Archipelago and North

Claude Simon

—Translated from French with an Introduction by Louis Cancelmi

INTRODUCTION

Claude Simon is best known as a novelist, in particular as a “new novelist”—therefore a formalist—with a gift for crafting long, super-subordinated sentences with a painter’s eye and engineer’s precision. Though the Nobel committee awarding him the 1985 prize for literature cited his “deepened awareness of time in the depiction of the human condition,” they might as easily have praised his careful attention to space. He was an artisan both in method and effect, and his training as a painter contributed significantly to the visual style of his writing, on vivid display in these prose poems, where story, without dissolving entirely, gives way to layers of memory, perception, and imagination, producing an almost cubist transcription of reality.

Neither Archipelago nor North was published in French during Simon’s lifetime. Les Éditions de Minuit brought them out in 2009, thirty-six years after they appeared in the journals Åland and Finland. The author first visited Scandinavia in the summer of 1963, when he gave a conference in Lahti, Finland, and both poems presented here have something of the travel journal to them: the geography and history, the natural and manmade habitats, and in general the sense of place they convey, are all depicted with an attention and intensity that imply direct experience. That said, they in no way resemble mundane (or even extraordinary) reportage. They are, rather, reformulations, “assemblages” of the material from which they were composed. The result is highly structured but at the same time lush, even sensuous, and in keeping with the rigorous experimentation of Simon’s major narrative works.

With Archipelago and North, Simon gives us both architecture and its photo negative, neither scaffolding nor space alone but a synthesis of the two, and a kind of demonstration that the artist’s subject cannot be disentangled from its form. Architecture, on its most basic level, is the creature’s response to the demands of nature, a manipulation of natural forms undertaken not only for the sake of survival, but in hopes of making nature habitable, useful, beautiful. The more extreme the environment, the more exposed are the limits of order, and the more apparent the tendency of nature (and of time itself) to reconsume the interventions and fantasies of human ingenuity, reduce them to mere traces. These poems, while providing an account of such tendencies, might also be read as creature responses themselves: artificial structures through which Simon negotiates an alien landscape, illustrating, demarcating, and organizing its spaces in order to build—image by image, word by word—a new and elaborate whole.

ARCHIPELAGO

like perforations at first, here and there, as though beneath the fabric of parallel meadows woods fields stretched another sky, symmetrical to the one the plane is flying through, yet darker, a lightly purpled blue

or gray

shimmering dull glare backlit like metal mirrors studded in the grass

lemon-yellow reflection now and then running quickly over the surface when the sun

optical illusion setting them in light as though not holes at all but puddles of mercury scattered in faint relief upon the darkened earth

one that barely forces the adjacent road to change its course then another larger one (the road turning off veering upwards curving coming back on the left following the edge of the river curving in the opposite direction and returning then to its rectilinear trajectory) then nothing more: only the fields the woods the little gleaming rectangles of roofs, then another, just a pond this time, then a fourth then five then ten the earth now spangled ripping itself apart dissecting itself so to speak

rag tattered with a thousand cuts

as though the plane were flying over one of these paintings one of these tessellations where from right to left one color gradually takes the place of another invading it by increasing fractions each element in equal tension with the center of the canvas then

the opposite now: strips drawn out in long parallel strands (what a marvelous glacier tons of years withdrawing slipping slowly away …) their darkness against this sparkling expanse as far as the eye can see

columns processions of pilgrims advancing a fantastic armada driving toward

millions of years of bluish strata crawling edging forth in a tremendous silence inhabited by tremendous groans the polished granite thousands of islands thousands of gulfs bays creeks where the oyster-colored ocean swells

water lilies ringed with light dissipating upon a slate-gray backdrop drifting

archipelago ΑΡΧΙ−ΠΕΛΑΓΟ: referring originally not to these innumerable specks of scattered earth but on the contrary to the vast sea

as though the sense had inverted itself Container for the contents the reverse of Greece (and likewise the two flags one a white cross against blue background the other a blue cross against white background) Like a photographic positive and its hourglass negative the top on bottom where the void is full language inside-out like a glove the seams here beginning to bulge

sudden thunder in these silences flower of fire with a yellow heart blooming vermilion petals battles for these straits as well these passages Swedish ironclads Russians with iron-laden vessels advancing through these cold white iron seas

fin-land suo-mi: marsh-land

imagining them peopled still with fabulous beasts half-man half-fish as in these paintings where pinkish lines on whitewashed backgrounds depict creatures through their torsos a medial bone the curved ribs on either side of which flaring like harpoon barbs

discalced Franciscan monks zealots come from where to build a sanctuary here with stones of pink lilac cyclamen blackish brown its roof covered in scales to depict the scourging the judge in his plum-colored robes washing his hands to sculpt these clusters of clotted blood

vines climbing the sides the palms the feet pierced with nails grapes hanging from them

the sea the whole archipelago climbing toward us One after another beginning with the most distant the islands sinking disappear one of them a low-lying one barely undulating rose up grew larger concealing the previous ones it scrolled past quickly to one side water splashing up under the floats His enormous sailor’s hands thick flat fingers square nails rimmed black with grease stopped fiddling with the levers and gadgets on the instrument panel with its various black dials and various black switches among which they had been dancing skimming over them delicately as over a complex and feminine form the din of the motor stopped when he was close enough he jumped deftly onto the rock and wound the rope around one of the stakes on the landing

silence clumps of alders rowans scarcely shivering and these long grasses like pink feathers in the distance forming blurry pastel clouds

helmets and arms these too made of iron they probably set foot on these same rocks piled out of hobnailed skiffs girded with baldrics beneath their brown frocks before painting upon the limed surfaces the white vaults between the multicolored palms of the archways these strange amphibian creatures

two escaping from the toothy maw of some swamp monster neither fish nor men nor women with their flat enormous feet still fins one of them endowed not with breasts but teats like a female cetacean’s whose vulva is said to resemble a woman’s same softness

silence the water spreading in layers without breaking over the polished granite surface retreating leaving it wet a whale’s flank lilac

grapes of blood

or still creviced: not rock but thick leather of an old pachyderm furrowed with wrinkles with fissures with interlacing gashes left by a chiseled knife

pier of loose planks all askew resting on a first cambered rock and tinted gray by the water the frost the sun another branch of water the undulating silence of pallid cattails then the stone underfoot silence

only the muted creaking of the rope straining and slackening the wavelets licking the floats the little red-and-white hydroplane un-moving poised on the water like a long-legged insect

and yet cannonades for someone from these rocks some fortress built from massive chunks of the same rocks guardian of these silences these mazes these scraps

some of them rather large with paths roads houses with green roofs red walls with white crosses From the plane the recently harvested or turned over fields where tractors had passed through leaving parallel grooves as though some enormous comb had set about tracing them rounding the corners embedding here and there some rock or some jade-green copse like those sacred gardens in Japan where raking the sand is a matter of ritual fawn-colored fossilized sea its parallel waves frozen around stones dropped here and there by a fastidious deity

others hardly big enough for a few trees three pines a silver birch

lapping silence

others still without even a tuft of grass ground down barely breaking the surface of the water petrified fish low enough even for a single wave to cover them washed over and again endlessly revarnished thousands of silences

thunderous flowers of fire bows loaded with iron great sails their figureheads plunging before them through the straits the pleats of their sculpted skirts flapping in the wind their impassive painted wooden faces raised toward the sky one hand concealing one of their paint-smeared breasts their chalky masks made up pink their blue earthenware eyes their thick coal-tar locks floating beneath the bowsprit the water separated by the bow into locks of foam

like sacrilegious thunderclaps answering one another in the silence echoing among the ice sheets the rocks the empty sky

Englishmen Frenchmen too redheaded barbarians with thick side whiskers Bretons with large ribboned hats with short coats short hands even thick fingers with thick nails splintered by the rigging

all the wildflowers umbels campanulae miniature daisies wild oats yellow or gray-green lichen like loose change clinging piled on top of one another ink stains daffodil spreading over blotting paper dotting the lilac leather of the rocks

engraving that shows them busying themselves around hefty black cannons on a wooden gun carriage loaded with iron harnessed with cables contorting with the recoil hefty shortish admiral with oakum sideburns wearing a cocked hat a telescopic spyglass whose copper glints in his right hand the thumb of the other on his chest between two buttons of his tunic

thunder and fire

then silence again nothing but the crackling of fire now and then a beam caving in with a splash of sparks the surfaces of the walls the battlements their enormous stones cyclamen pink strewn among the silent dead

seasons, castles

the flagship gliding slowly between the islands beneath the complicated scaffolding of its spars and rigging some queen of sculpted ice at its prow the empresses with their blue and white blue and red names Alexandra Kristina Katherina their dresses snow-white and gold fluttering about their thighs their snow-white faces a bit fleshy cruel proud sovereigns of the steppes of the woods

princesses with archipelagoes for their dowries with beds of islands upon islands

of forests upon forests vast as continents

quarreling with one another contending with the usurpers from the South

straits

isthmuses

water lily islands

lakes of mercury

fish islands

processions of islands

marshes

caravans of islands on the tinplate sea

inlets

pallid cattails

the fish men with snow-white bodies with pink bones the females their teats drawn in salmon pink on the white of silence

NORTH

once I arrived the setting sun like an orange hung above the frozen white sea incandescent disk without warmth unmoving as though caught between the interwoven branches of naked trees in a salmon gray satin sky the facades on the harbor with pediments and colonnades painted delicate colors pastel blue ocher in the whiteness of the ponds the tugboats had opened channels of black water

but never until now …

capital of the frigid North

HELSINGFORS blue red yellow finished with a flag F flapping in the wind swaying S, HELSINKI snapping on the K like those triangles of ice shattered by ship prows and which the nocturnal frost had probably soldered together again or maybe a cold so deep that as soon as the vessel passed, springing back in the swirls of wake knocking together, had solidified like this chaos of grayish slabs like stars like saw teeth climbing one on top of another their tips the wavelets of black water licking their oblique planes

screeching black-hooded seagulls their black feet landing for an instant on the tarnished surface arguing with one another furious then flying away all at once

spiral of orange peel floating rising and falling among the other detritus bits of wood corks wisps of straw brown things glommed together in rippling sheets

but I had never until now entered …

another time the orange sun still fading bit by bit turning pink in the pink midnight sky where long twisting russet streaks stretched out left there as though by the bristles of a paintbrush haze or smoke from the tall parallel red-brown chimney stacks the dockside cranes tangled together standing out in black against the painted sky

and what time? one o’clock in the morning maybe white horse in the milky June night the fog in gray scarves stretching dragging over the meadows between the dark woods occasionally they would thicken and the automobile would seem to plunge into an impalpable wall where the light from the headlamps dwindled the horse glimpsed for a split second unmoving as though hanging in the air like in a slow-motion film along the road behind the fence surrounding the unreal colorless meadow the animal too out of some Nordic legend in the half-light part of the same unreality as the night itself then it disappeared Further on still deep in the countryside a man and a woman in dressy attire also unreal she wearing something like an evening gown going to or coming from where what ball with neither automobile nor house in sight only these same scarves pulling themselves to pieces putting themselves back together again driven on by imperceptible movements dragging their bellies over the grass gray with dew

myriads of pearls

but I had never …

squares where solemn gentlemen ceremonious and severe were seated on bronze chairs dressed in bronze suits bronze ties with bronze-black mustaches gazing out before them with vacant eyes

… until now entered this youth this old age I thought

always somewhere glimmering a thousand specks lighting up going dark again between the trunks a lake

but this was not really the North yet only something that This melancholy

rising up among the wildflowers the insane and poignant vegetation of fleeting summers expecting to see it come apart little by little clear off in pieces crumble away the massive house as though gnawed at by invisible termites a secret melancholy its rococo gables its passageways its craft-worked balconies wooden lace yellowed with time between the pallid greenery like those old women with their driedout skin mummies draped in fading rags

airy ball gown all you could see its bright spot floating against the backdrop of black woods and the white as though phosphorescent trunks of birch trees

but only its edge its ornamental border was dressed in bronze in lace frills as though to

then I was there: little by little the woods lost their geometric contours their edges no longer carved off in straight lines by the fields by the enclosures now they rose and fell their peaks resembling flames soon between them there were no more spongy greenish patches their limits blurred where black streamlets turned in on themselves the hills began to peel back you could see the mallowy skin of the earth then there it was I walked on I made my way into the world’s old age the thousands the dozens the hundreds of thousands of trees cut down by storms uprooted lying among the vertical boles among the new eruptions of sap certain of them leaning still clinging to a younger one and no more rock no more grass no more flowers no more road only the sandy yellowish-brown path between the soft undulations of dunes blanketed with moss with gray lichens

and so on all the way to Sevettijärvi and so on all the way to Kandalaksha and after Kandalaksha Arkhangelsk and after Arkhangelsk Vorkuta and after Vorkuta Igarka and after Igarka Salekhard the plains the plateaus the mountains of Verkhoyansk those of Chersky so on all the way to the Anadyr Baikal the Chukchi Sea far very far farther than a man could walk if he walked his whole life the forest always the forest only cut off from the marshes from the ponds with their turquoise waters their amethyst waters their sapphire waters from long motionless rivers from giant estuaries from tributaries flowing flakes of gold from violent rapids

never until now

I made my way into the world’s childhood Separated from the forest top by a band of reddish light a mountain of clouds was rising its summit lined with a silver fringe

dazzling

cemetery where no lumberjack has ever

tangled skeletons lying among the living with their fantastical roots like crowns of daggers their spasmodic twisted limbs silver gray I walked silent as lichen silent as sand (there exist likewise, it is said, whale cemeteries strewn with bones) the ones cut down by the most recent storms still intact hard others would crumble when I set my foot upon them crushing others still they were nothing anymore but vague swellings of earth already covered over with the same lichens their trunks already three-quarters subsumed returning to the humus the earth from which they had sprung giant hoary stricken down weakening bit by bit collapsing hugging the landscape of the dunes sinking in gobbled up swallowed

centuries

before then I had never been inside old age inside the world’s cemeteries: budding expanding impetuous crossing the steel of winters summers without night autumns then fur-lined winters again more summers more autumns then lying down cracking decomposing food for the roots of those who in their place

matrix of trees

under the mountain of clouds the bloody fringe took on a sootbrown cast their summit hemmed with light rising bit by bit a wall now of blackish blue

cradle of forests

the rapids’ waters progressively darkened in the end they were completely black too ink where the manes the galloping chargers of foam were now like snow the birches on the opposite bank paler and paler under the black sky as though all the light had gathered together in these swirls these simmering pools the discolored foliage the rain began suddenly to fall violent ferocious mixed with flashes of lightning on the desolate banks on the thousands and thousands of dead pines sprawled out spasming

red-orange light in the bar too, absorbed by the dark woodwork clinging to the sculpted sides of the glasses the women’s naked arms like bright die castings that they themselves illuminated

understanding why there was something of the southerner in this somewhat affected somewhat stiff decorum that they did their best to uphold as though the wild and splendid Far North were protecting itself trying to raise up a barrier a facade behind which

expecting to see some Chekhov character come out of there some gentle and gloomy melancholic man with a goatee and pince-nez wearing a frock coat he would appear on the veranda under the gingerbread trim come down the worm-eaten steps settle into a rattan chair on the well-raked gravel and pretend to open a book while by the windows with their artistically scalloped canopies the paint flaking off you could see women coming and going in their stiff-collared summer dresses with their leg-of-mutton sleeves ribbons in their hair their almond eyes their cheekbones protruding slightly their faces stamped with repressed passion the silvery birch leaves flickering noiselessly the slender silver-pink trunks sprinkled with black spots, like horizontal mouths, like wrinkles, or wounds

onward I went into the world’s childhood its old age my steps falling without a sound

he watched me approach his body in profile head turned toward me topped by heavy branching horns covered in the same fur as his gray body stump-shaded black I stopped we stayed like that for a moment he with his contemplative horse face his softish mouth his gentle eyes then he turned away indifferent haughty went off at a leisurely pace then fell into a jog trot moved away among the scattered trees skirting the heaps of dead branches without a sound elegant and solitary in the vastness of the woods his gray coat appearing and disappearing between the boles soon I had lost all sight of him

or a cemetery for reindeer perhaps for gigantic animals lying there in whole packs their tangled horns knotted and gray which the frost the winters glaze over bit by bit

I also saw two enormous hares with white-furred bottoms with long ears one darted off straight through my feet practically I had bent down to pick up a root the shape of a candelabra

(and this strange shrubbery thorny bushes of nails crisscrossing every which way gathering in some places into parallel bundles organ pipes I found on the ground—what blacksmith what carpenter had been here …—hedgehogs with mobs of rusted quills stuck together by a lumpy flow of molten metal fire working with air and water on something extracted from the bowels of the earth …)

I stroked a dog reddish brown with its pointy muzzle like a fox’s with its pointed ears its tender eyes images showed how they would trap bears under trunks loaded with heavy polished stones wolves left cruelly hanging by one paw snagged in the fork of a tree or foxes their backsides clasped in a slipknot hoisted upside down by a counterweight to the top of a pole

I’m told that a bit farther on between the banks of sand at the edge of the great river that flows to the North there lived a very old man (I asked his age and they told me: same as mine) who’d only ever left to go to war and who afterwards had returned to this place where he was born where he had always kept his home where he had lived back when there were no paved roads (or for that matter any roads at all) no planes no electricity no propeller-driven sleighs no Honda motorcycles like the one his grandson has no Johnson outboard motors rocking on the backs of long outrigger canoes no heating oil no oil-fired stoves no prefabricated huts like the ones in Minnesota or Wisconsin no shop stalls where you could find standard fish hooks toothpaste insect repellent scope rifles magazines with naked ladies in Kodacolor on the cover antibiotics chocolate clothes hangers washing detergent back when there wasn’t any pharmacist either or any doctor making rounds by seaplane or helicopter no television no post office no canned vegetables no …

the river flowed peaceful slow describing large winding turns the sky was gray the water was gray a cold wind was blowing the grandson wore a light T-shirt with something in English printed on it and rummaged around the outrigger’s motor the boat hauled up on the bank He said the last time he was happy with how the fishing went was ten years ago he’d spent every night out on the river and every salmon he caught weighed more than thirty pounds

the fox-dog ran toward me wagging his tail rubbed up against my legs then lay down on his back tucking up his forepaws so I could stroke his belly

white arms like runnels of milk one of his companions got up and bent over she walked ahead of him toward the dance floor her arms were like snow

they said the old man could tell me how they rounded up the reindeer through the hailstorms at the beginning of winter how they corralled them into the pens of gray crisscrossed poles how they marked their ears with the owner’s brand how they wouldn’t be cared for when they were ill how they’d die without a word how they would bury the dead on the only island with sandy ground because the only shovels they had were made of wood how the water level rose once and unearthed the skeletons and how they had to bury them all again how they would put chunks of reindeer meat and dried fish on another island as an offering to the gods and how the neighboring tribe had crossed the frozen lake to steal the meat and the fish how they had sacrificed other reindeer whose bones you could still see in the crevices between the rocks how the moose that lose their horns every year like the reindeer do hide them so carefully no one has ever been able to find them how …

then the rain stopped the woods darkened again the water of the rapids as light as foam the river pocked with black rocks a horizontal reddish flame appeared flickering just over the ground went still at the base of a pine tree departed just as quickly its long tail waving behind it the squirrel reached the foot of another tree stopped again seemed to sit there and reflect a moment turning his head to the right to the left then vanished in a few short hops A yellow stripe was trailing now above the trees as I was writing it drifted slowly to the right the northeast the storm had destroyed a pylon and there was no electricity but I could write by this soft glimmer it was past midnight

white in the sleepless night it looked like one of these heavy warhorses out of an Uccello painting its breast rippling with muscles suspended in the air midstride for an indeterminable length of time perhaps carrying an invisible princess from a Norse tale her arms of snow her dress of fog

I wasn’t going to see the very old man by the river

everything returned to normal as the north receded the edges of the woods became rectilinear again as though dammed up tamed the glutinous marshes disappeared

the milky night filled the street too, light coming from everywhere and nowhere there were dark silhouettes of men here and there leaning against walls against the trunks of trees silent waiting (for what) as though sleep here were impossible great white birds flitted about perched on the deserted road took a few steps flew off again all together without a sound the owl of Minerva takes wing at nightfall

I thought the old man had the right not to say anything to be left alone over there by the edge of the great river flowing steadily toward the frozen seas

since I’d stopped stroking his belly the fox-dog looked at me questioningly with his gentle little eyes then he got up shook himself and went off toward the woods

supple streams of milk one passed over the shoulder of the man she was dancing with

on the lawn the man in the bronze suit was still welded to his bronze chair wearing his bronze tie looking out gravely before him his hands resting on his thighs

white almost bluish

great cadavers of trees all pointing the same direction through the endless days the endless nights some look like gigantic insects from before the flood skeletons millipedes wending along on their twisted legs

seven or perhaps eight sitting there their legs hanging over the edge of the dock in front of the arrangement of pastel-blue facades the reddish domes of the Russian church the same charming and interchangeable girls as in Amsterdam along the Seine or in the East Village impossible to distinguish from the boys all with the same long blond hair wearing the same faded jeans nonchalantly swinging their bare feet their heels strike the stone some of them turn their heads look at me without seeing me two of them have guitars

the boat for Leningrad was already casting off turning itself around in the middle of the lake with extreme majestic leisure its chimney belching scrolls of smoke On the white stern the invisible setting sun the absinthe sky above the dome of the cathedral leaving a vaguely golden reflection

one of the boys started to strum his guitar and hum It’s a guttural language at once violent and tender somewhat reminiscent of Japanese with its vowels its consonants doubled drawn out hanging as though from posts from the strokes of the hard letters the Ts and Ks like stanchions like fractures Their way of saying Ahhrha … as the Japanese also do to signal their interest their astonishment

almond-shaped eyes faintly slanted

on the record sleeve you can read the lyrics One of the songs begins like this

Miten mielellâni miten mielellani

puhuisinkaan suuresta ilosta

Maan ja taivaan mehuista

ja rakkaudesta

same as any other song the meaning of the words I imagine has no importance Only the sounds they make their music

when I turned around the boat from Leningrad had disappeared (with that lightning quickness of slow-moving things: there then no longer there the next instant the time it takes to turn one’s head it seems) As though it had been erased as though it had never existed the lake was empty a cool puff of wind rippled over the water which suddenly came and splashed beneath the bare feet the little boats moored there started banging together

the wind subsided picked up again subsided again then little by little bolstered itself tousling their long hair like blades of grass one of the girl-boys slipped a sweater on The wind blew in from the north the more it settled in the colder it became