Where is the war in The Flanders Road (1960)? Where is the war in Iran?
There is no war in Claude Simon’s The Flanders Road. Or at least, the war is elsewhere; if it isn’t here, it must surely be elsewhere. The focal point of the novel is Georges, a French cavalryman, riding on horseback at the outbreak of World War II into German tanks and machine guns. It is a bleak prospect for his unit, whose old ideals of military valour shatter against the Nazi machine.
Both character and author, narrator and narrated, Georges is at once ever present and eternally deferred: we glimpse him through memory only, always receding into an endless past, with no present reference to speak of. Georges is as much a creature of memory as the experiences of which he speaks and writes – much of the novel is dialogue, or at least in quotation marks, shifting between conversations with an alternating cast of characters. Part of the contention of the novel is that war can only be grasped through fragments like these.
The uncertainty of the origin of the text has turned many readers away from La Route des Flandres, with long divagating sentences that often subtly transition from one subject and speaker to another. Modern readers prefer a clear plot, a good guy who triumphs over evil, and a healthy dose of titillation so you have somewhere to put your other hand. This desire is partly why the US Department of War’s propaganda can fabricate cheering over endless wars and the brutalising of endless peoples. It is an easy-to-follow story, and the masculine and feminine (the age old cast) each have roles to play.
As the novel’s narratives overlap, memories blur together, documenting the subjective imprint of the war on Georges’ consciousness more than its chronological progression. In one ripple over the surface of memory, Georges’ experience as a prisoner in a Nazi camp gives way to a memory of many years later, giving and receiving oral from the widow of his former captain, the aristocratic officer de Reixach. Claude Simon blurs the line between torture and fellatio, just as he blurs the line between the tragic and the comic. Georges states that ‘vaudeville is nothing but abortive tragedy, and tragedy is farce without humour’.
While Simon’s novel may reflect different things, its depths are murky and indeterminate, and its substance suggests an absolute simultaneity of being. All is one, and while some moments are held up to the light, most are blurred at the edges. Tragedy and farce, sex and torture, war and peace – all exist in the same place. Distinctions aren’t impossible, but often as certainty hardens, your attention is jostled and you realise that what you were interpreting in one way has, somewhere along the road, become something else.
This novel is described as difficult. I hate this word. I think this novel would hate this word as well. It suggests that when I offer you this novel, I’m making a statement about your character. You could handle it, where others couldn’t. We privileged few. Is the world any less difficult? Can the simple narratives we ingest help us make any more sense of reality than this novel’s ‘difficult’ strategy? We shrug our shoulders, say that these difficult narratives are simply too much, art is for pleasure, leave me alone in my living room. Well I’m not going to leave you alone. I want you to get mad. The stakes are too high.
So I ask again: Where is the war in The Flanders Road? Where did it begin? Where does it end? There is no clear frontline, only occasional French units chasing behind advancing Nazi automobiles in a farcical Benny Hill-esque pursuit. There are no battles – there are bullets in the air and corpses on the ground. When Georges returns home, his memories haunt him. The war is not ended by dislocation through time or space, and nor are we left alone by this war on Iran. The war that is elsewhere should more properly be thought of as the war that is everywhere.
There is a more complete idea of the war implied by random artillery fire to either side, or the distant sound of gunfire, suggesting that the ‘real’ fighting is taking place elsewhere. The French civilians he meets are nonplussed as the German and French armies move over them like lines on a map. In Georges’ subjective experience, the desire for objective unity is always frustrated. The sense-making mythologies of war, such as nationalism, aristocratic duty, and expansion of civilisation are not contested by an alternate mythos, so much as made redundant by an omnipresent meaninglessness.
Now as before, the war is elsewhere. Iran is, for most westerners, a faceless and nameless evil. It has been given the role of villain, enemy of the West. The people of Iran are simply agents of this enemy, while the people of the West serve their nations as enlightened defenders of freedom. The mainstream news broadcasts every outgoing missile strike from Iran: See how they provoke? See the weapons they have, and how evenly matched we are? They surely must be our enemy. This surely must be a war. See how easy it is to understand?
In The Flanders Road, as now, the fighting is not between people, but between mad generals, miles from the frontlines. They employ myths as cult-like tools of control, powerful enough to create death camps, powerful enough to convince horsemen to ride suicidally into gunfire, powerful enough to send the world to war. It may be called the ‘Iran war’, but we should no longer fool ourselves that war can be confined to one place: just as Simon’s novel faces the fragmentation of war, this latest conflict is itself a dispersed World War.
The people of Iran die at the hands of American bombs under the cover of an Iranian government-imposed internet blackout. A handful of international dictators and oligarchs impose meaning upon this war in TikTok edits, while moneyed interests watch greedily on and draw up contracts for the aftermath. The people living under their warmongering governments only comprehend the atrocity of the war insofar as it affects their gas prices. A war without soldiers or armies, unarmed ships destroyed, human lives ‘tactically’ selected by Artificial Intelligence to be condemned to death from the sky.
I can think of nothing more horrible, and it cannot even be thought. Our concepts fail to comprehend the meaninglessness of this loss of life. It began nowhere, it will end nowhere. It will bring no peace. If we can find a meaning in this degradation of our species it is a psychopathic one, not to be celebrated, like finding the missing body in a murder case.
For all the book’s difficulty, the main message I can find in The Flanders Road is profoundly simple: war is an utterly nauseating exercise that has no end, no limit. It is a symptom of an international world that to even give it a name, to point to some-where, some heap of bodies or burnt out school, and say ‘There is the war!’ is to dignify a disgusting act of man-made destruction, and to isolate ourselves from it.
If we hope to do away with such inhuman constructs as war, we must all do away with the whole chain of fabrications that have led us here.
not war not the classical destruction or extermination of one of the two armies but rather the disappearance the absorption into nothingness […] of what was one week before still regiments batteries squadrons troops of men, or more precisely: the extinction of the very idea of the notion of regiment of battery of squadron of troops of men, or more precisely: the extinction of all ideas of all concepts to the extent that the general could no longer find any reason that allowed him to continue to live not only as a general which is to say as a soldier but more simply as a thinking creature and so he blew his brains out
– La Route des Flandres (1960, own translation)
Leave a comment