At the turn of the Flanders Highway| kumquat

Claude Simon's hand-painted route of the Flanders Highway

Before reading the French writer Claude Simon 's The Flanders Highway ( 1913-2005 ) , The Passage in War and Peace in which André was shot and looked up at the "sky of The High" was the most impressive literary writing of war. Not only its tragic violence and absurdity, but also because of the short moment that changed the growth trajectory of the characters: Duke Andrei Paulkonsky, who had longed for merit, looked at the clouds in the sky and suddenly realized that everything was empty. Click, as if, as Deleuze said, "Time is out of its hinges." The same rupture echoed through The Flanders Highway. This war novel, about the 1940 French army in the Flanders region of the Franco-Belgian border, is actually about the protagonist's journey from ignorance and naivety to disillusionment until he wakes up. Of course, this is simon's own story, whose life was rewritten in the spring light of May 16, 1940, on the country lane that he did not know how to call it, so he had to call it "Flanders Highway".

Simon was born in 1913, the son of half an aristocrat, and his mother's ancestor Jean-Pierre Lacombe Saint-Michel was a general under Napoleon on an expedition to Spain. His father was killed in World War I when he was not yet one year old, and his mother died of cancer when he was twelve. As an orphan, Simon has been loved in the family since childhood, and has no worries about food and clothing from an early age. Therefore, he has the innocent and peaceful curiosity about everything that is characteristic of the children of a rich family. Before the war, he studied Cubist painting in the studio of the famous painter André Lott, while experimenting with photography and beginning literary creation. In 1936, with a simple ideal, he went to Barcelona to see the great Spanish Revolution. In 1937, with curiosity about the Soviet Revolution, he traveled to Moscow and Odessa. In general, as he says in The Locust Tree, he inherited the "idiosyncratic" "character" of the family. However, the direction of the world situation brought him slowly closer to the final turning point of that fate.

On August 27, 1939, Simon enlisted in the army as a cavalry corporal. Five days later, World War II broke out. The day he received the conscription notice happened to be his father's death day, and he felt that fate was knocking on him, and there was no doubt that he would die! Presumably, like the protagonist who rushed to the battlefield in "The Locust Tree", he listened to the tremors of the rumbling earth in the northbound train, recalled his twenty-six years of wasted time, and exclaimed: "Oh my God, Oh my God!" How young we were then! "And now, he's going to die."

According to the scholar Eberhard Grube, Simon's unit was commissioned to participate in the "Deer Plan". According to the plan, once Belgium's neutrality was destroyed, the French concentrated their forces to the predetermined area (western Namur-Seidan) as quickly as possible, and at the same time transferred a part of their forces to the eastern part of the Meuse region of Belgium to hold back German fire and ensure that the large forces had time to reach the deployment site. The premise of this strategy was that the Arden area must be able to withstand the enemy's large armored forces and the Germans could not cross the Meuse River. It also determined that the troops that were in the vanguard were part of a mechanized force and a large number of cavalry units, and also determined the military steps to be carried out. However, the facts are very different from the expectations of the French. The Germans did not repeat the "Schlieffen Plan" used in World War I to capture Belgium first, but in May 1940 they unexpectedly concentrated their fire on Sedan, France, south of the Belgian city of Namur. The French were defenseless. Simon then described in an interview that, like "beams collapsed and pressed onto plywood," German planes and armored vehicles completely undermined french military strategy, resulting in the French's worst defeat since the Battles of Agincourt and Sedan in 1870.

From Simon's personal point of view, his intersection with this period of history is as follows: on May 10, in order to resist the German attack in the direction of Belgium, Simon's Thirty-first Regiment of Dragoons went north with the 4th Light Cavalry Division of the Ninth Army to engage the Germans; The next day, the Thirty-first Regiment crossed the Meuse River on horseback, but was defeated by German panzer divisions and fighter jets; On 16 May, the Thirty-first Regiment was ambushed and almost completely destroyed, and Simon escaped and tried to retrieve the large force; He met Colonel Ray of the Thirty-first Regiment, Colonel Guni of the Eighth Regiment, and three soldiers on the side of the road, and followed them down the country lane where they died; Hours later, he witnessed Colonel Ray being killed by a German sniper; The next day, Simon was captured.

From the expedition to the capture, it was only eight days, as if after a burst of electric flint, the cavalry company no longer existed, the former comrades-in-arms, the day and night warhorses, everything was in vain, and Simon's war career was hastily ended. For seven days, he did not fire a single bullet, not for fear of death, but by the disparity in the strength of the enemy's cavalry units made up of aircraft, artillery, armored vehicles, and machine guns, who were like hares in the hunting ground, and only had to flee for their lives. Simon was then sent to a prisoner-of-war camp in Mürberg, south of Brandenburg, and after five months of starvation, cold and servitude, he was transferred to a prisoner-of-war camp in the French province of Rounde in October of the same year, and successfully escaped from prison on October 27 and returned to his mother's hometown of Perpignan in the free zone of southern France. Since then, as he put it in The Locust Tree, "some kind of invisible wall, some kind of fracture that cannot be bridged" is torn between memory and reality, and the era of innocence is gone. Back in France, Simon experienced a long period of depression. The bloody battle (or massacre) of May 16, 1940, haunted his mind day and night, and he, who thought he had no return, managed to escape, and a vague self-condemnation in the Freud sense arose in his heart. He tried to figure out his own experience in this war, but as an ordinary soldier, how could he figure out everything that was greater than the human will? He wanted to write about the experience, but how? Writing means a re-establishment of order, and all that he experiences is out of order... In the face of unspeakable capital history, the writer loses his voice, and literature falls into a paradox.

In 1941, Simon completed his pre-war debut, The Cheater, but that was not the style he wanted. According to his own later account, it was just a one-step imitation of traditional literature. How do you present the memory of that war? This question has been on his mind for nearly two decades. It wasn't until the end of the fifties that Simon, after writing Grass, went to Etretta accompanied by Jerome Lindon, the president of Midnight Press. Halfway through the road, I came to a road bend, full of emerald green foliage: at that moment "the whole novel suddenly appeared in my mind", he later told the Express reporter. Then, he spent more than a year figuring out a way to write, using simultaneity to spread all the memories in the novel; That is to say, to use a novel to reproduce an all-encompassing moment in the mind.

He did it, and that is "Flanders Highway": the picture of the cavalry captain wielding a large knife, and after being shot, he stood up straight and fell like a melted lead soldier became the matrix of the whole novel, and in the novel, it was the protagonist's lingering nightmare; This central image evokes memories of pre-war, wartime, and post-war periods, as well as nested memories within the memories, interspersed with fragments of color. When creating, Simon first wrote down fragmentary fragments, then strung together into an outline, and marked different themes and characters with different colors. Then, with the eyes of a painter, he randomly mixed different color blocks to see where a little red was missing, where a little green was still missing... In the end, the story of the Flanders Highway unfolds to the reader in its original state of disorder and chaos. First-time readers will find it difficult to adapt because it is very different from the traditional novel that follows chronological and causal chains. Sometimes we don't know who is talking, who is recalling, what is the truth, which is speculation, where it is pure imagination. But everything is so fluid, pouring out like music, as colorful as paint, that the reader can turn from one page at random, or from another page at random the next reading, because it follows the order of stream of consciousness, the order of words attracting and coupling each other, the order of poetry and painting.

Author: Kumquat Fang

Editor: Xie Juan