CRITICS DIFFER ON CHOICE OF SIMON FOR PRIZE
Author: By Charles E. Claffey, Globe Staff
Date: Friday, October 18, 1985
Page: 14
Section: NATIONAL/FOREIGN
To Roger Shattuck, Commonwealth Professor of French at the University of
Virginia, the selection of Claude Simon as winner of the Nobel Prize for
literature was a "courageous choice" because the writer's work is important
but "neither popular nor traditional."
Shattuck said yesterday in a telephone interview that he "esteems Simon
very much," that the French writer "has earned a place as a major writer
working seriously to extend the relations between language, vision and the
novel form. . . . I welcome Simon to the writers of world rank."
Shattuck said Simon "generally is classed with the new novelists" and that
he probably is "the most serious and the steadiest" of the group.
"Simon's work is technically really quite brilliant. He is very strong on
visual imagery and has a kind of cinematographic concentration on detail and
movements in a field of vision," Shattuck said.
Shattuck added that Simon's novels are "almost cubist in terms of his
multiplying the novel lines until they intersect with one another and tend to
blur, so that his work requires a lot of work on the part of the reader."
Ned Rorem, musical composer, diarist and former American in Paris, said
that he was displeased with the choice. "When it comes to prizes there is no
right choice, although with hindsight every choice appears inevitable. Most
witnesses are uncomfortable, especially the losers, and even the Nobel Prize
is a raffle. In honoring Claude Simon, the Nobelists now show themselves to
admire the trend of form over content, which has been festering in all French
art for three decades, and which at its most extreme becomes the very
definition of decadence."
Rorem added that if he had to choose a Frenchman for the literature prize,
''rather than making some chic choice I would have been more comfortable with
Georges Simenon," the prolific writer of novels of crime and violence.
Victor Brombert, Henry Putnam University Professor of Romance and
Comparative Literature at Princeton, said he was "delighted" with the Simon
choice.
"Simon has been one of my favorites for a long time. I rate him as
outstanding among his generation of writers. He is very poetic and very
imaginative," Brombert said.
CLAFFE;10/17,15:42 CORCOR;10/18,14:51 REACT18
|
