Naming the World

Claude Simon’s books provoke people to either rage or adulation: Sadly, there is no middle ground. One thinks of the exasperating disdain epitomized by Isaac Bashevis Singer’s remark--upon being asked his opinion of the French 1985 Nobel Prize winner--”Is it a boy or a girl?” or of the dense explications of Simon’s work that rely on words like “intertextuality,” “representation” and “discourse” (and that guarantees many a reader being put off, thinking: I don’t know enough to read this or life’s too short for such a demanding writer).

Simon’s career, which includes 11 books available in English, underlines the one essential job of the writer of a book: to describe the real world, to describe the world solely through close attention to the particulars within the world, for as Simon asked in a recent interview, “What’s the point of making things up when reality is so much better than fiction?”

“The Jardin Des Plantes” is a precise verbal stroll, a liberating associative walk in a luminous garden of experiences and memories. The book begins with an epigram from Montaigne, a succinct description of what is to come: “No one has a definite understanding of the shape of his life. We can conceive of it only in little pieces.... We are all patchwork, and of a makeup so formless and diverse that each part, each moment acts on its own.”

And then, one opens the book and faces typographically complex pages (to which no newspaper column can do justice) with many discrete fragments--sometimes even two columns of text, and at other times a single word or phrase planted in the center of the whiteness of the page. This should be expected, however, from a writer who, with Robert Pinget and Alain Robbe-Grillet, threw out all the standard narrative pegs and frames of storytelling to renovate that baggy monster, the novel.

Forty years after his masterpiece, “The Flanders Road,” and continuing a literary career that has spanned more than 50 years, Simon opens his latest and easily accessible autobiographical work at a writer’s congress in Kyrgyzstan (no longer so obscure today). There the reader finds him feeling annoyed. He’s irritated by all the self-important people, not to mention by his own willingness to go along with the perks of travel and recognition that came with the Nobel Prize. He sighs, as he spots another writer: “The last guy I wanted to meet up with ... naturally he was the author of the masterpiece drivel Future generations Harvest’s that we will have sowed We all know that we must die but we want to put it off as long as possible etc. etc. two pages like that final motion blather Pay the bill.”

While at first superficially a sort of stream of jagged fragmentation, passages like this show how an alert mind becomes a respected and willing accomplice in Simon’s construction of his book. We encounter Arthur Miller at the conference, as we read on; then a woman is taking a bath; Joseph Brodsky appears and we are reminded of his trial during the Soviet times. A painter friend who was imprisoned in the Nazi camp Dachau is mentioned along with title of his painting “Archivio per la Mamoria” and then a startling paragraph that takes us back to Simon’s experience in the Spanish Civil War:

“ ‘a la cinque de la tarde’ about five o’clock yes probably death in the afternoon except that there was no one there to watch me no spectators no arena no little trumpet no applause only the cheerful green springtime countryside cheerful May sunshine so let’s say five o’clock me calf-deep in the stream swearing like a mule driver pulling on the reins of that mare that wouldn’t jump or even step into the water like comical English engraving foxhunt rider black cap red coat white pants boot tops folded down whiskey label same position except in this case the fox was me millions of men first shock the most merciless Good fortune of finding myself in the beat seats the front row little iron-gray balls began to rise up here and there in the field.”

Yes, it seems like a hodgepodge. But, by entitling his book “The Jardin des Plantes,” Simon is suggesting that it’s the duty of the writer to create a version of the world that begins in randomness; but, upon examination, a faint pattern becomes visible and allows the reader to make of it--of all the details, the tangle of descriptions not unlike plants and flowers growing wildly out of control--what he wants.

All of Simon’s books at some point hark back to the moment quoted earlier, the eight days in May 1940 when Simon was one of the few survivors of a doomed French cavalry regiment sent out to oppose the German tanks under Rommel. But in “The Jardin Des Plantes” he attempts to remember correctly what happened, goaded by the voice of a skeptical interrogator who keeps asking how he knows what happened and quoting passages from the notebooks of Rommel himself, who was in charge of the army trying to kill Simon--notebooks which are as fragmentary as the text of Simon himself.

Simon moves the reader to and fro from those days in 1940, to an earlier moment when he was involved on the Republican side during the Spanish Civil War and back again to the restless traveling about the world after he received the Nobel Prize with startling snapshots of life in Chicago, New York and Madras as well as memories of an illness while at a boarding school. And as he deals with the insistent interviewer, he also portrays the complex delight of sexual desire and the ever present disturbing memories of this disastrous century.

After the catastrophe of Sept. 11, we are again confronted by a central question: We all know what happened on that day, the story is told over and over again, but how to preserve what happened when already it has begun to disappear into a few over-reproduced photographs and to be dissipated in the pundits’ analysis of cause, motive and consequence? How to capture the exact nature of the brightness of that sunny clear morning? How to describe the moment when each person heard of this event? As a model for this describing, Simon’s “The Jardin Des Plantes” is exemplary, heartening in a particular and scrupulous way.

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Thomas McGonigle is the author of “The Corpse Dream of N. Petkov” and “Going to Patchogue.”