Conducting Bodies

Conducting Bodies (Les Corps Conducteurs) is a 1971 novel by Claude Simon, a leading figure of the French New Novel and winner of the 1985 Nobel Prize in Literature. The Chinese edition, translated by Jiao Junyi and Zhang Xinmu, was published in 2018 by Nanjing University Press as part of its Watchmen·Literature series. The book has no conventional plotline and no clear beginning-middle-end resolution: the author assembles scenes set in the primeval forests of the Americas, city streets, a long meeting, the recurring erotic tension between a couple, and paintings held in galleries and museums into constantly shifting passages. The lens moves from the Renaissance all the way to Impressionism, with light and shadow changing and colors shifting in intensity, like a camera roaming freely through time and space. Simon studied painting in his youth, and he uses lines, light and shadow, color blocks, and geometric terms such as "rectangle" as narrative elements, making characters and scenes recur, vary, and echo as visual fragments, forming a structure akin to Cubist painting and cinematic montage. Reading it is more like wandering through a vast, interlocking exhibition hall; readers must set aside expectations of causal chains and feel the texture and rhythm of the details themselves. The book runs to about 100,000 Chinese characters—not long—yet it is one of Simon's most experimental and most demanding novels, regarded as an important entry point for understanding this Nobel laureate's method of "painting with words."