, 115, 120). The novel refers, twice, to Ovid's Metamorphoses first:

it seems to me that I read somewhere a story like that, of guys metamorphosed with a wave of a wand into pigs or trees or pebbles, all by means of Latin verses (94)

of Apuleius then, with "this donkey of Greek legend" (268) and, more clearly, "Apuleius's donkey pushing tirelessly in her" (275).

More troubling are the allusions to mythological characters. Danae fertilized by Zeus transformed into a golden rain:

but now as if the ground had tipped over, sending her backwards, as she was, on her back, presenting now not to the earth but towards the sky as in expectation of one of those legendary fertilizations, of some tinkling golden rain, her twin buttocks, that mother-of-pearl, that bush, […] (180)

Leda visited by the same god metamorphosed into a swan, her image covering twice that of the peacock and Argus with a hundred eyes:

while leaving my neck her other arm seemed to crawl along herself like an animal like an invertebrate swan neck slipping along Leda's hip (or what other symbolic bird of the impudent of the proud yes the peacock on the fallen net curtain its tail motley with eyes swaying oscillating mysterious) (248)

the peacock's tail was still swaying weakly but no Leda visible of whom then the peacock of what divinity is he the vain stupid fat bird solemnly parading his multicolored feathers on castle lawns and concierge cushions? (274)

While the theme of the Centaurs, then of the female centaur (52-53) refers directly to Greek mythology, the goat-foot (243), as M. Riffaterre[xiv] has well shown, is a reminder of this mythology through Marie de France and Ronsard.

One might think all these echoes very learned. They testify to the attention that schoolboys have, at all times, paid to these scabrous passages of Greek and Latin literature[xv], supposed to be known to all.

Here a parenthesis is necessary on the erotic passages of the book. Certainly, good souls might be moved if it were put on the high school program, but, at the cultural level where I place myself, it seems to me that today high school students have, by experience, as much knowledge in this domain as the narrator, which dispenses me from talking about it further.

Art and Literature

In The Flanders Road, references to painting and literature are frequent. They are, most often, signaled by a demonstrative adjective and marked with imprecision. The author and the work are not explicitly designated, as if they were too well known.

Readings

There is no need to refer to Homer's text to find in the expression "dawn with petal fingers" (199) a variation on "dawn with rose fingers"; nor to La Fontaine to see that Blum mocks the fable of the two pigeons (188) by supposing that Reixach got "pigeoned"; nor to Molière to decipher the meaning of the antonomasias relative to Arnolphe and Agnès (183, 184) or "the equestrian statue of the Commander pissing jets of beer" (267). This last trait shows well how Blum's irony proceeds, by associating a reference to Don Juan with an allusion to Jérôme Duquesnoy's Manneken Pis (1619) symbolizing the irreverence of the Brussels people towards their Spanish governor.

Having, like any high school student of the time, learned entire tirades of Racine by heart, it is quite naturally that Georges slips in an expression, "the devouring dogs" (9), deserving a return to the text of Athalie (v. 506).

As much as the association of Rosinante and Bucephalus (228), eponyms of two antithetical horses, belongs to the stereotype, as much as the following passage poses problems for the reader:

And his father still talking, as if to himself, talking about what was his name philosopher who said that man knew only two means of appropriating what belongs to others, war and commerce, and that he generally chose first the first because it seemed to him the easiest and the fastest and then, but only after having discovered the inconveniences and dangers of the first, the second that is to say commerce which was a means no less disloyal and brutal but more comfortable, and that moreover all peoples had necessarily passed through these two phases and had each in turn set Europe on fire and blood before transforming into anonymous societies of traveling salesmen like the English but that war and commerce were never one like the other than the expression of their rapacity and this rapacity itself the consequence of the ancestral terror of hunger and death, which meant that killing stealing pillaging and selling were in reality only one and the same thing (33)

Seeking the name (and exact work) of this philosopher, some have seen in it the silhouette of Voltaire[xvi], others of Rousseau[xvii], while the only identical formulation is found in Benjamin Constant's essay On the Spirit of Conquest (1813). This is to say how much Simon operates an amalgam, blurring the tracks, creating a figure of philosopher from various elements, a Swiss "effusionist" (189) who has all the traits of Rousseau. In other words, Blum is not far from thinking, like Gavroche, that the ancestor fell into the gutter by his own fault.