Poetry of Perception

HISTOIRE by Claude Simon. 341 pages. Braziller. $5.95.

To the French truth seekers known as New Novelists, the trouble with traditional hesaid, she-said fiction is that it creates only the cozy illusion of life, not the awesome awareness of it. True awareness, they say, lies in the endless inner space of consciousness, and that can only be approximated in literature, just as iron filings can indicate but never duplicate a magnetic field. New Novelists also agree that plot, characterization and psychology are outmoded: Freud is forsaken for Heidegger's phenomenology and the cold squint of the behaviorists.

France's Claude Simon would agree with all these propositions, but he is less interested in erecting models of a thesis than in exploring the possibilities of language. In Histoire, as in The Wind, The Grass and other books, he turns fragments of the imagination into poetry rather than into the monotone prose that is the mark of most New Novels. Histoire should be read as poetry, which means it should be read aloud. Speed readers, trained to sop up information and the dull acknowledgments of psychological and sociological fiction, will have to shift into low. Histoire has the dream's unquestioned authority to exist without having to justify itself in time, space or in man's rickety categories of experience.

In so far as the book is about anything, it is about the disintegration of a family. And, typically, at the same time it is about the disintegration of a story about the disintegration of a family. Hence the title, Histoire, which means both history and story--an indication of the trompe 1'oeil that gives the novel its mystifying rhythm of now-you-see-it, now-you-don't. Swimming through the pages with nothing stronger than a colon to slow them are fragments of memories, conversations, odors, tastes, tactile sensations and dim images from old postcards. Somewhere below, finning almost motionlessly, is the suicide of a cousin beloved by the narrator. He may or may not be responsible for the death because he may or may not have run off to fight in the Spanish Civil War.

All this is wondrously irrelevant to the overall lyric effect. Simon can be chided for the illusory pun of his title and for his helpful but distracting prefatory lines from Rilke: "It submerges us. We organize it. It falls to pieces. We organize it again and fall to pieces ourselves." But Simon is at ease with uncertainties and loose ends. In fact, loose ends are his antennae. How he uses them to convey his own private perceptions is his mystery and his art.

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