venerdì 15 novembre 2019

SIMENON SIMENON. WRITING A NOVEL IS LIKE LEADING AN INVESTIGATION

About the similarities between Simenon’s way of writing and Maigret’s method of investigation


SIMENON SIMENON. SCRIVERE UN ROMANZO È COME CONDURRE UN INDAGINE
Sulle somiglianze tra il modo di scrivere di Simenon e il metodo di indagare di Maigret
SIMENON SIMENON. ECRIRE UN ROMAN COMME ON MENE UNE ENQUETE
A propos des similitudes entre la façon d’écrire de Simenon et la méthode d’enquête de Maigret





“I wanted to live, whatever the cost, all the possible lives…” Simenon stated once. We could say that the novelist made a kind of collection of individuals, of contacts, and above all of experiences, because he claimed that observing was not enough, it was necessary to live personally ambiences, situations, and to have human contacts.
This is what Simenon did with his continuous moving from one end of the world to the other, when he was not writing (in fact he didn’t stop writing even when he was travelling). And if you think about it, this is what Maigret also does. During his investigations, the Chief Inspector has to attend esteemed bourgeois and poor devils, good people and delinquents out of necessity. It is not always about environments and people that are familiar to him, and often he has to face unusual situations. “When he suddenly found himself in front of a new ambience, with people he didn’t know anything about – Simenon explained – he seemed to mechanically suck the life that was around him up to the point he was soaked up with it like a sponge…”
We can notice this correspondence between Simenon’s writing method and Maigret’s investigation method. It’s a projection of the method the novelist used in his novels on the Chief Inspector's way of investigating. We could even say that, beyond the plot of the novels, Simenon’s method followed a “detective” way of investigation during the preparation of his writings. The element from which he drew inspiration and around which he turned for days, could be analogous to the clue to which Maigret tries to give a sense. Simenon’s way of noting names, places, relationships between characters on the yellow envelopes before he started writing, corresponds to the phase during which Maigret documents on victims, suspects, witnesses before beginning his investigation. And the fact that Simenon, as he stated, didn’t know where he would get with his novel and characters, looks much like the investigator’s uncertainty when at the beginning he has a wide range of possibilities where to go on with his investigation.
Moreover, we know that Simenon, before writing a novel, spent a period of mild discomfort, that changed into the “état de roman” or “état de grâce”, that is to say that state of emptiness that allowed him to make way for the protagonists of his novel, and thus he began his cohabitation with them. And when he wrote the Maigret novels maybe he instinctively put in his hero’s head an investigation process that was not so different.
“There we are. The boss is in trance”. That’s a statement pronounced by Maigret’s inspectors when they comment the preliminary phase in which the Chief Inspector begins to empathize with the characters who gravitate around the crime. When he will be able to think and react like them, he will know in which direction to launch the investigation and then the culprit will not have much time left anymore.
In fact the creation of a novel is a little like the preparation of an investigation. Methods are similar also because motivations are similar. Simenon seeks the reason why his protagonists behave in a certain way and then are brought to the extreme consequences. And Maigret is not only interested in knowing who has committed the crime, but much more why he did it, which are the motives that conducted someone to that gesture.
Simenon defined himself as a thief of stories and lives. He put himself into someone’s skin, yet usually it was about a character or a typology of people he well knew because he had attended them, and during his journeys he had made a true stock of plots, characters and situations. And the more we know about his life the more we can understand the protagonists of his novels, the ambiences, the mentalities… This is why our blog tries to make Simenon the man more known, as a character, a father, a husband, a lover… so that when you read a novel, you’ll have some more instruments to understand his choices and motivations.

by Simenon-Simenon

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