Vers un nouveau langage romanesque

Claude Simon’s The Battle of Pharsalus (1969) is a verbal patchwork containing heterogeneous narrative fragments and intertextual inserts that are all integrated into a “jigsaw puzzle” structure. The moving complexity of such a fictional device clearly appears when one studies the quotations from In Search of Lost Time used throughout the novel. A detailed stylistic analysis of those quotations (graphic layout, phrasal structure, insertion modes, metatextual marks …) shows that textual collage may be considered as the expression of a specific literary project resting on a reticular conception of writing, a “perspectivist” view of verbal and nonverbal objects, postmodern aesthetic precepts and the use of transsemiotic references to iconic language.