#le tramway

[cool6876d]

[millebuzzet1]

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Un homme soûl rate le tramway

un homme soûl se met en colère, il cris et frappe violemment dans un panneau après avoir raté un tramway pour la 6ème fois parce qu’il met trop de temps à se lever.

[bookediam]

"Le Tramway", Claude Simon's Swan Song

The novel is about an old man (Claude Simon himself was almost 88 years old when he wrote it, already a Nobel-prize winner and a cultural icon in France) who, being in the emergency room of a hospital, recalls memories from his childhood and, as the narration evolves, his latter life. The predominant figure through the whole reminiscence is the narrator’s beloved mother, whose we follow the route to death, under the devastating and overwhelming consequences of the World War I. Rather not coincidentally, the author of La Route des Flandres uses the journeying of the tram through space as a symbol of his protagonist’s life journeying through time.

Like the route of the tram, which is finite, Claude Simon’s novel brings to our attention that life itself is finite. Each journey has a certain starting point and a foregone ending; it is a bounded system. Time, correspondingly, elapses as long as the journey of life endures, but the duration is fixed. Death -which is latent yet perceptible through the whole novel- is the omega of all past and intermediate moments; it is the most inescapable and certain potentiality of the being. The existence of all beings is a route to death (sein zum Tode). However, the finity of time, in respect of every being, is a characteristic of maturation (historicity). Such maturation is undoubtedly identified in the narrator’s character and, deductively, in Claude Simon himself, who was then, in turn, on his way to non-existence.

Moreover, the unremitting intermingling of memories, as the narrator jumps from one anecdote to another and, then, forthwith to the present, illustrates the simultaneousness of all -purported to be sequential- time units. Each moment derives from a previous one and, at the same time, it is experienced as a whole with the moment that’s about to succeed it. Each moment of the tram’s journey, just like the life of the novel’s main character, bears the past, the has-been, and at the same time directs to and settles on the future. Overall, Le tramway seems to be rather a philosophical approach to the ontological nature of time than just a recollection of memoirs.

Claude Simon’s unique writing style has led literature critics to enlist him in the nouveau roman movement. Partly, such labeling is fair, in the sense Emile Henriot gave to this term, using it to describe certain writers who experimented with style, creating an essentially new style in each novel, transcending the established features of the literature of the 19th century. What is distinctive and outstanding in Simon’s oeuvre is the lavish use of parentheses. Most commonly, information that comes into parentheses is considered to be of less importance, an understated, non-vital interruption or just an afterthought. In the case of the French nobel laureate novelist, however, a major part of each of his writings comes into parentheses. Either to make a subjective comment over an objective fact or to build a metaphor, either to give an elaborate, detailed description or to provide with an alternative name for the word he just used, Simon is not afraid not only of using a long parenthetical period, but also a parenthetical clause within that. Meanwhile, it can take several lines (or even pages in other simonian novels) for the writer to come back to the main clause. However, this structure implies an inextricable connection and a perfect reflection of the novel’s subject matter. Fractured clauses can be seen as the structural equivalent of the novel’s fractured timeline; aversion to linguistic linearity reflects the aversion to time linearity and allows the “plot” of the novel to unfold in more than one levels. Le tramway is a perfect example of a work of art whose form and content are inseparable; it is the form that it is only by virtue of the content that embodies. And, to our mind, it is such achievement that renders something to be a true work of art and not just something that captivates us only in terms of its appearance.

Claude Simon’s eloquent descriptions, through the meticulous use of adjectives cannot, of course, elude our attention. It is on account of such descriptions the Nobel prize committee said that “[Claude Simon] combines in his novel the poet‘s and the painter‘s creativeness” and this along with a “deepened awareness of time in the depiction of the human condition”.