Claude Simon

was hygienically sterilized from the start by Robbe-Grillet's anathema against le mot A caractere visc6ral, analogique et incantatoire. Twenty years later, writers and critics alike have had, it would seem, a little too much intellectual austerity: R. Barthes now proclaims Le plaisir du texte, A. RobbeGrillet admits affective reactions (meaning some measure of frustration) to impeccable critical demonstrations.1 Somewhere between mathematics and impressionism there should be space for a poetic reading of the New Novel and Simon's work is the most obvious field to start such reading. I propose to point out a recurring -therefore obsessive in Mauron's terms -metaphor in Simon's early novels and to follow its diversification into mitaphore g6n6ratrice in La Route des Flandres, allegory, a delicate poetic structure superbly handled in Triptyque and finally into myth in La bataille de PharsaZe

Allegory · Art · Art history · Epistemology · Humanities · Linguistics · Literature · Meaning (existential) · Metaphor · Mythology · Poetry · Reading (process) · French Literature and Critical Theory · French Literature and Criticism · Historical and Literary Analyses · Philosophy