The street in Flanders
The street in Flanders ( French: La Route des Flandres ) is a novel by the French Nobel Prize laureate Claude Simon from 1960.
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In his novel, Simon tells of the confrontation between young Georges, who comes from the French upper class, and the brutal reality of the Second World War . He is torn from the sheltered life of a young person with an ancient language educational tradition by being seconded to a cavalry squadron commanded by his noble relative, Rittmeister de Reixach. The traumatic experiences of the battle in Flanders, the retreat and demise of the troops (motto: “I believed I learned to live, I learned to die”) determine his life after his return from captivity. In his overlapping and ever-changing memories, three aspects dominate the increasing disillusionment of his previous identity:
1. Georges, the son of a university professor and his wife from the noble de Reixach family, was brought up and intended to follow the conception of people and the world of the classical educational ideal taught at school with its "idyllic shady landscapes, the idyllic maudlin realm of reason and virtue" To become a teacher. But in contrast to his father, who "sat in the semi-darkness of the twilight pavilion where the world appeared as a whole through the colorful window panes", the ideal of the Enlightenment is increasingly being suppressed by the reality of war. B. by the decaying human and horse carcasses on the roadside, "assimilated by the deep earth, which in your lap under the hair of grass and leaves the bones of every deceased Rosinante [...] and every deceased rider [...] and every deceased Alexander which have become brittle lime again [...] to fossils, which he [...] himself was about to become by witnessing the unconscious how the stuff he was made of slowly transformed [...] was eaten up [...] by a crowd that was slowly advancing and that was perhaps the secret tumult of the atoms that had just permuted in order to rearrange themselves in the crystalline twilight according to a different structure, a mineral or crystalline one ”. He feels “already half engulfed by the earth, withdrawn”. Also in Wack's facial expression, Georges experiences “the brusque revelation of death that was finally not only known in the abstract form of that idea with which we have become used to living together, but in his physical reality had appeared or rather had struck, this act of violence, this attack, a blow of unheard-of, unimagined, immoderate, unjust, undeserved brutality, the dull, startling rage of things that need no reason to strike ”. Georges experienced not only the “annihilation of one of the two armies but rather the disappearance of what a week earlier had been regiments of batteries squadrons people were sucked into by the nothing or the Urals, or even more: the disappearance of even the idea of the term regiment battery squadron Man, or even more: the disappearance of every idea of every concept ”.
From imprisonment he wrote to his father, who lamented the bombing of the Leipzig library: “If the content of the thousands who had browsed this irreplaceable library had not been able to prevent incidents like the bombing that destroyed it, I would not see to what extent the destruction by phosphorus bombs these thousands of books and papers that were apparently completely useless meant a loss for humanity. This was followed by a detailed list of the safe values, the very necessary things that we need here much more urgently [...] namely socks, underpants [...] ". But it is not only in war that Georges experiences the rights of the stronger and the loss of solidarity. If the hierarchies are given to the soldiers, they develop in the camp in battles of gambling and the black market, in which the haves or the unscrupulous rule the weak.
2. At the same time, he calls into question the educated or upper-class elitist lifestyle by meeting the soldiers from the common people with their long working days. B. the Alsatian farmer Wack or the Jewish tailor and cloth merchant of the same age Blum. The cruel downfall of the cavalry squadron in Flanders, "bad affair" in the words of an officer, contrasts with horse racing as a social sport of the nobility and the upper classes with their appearances in the stands and the rivalry for the best horses and jockeys as proof of their power. In war, the exploitation of humans and animals is carried to the deadly point. Both events are intertwined in the middle of the novel. The horse race frames the final demise of the squadron. When Georges returned to his parents' house in the manor house after 5 years of imprisonment, he broke away from his previous class ideas. He takes over the agriculture that was left to a tenant before the war.
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3. In addition to describing the situation of soldiers in Flanders and in captivity, Georges is fascinated by his female fantasies, which are articulated in sexual dreams and refer to fleeting encounters and puzzling love triangles between husband, unfaithful wife and her lover. Such thoughts are triggered with him by the ride of the Rittmeister in the "honorable camouflaged suicide". Georges searches for the reason for this and asks himself what role his young wife Corinne plays in it. Associatively, he can think of other examples of mysterious women:
While billeting in a village in the Ardennes, he witnessed a dispute between the alderman and the farmer armed with a hunting rifle over the young farmer's wife, probably his sister-in-law. The woman, who Georges only saw briefly in the light of the lantern "like milk" in the barn, unleashes his passion and he imagines her behind the curtain of her window embroidered with a peacock as a goddess.
He remembers seeing a portrait of de Reixach's great-grandfather Arnolphe, who died around 150 years ago, with a head shot bleeding in his imagination, and hearing from servants that the suicide was linked to the affair of his unfaithful wife Agnes. With Georges, Blum thinks through this case in all possible variants, but finally evaluates the family history as "novels made up of theater tragedies [...] you like that, you are still crazy". The hard-working tailors and cloth merchants in his district had no time for the de Reixachs' aloof pseudo-problems.
Stimulated by the slippery chattering of the soldiers and their interest in lonely women, Georges, in connection with his sexual fantasies, is evidently fascinated by the image of the femme fatale : a woman who is sexily dressed, appears egocentrically eccentric, unconventional and the men themselves captivates and dominates. In the novel, she is personalized as a counter-figure to the Sleeping Beauty farmer's wife in Corinne de Reixach, whom Georg only briefly saw once at a horse show and from which he can refer to "Sabine gossip stories [his mother] or scraps of sentences (which themselves scraps of reality were), from confidential communications “Iglesias'“ during the long months of war, imprisonment, involuntary abstinence ”, a stage figure was invented:“ And this time Georges could see her just as if he had been there himself ”,“ the angel face [... ], the transparent aureole of blond hair, the young impetuous, immaculate flesh and blood ”. Several times in the course of the novel her image changes in various facets. She first appeared to Iglesia, in the words George remembered, as a child in adult clothes. He was impressed by “this childlike, innocent, fresh, so to speak pre-virgin appearance”. Then she is described as a type: as the “most feminine woman” or later as “a woman without age, like the sum of all women, old or young, something that could just as well be fifteen, thirty or sixty years as thousands of years, an anger omitted or moved by an anger, resentment, hostility, malice that did not result from a certain experience or accumulation of time, but was something else, and he thought [...]: 'You old whore! You old babe! '".
Georges tries again and again to ask Iglesia about her personality and his relationship with her. Corinne probably provoked her husband, who did not meet expectations, by dealing with Jockei, who was victorious in many races, so that he wanted to prove himself at a horse race and risked, that was her concern, he might make a fool of himself in front of the noble audience. While the horse-experienced jockey put on the young chestnut mare and advised to let her run according to her instinct - "You just have to let her go and she will run all by itself" - Reixach tried to tame the horse and drove it with him Whip on. This attitude can symbolically be transferred to his dealings with Corinne. With this violent method he got second place, but that didn't impress his wife, she only valued winners who have a feel for horses. In order to hurt him, she had a one-off affair with Iglesia, which she only used as a servant. Apparently, De Reixach knew about it and saw that he could not win Corinne for himself, because when he went to war after 4 years of marriage, he took Iglesia with him as a boy and resignedly sought death in battle as a double loser the hope that the Jockei riding behind him will follow him. But this interpretation is also based on speculation and is therefore controversial.
Georges often thinks not only in terms of the individual people ("I should have been that person too [...]"), but also in their suspected erotic situations, e.g. B. in sexual dreams that are faded into the billeting of the farmer or the imprisonment, but at the end of the novel all questions about the affairs of the young women remain open (“But how can you know”) especially since Corinne denies after the war, “at some point in time to have had personal relationships [to the jockeys] "," [...] so that the only real thing about all this was perhaps only vague slander and defamation and the boasting about which two imprisoned imaginative youths who saw no women "drove the Iglesias to use it as an instrument to satisfy their needs. A scene in which the unnamed woman rejects his confession of love and says to him in an enigmatic ambiguity: "[...] I don't know me Do you love me because I am what I am [...] is very characteristic of George's desire for cliché figures." ] ". This topic is continued in a further conversation with ghosts in the wagon, "while in reality [he] may have never stopped [...] riding". When he admitted that he had waited for her [Corinne?] For 5 years, she replied: "No [you are] not with me. I am just a soldier's girl like the figures you see drawn with chalk on the barracks walls [...] [ ...] not even a face ”. It is also questionable whether George had a three-month affair with the remarried Corinne after the war, which she then aggressively ended: “Perhaps it was just as futile, just as senseless, just as unreal as stringing together scribbled words on sheets of paper and looking for reality Searching for words ”, and perhaps George’s final comment also includes his last romance in a novel:“ But did I really see it, or just thought I saw it, or just imagined it or even dreamed it, maybe I was asleep and had never stopped sleeping with eyes wide open in broad daylight. "
shape
Simon's work, which is assigned to the Nouveau Roman , is not told chronologically from a uniform perspective. Many of alternating between the ego and personal form of acts written from different times are made up of a mosaic of interconnected and mutually overlapping descriptions. Many connections are only revealed at the end as nested memories, sometimes in the style of a breathless stream of consciousness without dots and commas, or the protagonist's constructions changed on the basis of new information and associations. In captivity, Georges and Blum repeatedly play through different variations and mixtures of the two Reixach deaths and their previous histories with the guarded farmer's wife: "[...] where they tried each other indirectly (namely by virtue of their imagination, that is, by doing everything Searched for and put together what they could find in their memory of what happened, heard or read, in order to conjure up the shining, shimmering images by means of the ephemeral, evocative magic of language, by means of found words in the hope of making it palatable [...] ] what their unspeakable reality was) to put them in the vain, mysterious, passionate world in which they - since they could not physically - moved mentally: something that was perhaps no more real than a dream than words coming from their lips " . In connection with the discussion about the question of whether the Reixach ancestor shot himself, e.g. B. because he suffered a defeat comparable to that of the Rittmeister, or whether he was killed by Agnes' lover when he surprised him with her in the bedroom, Blum exposes George's method of overlapping memories as "a woman's gossip [George's mother Sabine ] who is perhaps more concerned with saving the reputation of a loved one [...] and giving a name that has become dull a new shine ", whereby the son associates the rumor, so called by his mother, with an in flagrant representation. Blum asks him: “But what do you really know?” And that is a central message from the author to the reader.
Within George's constructions, the following time levels can be recognized as secured novel plots:
1. Childhood with parents in the de Reixach mansion.
2. De Reixach's 4-year marriage to his wife Corinne, who is 20 years his junior, whose unresolved relationship with the Jockei Iglesia and the conflict-reflecting horse race.
3. The deployment of Georges in the cavalry squadron of Rittmeister de Reixach, who was related to him by his mother, together with Iglesia, the officer's boy . He remembers the roll call when the general of the cavalry, who shot himself after the defeat, walked past the squadrons who had lined up in a field in the Ardennes one winter morning.
4. Reixach's decimated squadron moves on muddy roads past cadavers through destroyed villages after major losses in Flanders. He is ambushed with the last four of his company and the Rittmeister rides to his death with his saber raised. George's comrade, Lieutenant Wack, follows him while Georges and Iglesia flee, wander through the area and experience the dissolution of all military structures. In a farm they change their uniforms for peasant clothes. They hide from both French and German soldiers, reverse the exchange of clothes because they fear being shot as deserters, and are taken prisoner.
5. George's transport with other prisoners of war in a cattle wagon to Saxony.
6. Reunion with Blum and Iglesia in the prison camp. They are used for earthworks, unloading coal wagons or as harvest workers. George escapes, is caught and taken back to the camp.
7. George returns to his parents after 6 years. He took over the farm that was left to a tenant before the war and visited Corinne, who was remarried in Toulouse.
interpretation
Burmeister has discussed the novel - the absurdity of being a soldier and the criticism of class society - and provided autobiographical background information: drafted in August 1939, the author served in the 31st Dragoon Regiment under Colonel Ray. The regiment was wiped out by the Wehrmacht in France on the Belgian border in mid-May 1940 . A German sniper shot the colonel. Claude Simon managed to escape from captivity near Mühlberg in October 1940 .
Burmeister points to repetitive symmetries. The fatal ambush shot - described repeatedly - frames the novel. The annihilation of the cavalry regiment - placed in the middle of the novel - is flanked by a horse race in peacetime that Rittmeister de Reixach loses.
literature
Spends used
- The street in Flanders. Novel. Translated from the French by Elmar Tophoven . R. Piper, Munich 1961, 1985.
- The street in Flanders. Novel. Translated from the French by Elmar Tophoven. With an afterword by Brigitte Burmeister. Verlag Volk und Welt, Berlin 1980. 342 pages (licensor of the German translation: R. Piper, Munich 1961), without ISBN
Secondary literature
- Brigitte Burmeister : The senses and the sense. Exploring Claude Simon's linguistic world . Matthes & Seitz Berlin 2010 (1st edition), ISBN 978-3-88221-686-8
- Winfried Wehle : Glissement perpétuel de la narration: Claude Simon, La Route des Flandres., In: Albers, Irene; Nitsch, Wolfram (Ed.): Lectures allemandes de Claude Simon. - Lille: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2013, pp. 63-75. PDF
Individual evidence
- ↑ Burmeister, p. 47 above
- ^ Piper edition 1985
- ↑ p. 214, as cited below from the 1985 Piper edition.
- ↑ p. 193
- ↑ p. 233
- ↑ p. 231f.
- ↑ p. 232f.
- ↑ p. 84f.
- ↑ p. 287f.
- ↑ p. 215
- ↑ p. 208
- ↑ p. 273f.
- ↑ p. 157
- ↑ pp. 137- [148-159] -174
- ↑ p. 223
- ↑ p. 193
- ↑ p. 12 etc.
- ↑ p. 13 etc.
- ↑ p. 56f. 258 etc.
- ↑ p. 57
- ↑ p. 59
- ↑ p. 278
- ↑ p. 177
- ↑ p. 80
- ↑ p. 276
- ↑ z. B. Blum's interpretation of the affair of Reixach's great-grandmother Agnes, p. 177ff.
- ↑ pp. 38, 91, etc.
- ↑ p. 278
- ↑ pp. 56, 221 etc.
- ↑ p. 221
- ↑ p. 221
- ↑ p. 136
- ↑ p. 141
- ↑ p. 133
- ↑ p. 133
- ↑ p. 140f.
- ↑ p. 138
- ↑ p. 176
- ↑ p. 284
- ↑ p. 278f.
- ↑ p. 292
- ↑ p. 292
- ↑ p. 248
- ↑ p. 266
- ↑ p. 265
- ↑ p. 284
- ↑ p. 302
- ↑ Burmeister, p. 57 below
- ↑ p. 175
- ↑ p. 179
- ↑ Graphic “The Surprised Lover”, pp. 81, 205
- ↑ p. 179
- ↑ z. BS 30f. 80f.
- ↑ p. 8
- ↑ p. 193
- ↑ p. 10 etc.
- ↑ p. 12
- ↑ pp. 104, 149f.
- ↑ p. 109
- ↑ p. 201
- ↑ p. 231
- ↑ z. BS 71
- ↑ p. 175
- ↑ p. 280
- ↑ p. 175
- ↑ pp. 221, 226-229
- ↑ Burmeister, pp. 47–70
- ↑ see for example the edition Volk und Welt 1980, pp. 198–199
- ^ Edition Volk und Welt 1980, p. 317