| The work of Claude Simon is born from the wars that shook European consciousness between 1914 and 1945. For Simon, the experience of war is not an experience of history: it is an encounter with the inhuman, which totally disqualified all forms of writing. How then can history occupy such a primary place in the work of Claude Simon? I argue that it is through a radical refoundation of history and historiography.;Contrary to previous critical assessments, history in Simon is not so much a matter of a return of the Same, as it is the place where difference is inscribed. There is no return to History in Simon, but a return of history. As Simon has often stressed, the past experience manifests itself strictly in the present of writing.;In such a writing, representation is strictly impossible. It is therefore not from a mimetic viewpoint that one has to understand the place of photography and painting in Simon's oeuvre. Much of Simon's transformation of the writing of history is indebted to a photographic imaginary. As Walter Benjamin has shown, photography offers an entirely new way of conceiving history. While Benjamin's theses illuminate Simon's practice, I show that Simon's writing of photography offers a view of the "end" of history that Benjamin did not envision.;It is my thesis that Claude Simon "makes" history in writing, in an unceasing deconstruction followed by partial, fragmentary and contradictory reconstructions. In this writing, both photography and painting play a crucial role: without these two "arts," Claude Simon's work as we know it would simply not have come into being. |
