"One of them, for example, which will probably haunt me more than any other is the problem of communication"
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Haunting, in Simenon, isn’t gothic atmosphere so much as a clerical anxiety: the dread that life’s most ordinary machinery will fail at the exact moment it’s needed. “One of them, for example” sounds offhand, almost shruggy, but the syntax smuggles in a confession. There are multiple problems, a whole drawer of private knots, and the one he nominates as his chief specter is not death or ambition or morality. It’s communication. That’s telling in a writer whose entire job is to make meaning travel from one mind to another.
The intent is deceptively modest. He frames communication as a “problem,” not a tragedy or a mystery, which keeps the statement practical while sharpening the sting: if it’s a problem, it should be solvable; if it haunts, it keeps refusing solution. The subtext is that language, for all its apparent precision on the page, is a leaky vessel in real life. People miss each other by inches: not just through lies or censorship, but through tone, timing, class, shame, fatigue. Simenon’s famous clarity becomes, here, an indictment of clarity’s limits.
Context matters. Writing in the shadow of the 20th century’s mass politics and mass media, Simenon watched how easily words could be weaponized or emptied out, how public speech could be loud while private understanding stayed impossible. For a novelist preoccupied with motive and misrecognition, “communication” isn’t a tech issue; it’s the engine of loneliness, misunderstanding, and, often in his work, guilt. The line works because it turns the author’s presumed superpower into his most persistent fear.
The intent is deceptively modest. He frames communication as a “problem,” not a tragedy or a mystery, which keeps the statement practical while sharpening the sting: if it’s a problem, it should be solvable; if it haunts, it keeps refusing solution. The subtext is that language, for all its apparent precision on the page, is a leaky vessel in real life. People miss each other by inches: not just through lies or censorship, but through tone, timing, class, shame, fatigue. Simenon’s famous clarity becomes, here, an indictment of clarity’s limits.
Context matters. Writing in the shadow of the 20th century’s mass politics and mass media, Simenon watched how easily words could be weaponized or emptied out, how public speech could be loud while private understanding stayed impossible. For a novelist preoccupied with motive and misrecognition, “communication” isn’t a tech issue; it’s the engine of loneliness, misunderstanding, and, often in his work, guilt. The line works because it turns the author’s presumed superpower into his most persistent fear.
Quote Details
| Topic | Deep |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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