Picturesque Roadside Scenery

Claude Simon is one of the representatives of the French Nouveau Roman, which developed in its attack on traditional literary ideas and gained tremendous strength during those anti-tradition years. Tempered by all kinds of thoughts and emerging philosophical ideas, the writers only selectively inherited the tradition and needed more details to criticize traditional literature represented by Balzac's works. In this context, a weird group of Nouveau Roman writers saw the light of day. Most of Simon's works, characterized by "perfect integration of poetry and painting", attached great importance to the feeling of recalling, synchronicity, and re-recognition of the meaning of characters and things.This thesis is mainly an interpretation of Simon's La Route des Flandres. In terms of form, the writer was good at juxtaposing fragmented events to portray "innermost landscape". Under the influence of Impressionism and Cubism, Simon replaced chronology of traditional fictions with space and synchronicity of painting and, therefore, turned time-based art of language into space-based visual art. Focused on synchronicity, the thesis reveals the original look of the deconstructed story through an analysis of the narrative and pictorialized way of representation and combing its enigmatic plots.In term of content, the fiction, with the war as the background, was threaded by scenes of sex. Simon endowed the horse, a critical image in war, with the position equivalent to the characters. Through intensive reading of the text, the thesis probes into absurdity of the war and inanimation of sex while making a profound analysis of horses on racecourse and battlefield. The meaning of characters and things is totally different traditional philosophy, which rightly demonstrates the subversive ideas about value of the life held by Simon or even the era.The thesis also involves Simon's other fictions, interprets the characteristics of pictorialization and discusses the synchronic narrative and his treatment of fragmented plots.Literary connotation of Simon's works, well demonstrated by combination of poetry and painting, lies in anti-tradition and deconstruction of meaning. As well, the thesis puts forward opinions concerning status quo of the Nouveau Roman.