"Writing is the continuation of politics by other means." -- Philippe Sollers
Philippe Sollers (born Philippe Joyaux 28 November 1936, Bordeaux, Gironde) is a French writer and critic. In 1960 he founded the avant garde journal Tel Quel (along with the writer and art critic Marcelin Pleynet), published by Seuil, which ran until 1982. In 1982 Sollers then created the journal L'Infini published by Denoel which was later published under the same title by Gallimard for whom Sollers also directs the series.
Sollers was at the heart of the intense period of intellectual unrest in the Paris of the 1960s and 1970s. Among others, he was a friend of Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser and Roland Barthes. These three characters are described in his novel, Femmes (1983) alongside a number of other figures of the French intellectual movement before and after May 1968. From A Strange Solitude, The Park and Event, through "Logiques", Lois and Paradis, down to Watteau in Venice, Une vie divine and "La Guerre du goût", the writings of Sollers have often provided contestation, provocation and challenge.
In his book Writer Sollers, Roland Barthes discusses the work of Phillippe Sollers and the meaning of language.
After his first novel A Strange Solitude (1958), hailed by François Mauriac and Louis Aragon, Sollers began, with The Park (1961) the experiments in narrative form that would lead to Event (Drame, 1965) and Nombres (1968). Jacques Derrida analyzes these novels in his book Dissemination. Sollers then appears to have attempted to counter the high seriousness of Nombres by producing in Lois (1972) a greater linguistic vitality through, for instance, the use of wordplay and a less formal style. The direction taken by Lois was developed through the heightened rhythmic intensity of the unpunctuated texts such as Paradis (1981). Sollers's other novels include Women (1983), Portrait du joueur (1984), Le coeur absolu (1986), Watteau in Venice (1991), Studio (1997), Passion fixe (2000), L'étoile des amants (2002), which have all introduced a degree of realism to his fiction to the extent that they make more recognizable use of plot, character and thematic development. They offer a fictional study of society by reinterpreting among other things the role of politics, media, sex, religion, and the arts.
In all these novels Sollers's interest in Chinese civilization plays an important part. From the late 1960s, he studied Chinese and employed ideograms increasingly in his writings. He especially exemplifies this view in the subtitle of Lois, a Chinese ideogram representing both "France" and "Law." The positions adopted by Sollers and Kristeva towards Mao's Cultural Revolution in China are discussed critically by the author Richard Wolin in his 2010 study of French intellectuals and the Cultural Revolution.
Vocalisation or his preference for the spoken word has always been a priority for Sollers in his writing. The combination of music, voice and theater is especially found in opera. The kind of opera associated with Sollers should properly be called opera bouffe because of that sense of humour and love of irony. In many ways Sollers is doing the work of the opera bouffe or drama giocoso with his novels since Women (1983). Since Lois, there are many references to music. In Women already: "Whoever understands nothing about music, understands nothing about metaphysics."
The focus on the spoken language also draws Sollers toward James Joyce. Sollers is fascinated by Joyce's style and he and Stephen Heath have collaborated to translate Joyce's Finnegans Wake into French. In January 1975, Sollers gave a lecture to an international symposium on Joyce claiming Finnegans Wake as "the most formidable anti-fascist book produced between the two wars". Both educated by Jesuits, Joyce and Sollers have strong ties to Catholicism. As Sollers indicated in Paradis, Joycean Christianity like Sollers' Catholicism, participates in the comic and the pathetic.
The novel Paradis has a particular flavour because the narrator is similar to a troubadour singing the story of postmodern times. The self appears to disappear as word games, puns, neologisms and misspellings create a text that is hallucinatory and humorous in its juxtaposition of seemingly incongruous words and phrases. There are constant references to orchestration and symphony, thus suggesting that there is an innate structure to what appears, at first glance, to be a chaotic text.
His novels Femmes (1983) and Portrait de joueur (1984) have achieved a certain popularity. The first was translated into English as Women by Barbara Bray and published by Columbia University Press (1990). Philip Roth's comment on the cover of Women says that Sollers is a "master of good-natured malice, a kind of happy, lively, benign Céline."
In 2000, Sollers published Passion fixe, a love story.
In 2006, he published Une vie divine. The narrator, a professor of philosophy, was entrusted with the task of reflecting upon a world philosophy that would not exclude the religious dimension of humanity. Throughout his research and discussions with the two women in his life (one intellectual and the other frivolous), he discovers that only one thinker is strong enough to found a project of world philosophy: Nietzsche. In this novel, Philippe Sollers rises against contemporary nihilism — literature in deadlock, misfortune and melancholy — to which he contrasts promises of life and happiness.
Sollers also sees himself and his novels in an eighteenth-century lineage with philosophes like Diderot and Voltaire; so his break with tradition is not all-encompassing.
Craig Owens, "Sects and Language," in Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture, Scott Bryson et al, eds. (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1992), 243-52.
