Thinking of Claude Simon this morning, and of standing in line at the Chagall exhibit recently. I still remember the overwhelming joy I felt at devouring The Flanders Road in the early '80s. And later, much later, in Bonn, I finally understood those pigeons outside the palace in Simon's novel, while I watched a pigeon flap against its image in the highly reflective surface of an office building's first story window, next to the McDonald's across the Bertha-von-Suttner-Platz from the Beethoven-Haus.
Leaving aside the complaints that I am a "difficult", "boring", "unreadable" or "confused" writer, and recalling that the same reproaches have always been levelled at any artist who even to the slightest degree upsets acquired habits and the established order of things, let us wonder, instead, at the way in which the grandchildren of those people who in impressionist paintings once saw nothing but shapeless (i.e., illegible) daubs today form endless queues outside exhibitions and museums to admire the works of those very same daubers.
…
I will come back to those who reproach my novels for having "neither a beginning nor an end", which is perfectly correct. Here I would like to dwell on two adjectives regarded as defamatory, and which are always naturally or, one could say, correlatively associated, and which serve precisely to pin-point the nature of this problem; namely those which denounce my works as a product of "labour", and thus necessarily "artificial".
[Claude Simon, 1985, Nobel lecture]
[via wood s lot kinda]
Posted by jim at September 19, 2003 12:39 PM | TrackBack