Claude Simon: when the emergence of the real demands a poetics

Abstract

As a cavalryman in the French army from May 10 to 17, 1940, Claude Simon experienced a series of traumas that he perceived as a plunge into the Real, in the Lacanian sense of the term. His entire writing would be shaped by a constant movement between the recollection of those moments, the impossibility of evoking them, and an overt return to the Symbolic. His poetics emerges precisely from this difficulty in expressing that experience.