Yeni roman: claude simon ve william faulkner

This thesis on the New Roman and its inspired novelty, analyzes the literary inspiration process based on the comparison of a French New Roman author, Claude Simon, and an American novelist, precursor of this movement, William Faulkner. The analysis and comparison of these two writers will be based on those of their respective masterpieces that are The Acacia and The Sound and the Fury. This study allows distinguishing the elements of « novelty » and stylistic creations of the New Roman. Everything seems to separate these two novelists: They are from different continents, different nationalities and ages. They differ by their experiences and issues they deal with. Yet we show in this paper how the writing techniques of the French writer Claude Simon (1913 - 2005), are based on those of the American author William Faulkner (1897-1962). The first part will be devoted to the modem novel and the definition of the New Roman to determine the writing techniques which make the « novelty », the value of « creation » of these novels, also mentioning its limits with postmodernism. In the second part the French novelist Claude Simon, a long misunderstood writer and his prolific work The Acacia will be discussed and the reasons for its classification as a « New Roman » will be analyzed. The third part is devoted to the American writer William Faulkner, a very controversial writer in its time, as well as an analysis of his novel The Sound and the Fury. Furthermore, we will determine that the author is a pioneer of the movement «New Roman » and its influence on Claude Simon. In conclusion, these two books and their authors will be compared to draw points of comparisons and differences to show demonstrate William Faulkner inspired literary creation of Claude Simon. The evolution of the novel towards modern novel marks the end of the omnipotence of the novelist because of the entry in a complex, uncertain and fast world. Given the disruption in the history of the twentieth century, industrial development, wars and global economy, writing should be completely different. Novelists became dissatisfied with the inherited stylistic traditions which can no longer express the reality of the world. The world cannot be explained in dichotomies, oppositions which are fixed and clear. At the end of the nineteenth century, eminent philosophers like Nietzsche and X Bergson showed interest in human perception and consciousness. They agree that the experience is a constant stream of sensations and memories; it is a « stream consciousness ». The writers of the early twentieth century such as Marcel Proust and James Joyce literary experiment these new, open paths. In the 1920s, for writers like William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf and Franz Kafka, writers of different nationalities and cultures, the reality is distorted, inconceivable and ironic. Not only the time intertwines their stories, but also there is an interpenetration and fusion between reason and madness, between intellect and emotion, between the subjective and the objective. The goal of the modernists is not disintegration but « super-integration » where all fragments are integrated into a whole. These authors are clearly precursors of the New Roman. In the late 1950s, critics are strong towards the literature of the time; these are difficult to read due to lack of punctuation or its surplus and the lack of temporal chronology texts. New Roman is the stylistic response to the opacity of this world. It is defined as a research and not as a rigid set of theoretical criteria. This movement arises in the continuation of the novel as a stage of permanent and necessary evolution of the genre process that must be redefined according to the needs and discoveries of its time. Defining New Roman as a literary movement was not obvious. Literary critics have considered the New Roman as a homogeneous movement. As for the writers of the New Roman, they considered this literary grouping as an invention of the critics to impose order in the chaos of contemporary writing. The movement of new novelists, who are especially the part of it, including Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute, Claude Simon and Michel Butor must be defined as a convergence of interests in the fight against the rigid laws. Since the reality and objectivity have become related notions, the reader is given an active, creative role. Recent novels require the reader a willingness to let go in the subjectivity of the narrator, to follow this stream of consciousness without trying to make it fit into a grid of logic and linear temporal succession. This is for each reader to find a sense and their own meaning and interpretation. Man is in the center of the New Roman because of the expression of things; everything is done only through its observers and actors. Since the absolute truth does not exist, it is just precisely the subjectivity, the strengths and weaknesses of the narrator, will tell this « truth » which arises in total subjectivity. Recent novels are written in an aesthetic concern, art for art's sake and must be addressed as well as an abstract work of art that you look in all its aspects and include every point of view of the hidden beauty or even a musical work that triggers the complex feelings in us.XI For new novelists, the language is the base for a novel, its reason for being. After two world wars and atrocities, the intelligibility of the world has been called into question and the basis of the naive and simple narration was broken. Linguistic rules were disrupted and syntax, semantics, spelling were devastated or ignored. The traditional rules of punctuation cannot be met because the narrator could not refrain from thinking. The author (or the author's absence) is used as punctuation to make the reader understand his flashbacks, ellipses, inner monologues. In the New Roman « characters » are present but not named. They are just what the characters in the novels have always been, that is to say, the projections of novelist's intimate concerns. This literary movement however avoids the social, psychological and political themes. We are far from surrealism of the pre-war period, and the literature of Sartre which is committed to socialist realism. New Roman may be defined as a set of refusal: refusal of anthropomorphism, a refusal of existentialism, a rejection of realistic illusion and psychologism, a refusal of the notion of character and chronology. After defining and laying the framework of the New Roman and its intentionality and writing technique, the second part of this thesis analyzes one of these new French novelists, a man personally marked by this period of upheaval, the wars of the twentieth century, Claude Simon. This Nobel Prize in Literature has left us a prolific work with a highly biographical character, a search of temporality through a very particular style which we will look through his particular work Acacia. Claude Simon has complicated relations with other new novelists. There is a mutual admiration for him from the writers who have similar ideas to his. Claude Simon nevertheless claims his total artistic freedom and arises as the naturalist of the New Roman. Marked by two World wars, Claude Simon's autobiographical novel uses to transcribe his experience as he felt. However as Claude Simon, and as for William Faulkner, language is inadequate and cannot recreate the psychological reality and the absurdity of war. Thus Simon created new stylistic ways such as; parentheses in parentheses a pictorial and musical writing both as an individual employment of present participle to try to recreate this experience, and chaos. Claude Simon is undoubtedly the creator of a new style what it is fascinating to analyze the sources of his inspiration as an example of literary influence process across countries and over time. His use of the present participle in particular is based on his reading of The Sound and the Fury. Its author, William Faulkner, has traveled a difficult path to become a modernist writer in spite of or in opposition to the strong influence of Victorian values that marked his childhood. In one of his masterpieces, The Sound and the Fury, he describes himself as his « most splendid failure », William Faulkner, the author of the fictional world of Yoknapatawpha, said he failed four times to tell Caddy's history. XII This story reflects not only the decline of the southern United States after the Civil War but also a universal decadence. The fact that the novel opens with the vision of the character Benjy, an adult child mentally very limited, is particularly difficult to follow for the reader. Nevertheless it is precisely because Benjy has no defined personality that he does not need to detach events and he can reveal the whole story of Caddy in all its brutality. From the beginning, the reader is immersed in a text that makes them uncomfortable because it does not match any of his previous reading experiences. Language and grammar are extremely simple and minimized. Instead of allowing the reader to sit comfortably in the familiar fictional world of the novel, William Faulkner forces him to find himself the specific principles that guide its creation. William Faulkner uses the full stream of consciousness writing and thus shows us the inadequacy of words to just express the concepts. William Faulkner especially uses italics to show the interior monologues. Therefore, William Faulkner shows large differences which exist between different human understandings of reality. Comparing Claude Simon and William Faulkner, we see a good example of literary inspiration across continents and eras; a literary inspiration process that led the emergence of the masterpieces. These novels sometimes are criticized as incomprehensible because some inexperienced readers could encounter difficulties in their reading; they are masterworks, virtuoso of literature, and real literary creations. We hope that this study will inspire those wishing to work on the New Roman including the translators of the New Romans in Turkey. Other future comparisons of authors of New Romans with their predecessors of their successors postmodernists could yet shed another light on the literary movement.