Writer Sollers 0816616272, 0816616280

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Roland Barthes

Writer Sollers Translated and Introduced by

Philip Thody

University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis

FQ 2677 O4 vas DNS

1467 Copyright © 1987 by The Athlone Press, Sollers Writer. First published in France as Sollers Ecrivain, Copyright © 1979 by Editions du Seuil.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Published by the University of Minnesota Press 2037 University Avenue Southeast, Minneapolis MN 55414. Published simultaneously in Canada by Fitzhenry & Whiteside Limited, Markham. Printed in Great Britain.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Barthes, Roland. Writer Sollers. Translation of: Sollers écrivain. Includes index.

1. Sollers, Philippe, 1936— interpretation. I. Title. PQ2679.04Z5613 1987 ISBN 0-8 166—1627-2 ISBN 0-8 166—1628-0 (pbk.)

—Criticism and 843.914

The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer

87—-10950

Contents

Introduction

1

The Text

Dialogue

35

Drama, Poem, Novel

ane

The Refusal to Inherit

69

Over Your Shoulder

75

Situation

93

Oscillation Index

97 101

Introduction I Philippe Sollers published his first book, Une Curieuse Solitude, in October 1958, at the age of twenty-two. It was a short, fairly conventional novel, describing the seduction of a thirty-year-old Spanish housemaid by a sixteen-year-old upper-middle-class French boy from South West France. The story is told in the first person, and the maid, Concha, addresses the narrator as Felipe.

There is an apparent debt to Proust in the interest which Felipe takes in what he discovers to be a lesbian relationship between Concha and the family cook. The narrator also describes how he reads Proust and suffers from asthma. Concha leaves Felipe because she thinks she is too old for him. By that time, however, he has already left home, become a student in Paris, and discovered what he calls ‘the only real loneliness, the one whose eyes are open’. Une Curieuse Solitude, which was translated into En-

glish in 1961 under the title A Strange Solitude, was praised by three of the best-known representatives of the established French literary world. François Mauriac showed himself particularly pleased at the way his earlier forecast of the literary glory awaiting Sollers had been proved right. In 1957, Mauriac had written enthusiastically in Le Figaro about a short story, ‘Le Déf’, in which Sollers had described the suicide of a girl that abandoned by her lover. He was clearly delighted

[1]

Introduction

the tradition of the French novel of psychological analysis, to which he had made so immense a contribution, was being continued by another Catholic writer from the Bordeaux area. Louis Aragon, the most famous literary survivor of the French Surrealist movement, as well as the best-known French writer to

remain a member of the Communist Party, described Sollers as ‘a genuine writer’, as well as ‘a noble soul, one

which knows what it is to dream’. In Le Monde, the

almost equally eminent critic Emile Henriot, a member of the Académie Francaise, devoted the whole of his weekly column to ‘Le Défi” and Une Curieuse Solitude, and was equally enthusiastic in greeting ‘a very good

book, a great talent and a writer’.! Sollers’s literary career then proceeded to take the first of the radical changes which have characterized it since. Barthes refers to these in the imaginary interview which opened the slim volume entitled Sollers Ecrivain when it was published in France in 1979, a year by which the French public for whom Barthes was writing would have been well aware of the different political attitudes adopted by the extraordinarily versatile writer whose work he was discussing. This change was visible both in Sollers’s next novel, Le Parc, published in 1961, and in

his membership in October 1960 of the group of writers who launched the quarterly review Tel Quel. Unlike Une Curieuse Solitude, Le Parc does not tell a story. The dust-cover described it as ‘a poem in novel form’ (un poème romanesque) in which the reader gradually discovers ‘through the profusion of life’s images, the first source of all poetry: the nocturnal and luminous, visual and verbal, unchallengeable working of the domain of the imagination’. Although the narrator — unnamed this

[2]

Introduction

time — does have memories of a child, of a woman he

has loved and of a friend who has been killed in the Algerian war, his main preoccupation is with the orange-coloured exercise book in which he is trying to write a novel. Le Parc was also published in English translation, in 1968, under the title The Park. In France, it was awarded the Prix Médicis, reserved for a novel or

collection of stories bringing a new note or a new style. Une Curieuse Solitude had also won the Prix Fénélon. In 1979, however, Sollers made it clear that he no longer

wished to be associated with either work.? Between October 1960 and 1982, when it became the

quarterly review entitled L’Infini, Tel Quel published ninety-four numbers and underwent several changes of direction. Sollers was one of the few writers to remain with it throughout the twenty-two years during which it was widely regarded as the leading avant-garde review in France. It is therefore quite likely that its changes of attitude are very much his own. It is very unusual to find an issue of Tel Quel without at least one article by him. Many of the later numbers also have a photograph of him. In some, he is simply walking along a street or sitting in a train. In the ninety-second issue, in 1981, he

is reading out loud from his book Paradis at the Centre Beaubourg. He is not a writer who has fled the limelight, and one of the advantages of this translation is that it draws the reader’s attention to the purely literary questions raised by the books he published between 1965 and 1979. From 1960 to 1968, Tel Quel was concerned very much with what the first issue called ‘literature constantly despised and constantly victorious’, and with the elaboration of a theory of literature. This made it

[3]

Introduction

especially interesting for Roland Barthes, who published a number of articles in it and was in 1971 honoured by having a special issue dedicated to his work. Barthes also provided, in Tel Quel for Winter 1964, a guide to what his own literary preferences were. For he then contrasted — providing his own inverted commas — what he called ‘bad’ literature with ‘good’. The first, he argued, was characterized by a total confidence in the fact that it was telling the truth, and doing so in the only possible manner. The second struggled constantly and openly with the fact that any meaning which a literary work might have was to some extent an illusion. It is true that Barthes did not put it quite like that. What he actually wrote was that ‘bad’ literature ‘pratique une bonne conscience de sens pleins’ (practises a good conscience of full meanings). ‘Good’ literature, in contrast, he defined as ‘celle qui lutte ouvertement avec la tentation du sens’ (the one which struggles openly with the temptation of meaning). In the same interview,

Barthes

also said that there was,

in con-

temporary French literary criticism, ‘une évanescence progressive du signifié, qui paraît bien être l'enjeu de tout ce débat critique’, and his statement sets a comparable problem to his translator. For the phrase ‘a progressive evanescence of the signified’ is not the one that creates an instant image in the mind of the average native speaker of English. Something like ‘the gradual vanishing of subject matter’, or ‘the disappearance of content and its replacement by form’, or ‘how you say it is becoming more important than what is said’ does not have quite the same disadvantage. However, it does suffer from another drawback: it is not exactly what Barthes said. In his lecture Lolita in Wonderland, given

[4]

Introduction

to the IVth Annual Conference of the British Comparative Literature Association in December 1986, Michael

Wood said that the official translation of Michel Foucault’s ‘Tout graphéme est d’essence testamentaire’ as ‘Every grapheme is of testamentary essence’ was not

particularly satisfactory.’ A less word-for-word rendering such as ‘A text is something whose author has gone away’ was much better. He also offered his audience

another idea which they could immediately grasp when he added that most readers would be quite happy to welcome the author back so that they could see what he looked like. But at the same time, Michael Wood also laid himself open to the comparable criticism that this is not quite what the original French actually says. Any translator either of Barthes or of the other authors associated with Tel Quel — Foucault himself, Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Derrida, Gérard Genette, and many others — has therefore to face a problem. If, as Barthes’s English translators have generally done, she or he opts for a fairly literal rendering, the English version tends to present the uninitiated reader with a text that is almost as difficult to understand as the original French. If, on the other hand, the translator actively decides to be the traitor of the Italian proverb traduttore, traditore, and produces a text which says what he thinks the French

means,

he becomes

vulnerable

to a different

accusation: that of dragging Barthes down to his own level and failing to appreciate the whole point of what Barthes himself and the Tel Quel group were setting out to do. For as the Déclaration in the very first issue of the ‘review, in 1960, made clear, the members of the group _ considered that language could never be concerned with

anything but itself. They were not therefore concerned

[5]

Introduction

with putting forward ideas which other people would express ‘in their own words’. ‘Ideologists’, the Déclaration stated, ‘have had a sufficiently long reign over expression for the latter now to be able to move away from them, concerning itself solely with itself, its fatality and particular rules.’ In 1967, Sollers gave one of the aims of his own programme as that of encouraging ‘the radical non-expressivity of textual writing’. He added that the theory of this kind of writing regarded traditional literature, like the whole of the culture of which it formed part, as over. Textual writing, as historical

was

awareness

(comme

conscience

historique),

inevitably on the side of current revolutionary

action.* The first of these two ideas, that of the refusal to

consider language as an instrument, was stated in even more categorical terms in October 1968, when the Editorial Board published a volume entitled Théorie D’Ensemble. This concluded with a statement that declared, in block capitals, ‘L'ECRITURE DANS SON FONCTIONNNEMENT VERBAL N’EST PAS REPRESENTATION’ (WRITING IN ITS VERBAL FUNCTIONING IS NOT REPRESENTATION),

Not only, as Yeats suggested, can you not tell the dancer from the dance. You can never separate the thing said from the way of saying. Indeed, apart from the way of saying, there is, quite literally, nothing said. One of the questions raised in the six texts translated here is that of what happens when an author deliberately sets out to write books in which content is so subordinated to form that it is impossible to say what he is ‘writing about’. The books which Barthes discusses in Sollers Ecrivain —

[6]

Introduction

principally Paradis, Drame, H and Lois — have to be referred to as novels because there is no other term to designate them. But they do not tell stories, describe a particular society or present identifiable characters. They are texts of which language itself is the subject, language which is wholly free from the duty to describe. The world which these texts present is not one which the reader could either identify as her or his own or see clearly as different from it. In the past, in Barthes’s view, it was the author’s duty to describe such a world which held language unjustifiably captive. One of the reasons that he writes with such enthusiasm about Sollers is the way in which texts such as Paradis and Lois show what happens when this duty is removed. 1968, the year which The Théorie d’Ensemble was published, also marked the first of Tel Quel’s purely political turning points. None of the writers associated with it had made any secret of their general revolutionary sympathies. Neither had they hidden their dislike of French middle-class culture and politics. In his own article ‘La pensée émet des signes’ (Thought emits signs), in Winter 1965, Sollers had quoted with great approval Nietzsche’s statement that he feared we had not yet fully killed God because we still had grammar. The authors most admired by the Tel Quel group were those who, like Antoine Artaud and the Marquis de Sade, represented a powerfully deviant tradition in European culture. In his discussion of Artaud in ‘La pensée émet des signes’, Sollers wrote: If Foucault can write that ‘man, today, has truth only in the enigma of the madman that he is and is not’, this is because this enigma is henceforth that of a ceaseless contestation, of a region at one and the same time present and absent, in relationship to which it behoves the world to feel its limits,

[7]

Introduction and man himself [le sujet] to turn back again towards an

image of himself which is no longer the falsely disquieting one of the mirror.”

Artaud had spent some time in a lunatic asylum, and the twenty-seven years which de Sade had spent in enforced captivity were not calculated to make anybody sane. The other writers admired by Tel Quel, especially the nineteenth-century poet Lautréamont, also belonged to a tradition which had a high regard for the powers of the irrational. The essay which Sollers published in the Autumn 1963 number of Tel Quel, ‘Logique de fiction’, made a claim which illustrated how high this regard was. Fiction, he wrote, ‘through its awakening and compositions, tends towards a genuine epic of knowledge. In order to link up with the thread of true discourse, it must pass through madness and nonsense [la déraison et

le non-sens], night and fire.’® It was nevertheless after the students’ revolt of 1968 that the rebellion against French society already implicit in Tel Quel’s intellectual stance took a more specifically political form. Although the French Communist Party had stopped supporting the student rebels after Pompidou’s government had granted large wage increases to the industrial working class, Tel Quel still demanded, in Summer 1968, what its thirty-fourth issue

called ‘Revolution here now’. Indeed, by its phrase about the dangers of what it called “infiltration idéologique petite bourgeoise et gauchiste’, Tel Quel even suggested that some of the students’ leaders might be wrong. When the French Communist Party proved rather suspicious of Tel Quel, Sollers became a Maoist. In Winter 1970, he published in Tel Quel ten poems by Mao Tse-Tung which he had ‘read and translated’. In

[8]

Introduction

Spring 1971, in the forty-fourth issue, he also published what he called his ‘Thèses générales’. These included the view that the crisis of capitalism must be hastened by the disintegration of the traditional modes of bourgeois thought. This, for Sollers, explained the importance of writers such as Freud, Artaud, Lautréamont and Mallarmé. He also claimed that what he called ‘le texte’ would have the same relationship to ‘la littérature classique de représentation’ as chemistry has to alchemy. Such a text would be a ‘materialist, historical, dialectical one’ reflecting ‘the ideological practice of Marxism in so far as it transforms (through the unconscious itself) the foundations of our thought’.’ The special number of Tel Quel dedicated to Roland Barthes in Autumn 1971 put forward a number of similar ideas. It ended with a long text violently attacking the French Communist Party — including Aragon — and praising ‘the decisive contribution of Mao Tse-Tung and the Chinese cultural proletarian contribution’ to the development of revolutionary theory. Sollers collaborated in the text, which declared that the

chances for modern avant-garde, at a time which had seen ‘the Chinese proletarian cultural revolution’, could lie only in ‘the irreversible spread of the revolutionary practice and theory of our time: the thought of Mao

Tse-Tung’.® Roland Barthes was not a political writer. In spite of

his evident sympathy for left-wing modes of thought generally, he was almost alone among the writers of his generation in not taking an overtly political stance against the Algerian war of 1958-62. He did not, for example, sign the Manifeste des 121 whereby other left-wing writers such as Jean-Paul Sartre declared their

[9]

Introduction

support for the Algerian struggle for national independence and their refusal to bear arms against the Front de Libération Nationale. One of the reasons for Barthes’s decision to give the title Sollers Ecrivain to his six articles on Sollers was precisely to remind his readers, as he pointed out in the dialogue which appeared in Le Nouvel Observateur in 1979, that Sollers was primarily concerned with words and only incidentally with the striking of political attitudes. The changes in Sollers’s political stance in the 1970s had indeed made such a reminder necessary. In 1975 he visited America, and the double number of Tel Quel which appeared in Autumn 1977 must have been something of a surprise for the members of the French left wing who thought that his visit to China in 1974 had produced in him a permanent state of revolutionary fervour. The Autumn 1977 issue of Tel Quel gave quite an attractive account of American culture, one which is

difficult to reconcile with the enthusiasm for dialectical materialism evident in Sollers’s long 1974 essay entitled ‘Sur le matérialisme: de l’atomisme à la dialectique révolutionnaire’. This enthusiasm nevertheless disappeared in the late 1970s as Sollers became increasingly interested in religion, to the point where he declared, in Autumn

1979, that he was a Catholic ‘as

Matisse is. Or, if you prefer, as a Pole is today’.” Sollers said in an interview in 1981 that he changed his political position very frequently because, ‘unlike other writers’, he had ‘a great many things to say’. Like a number of French intellectuals, he took a long time to see the disadvantages of Marxism. It was not until the revelations of Solzhenitsyn in the 1970s that he began to ask the question which Arthur Koestler had discussed in

[10]

Introduction

the late 1930s, George Orwell in the 1940s and Camus in the 1950s: ‘Why,’ as he put it in an interview with André Glucksmann in 1976, ‘does the political history of the twentieth century present itself as a tragi-comedy against a background of charnel houses, between philosophy and the police?’!° Having asked this, Sollers proceeded to become quite a vigorous cold-war warrior. In 1981, for example,

he attributed

the attempt

to

assassinate Pope John Paul II to ‘a plot hatched by the Arabs and the Russians, or if you prefer by the disciples of Khadaffi and Brezhnev’."! The second half of the 1970s was marked in French intellectual life by the popularity of the thinkers who became known as ‘les nouveaux philosophes’. The most influential

of them,

Bernard-Henri

Lévy, was

twice

interviewed in Tel Quel, and enthusiastically welcomed as a leading thinker. One of the principal contentions of his La Barbarie a visage humain (1977) and Le Testament de Dieu (1979), as of André Glucksmann’s Les Maitres Penseurs (1977), was that the whole of the

left-wing revolutionary movement of the twentieth century had been led into barbarism and tyranny through its refusal to acknowledge the ethical truths enshrined in Judaeo-Christianity. When, in Spring 1978, Sollers also published in the 75th issue of Tel Quel an interview with Jean-François Revel, the wittiest and most iconoclastic of French anti-Communist intellectuals, the wheel seemed to have come full circle in

the career of a writer whom it is sometimes tempting to think of as the French equivalent of the Vicar of Bray. Worse — or better — was nevertheless to come. In . 1982, Sollers left the Editions du Seuil, the home of Tel

Quel as well as the publisher of his own and of Barthes’s

[11]

Introduction

work, and transferred to Gallimard, still the most prestigious but also one of the more conventional of French publishing houses. And in February 1983 he published his longest work so far, a 569-page novel called Femmes, in which, like the Emperor Clovis converting to Christianity, he seemed bent on burning everything he had previously adored and adoring everything he had earlier burned. The novel does, it is true, resemble the

earlier Le Parc in that it contains a novelist in the process of writing a novel, and shares with the more experimental novels Paradis, H and Lois a lively interest in a wide variety of vividly described and occasionally slightly unorthodox sexual practices. There is even perhaps a distant reminiscence of the death of the heroine in ‘Le Déf’ in that one of the narrator’s many mistresses, an American girl called Cyd, is killed in a terrorist attack apparently aimed at the narrator himself. But as far as the rest of Femmes is concerned, it would be hard to imagine a more complete denunciation of everything with which the Sollers of the sixties and the seventies had been associated. For example: if there was anything of which Tel Quel disapproved, it was the writing of novels purporting to give an accurate account of a particular social milieu. Femmes, as a number of French critics observed, did for the Paris of the 1970s what Simone de Beauvoir’s Les Mandarins had done for the Paris of the 1940s: it showed French intellectuals at work and at play. The narrator of Femmes, a thirty-five-year-old American journalist called Will, even states that a novel is successful precisely in so far as it ‘makes you feel, at a particular moment in time, the social comedy of the period, this

infinite interweaving of Narcissisms in which nobody

[12]

Introduction

listens to anybody else, in which each living particle participates in a generalized somnambulism.’ Until the mid-seventies, Sollers’s political and literary loyalties had been very much on the left. A vigorously argued passage in Femmes maintains that no good art has ever been produced, at any time in history, by a progressively minded artist. Sollers had made himself notorious, in the

early and mid-1970s, for his enthusiasm for the Chinese cultural revolution. Femmes denounces what it calls the ‘universal spying, the arrests, the summary trials, the beatings-up, the “re-education” that took place in the China of Chairman Mao’. Neither is Sollers’s own earlier work spared in this denunciation of everything for which he and Tel Quel had previously stood. His highly experimental novel Paradis, discussed by Barthes in Sollers Ecrivain when it was still being published in instalments in Tel Quel, eventually appeared in book form in 1981. Sollers recorded it on cassette, restoring, by the way he read the stream-of-consciousness

sentences, the punctuation so

disconcertingly absent from the printed text. It was broadcast in 1981 by a Belgian radio station and also played continuously at the St Germain des Prés bookshop La Hune for the benefit of anybody who cared to drop in and listen. Femmes, in addition to referring to a book entitled Comédie by ‘un certain S’ as ‘son truc sans ponctuation (his thing with no punctuation) also mentions how this book is being read out loud and describes it as ‘le charabia le plus illisible que l’on ait élucubré à ce jour’ (the most unreadable rubbish ever lucubrated to date). It likewise accuses the

same ‘S’ of ‘taking himself for James Joyce’. It is of course possible that the whole of Femmes is to

[13]

Introduction

be seen as a joke. The narrator, Will, expresses in exaggerated form something of the intense dislike of women to which Kingsley Amis gave vent in Stanley and the Women in 1983. It is no more possible to take him seriously in these parts of the novel than it is Mr Amis. The Sollers of Femmes also invents two organizations called Womann (World Organization for Men Annihilation and New Natality) and SGIC (Sodome and Gomorrhe International Council). There was, apparently, an organization in the America of the 1970s called S.C.U.M. (Society for Cutting Up Men). This particular joke, if intended as such, does not have a particularly palinodic ring. Although Tel Quel had published a special number on feminism in 1977, Sollers had never particularly concerned himself with the Women’s Movement. The aggressively misanthropic note on which Femmes opens may well have simply been intended to appeal to an audience of Latin males who felt a general impatience with feminism. Femmes also contains a number of thinly disguised portraits of wellknown personalities of literary Paris, and the thought does occasionally strike the sceptically minded reader that the whole book — scandal, topical references to sex included — was written simply to make money and to raise a laugh at everyone’s expense, including that of any reader who takes it seriously. But if Femmes was intended to be funny, some of its jokes are in remarkably bad taste. There is, for example, a blatantly clear reference, through the character of Laurent Lutz, to the tragic incident in which the French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser strangled his wife and had to be confined to a lunatic asylum. Other people are treated in a way which makes one quite

[14]

Introduction

happy never to have lived or worked in intellectual and literary Paris, and especially relieved never to have met Philippe Sollers. Not even Roland Barthes himself is spared, and the Latin tag of De mortuis nil nisi bonum is clearly not one to which Sollers subscribes. Barthes was unmarried, and was greatly attached to his mother. She had brought him up alone after his father, Louis Barthes, had been killed in a naval battle in the First World War.

This happened in October 1916, when Barthes was not yet a year old. In February 1980, Barthes was knocked down by a van while crossing a Paris street, and died in hospital less than a month later. He was still deeply affected by the recent death of his mother, late in 1979, and seems to have died less because of his physical injuries than because he had lost the will to live.

On page 126 of the 1983 Gallimard edition of Femmes, Sollers writes, making a fuller use of punctuation than in the novels like H and Paradis that Barthes discusses in

Sollers Ecrivain, I can see Werth, at the end of his life, just before his

accident ... His mother had died two years earlier, his great love... The only one... He let himself slide, more and more, into complicated affaires with boys, this was his tendency, it had suddenly taken an accelerated form. That was all he thought about, while dreaming all the time of breaking off, of asceticism, of a new life, books to write, starting again... Did he know that his nickname, from that time onwards, whispered softly in the course of the rather special evenings organized by him for his friends to give him the opportunity to go on the troll [pour lui fournir des occasions de drague] was ‘Mammie? Mammie! A whole programme...

[15]

Introduction

Il

There is one unquestionable similarity between the ideas of Barthes and the Tel Quel group on the one hand, and the approach to literary criticism practised in Englishspeaking countries in the twentieth century on the other. It lies in the refusal of what might be called the biographical approach. Just as T. S. Eliot maintained that ‘Impressions and experiences which are important for the man may take no place in his poetry, and those which become important in his poetry may play quite a negligible part in the man, the personality’, so Barthes believed in what he called in 1968 ‘La mort de l’auteur’. The person whom the nineteenth century, in Barthes’s view, virtually deified as The Author was, in his opinion,

essentially an ‘emitter of codes’. Such a person was also, again for him, best referred to not as an author but as a ‘scripteur’, someone who ‘is born at exactly the same moment as his text’ and is thus ‘in no way endowed with a being that precedes his act of writing or continues after this has finished’. The scripteur, moreover, has in him ‘neither passions, humours, feelings or impressions. Only the immense dictionary from which he takes a writing [écriture], which can never cease.’!? There are a number of other authors who have said that one should, when studying a literary text, try to forget anything one knows about the person who wrote it. Proust argued in Contre Sainte-Beuve, in 1909, that

‘a book is the product of a different self from the one we

exhibit in our habits, our society, our vices’, and W. H.

Auden said much the same in his poem on the death of Yeats. Although Barthes does mention, in Sollers Ecrivain, the liking which he had for Sollers as a person,

[16]

Introduction it is also an idea which is specially relevant both to Barthes and to Sollers himself. It explains exactly why Sollers Ecrivain contains none of the biographical information normally contained in books of literary criticism. Sollers may indeed, like François Mauriac and Barthes himself, have come from the Bordeaux area; the death of his father, a wealthy industrialist, may have led him, in 1970, to rewrite his novel Lois in such a way as to accentuate its violent and erotic quality. But neither of these facts, any more than his marriage to the writer and critic Julia Kristeva, has anything to do with his achievements as a writer. Barthes does, it is true, observe

in passing that Sollers is an assumed name, probably chosen because its Latin roots suggest a person who is well informed as well as productive. But he does not mention that Sollers’s original name was Joyaux — a fact with which Sollers was to make great play in his most recent novel, Le Joueur, in 1984. But this omission of

fundamental biographical data from Sollers Ecrivain does not stem solely from the fact that Barthes is writing for a French literary audience who could reasonably be expected to know such things. The Barthesian ‘death of the author’ has given a revived dimension to the remark that scripta manent, and one which seems especially appropriate to Sollers himself. A man’s moral character has nothing to do with the quality of the books he writes. It is also true that our understanding of Sollers Ecrivain is in no way enhanced by any knowledge we might have about Barthes himself. He was an excellent pianist; left-handed;

unmarried;

a Protestant;

and a

man who had been prevented by an attack of tuberculosis from sitting for the Agrégation. These facts

[17]

Introduction

may have given him a sense of exile in French society, and may have heightened his sympathy for unorthodox forms of literary thought. In his Roland Barthes par luimême, published in 1975, there is a note of regret as well as irony in the question: ‘Qui ne sent combien il est naturel en France d’être catholique, marié et bien diplômé (Who does not feel how natural it is in France to be a Catholic, married, and academically well qualified). But if a knowledge of the kind of man he was adds nothing to our understanding of the six essays in Sollers Ecrivain, these essays do take on an additional interest when seen in the context of Barthes’s other works. It is easy to see why Sollers Ecrivain is the last of Barthes’s works to appear in English translation. None of the works by Sollers which it discusses has so far been translated into English. Neither has Sollers made the same kind of impact so far on the English-speaking world as other French avant-garde writers such as Alain Robbe-Grillet or Claude Simon. It would also be idle to ignore the fact that Sollers Ecrivain is a difficult book to understand. Its ideal reader, | have come to appreciate by trying to translate it, would have an IQ of at least 160. She or he would also greatly benefit from having read the great classic novels of the nineteeenth century. Since the French nouveau roman of the 1950s and 1960s, like the Tel Quel movement and Barthes’s own views

on

literature,

was

to an

important

extent

a

reaction against the tradition of Balzac, Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, Tolstoy and Zola, as well as of more recent authors such as Maupassant, Gide, Martin du Gard, Sartre, and Camus, it would be an advantage

to know what Barthes and thinkers like him are re-

[18]

Introduction

jecting. For just as Barthes is opposed to any biographical approach to literary criticism, so he does

not believe that the content which authors consciously put in works of the imagination can tell you anything about society, about human relationship and emotions. Neither, in his view, will these works tell you about the kind of moral dilemmas that people encounter either in their private lives or in their political activities. Only form can do that. This idea is not explicitly stated in any of Barthes’s works. The way he wrote precluded unambiguous statements. It is nevertheless implicit at a number of points in Sollers Ecrivain, and especially in footnote (III) to Drama,

Poem,

Novel, in which

Barthes

dismisses

what he calls ‘psychology’ and claims that works of the imagination — like life itself — consist of nothing but constantly revolving codes. It also runs through the whole of Barthes’s longest discussion of fiction, the analysis which he published in 1975 of Balzac’s short story ‘Sarrasine’. For it was in this book, S/Z, that he gave one of the clearest statements of his concept of the relationship between reality and language when he wrote that ‘the meaning of a text is nothing but the plurality of its systems, its infinite (circular) “transcribability”: one system transcribes another, but

reciprocally as well.’'* We may think, when we read a novel, that the author is telling us what actually happened. A moment’s reflection, however, is enough to make us realize that this is not true. The author has made it all up. This is what fiction means, and there is an important sense in which Barthes is absolutely right. All we have are words arranged in a particular pattern, a story told in a par-

[19]

Introduction

ticular code. If, in Barthes’s view, the story gives us the illusion of being true, this is because the author has so arranged the words as to fit in with the ideas which her or his readers have already absorbed, from other books and from hearing people talk, about how human beings behave and what society is like. When Barthes talks, as he

does

in Drama,

Poem,

Novel,

about

‘the

re-

sponsibility of forms’, it is because he wants to make people stop thinking so much about the content of works of literature and more about how things are written. You can, in his view, talk reliably about form. You cannot say anything about content.

This refusal to admire writers for the content of their work is also very marked in the pages of Tel Quel. In Spring 1961, for example, its review of recent publications spoke enthusiastically of the article in Arguments in which Barthes had maintained that ‘to

write is an intransitive verb’. The distinction which Barthes made in the same article between those he called les écrivains — defined as using language for its own sake — and les écrivants — whose utilitarian concept of language led them to see it as nothing more than an instrument of communication — was indeed central to the whole literary enterprise of the early years of Tel Quel. In another issue, there was high praise for Hemingway on the grounds that ‘in no other author does one find the same intensity of absence as in certain of the Forty-Nine Stories.’ Gérard Genette wrote with great enthusiasm of how Flaubert one day formed ‘that project of saying nothing which Blanchot has shown to be the unconscious aim [le dessein, secret à elle-même] of all literature, the progressive awareness of which has come to constitute, for the last hundred years, the whole

[20]

Introduction

movement of modern literature.’ Liaisons dangereuses in 1966, forward a comparable insistence self-sufficiency of literature. He

Writing of Laclos’s Les Tzvetan Todorov put on the idea of the total asserted:

Every work, every novel, relates, through the pattern of events [la trame événementielle], the story of its own

creation, tells its own story. All that works like those of Laclos or of Proust do is to make explicit a truth underlying ,all literary creation. They thus bring out the pointlessness of attempts to discover the final meaning of such and such a novel, of such and such a play; the meaning of a work lies in telling itself [consiste à se dire], in talking to us about its own existence.'°

It is easy to see, in the light of these ideas, why Barthes should write with such enthusiasm about Sollers. The four books on which he concentrates in Sollers Ecrivain

are all works in which the exploration of language for its own sake, and not as a medium of communication, is at its most intense. In 1970, reviewing Severo Sarduy’s novel Cobra, Sollers defined his own aims when he

wrote in Tel Quel: negative, plural, the modern novel presents itself as an attempt to place on top of one another and link together a number of sequences whose liaisons, divisions and contrasts materially provide the ‘story’ [négatif, pluriel, le roman moderne se présente comme une superposition et un enchainement de séquences dont les liaisons, les

oppositions, forment matériellement le récit].'°

In Drame, published in 1965, it would be a gross travesty of Sollers’s achievement to say that there is a . subject at all. There is an unnamed narrator. There is what seems at times like a seaport. There is what might

[21]

Introduction

be a town. There is what could be a forest, and there is what the naive reader might try to identify as a woman. The whole book, as the second and longest essay in Sollers Ecrivain points out, is to be read as a novel in the process of making. In 1967, Julia Kristeva referred to it in Tel Quel as a book whose structural grid (the alternating combination of continuous and broken pasages — ‘he writes’ — which together form 64 squares) and pronominal permutation — (T — ‘you’ — ‘he’) — links the serene numerology of the Yi-King to the tragic throbbing of Western discourse’.

This Chinese ‘Book of Mutations’,

she explained, is

made up of 8 trigrammes and 64 hexagrammes, and thus goes to prove Ferdinand de Saussure’s thesis that ‘the quantities of language and their relationship with one another can be expressed, in their fundamental

nature, by mathematical formulae.’!” Sollers’s Logiques is a collection of essays published in 1968 and deals with the authors who, like Artaud, Lautréamont and the Marquis de Sade, belonged to the deviant and irrationalistic tradition in French literature. Like the work of Gérard Genette, Tzvetan Todorov and

Barthes himself, Logiques also put forward the view that books expressed only themselves. It was described, by an anonymous reviewer in The Times Literary Supplement, as presenting ‘the most coherent and sophisticated theory of literature in society up to

date’.'*

It was

published

simulataneously

with

Nombres, a book consisting of a hundred numbered fragments shared out in four sections. Sections 1, 2 and 3 are written in the perfect tense; section 4 in the imperfect. It would again be misleading to look for a story,

[22]

Introduction

for characters, or for an identifiable social milieu. It is

language working on itself, freed from the obligation to communicate, no longer held down by the weight of content. Lois was published in April 1972, and is perhaps the most immediately accessible of Sollers’s experimental novels. The Chinese character on the front cover is, as Sollers himself explained in an interview in 1981, a pun on the Chinese for France and for law. The characters on page 6 are either a Buddhist mantra or the evocation of a complete classic jade orchid; probably the former. It is occasionally useful to be able to read Italian and to follow a musical score. The admirer of Céline, of James Joyce and Samuel Beckett will nevertheless not feel too out of place when she or he reads on page 64 that Fin de la bande... Sinsinsinning since the night of time and each and all of their branches making and shaking twisty hands all over again in their new world through the germination of its gemination from ond’s outset till odd’s end. And encircle him circuly. Evovae! Babol! Help, mammuses! Pommève! Order is othered! Un trou chasse l’autre! Monticul! Pégase dans la tradition! Manque la langue. Manque la terrine en langue. C’est pourquoi plusieurs. Voila. C’est.

The passage on page 107: broum schnourf scrontch clong pof pif clonck alala toc toc toc cling skock bing glup burp snif pout pout paf crac pot clic crac tchhh hé hé guili sluuiirp aaa mhouh mmouhou mouh plouts gnouf snoups tchi tchit chiiiiii é é é é slam ga hou gnin hop drelin drelin braang fochloour badabang!

[23]

Introduction

also has a slight déjà vu about it. The puns on page 122 are also not going to seem too outrageous to the admirer of Alfred Jarry. To read that L'école reste vachement normale. Avec col moral. Un universytaire enculé en vaut deux. Tringlez-moi leur caisse! Soyez incléments! Déplacez linguales coupez lignes mots brèves stations d’arret qu’on sente courant. Les

parents biologiques ne sont que des locataires. Ils agissent sur ordre de propriétaires absents détournant le script de la vie récrite. Dans chaque testicule esquisse du scénario. A dada! Doudoun! Softy! Junkie! Moteur séquence tigez les bouboules et s’englande filets-jets reglandes. Preausteric man and his pursuit of panhysteric woman.

is not only to be reminded of Ubu roi. It also leads you to think critically of the theories of de-schooling society which began in the 1960s; and which culminated in the England of the 1970s with the Boom Town Rats. There is also plenty in Lois to entertain the reader who enjoyed the essay on lavatories (‘Introduction aux Lieux d’Aisance’) in the collection of early essays which Sollers published in 1963 under the title of L’Intermédiaire. The dust-cover of Lois quotes Chairman Mao as saying: ‘The line is the main string in the net. When you pull it, the meshes open.’ Another quotation reminds us of one of the basic tenets of Marxism when it reproduces Engels’s statement that ‘The eternal laws of nature are changing more and more into historical laws.’ The text entitled H, discussed at

some length in the fourth essay in Sollers Ecrivain, attracted much critical attention when it was published in 1973 by the fact that it had, like Paradis, no

[24]

Introduction

punctuation or capital letters. The dust-cover of Lois had also warned the reader that ‘the structure of the volume is not apparent’ before stating that ‘Book I has a dominant cosmo-theogony (Hesoid-prehistorical) theme. Book II insists on Greece and Chris-

tianity. Books III, IV, V and VI on the era of modern capitalism with the transversal accentuation of revolutionary reality (China). Spiral-return-progression through the repressed. Subject/Masses (let us suppose the subject a cube)’.

Paradis also resembles Lois in presenting an interior monologue which makes Molly Bloom seem by comparison as chaste in her mode of expression as Emma Woodhouse. The dust-cover explains the absence of punctuation by the fact that ‘everything is told and rhythmed nowadays at one and the same time, not in the restricted order of the old, mixed-up, terrestrial logic, but in the marvellously clear and continuous logic, one with eclipses, of waves and satellites.’ As this outline of Sollers’s work suggests, the ideal readers of Sollers Ecrivain — as of Sollers himself — might also need to supplement their very high intelligence by a certain amount of patience and persistence. The scatology may carry some of them forward. The precise nature of Sollers’s eschatological views might prove more elusive. Considering the effort needed to understand these views, it is a little disappointing to reflect that he now seems to have given them up. One is re-

minded of Max Beerbohm’s comment, in a discussion of

Bergson, about the distress which he felt at his inability to keep up with the modern thinkers as they vanished ‘into oblivion. For the apparent denial in Femmes of everything in which Sollers had previously believed was

[25]

Introduction

not merely an attitude Sollers attributed to a fictional character. In an interview which he gave at the University of California in 1981 to the Chinese writer Shuhs Kao, Sollers said of his earlier beliefs that they reflected a ‘utopia’, which he had now completely abandoned, in which ‘revolution in language and revolution in action

ought to go completely hand in hand’.'” All readers, if they are to appreciate the wider linguistic, philosophical and political implications of what Barthes is saying, will find it very useful to be acquainted with a number of languages. A nodding acquaintance with Chinese, Russian, classical Greek, with Japanese, and with the languages spoken by the Chinook and Nootka tribes on the West Coast of Canada and the United States is taken as read. Barthes also counts on his readers having some knowledge of the Arab mystical tradition. He expects them to know the theories of Jacques Derrida, and his view that linguists have unduly depreciated the role of writing by giving it a secondary place as primarily a transcription of the spoken word. He also expects them to accept this theory as true. Barthes also presupposes a reasonable acquaintance with the discipline known as semiology, or the study of signs, as well as with the most recent developments in Freudian-based psycho-analytical theory and with what Sollers himself later denounced as the rigid theology of Marxism.

One of the wider implications of the popularity in the France of the sixties and seventies of writers such as Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, as well as of Sollers himself, is the

evidence it provides of the general state of Western culture. On a number of occasions in Sollers Ecrivain,

[26]

Introduction

Barthes mentions the hostility evoked in certain quarters by Sollers’s work, and these remarks may well also reflect some of his own experience. In 1965, after the publication in book form in 1963 of the three essays in Sur Racine, Barthes was taken rather sharply to task by Raymond Picard, in a book entitled Nouvelle Critique ou Nouvelle Imposture, for having given what Picard saw as a distorted portrait of France’s greatest writer. Barthes’s reply has recently been made available in an English translation entitled Criticism and Truth, and some of the re-

marks which it quotes from Picard and his admirers confirm the view that literary debate takes place at a high temperature in France. Sollers came immediately to Barthes’s support in 1965, arguing in Tel Quel that Picard’s attack was reminiscent of the worst aspects of French reactionary thought. Almost every issue of Tel Quel refers to the attacks being made on the review, and it does seem from what Barthes and Sollers say that French writers do not live in as tolerant a climate as their Englishspeaking colleagues occasionally imagine. But Barthes and Sollers never seem to have encountered any economic or political obstacles in bringing their ideas to the attention of the public, and Tel Quel itself was not only published as a commercial venture. It also acknowledged, from 1979 onwards, on its cover the grant of money made to it through the ‘Centre national des lettres’. There was, in other words, a sufficiently alert, curious and sophisticated readership in the France of the sixties and seventies to support a review which made considerable demands upon even the most developed intelligence. This readership also seems to have been quite happy to see virtually every intellectual and political presupposition officially underlying Western capitalist civilization called into question.

[27]

Introduction

Far from trying to restrict freedom of expression, the government also provided a subsidy from the taxpayer. The hostility to bourgeois civilization comes through in the style as well as the content of Barthes’s own work. In his very first book, Le Degré zéro de l’écriture, published in France in 1953 and translated into English in 1967 under the title Writing Degree Zero, he argued that it was a mistake to admire French prose for its clarity. The way of writing which made its first appearance in the seventeenth century was, for him, essentially an instru-

ment developed by the French bourgeoisie in order to express and confirm its dominant position over the other classes in French society. He made the same point in 1966 when he replied in Critique et Vérité to Raymond Picard’s strictures on Sur Racine. Picard, he argued, was holding back the progress of intellectual enquiry by insisting that all ideas should be expressed in the kind of language which he and other middle-class critics regarded as clear. This language, Barthes pointed out, predated Freud and Marx. It also took no account of the revolution in linguistics stemming from de Saussure’s insistence on the arbitrary nature of the sign. It consequently placed modern thinkers on a kind of Procrustean bed. If they could not say what they had to say in the kind of language which Voltaire or Anatole France would have understood, their arguments would be disallowed. Sollers Ecrivain is an excellent illustration of the kind of language Barthes regarded as suitable for the exploration of new literary concepts. It certainly cannot be suspected of illustrating Anatole France’s remark that ‘la clarté est la politesse de l'homme de lettres’. As Barthes suggests on p. 72 of Sollers Ecrivain, the boot is now on the other foot. It is the duty of the reader to try

[28]

Introduction

to understand the author, not of the author to bring herself or himself down to the reader’s level. Since the books which Sollers wrote while in his most revolutionary, experimentalist period also place the same requirement upon the reader, there is an important sense in which Sollers Ecrivain is the best possible introduction to this part of his work. It plunges you immediately into the mode of discourse of the writer it is studying. It is as inappropriate to provide a conventionally written preface to Sollers’s work — or, for that matter, to that of Barthes — as it would be to invite Bertrand Russell or A. J. Ayer to write the introduction to a book of Catholic theology or of Zen Buddhism. It would also — and this is a problem I have already mentioned — be misleading to translate Barthes into ordinary language. For this would presuppose that you can separate the thing said from the way of saying; and this is an idea which the whole of Barthes’s thinking about literature has sought to reject. The way Barthes writes, especially in Sollers Ecrivain, presupposes that there is no common discourse even among speakers of the same language. It also confronts his translator with the difficult choice which I have already mentioned: she or he either respects the particularity of Barthesian discourse, and produces a purely literal rendering; or he tries to work out what the English would be for a Barthes who accepted the possibility of seeing his ideas expressed in the kind of language used in the essays of George Orwell. I hope that my own preference for this kind of language has produced a creative tension which comes through in this translation. If, as a reader with a good knowledge of French, you do not think that my version expresses what Barthes means, you are probably right. One of the advan-

[29]

Introduction

tages which he personally derives from the way he writes in French is an immunity to criticism. If you think that what he says is wrong, you will be told by his admirers that this is because you have misunderstood him. Since what he says is not translatable into ordinary English, this is probably true. This may, however, be more of a reflection on the limitations of ordinary English than a criticism of Barthes’s ideas. Philip Thody

Notes

1 Le Monde, 5 November 1958. For the other comments on Sollers, see the jacket of Le Parc, Editions du Seuil, 1962, and

of Une Curieuse Solitude, Editions du Seuil, 1958. 2 Le Monde, 29 November 1979. Interview with Jean-Louis de Rambure. 3 See Tel Quel (hereafter TQ), 16, pp. 10 and 11 for the Barthes quotation. I am grateful to Michael Wood for the information that the phrase ‘Every grapheme is of testamentary essence’ is from page 69 of Gayatri Spivak’s translation of Derrida’s Grammatology (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976). It corresponds to page 100 of the 1967 Editions de Minuit version of La Grammatologie: ‘Tout graphéme est d’essence testamentaire. Et l’absence originale du sujet de l’écriture est aussi celle de la chose ou du référent.

an ee SpA 5 TQ, 20. See p. 13 for the remark about Foucault, and p. 23 for the quotation from Nietzsche. On the same page, Sollers also quoted Wittgenstein’s remark that ‘The limits of my language are the limits of my world’, and added:

[30]

Introduction These limits are grammatical in so far as | want to remain within communication — but I know that I shall really achieve communication only if, by a breaking movement which has no return [par un mouvement brisant et sans retour], | am also the person who denies these limits, who by this meaning reaches the pulsation of meaning [la pulsion du sens].

TON p22t: 7 TO, 44, p. 98 8 TO, 47, ‘Position du Mouvement de Juin 71’, pp. 133-41, p1369

TO, 81, ‘Interview avec Marc Devade’.

10

TO, 64, pp. 69-70, p. 70.

11

TO, 90, pp. 98-104.

12

Femmes, Gallimard, 1982, pp. 161-2; 259; 269.

13 See Mantéia, Marseilles, 1968, pp. 12-17 and, for Eliot, The Sacred Wood, 1920, University Paperbacks, 1960, p. 56.

14 S/Z, Editions du Seuil, 1970, p. 126. Translated by Richard Miller, Jonathan Cape, 1973, p. 120. 15

TO, 8, p. 95 for Hemingway; TQ, 10, p. 57 for Genette;

TO, 27, p. 28 for Todorov.

fe ATO/AT p: 35. 17 TO, 29, p. 69. 18

TLS, 5 December 1968. On 25 June 1969, Sollers reviewed

Jacques Derrida’s La Grammatologie for the TLS. In a long article, he argued that the concept of writing as representation ‘buttresses the feudal religious state and bourgeois capitalist democracy, the aristocratic hierarchy and utopian socialism,

idealism and mechanistic materialism.’ Modern culture was, he claimed, in the process of a great evolution which was trying to

overthrow ‘a fundamental prejudice, one that is doubtless as

[31]

Introduction

tenacious as that of the motionlessness of the Earth before Galileo, that of the “eternal nature” of the capitalist mode of production before Marx and Lenin or that of the omnipresence of the conscious mind before Freud.’ This prejudice was the vision of writing ‘as an instrumentalist or technicist concept inspired by the phonetic model, which in

fact can fit it only for those who are victims of a teleological illusion.’ 19

0, 38. Bato.

[32]

The Text

Dialogue

‘Let’s not forget Sollers.’ ‘But you never hear about anyone else! Only yesterday, I saw that he was being attacked in a leftwing newspaper. They were criticizing him for having been a Stalinist (because he went to the annual fair for L’Humanité), a Maoist (since he’s visited China) and for

now being a supporter of President Carter (because he’s been to the United States).

‘Nobody ever talks about him. Nobody ever says nowadays that he’s a writer, that he has written and does write.’ ‘If you’re thinking about Paradis, which he is publishing in fragments in each instalment of Tel Quel, you must admit that it’s unreadable.’ ‘Paradis is readable

(and funny, and striking, and

rich, and setting lots of things off in every direction — which is what literature’s all about), if you restore the punctuation, by the way you read it to yourself or by saying it out loud.’ ‘Why does he miss out the punctuation, then?’ ‘Perhaps to make you read more slowly? At a new rhythm, a new tempo? Do you read Le Monde at the same speed as France-Soir?’ ‘I only read Le Monde.’ ‘You would nevertheless agree to read a literary text at a different rhythm from your newspaper? In

[35]

Dialogue literature, a great number of things depend upon the speed at which people read. Sometimes, punctuation is like a metronome which has jammed; if you release the blockage, the meaning explodes; it’s slower to read, because it’s richer and because it’s slower, paradoxically, it races away.’ ‘But why does he persist in forever publishing fragments of this work without ever explaining what he’s doing?’ ‘That’s just the point. You might give him some credit and consider that this persistence is meaningful: that it makes us feel the tension, the dazzle, the danger of a great project, a project of a different size (the size of a work, like the speed at which you read it, is part of its meaning)” ‘But why reveal the work in fragments?’ ‘Proust did it, and those fragments weren’t always very well understood.’ ‘You’re surely not going to compare Sollers to Proust!’ ‘As far as practice and suffering are concerned, any writer can be compared to the greatest. And it seems to me that the example of these two authors draws our attention to a certain ethic of the writer, which makes him put his work forward as an enigma from the very beginning. (Proust said it again and again: don’t judge too quickly, not everything has been said, wait.) Sollers leads us (or at least he leads me) to conceive literature not as a series of tactical moods (“winning” with a book) but more eschatologically.’ ‘That’s a religious word, isn’t it?’ ‘The meaning of a word can migrate. “Revolution” is an astronomical term, but it has enjoyed some success in an extra-celestial context!’

[36]

Dialogue

‘And what does “eschatological” mean? I don’t have my dictionary with me.’ ‘It’s what happens when the thought (or the desire) of a particular goal goes beyond the present moment, beyond immediate calculations. It refers you to the idea of a much more distant goal than a tactical or a strategic one: a goal that the writer perceives in his social solitude. For the writer is alone, abandoned by old and new classes alike. His fall is all the more serious in that he now lives in a society in which solitude itself, in itself, is seen as a fault. We allow people to be different (that is our master stroke), but not unusual. We accept types, but not individuals. We show our cunning genius in creating choirs of individual people, each endowed with a shrill, demanding, inoffensive voice. But what about

the person who is absolutely alone? Who isn’t a Breton, a Corsican,

a woman,

a homosexual,

a madman,

an

Arab, etc.? Somebody who doesn’t even belong to a minority? Literature is his voice, a voice which, by a “paradisiac” reversal, proudly assumes all the voices of the world, and mingles them in a kind of song which can be heard only if (as in those extraordinary perverse acoustic instruments) you go and listen to it a very long way off, far ahead, beyond schools, avant-gardes, newspapers and conversations.’ ‘Why are you writing this today?’ ‘I see Sollers shrunk to the size of a Jivaro head. All he is now is “the man who has changed his ideas” (he’s nevertheless not the only one, as far as I know). Well, I think that a time comes when social images have to be called back to order.

-;

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Pa «th “aA

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)

Drama, Poem, Novel’

(1965-68) The text which follows appeared in Critique, in 1965, after the publication of Philippe Sollers’s Drame (Editions du Seuil). My first reason for adding a commentary of my own is to take part in the continuing attempt to define what is meant by ‘writing’ (‘écriture’), a definition which must be continually adjusted in relation to what is being written today and in complicity with it. I also wanted to demonstrate the right of the author to take part in a dialogue with his own texts. Commentary is undoubtedly a timid form of dialogue since it allows two authors to perform different parts, instead of mingling their texts genuinely together. When applied by the author himself to his own text, it can nevertheless give some standing to the idea that a text is at one and the same time definitive (the author cannot improve it, taking advantage of what is happening here and now in order to give it a retrospective truth) and infinitely open (the text cannot be opened out by being corrected or censored, but only under the action, under the addition of the other writings, which draw it into the general space of the multiple text). In this respect, the writer should look upon his earlier texts as something entirely different, something which he can take up again, which he can quote or distort as he would do with a multitude of other signs. es Veh Dal rie oi de nt yh i peeTE Dos a 1968. Quel’, * From Théorie d’ensemble, Collection ‘Tel

[39]

Drama,

Poem,

Novel

I have therefore provided a certain number of comments in my original text. These comments are printed in italics, and indicated by a bracketed Roman numeral. The notes preceded by an Arabic numeral belonged to the original, 1965 LEXL.

Drama and poem are words that are very close together. Both stem from words meaning to do or to make. Nevertheless, the doing in a drama takes place within the story, it is the action used to form the narrative, and the subject of the drama is cil cui aveneient aventures, the person to whom the adventures take place (as in Le Roman de Troie). The making of the poem (as we are always being told) is on the contrary outside the story, it is the activity of a technician who assembles elements in order to constitute an object. Sollers’s book Drame in no way seeks to be this fabricated object. It wants to be action, not making. Drame is the account of a primordial event and the author refuses to consecrate this event by bringing in his own act of personal creation, by constituting it as a poem: drame is chosen instead of the poem and in opposition to it. However, since it is this refusal which, by thinking about itself,

constitutes the action of Drame, the author is compelled to play with what he refuses. The poem is stopped short just as it is about to ‘take’, but this is never a once-and-for-all

interruption. We consequently have a certain right to read Sollers’s Drame! as a poem. Indeed, this is what we ought to 1 It is in fact possible to read Drame as a very beautiful poem, the celebration at one and the same time of language and of the beloved, of this path towards each other, as, in its time,

was Dante’s Vita Nuova. Is not Drame the infinite metaphor of the phrase ‘I love you’, which is the sole transformation

[40]

Drama,

Poem,

Novel

do, if we want to be swept off our feet as the author is. But we should also stop ourselves at the same time as he does, and constantly separate ourselves from the beautiful poem which is coming to birth. Drame is a constant weaning, the initiation to a substance which is more bitter and more divided than the full milk of the poem. The author calls this substance a novel. If it still seems provocative nowadays to use the term novel to describe a book which has no (visible) anecdote, and no (named) characters, this is because we are still suffering from the same condescending surprise of one of Dante’s translators, Delécluze (1841), who saw the Vita Nuova as ‘a curious work, since it is written under three forms (as memotrs, as a

novel, as a poem) which are developed simultaneously’, and who thought it his duty to ‘warn the reader of this peculiarity ... in order to spare him the trouble of unravelling the kind of confusion of images and ideas which this way of telling the story gives birth to on first reading’ — after which the said Delécluze moves on to what he finds much more interesting, the ‘person’ of Beatrice. In Drame,

we donoteven have a Beatrice whose ‘person’ is given us. Ina way which is at one and the same time abstract and sensual, we are held prisoner in the puzzle of a totally pure novel, since it is a quotation of ‘the novel’ asa literary form. Now we are, when confronted by these problems of literary genre (which are not only problems of criticism but also of reading) a little less empty-handed than we were afew years ago. The novel is in fact only one of the varieties of the great narrative form. Side by side with it, we have the myth, the short story and the epic. We have at our disposition, when faced ES PE eae ee ae Dejus Men ee ee LT SS

_ of all poetry? (cf. Nicolas Ruwet, ‘Analyse structurale d’un poème français’ Linguistics, 3, 1964).

[41]

Drama,

Poem,

Novel

with a narrative, two ways of analysing it, both in their infancy. The first is functional, or paradigmatic.It tries to bring out, over and above the mere sequence of words, the elements which are knotted together within the work. The second is sequential or syntagmatic. It tries to rediscover the path — or paths — followed by the words from the first to the last line of the text. When we use these still embryonic methods in order to come face to face with an advanced work in our literature, it is obvious that we are turning our back on ‘literary history’ and perhaps even more on the practice of giving a critical account of new works as they appear. Whatever the novelty of Drame may be, I shall not be concerned with it as an avant-garde work. I shall be looking more at its anthropological reference.! I shall try to appreciate Drame less by comparison I The anthropological temptation has had its moment of truth. For years, History had been presented as a puzzle and used as a weapon against us. It has been treated as a fairly simplistic goddess who required the sacrifice of all consideration of forms, which were dismissed as insignificant. If only to deprive the fetish of its sacred character, we have had to take other long-term factors into account, such as they are found in systems which transcend History, like language or stories. It is this new accommodation that I have referred to here as anthropological. However, the reference is no longer as appropriate as it used to be. First of all, History itself is seen less and less as a monolithic system of predetermined events. It is fully and increasingly recognized, like language itself, as a system of structures whose independence towards one another can be carried much further than originally believed. History, too, is a writing. If we set up an anthropological horizon, we also close the structure, and use science to prevent the All development of signs. No analysis of a story, in my wa

[42]

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with the latest daringly experimental work than in its relationship to a very primitive myth, a story so ancient that the only vestige which remains nowadays is its intelligible form. A recent hypothesis (which has so far been little developed)’ has suggested that we should try to discover in view, can be accomplice to an authority which accredits the idea of a human normality, even ifit does so by celebrating departures from this normality or transgressions of it. Finally, unless we take up the constant possibility of going further and further backwards in our argument, there is no longer much advantage in contrasting historical with anthropological man. What does the difference between them matter, ifthey share a perfectly centred image of themselves? What we have to do is widen the tear in the symbolic system in which the modern West has just been living and is still living. This enterprise of vacillation will remain impossible unless we change the very whereabouts of Western culture, that is to say its language. Ifyou pay no attention to this language, if you reduce it (to words, to communication, to the status of an instrument) all you are doing is respecting it. In order to decentre it, to deprive it of its thousand-year-old privileges, to bring about a new writing (and not a new style), you must have a practice which is based upon theory. Drame was certainly one of the first examples of how this theory could be put into practice. Nombres followed it, quite recently. In Drame, vacillation

affected what is said to be the subject ‘of the statement’, the sacred separation between action and narration. In Nombres, vacillation subverts tenses, opens the space of infinite quotations, and replaces the line of words with a writing spaced out at intervals, transforming ‘literature’ into what, literally, must be

called scenography. 2 See A. J. Greimas, Cours de Sémantique, roneoed pages of : lectures given at the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Saint Cloud in 1964.

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the story the main functions of the sentence. From this point of view, we might look at each story simply as a very long sentence (just as each sentence, in its way, is a short story). This would enable us to discover (I am simplifying) two couples and four terms. There is a subject and an object (joined in opposition on the plane of a quest or of desire, since in every story someone is longing or looking for something or for someone). There is a helper and an opponent, narrative substitutes for circumstantial grammatical terms (joined in opposition on the level of the trials undergone, since the former helps the subject in his quest and the latter constitutes an obstacle, taking it in turns to provide the danger threatening the subject and the help received by it). The (bipolar) axis of the

pursuit is constantly transfixed by the axis of events going against it or allying themselves with it. It is this double movement which makes a narrative into an intelligible object. Any succession of words, if it subjects itself to the power of the symbolic function of language (of which these opposing elements are only the elementary forms) thus becomes a ‘story’. This generative structure might seem banal. This is inevitable if it is to account for all the stories in the world. But at the same time, as soon as you approach the transformations of this structure (which make it interesting) and the way in which these paradigms constantly refill themselves without ever getting lost, you perhaps throw a clearer light on the universality of the forms and the unique quality of the contents, the way the work communicates while the author remains opaque. Standing (with its subtitle of novel), at one end of the thousand-year-old chain which, in

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the West, begins with Homer, Drame contains the twin

opposition which I have mentioned. In it, a man is desperately seeking for something. At one moment he is carried far away from the object of his quest, at the next he is brought closer to it, by the forces making up this interplay, as in any novel. What is this man? What is the object of his desire? What is it that bears him up? or resists him? The story told by Drame has as its subject (in what henceforth is the structural sense of the term) its own

narrator.! When a man tells what has happened to him Il In the structural (linguistic) sense of the word, the subject is not a person but a function. There is nothing to oblige us to give this function a central (narcissistic) function. The structural subject is not necessarily the person you are talking about, and not even the person talking (positions which are external to language). The subject is neither underneath nor next to discourse. It is not a point which radiates, sustains or

acts. It is not the other side ofamask or the principal body of a predicative appendix. And let me here state the need to set in motion a programme which will open the subject to unheard-of metaphors. Structuralism has already somewhat emptied the subject. The task still remains of depriving it of its situation. The observation of a number of languages distant from our own could help in this respect. Whereas in our sentences it is the subject itself which decrees the objectivity of his discourse — and offers this additional decoration — Japanese behaves quite differently. By subjectivizing grammar (which is a discreet form of behaviour, since no statement is thought of as being objective, that is to say universal) Japanese makes the object not into the all-powerful agent of ‘discourse but rather into a great, stubborn space enveloping the statement and moving about with it.

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.

(in the case of the novel told in the first person) or what is happening to him (when the diary form is being used), is no shortage of first-person narratives! In fact, the ‘I’ of the classical first-person narration is based on a split personality. This ‘T is the author of two different actions, separated in time. The first action consists of living (loving, suffering, taking part in adventures). The second consists of writing it down (remembering, narrating). Traditionally, there are consequently two performers in first-person novels (the performer being a character defined by what he does, not by what he is). The first acts, the second talks.

Since there are two of them for the same person, these performers have a difficult relationship with each other. This difficulty is indeed given specific recognition by the use of words like sincerity or authenticity. Like the two halves of the originally androgynous creature in Plato’s Symposium, the narrator and the subject of the action pursue each other without ever coming together. The gap between them is called bad faith, and has been a concern of literature for some time now. In this respect, Sollers’s project is a radical one. He intends, at least for once (Drame is not a model; it is doubtless an unrepeatable experiment, even by its author himself) to remove the bad faith attached to any personal narrative. Sollers takes the two traditional halves, the narrator and the subject of the action, joined together by the equivocal ‘I’, and makes them into a single performer. His narrator is entirely absorbed in one single action, that of telling the story. The act of telling the story, which is transparent in the impersonally narrated novel and ambiguous in the first-person narrative, has become visible and opaque,

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taking up the whole stage. As an immediate and natural consequence of this, all psychology" disappears. The narrator no longer needs to bring together what he did in the past and what he is saying now. Time, memory, reasons and remorse all cease to be part of the charac-

Ill The casting out of ‘psychology’, which has been for so long an essential characteristic of the traditional, bourgeois novel, does not concern only literature. Psychology also lies in the way the world itself writes, in the book which we believe to be an inner book, and which, in a naive belief that it is

different from the world of books, we call ‘life’. The whole of our day-to-day imaginary universe, presented quite independently of art or literature, is essentially psychological. A work which is based on psychology is always clear, because our life comes to us from our books, from an immense geology of psychological modes of writing. Or, rather, what we call clarity is this smooth circulation of the codes in which our books and our life are both put into language at the same time. Life is never anything but the transliteration of books. To change the book is thus, to quote the first definition of our modernity, to change life itself. A text like Drame, to the same extent as some others which have preceded, accompanied or followed it, in so far as it changes writing, has the power to bring about this change. It does not invite us to dream, to transport into ‘real life’ a few images which the author has narcissistically transmitted to the reader, this ‘brother’. It modifies the very conditions on which dreams take place or stories are told. By producing a multiple writing which is not strange but unheard of, it rectifies language itself, bearing witness to the fact that, today, originality does not lie in an aesthetic attitude but is an act of mutation.

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ter. The result is that the act of telling the story, the basic function of the subject, can no longer be naïvely entrusted to any personal pronoun. It is Narration itself which speaks and which is its own mouthpiece. There is no previous example for the language it speaks. The voice here is not the instrument, not even a depersonalized instrument, of a secret. The it which is reached is not that of a person, but of literature (this sums up a certain mystery of Drame). Nevertheless, verbal forms still exist, requiring every sentence (every act of telling a story) to be either personal or impersonal, to choose between saying ‘he’ and saying ‘I’. Sollers alternates these two types of speech according to a formal project (the ‘he’ and the ‘I’ alternate like the black and white sequence on a chessboard). The very rhetoric involved in this project reveals its arbitrary character (rhetoric aims

at overcoming

the difficulty of speaking sincerely).

There is, of course, a certain difference of substance between the black ‘he’ and the white ‘I’. The classical tendency is for the author — ‘I’ — to decide to talk either about himself or about somebody else — ‘he’. Here, on the 3 There are a number of notations on this subject in Drame:

‘It’s him and him alone... but what is this “him” about whom he knows nothing?’ (p. 77). — “To kill oneself? But who kills himself, if he does kill himself? Who kills self? What is this who is all this?’ (p. 91). — ‘It’s not him yet, it’s not yet enough to be him’ (p. 108). — ‘He’s in the night that he is. He is holding it as it were in reduced format in his gaze — but he himself has disappeared into it (he verifies in short that there is no ‘subject’ — any more than on this page’ (p. 121). — The depersonalization of the subject is common to many modern works. What is specific to Drame is that it is not recounted =

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contrary, we have an impersonal voice. It sends out, like

an arrow which is shot from the bow only to be constantly taken back*, an ‘I’ whose only person, whose only individuality lies in the hand of flesh and blood which is doing the writing. The two persons of the narrative are thus separated not by their separate identity but merely by the fact that one comes before the other. Every time, ‘He’ is the person who is going to write ‘I’; every time, T is the person who, beginning to write, nevertheless goes back into the pre-creature which gave him birth. This instability works like a quivering brought under control, entrusted with the creation of a person who deprives the story of itself. Every story is told from a particular point of view. This can be called its modality, since in grammar, the mood of a verb also has the function of telling us what the mental attitude of the subject is towards the process stated by the verb. Modality, from Joyce, from Proust, to Sartre, to Cayrol, to Robbe-Grillet, is one of the great areas of research of contemporary literature. Sollers cannot create a belief in an anonymous narration since ‘He’ and ‘T are imposed by language. But by weaving together the black thread and white thread of the personal and the impersonal, he transforms the psychological disappearance of the person (a fairly long-standing acquisition by now) TO

Ah ENE

ee

ee

ee

eee

ener

eee

(reported) in the book, but constituted (if I can put it that

way) by the very act of the story. — 4 Sollers concludes a very fine description of Saint Sebastian in the following manner: ‘he can represent a bow and I the arrow. The second should leap from the first like the flame from the fire... but nevertheless go back into it without effort .... and J can then become what feeds it and burns itself on it’ (p. 133).

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into the technical disappearance of modality in the story. He signifies the absence of modality. The subject, the hero, of Drame is thus a pure narrator. This hero is trying to recount something. For him, the real story is the outcome justifying his enterprise, his hopes, his ruses, the way he expands himself, in short his whole activity as a narrator (since that is all he is).'Y In Drame, the story (the novel) is so important that it becomes the object of the quest. The IV As we know, nouns of action (indicated in Latin by the ending ‘tio’) are normally seen as inert substantives, merely denoting an end product. Description thus ceases to be the action of describing and becomes the result of this action, a pure motionless picture. Here, Narration should escape from this semantic degenerescence. In Drame, we are placed in the

presence not of the thing narrated but of a labour of narration. This slender line which separates the product from its creation, distinguishing narration as object from narration as process, is the historical dividing line which places on one side the classical story, emerging ready armed from an earlier preparation, and, on the other, the modern text, which has no

desire to exist before it is told and which, presenting its own labour as subject matters, can finally be read only as something working upon itself. This difference is very clear if you look at a classical form which is apparently very close to the story as action. What I am talking about are the stories within a story, where the narrator, introduced in a way which is

always anecdotal, says that he is going to relate something; and the story then follows. What a novel like Drame abolishes is precisely this passing of the narrative flow through these different locks. The classical narrator installs himself in front of us like someone sitting down in front of a table. He is preparing, as they say in detective stories, to sing like a =

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story is the desire for the story. What is the elementary fable which is thus pursued and whose pursuit makes up the book? We shall never find out, if we forget that in this

case the narrator is in no way the other half (as is normally the case) of an actor whose objective secret we have to reconstitute. If we expect Drame to have the interest of a detective story, that is to say if we forget the person telling the story and concentrate solely on the actor, we shall never find ‘the solution’, we shall remain in constant ignorance of what the real story is, a story which is mysteriously quoted and evoked throughout the book. But if we bring the riddle back from the actor.to the narrator (since it is he who is the only performer in the fable), we shall immediately understand the real story is nothing other than the quest which is being recounted to us. This kind of tautology is not sophisticated. The fact that the absence of a story (on the level of fiction) can give rise to a full and complete story (on the level of writing); that you can have a zero degree of action accompanied by words which are full of meaning and which carry a significant canary. He sets out his product (his soul, his knowledge, his memories) in a posture which, in punctuation, is the equivalent of the two dots of the colon in the introductory quotation which is going to blossom out into a splendid narrative sequence. The narrator in Drame erases the two dots, gives up any idea of installing himself. He cannot be behind the table, facing the story he is going to tell. His work is more that of a migration. It consists of going through the codes, of using them, like the lateral walls of a voyage, to hang with tapestry the space of a text, in the manner of a host of writers combining fragments of gestures among themselves in order to transform J the line of words into a scene of verbal action.

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mark; that the event (the drama) should be in some way

transfused from the world which is normally copied (whether real, a dream, or fiction) to the very movement

of the words which gaze hard at this world like eyes — all this can be the starting point for absolutely realistic works.

Cervantes,

Proust have written

books which

have met the world in their search for the Book. They did this in the belief that they were fixing their gaze on written models (on court romances or on the book that they longed to write), that is to say on writing itself, but

without writing that particular story which lay before them. They were able, as they pursued their aim, to recount a whole world — and one of the most real.Ÿ While pursuing a purely literary project, Sollers’s narrator also journeys through a world perceptible to the senses (this is the poem I was talking about at the V This use of an indirect mode of speech has a truth-telling function. Whereas language seen primarily as expression is given the task of authenticating a ‘thing’ conceived as existing before speech takes place, the indirect mode of discourse disturbs the very process of expression. It falsifies the relationship between the centre and the outside edges. By holding fullness (information, meaning, the end) perpetually out in front, keeping it in what has not yet been said, it carries out a constant movement away from the ‘thing’ which language is supposed to express — which is also a way of preventing works from being interpreted. The indirect (the constitution of a landscape which lies to one side) ensures that the story is placed in parallel, that assertion is stereographically transformed. Perhaps linguistics itself which recently, thanks to Jakobson, has been able to detect new typical forms of message — will one day recognize that the oblique is a fundamental mode of enunciation.

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beginning), but this world can come alive (be washed clean

ofall bad faith: beinnocent?) only inso far as one condition is satisfied: that evil and death being attached to the story to be created — but which is never completed — the narrative is in fact only the form freely taken by the question ‘What is a story?’ At what level in myself, in the word, am I going to decide that something ishappening to me? The earliest poets, the authors of the very ancient epic ballads which preceded the Iliad, exorcised the terrifying arbitrariness of the story (why begin here rather than there? by a proem whose ritual meaning was this: history is infinite, ithas been going on fora long time (did it even havea beginning?), sol will take it up at this point, which I will announce as such. The same is true of the fundamental story, the elementary fable, which the subject is here seeking without ever being able to reach it. For this story ritually determines the reference point from which (or towards which) something can be told. This fundamental story is like the invisible system of calling things by their names (the langue, in the Saussurian sense of the word) which is going to allow speech to take place.° It is once again language (since the action is here entirely

narration) which is going to provide the crossbeams and supports which branch across the subject’s quest. Two languages enter into conflict, one hostile to the real story (we never hear it), the other drawing very close to it, giving birth to that chimera, that verbal being, neither real nor fictitious, which Spinoza talks about, which is inaccessible

to the understanding and to the imagination, since in 5 ‘If there is a story, it tells basically how a language (a syntax) goes in quest of itself, invents itself, makes itself at one and the same time into a machine for emitting and receiving signals’ (Note for the reader in Drame).

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Drame it slides along an absent story. The opposite is a language which is excessive, encumbered with signs, worn out in prefabricated stories, made up of ‘passages foreseen in advance’. It is ‘that language, that writing which is already dead, which has one day been definitively classified’. It is that excess of expression by which the narrator is expelled from himself, poisoned with awareness, overwhelmed by the ‘inexpressible individual weight’. In short, this enemy language is Literature, not only institutional

and

social,

but also internal,

that

ready-made cadence which ultimately determines the ‘stories’ which happen to us, since to feel, unless you are constantly on the lookout, is also to name. This language is a lie, because as soon as it touches the true vision, the latter

vanishes.® But if you give up this language, a language of truth begins to speak.’ Sollers follows the original myth of the writer very closely: Orpheus cannot turn round, he must keep going forward and must sing what he desires without giving it thought: the only way of finding the right word is by profoundly dodging away. The problem, in fact, for someone who believes language to be excessive (poisoned with sociality, with ready-made meanings) and who nevertheless wants to speak (refusing the idea that speech is impossible) is to stop before this excess of language can take shape. Such a person must go faster than 6 ‘A verbal effort which is difficult to spot at first (and the fact of discovering or seizing it too close prevents you in fact from seeing it)’ (p. 77).

7 ‘lam ready to give up. I give up. And then, in the margin, there is this shock (if I really have given up): a language sets out in search of itself and invents itself. Impression that I am going to describe exactly the movement of the words on the page — exactly nothing else, nothing more’ (p. 147).

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acquired language, putting in its place an innate language, one which precedes all awareness but which is nevertheless endowed with perfect grammaticality. This is what Drame sets out to do, its first aim being very similar to that of the spontaneous writing of the Surrealists, its second totally opposed to it. Language here puts forward its second figure, offering itself as a guide like the fairy which assists the hero in his quest. A certain language comes to visit the narrator, to help him to circumscribe without fail what happens to him (the real story). This auxiliary language cannot be triumphant. It is a furtive, roundabout language,” a very short ‘speech time’ since it must coincide with ‘genuine spontaneity, which precedes every attitude and every choice’. Drame is a description of this speech time. 8 ‘He could explain this only in a disappointing, disjointed way, deprived of all probability, harmony, plot . . . A suspended story in which nothing would ever seem to happen and which would nevertheless be the height of inner activity’ (p. 73). 9 L’Intermédiaire, p. 126. Sollers makes it quite clear in this text that ‘spontaneity’ is not linked to a disorder of the words but, on the contrary, to a protocol without interstices:¥! ‘There would take place such an overloading of intentions, such a practical complexity, that far from being impoverished or made tiresome, the feeling of being alive would be multiplied at its source.’

VI The ‘spontaneity’ which people normally talk to us about is the height of convention. It is that reified language which we find ready-made within ourselves, immediately at our disposal, when we do in fact want to speak ‘spontaneously’. The spontaneity which Sollers is trying to achieve here is an infinitely more difficult concept. It is a fundamental criticism of _ signs, an almost utopian (one which is nevertheless essential in the theoretical plane) quest for an a-language, a fully corporeal

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Classical rhetoric had produced codes to measure the historical period of time in which writing took place, such measurements being normally applied to the golden age, that of the coming to awareness, that of speech. The time it evokes is that of the body waking up, still new and neutral, untouched by meaning and by the act of remembrance. It gives us the Adamic dream of a total body, marked at the dawn of our modernity by Kierkegaard’s cry: ‘But give me a body! It is the division of being into body, soul, heart and mind which creates the ‘person’ and the negative language attached to it. The total body is impersonal. Identity is like a bird of prey hovering far, far above the sleep in which we peacefully go about leading our real life, living our true story. When we wake up, the bird plunges down upon us, and it is during its descent, before it has touched us, that we

must move faster than it does and speak. The Sollersian wakening is a complex time, at one and the same time very long and very short. It is a wakening coming to birth, (just as it is said of Nero in Racine’s Britannicus that he is a one, fully alive, a prelapsarian space from which stereotypes, those constituent elements of all psychology and all ‘spontaneity’, have been expelled. The practice which Sollers refers to here, indirectly (the only possible way of telling us about it), has nothing to do with the kind of revolutionary changes which our society periodically demands with such urgency. This practice does not consist in paying no attention to language (an excellent way of ensuring that it comes galloping back, in its most outworn forms) but in catching it unawares — or, as in Drame, in listening to its precarious suspension. It is an enterprise so lacking in immediacy that you can doubtless find its equivalent only in the radical experiments of poetry or in the very patient operations of extreme

civilizations,

such

as

the wuhsin,

non-language, pursued in Zen mysticism.

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monster coming to birth).!? Etymologically, ‘éveil’ in French comes from the vulgar Latin exvigillare, to watch over. Here, too, the fact of being awake is a watching-over. Here, too, being awake is the activity of a mind which neither the day nor the night obliterates and which, by speech, controls the treasures

of sleep, of unsituated

memory, of vision. Sollers is nevertheless not concerned with a pure poetics of the dream. In his work, sleep and waking are more the opposing terms of a formal function, with sleep representing what lies before and being awake what lies afterwards. The act of waking is the neutral moment at which the opposition between them can be perceived and spoken. Sleep is essentially what goes before,!! the scene of the insoluble origin.!? There is thus no privileged place for the dream (constructed, anecdotal dreams are in any case fairly rare in Drame). The dream is put on the same level as memories, visions and imaginations, in some way formalized, called into the great alternative form which seems to regulate the discourse of Drame at each of its levels and which sets day off against night, sleep against wakening, black against white (of the 10 Sollers has given some indication of his method of sleep (and of waking) in a passage of L’Intermédiaire (p. 47) devoted to the interrupted siesta. 11 ‘It seems to me that I am at the frontier of words, just before they become visible and audible, close to a book dreaming itself with an infinite patience’ (p. 87). — ‘. . . the reminder of a state with no memory, something which would have always preceded what he is obliged to see, to think’ (p. 64).

12 ‘...to brush against the limit inside oneself; the gesture, the word that nobody would now be able to understand; that he would not understand either, but of which he would at

least be the insoluble origin’ (p. 91).

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chessboard), the ‘He’ against the ‘T whose awakening is in fact nothing but the precious neutralization. It is the language of abolition which is seeking itself out: the abolition of separations and, finally, of that separation which is inside language itself, and which mistakenly puts things on one side and words on the other. For Sollers, at the level of the experience which he is recounting, words occur before things — which is a way of blurring the distinction between them: words see, perceive, and provoke things to exist. How this can come about (since this precedence accorded to words should not be taken as a mere figure of speech)? As is well known, semiotics makes a careful distinction in meaning between the signifier, the signified and the thing (the referent). The signified is not the thing: this is one of the great acquisitions of modern linguistics. Sollers stretches-the gap between the signified and the reference (a gap which is minimal is ordinary language) to its widest extent: ‘It is with the meaning (that is to say: with what is signified) of words that we are concerned, not with the things in the words. There is no point in calling to mind a fire or a flame. What they are (that is to say: their semantic being) has nothing to do with what we see’ (p. 119). The speaker (the person who has been awoken) imagined by Sollers does not live among things (any more, of course, than he lives among ‘words’, as signifiers, for we are not concerned here with a derisory verbalism) but among things signified (since the thing signified is precisely what has ceased to be the referent). His language is already offering itself to this rhetoric of the 13 ‘He sees again, it is up to the words to see again for him...” (p. 67) — ‘Then the precise formula becomes not: this or that, but: since what I have said, I notice...’ (p. 150).

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future, which is — which will be the rhetoric of things signified. For him, with him the sides of language (as one talks about the limits of the world) are not those of nature

(of things) as was the case with Romantic poetry, which: could be dealt with by a study of its themes. They are those of that other side of meaning which is constituted by associations or chains of things signified. The meaning of fire is not flame, for we are no longer concerned with associating the word to the thing it refers to. It could, rather, be bracken (among other meanings), since we are in the same metonymic space (poetically superior today, it would seem, to metaphoric space). It naturally follows that there is no longer a gap between the book and the world, since the ‘world’ is not directly a collection of things but a field of things signified. Words and things thus circulate on the same level, like the units of the same discourse, the particles of the same matter.!* We are not far away here from an ancient myth: that of the world as book, of words inscribed in the earth itself. The hero as searcher, the story as the object of his search, language as an enemy, language as an ally, these are the cardinal functions which make up the meaning of Drame (and, consequently, its ‘dramatic’ tension). However, the terms of this fundamental code are disseminated, like the 14 ‘... and thinking suddenly that somewhere, in a book, a tangled paragraph opens out in fact to the sky (p. 141). — ‘Words... (You are transparent among them, you walk through them like a word among other words)’ (p. 81). 15 See L’Inferno, Canto XXIV: ‘quando la brina in su la terra assempra/’imagine di sua sorella bianca,/ma poco dura a la sua penna tempra’ (when first the earth copies the image of its white sister (= snow) but the sharpness of its pen lasts but a short time).

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seeds of proofs (semina probationum) of classical rhetoric.

They consequently need to be in a way recoded into a certain order of discourse, one which is dealt with by sequential analysis (and not, on this occasion, functional

analysis). It is the problem of the Logic of the story, important in so far as this logic is responsible for what one might call (as in recent linguistics) the acceptability of the work, in other words its verisimilitude. Here again, it is the mingling of the narrator with the performer (which is definitely the key to Drame), that is to say the initial formula of the functions, which explains the particular logic of Drame. Normally, a narrative involves at least two temporal axes: an axis of rotation, which is the actual time that the words take to follow one another, and a fictional

axis, which is the imagined time of the story. Sometimes, these two axes do not coincide (they go out of phase, you have an ordo artificialis, flashbacks). Now it would be an

understatement to say that these axes continuously coincide in Drame. Since it presents us with an adventure of language, the axis of notation absorbs temporality com-

pletely: there is no time outside the Book. The scenes it presents to us as having happened (we do not know, and for good reason,

whether

they are dreams,

memories

or

fantasies) imply no fictitious reference point which is ‘other’ than the situation in which they are written down.!f The singularity of the notational axis is absolute. An author could in fact reject all narrative chronology and still submit his notation to the flux of his impressions, memories, sensations, etc. But he would still be keeping two axes, for 16 Sollers, quoting Fluchère on Sterne: *. . . it is that the past is always present in the mental operation which consists of putting it down in words on paper’ (Tel Quel, No. 6).

[60]

Drama,

Poem,

Novel

he would be making his notational axis the copy of a different temporality. This is no way the technique in Drame. Here, literally, there is no time other than that of

the words.!” We are presented here with a total present, which is that of the subject only in so far as this subject is entirely absorbed in his function as narrator, that is to say as a spinner of words. We thus do not have to situate the episodes of Drame in relation to one another. The indecision of their substance (are they memories? dreams? visions?) makes them, literally, inconsistent. The temporal operators, numerous in discourse (now, first of all, but

then, finally, suddenly, whereupon) thus never refer to a fictitious time of a story. They refer only — and in a manner which is wholly autonomic — to the time occupied by the discourse itself. The only time recognized in Drame is not that of a chronology, even an internal one, but the time of simple urgency which we find in the expression: it is time to.'® This urgency is not even that of the anecdote, but that of language: it is time to tell this, which is nothing but the time of the infinitely vast word which is happening to me. If we go back from this to my initial hypothesis (which in any case I have never abandoned), that is to

say that there is a strict similarity between the categories of the story and those of the sentence, the different

episodes of Drame (which correspond, roughly, to the 17 Sollers, talking about Poussin: ‘It is not . . . a “moment” or a boring succession of more or less complete images, but the passage of time which has been deliberately ranged in tiers, directed, played with, neutralized, annulled in a solid physical scale’ (L’Intermédiaire, p. 84). And in Drame: ‘This does not take place in time but on the page on which time is laid out’ (p. 98). 18 cf. L’Intermédiaire, p. 150, on Robbe-Grillet.

[61]

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Poem,

Novel

verbs in a sentence) are never formed like tenses (in the sense which this word has in grammar) but like the aspects of a development (the importance of aspect, as a tense, is well known in languages such as Greek or the Slavonic tongues. Why should it not also exist in the language of the story as well?)." When the narrator tells VII French (at least in the morphology of its verbs) does not contain an aspectual form. It is precisely with this lack in our language that Sollers’s discourse enters into conflict; it provides what is missing, that is to say, according to Derrida, adds itself to it, and substitutes itself for it. You could in fact say that discourse, in its relationship to language, provides a labour of compensation (and not simply of utilization): discourse remunerates language, it makes up for what is missing. We must remember (according to what Boas and Jakobson have told us) that ‘the real difference between languages does not lie in what they can or cannot express, but in what the speakers of these languages should or should not transmit.’ The writer, in this case alone, special,

and in opposition to all those who speak or who write the language in order to communicate, is the person who does not allow the obligation of his language to speak for him, who knows and feels the deficiencies of the particular language he is using and has a utopian vision of a total language in which nothing is compulsory. The writer thus makes a number of borrowings, through his discourse, and without knowing it. He takes from Greek the middle voice, as when he assumes responsibility for his writing instead of leaving it vicariously to some sacred image of himself (like the Indo-European taking the knife from the priest’s hands in order to carry out the sacrifice himself). He takes from Nootka the amazement of a word in which the subject does nothing more than predicate, in extremis, under the form of a secondary suffix, the most trivial information, which is, for its part, pompously w

[62]

Drama,

Poem,

Novel

us that he comes down from his room, goes out of the town, witnesses a car accident, this succession of events

is given neither as contingent (an event taking place at a specific time) nor as transcendent (a custom). It is, if you

like, an aorist, the verbal mood of the development in itself. The ‘paths’ followed by discourse are thus neither those of chronology (before/after), nor those of logical enshrined in the root. ‘He takes from Hebrew the (diagrammatic) figure whereby the person is placed before the verb, according to whether it is directed to the past or to the future. He takes from Chinook a discontinuous temporal which is unknown in French (the past tense is indefinite, recent or mythical) etc. All these linguistic practices, at the same time as they form as it were the vast imagination of language, bear witness to the fact that it is possible to construct the relationship between the speaker and the statement by centring or decentring it in a way which is unheard of for us and for our mother tongue. This total language, brought together beyond all normal linguistic practice by the writer, is not the lingua adamica, the perfect, original, paradisiac language. It is, on the contrary, made up from the hollowness of all languages, whose imprint is carried over from grammar to discourse. In writing, the constant addition of sentences to one another, which in theory can be carried on to infinity, has nothing to do with the addition of associated messages or the rhetorical expansion of secondary details (known as the ‘development’ of an idea). In relationship to language, discourse only appears to combine different elements together. In fact it either rewards or calls into question; and it is for this reason

that the writer (the person who writes, that is to say denies the compulsory limits of his own language) is responsible for carrying out a political task. The task does not consist of ‘inventing’ new symbols, but in changing the symbolic system as a whole, in turning language inside out, not in renewing it.

[63]

Drama,

Poem,

Novel

narrative (one event being implied by another). The only governing principle here is that of a constellation. If all discourse were not linear (an obligation which has an infinity of consequences for literature), we should have to read Drame as a great galaxy, whose topology is unimaginable to us. What causes the syntagma to move forward is thus not something which is behind words and of which words are merely a covering. It is words themselves. Here, the word is at one and the same time a

unit and an operator of the syntagma. The word sets the discourse going, puts it into gear, either as a signifier (certain cantos of Drame are linked together by their echoes) or by what it signifies (as I have suggested earlier). The word, as Aeschylus says, whips things along.” This is, of course, a very old technique in poetry. What is new in Sollers is the fact that these propelling words, these operators of syntagmas, determine periodic chains of associations, within which substitutions can be infinite. Semantically, the word is bottomless, the sentence endless. The work itself, perhaps analogous in this respect to the great generative structure postulated by Chomsky for the sentence, is its own language, made up of infinitely substitutable elements. Each one of us thus speaks an immense sentence, replacing to infinity its constituent parts, which is interrupted only by death. Drame makes us doubt whether closed works can exist.20 19 Suppliants, 466. 20 (Image of a fire): “The dream allows only one word to subsist, or rather suggests it mechanically, in a roundabout way, in a false, rigid fashion. But whose place can this word take? Whose place can the fire take? (does he dare to think: whose place can the word take?)’ (p. 85).

[64]

Drama,

Poem,

Novel

Drame cannot fail to arouse resistance among readers, since the absolutely regular structure of the narrative functions (a hero, a quest, benevolent forces,

hostile forces) is not taken up by a ‘logical’ discourse, that is to say a chronological one. The reader has to look for the dramatic foundation of the story in the actual calling into question of the story. In other words, Drame has a narrative code which is regular but an expository code which is not, and it is precisely this gap which attracts the ‘problem’ and indeed the ‘drama’, and together with them the resistance of the reader. This resistance can be expressed in another way: the cardinal functions of Drame, which are those of any story (subject/object, helper/opponent) are valid within only one universe, which is that of language (with ‘universe’ being given its full meaning, as a cosmogony of the word). Language is a genuine planet, emitting its heroes, its stories, its good, its evil.?! This is the wager which Sollers has stuck to with irreproachable consistency (albeit not one which has gone without reproach). Now there is nothing which provokes more resistance than laying bare the codes of literature (the reader will recall Delécluze’s suspicion when faced with Dante’s Vita Nuova.) It is almost as though these codes must at all costs remain unconscious, exactly as the code of language does. No current work is ever language on language (except for certain commentaries on classical texts) to such an extent that the absence of a metalinguistic level is perhaps the surest criterion 21 ‘The book should not stay caught in the trap that it makes for itself. It must place itself in a space which belongs only to ‘it (Tel Quel, No. 6).

[65]

Drama,

Poem,

Novel

enabling us to define a work with mass appeal (or one belonging to the same family). There is still a very powerful taboo” (with the author as witch doctor) against making language into a subject, and doing so through language itself. Society seems as anxious to restrict language which deals with language as it does language which deals with sex. This censorship meets up with a certain kind of laziness (or expresses itself through this laziness). Normally, we are good at reading only works into which we can project ourselves. Freud, taking up an idea from Leonardo da Vinci, contrasted painting (and suggestion), which proceeds per via di porre (by means of putting in) with sculpture (and analysis), which proceeds per via di levare (by means of taking away). We always think that literary works are like paintings and that we ought to read them in the way we believe they were made, that is to say by adding ourselves to them. From this point of view, only the writer can project himself into Drame, only the writer can read Drame. One can nevertheless imagine and hope for another reading. This new reading to which Drame invites us would not try to establish an analogical relationship between the work and the reader but what one might call a homological one. When an artist struggles with matter — with canvas, wood, sound, 22 It is this taboo which Dante — among others — threw off when he made his poems and the technical commentary on them into one and the same work (the Vita Nuova), and even

more precisely when, in this book, addressing his ballad (‘Ballad, go off and discover love’) he rejects the objection that nobody will know who he is talking to with the argument that ‘the ballad is nothing but what I say of it’.

[66]

Drama,

Poem,

Novel

words — this struggle may, as it proceeds, produce precious imitations on which we can reflect endlessly. But it is nevertheless this struggle and this struggle alone that the artist finally tells us about. It is this which is his first and last word. Like a series of endlessly reflecting mirrors, this struggle reproduces all the struggles in the world. This symbolic function of the artist is a very old one, and is presented much more clearly in works from the past than it is today. For in those days the bard, the poet, was charged with representing to the world not only its dramas but his own drama, the actual event of his own speech. The constraints of poetry, which are so powerful in very popular genres and whose mastery by the poet has always been greatly admired by the community, can be nothing but the homological image of a certain relationship to the world: there is only one side of the struggle, there has always been only one victory. This symbol has grown less marked in modern literature, but the writer is precisely there constantly to reawaken it, whatever price he may have to pay. It is thus that, like Sollers, he is on this side of the world.

[67]

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The Refusal to Inherit (1968) The revolutionary idea is dead in the West. From now on, it is somewhere else. For a writer, however, the political whereabouts of this somewhere else (Cuba, China) matter less than its form. What most directly concerns the writer in this migration, that is to say as far

as his work is concerned (for the writer works as well) is

the dispossession which it implies of the West, the new image which it imposes: that of a field in which the Western subject is no longer the centre and no longer provides the point of view. It is in this far distance of the revolution (a far distance which is absolutely unknown,

‘unwritten’) that Philippe Sollers has chosen to pursue his labours and develop his work. Sollers refuses to inherit — except what cannot be inherited. This refusal to inherit, which is normally minimized under the name of impertinence, can take the form of different positions, some of them fundamental (they will be found in the programme of Logiques'), others which are more contingent, linked to the activities of the review and collection ‘Tel Quel’, activities which are also forms of writing. For example: it seems necessary to Sollers to show how he has broken

ee ET SE ee eral * First published in Le Nouvel Observateur, No. 181, 30 April 1968. 1 Logiques and Nombres, Editions du Seuil, 1968.

[69]

The Refusal to Inherit

with the political language of the fathers — the fathers being, in this instance, the left-wing writers and intellectuals who have been absorbed for the last ten years by the anti-Stalinist struggle. Their mode of political inscription in the world must now be disinscribed, written in a contradictory, ‘scandalous’ manner. A Communist in ‘Tel Quel’? Why not, if this involves unwriting the anti-Communism on which left-wing intellectuals have fed (and overfed), while at the same time

— we must not forget it — unwriting the traditional distaste for formalism among Communist intellectuals. These are two ‘inheritors’ which it is no bad thing to cancel out one by the other, all the more so since they share the same blithe lack of interest in the responsibility of forms. As far as the fundamental break is concerned — the one developed mainly in Logiques and alluded to in Nombres — it is essentially concerned with the history of our literature. In Sollers’s view, this literature has for centuries been characterized, and still is characterized,

by the subjection to a certain form of readability. A tragedy by Racine, a short story by Voltaire, a novel by Balzac, a poem by Baudelaire or a story by Camus are all intended to be read in the same way. They all have the same idea of meaning, observe the same narrative practice — in short, the same ‘grammar’. Now the rules of this deep grammar — a grammar of reading, not just a grammar of the French language — are now starting to be taken to pieces. And as this is done, it begins to appear as a particular grammar, although we still experience it as universal, that is to say as natural. Immediately, another language then appears possible, one

[70]

The Refusal to Inherit which is revolutionarily justified. It is a language which, in an eccentric manner, has come to be written here and

there, on the extreme edge of this canonical reading of ‘reality’ which has stamped its single, dominant imprint on the whole of Western speech. Mallarmé, Lautréamont, Roussel, Artaud, Bataille — discussed by

Sollers in Logiques — are the first operators of this other language. The way they write is in no way a style or a manner which one would adhere to by ‘taste’ (according to that old Voltairian principle which reduces every phenomenon to its smallest possible cause). It is an act of denial, aimed at casting off the natural right of the old texts. It renders out of date the concepts of subject, reality,

expression,

description,

story,

meaning,

according to which these texts were constructed and read.

Sollers’s calling into question of literature (since this is the name of this old way of writing) involves not only a revision in the way of writing but also a new definition of reality, of the writer, and of their mutual relationship. In order to understand Sollers’s action, you have to start with the sign, a term common to all recent researches, even if the sign is finally to be carried off into a space, into a text which will destroy it. What writers have for a long time called ‘reality’ is itself nothing more than a system, a continuous flow of different kinds of writing stretching out to infinity. The world has always already

been written down. Communicating with the world (this pious vow proudly used against all ‘formalisms’)

thus no longer consists of putting a subject and an object, a style and substance, a vision and facts, in contact with one another. It means going through these

[71]

The Refusal to Inherit ways of writing of which the world is composed, treating them as so many ‘quotations’ whose origin can never

be either precisely identified or decided. It means producing this textual writing which Sollers requested, an expression which has nothing mysterious about it if one simply stops to think that a text, etymologically speaking, is a weaving together, a network of writings — not a picture which the writer has taken from his own mind or from reality, while parsimoniously receiving from art the right to distort them. The mode of writing which Sollers demands and practises thus calls into question a particular use of literary language, that of representation. For centuries, literature has modelled itself upon painting, inasmuch as painting represents actions, landscapes and characters. This has given us stories, descriptions and portraits. However, painting itself, in the fifty years separating Cézanne from Duchamp — as the catalogue for a recent exhibition reminded us — has abolished, one after the other, tradition, the subject, the object, and painting itself. This has not, we should note, meant that Cézanne,

Picasso, Kandinsky or Duchamp has become ‘incomprehensible’. There are a number of social reasons why you cannot do quite the same with language, which is something the writer shares with all other men. However that may be, what is at stake is the same. What Nombres does is to cast writing out, making it circulate with the other forms of writing with which the world which is in movement is written. It does so by using what Sollers calls the ‘feature’, moving from the page to the canvas, to the object, in contrast to the ‘voice’, which is a mythical organ of expression. In so doing, Nombres contains, disseminated like seeds through one of the

[72]

The Refusal to Inherit most beautiful languages in French (for ‘felicitous phrases’ were already what was modern in ancient texts) many forms of writing which come from these other languages (Mathematics or Chinese, for example) which together make up what is necessarily for us the language spoken by other people. The dismissal of representation (or, if you prefer, of literary configuration) has, among others, one important consequence. It is no longer possible to put some thing or some person behind the author. You cannot, on the surface of plural writing, look for the person who writes. Nombres gives no image of him, not even (above all) a hidden image. Everything which made up the weight of the imaginary (themes, repetition, hints, the telling of stories, scenarios) has gradually left writing, since by abolishing the story you go beyond fantasy. We must think of the writer (or the reader: it is the same thing) as a man lost in a gallery of mirrors. Where he cannot see his own reflection is the way out. There lies the world.

What link does this have with the revolution? A writer can define himself only by his work. From the point of view of this work, the revolution is essentially a form, that of the final difference, the difference which has no resemblance. Confronted with a new historical situation, Sollers profits from it. He exploits the principle — which has long been repressed — according to which the relationship between the revolution and literature cannot be analogical, only homological. What is the point of copying the real, even from a revolutionary point of view, since this would be to have recourse to the essence of bourgeois language, which is, above all else, a

[73]

The Refusal to Inherit language which copies? What can pass from

the re-

volution into literature is subversion, is a fire (the image

in which Nombres opens) or, if you prefer to speak in specific, positive terms, what can make this move

is

plurality (different forms of writing, quotations, numbers, masses, mutations). What Sollers represents, as a continuation and a beginning at one and the same time, is this emergence from the narcissistic games of the West, the arrival of an absolute

difference — which

politics will certainly take it upon itself to present to the Western writer, unless he makes the first move.

[74]

Over Your Shoulder (1973)

One day, I said of a text that it was beautiful. People protested: how can you be modern and talk of beauty? Our vocabulary is so limited (precisely where there is a superabundance of novelties) that we do have to accept that words turn round and come back. I start with things and I bestow words, even words that have worn out. I shall therefore persist and say of Sollers’s book’ that it is beautiful. What I mean by that word is not some conformity to a canonical ideal, but a material fullness of pleasures. What is beautiful is everything which is erotically overdetermined. Sollers’s book abandons nothing, neither history, nor criticism, nor language, and it is this suffocation that I call ‘beauty’. How does it work? Like a ‘whirlwind of language’. Look at these leaves on the ground, caught up in the approaching storm: they are small spirals, themselves entering into a great spiral, and this spiral moves off, goes away, we don’t know where. In H everything is organized into a splendid series of irrelevancies. Scarcely has it been captured in what looks like a sentence than the subject (the topic, as they say in English) unhitches itself, avoids the constantly threatening oratorical period. What makes our head spin is the distance of the * Published in Critique, No. 318, November 1973. 1 H, Seuil, 1973.

[75]

Over

Your Shoulder

subjects telescoped together, the prodigious speed with which they go past us, the narrowness of the place at which they change over. It is a kind of Brownian movement — it is, without carrying the comparison too far, like a television screen before the image settles down, or when the image, that holy of holies, is interrupted (by some storm) so that the frosted glass surface vibrates,

dazzles, crackles,

acts

as a barrier

to the

metaphysic which will come back when the storm has passed (the metaphysic, that is to say the advertising sketch, the ‘serial’, ‘major documentary’, etc.). In Sollers’s book, the rain is coming down, like those long lines of ideograms (tightly packed, close-set yet slender, carried away yet under control) which constantly score (and yet, how light and airy it is!) the coloured paper of the Japanese Ise-Shû twelfth-century manuscript ‘Rain, Seeds, Dissemination, Thread, Tissue, Text, Writing’.

H scours almost all languages clean.? But it can do this only because it is not a language itself, but a language within a language. Its plural contains no folds (in the sense that we fold back a map, or an army retreats and falls back upon itself). The aporia, the logical contradiction, which it avoids is that normally, in order to scour, you need a scouring language, which in its turn becomes a new coat of paint. Hence the plural solution: using the cracks of language to produce on the wall (the screen, the page) of representation, a number of multiple stains, bizarre sketches, cracking (is it not said that 2 Jacques Henric, speaking of Lois, talks about ‘a rewriting which scours clean a number of the great myths on which our Western culture is based’.

[76]

Over

Your Shoulder

Chinese writing was born of the cracks appearing on tortoise shells which had been heated white-hot?). There are different ways to approach the ‘tangle’: as a disorder, an accidental layout, a global figure, a celestial infinity, etc. But the tangle is also that area of delight in which it is possible to burrow and search. H, from this point of view, is a forest of words, within which I look for what is going to move me (when we were children, we used to look in the undergrowth for chocolate eggs which had been hidden there). It is a different kind of

suspense from the one offered by a story or a puzzle. I wait for the verbal fragment which will concern me and establish the meaning for me. H is a theatre, analogous to Mallarmé’s utopian Book. The scene of the text sends out shafts of language (you could, to simplify, call them verses: is the verse not something which detaches itself and strikes us?), none of which is addressed to everyone,

but each of which will interrogate somebody (the readership of a book is not an anonymous and uniform

mass; the more ‘modern’ a work is, the more it requires

a sharp differentiation of its readers — of its enjoyers. The vacillation of the subject, sought for by H, is achieved by frenzied individualism, the individualism of bodies, which laughs at the laws of universalization, of alignment, of massification, which are laid down by a centralized, state-ridden society).

H, made up half of the spoken word, half of writing (aiming at writing which is spoken, which would be the exact opposite of spoken words written down), carries a strange quality over the first to the second: eloquence. The eloquence of H stems from the fact that the dis-

[77]

Over

Your Shoulder

course (is it still discourse?) advances, runs, rolls, bowls

along, set in motion

again and again by different

‘ignitions’. The ideas are forever crackling (for me, an ‘idea’ is the exact opposite of a platitude), as are the

words, the sounds, the letters — everything that writing can pack into itself to keep certain qualities of the voice: not its expressive lures, but its timbre, its grain, which, in singing, is called its mordent, that is to say the unavoidable, implacable, unalienable mark of the body. In former times, eloquence was associated with the ‘heart’; and why not? It would not have been possible to write a book as full of presences (in the world) without

generosity (a Nietzschean value). Where should one start? Well, by the working instrument, the typewriter. In far-off days the bard, before reciting, tried to set the narrative machine into motion. This was called the proem. Later, the troubadour, the minnesinger, before singing, let his hands wander over the lyre. This was called the prelude. Having to enter the infinity of language, Sollers sets out from what, materially, is going to produce it. Everything begins not with the subject, but by the instrument of production. The name ‘Sollers’ not only means ‘the man who has his wits about him’. It also means ‘the productive person’ (See Henri Goelger, Le Latin en poche). When

he unfolds his name

(a major signifier) Sollers

obviously does not transfer the meanings of the Name on to his own person (as the nobles did by glorifying themselves on the etymology of their patronymic, or as books about people’s first names suggest we do nowadays). The Name here is a starting point for

[78]

Over

Your Shoulder

digressions, the break in a metonymy. It is by speaking deliriously (even from a historical standpoint) about his own name (about his proper name) that the subject frees himself from the stickiness of his own person. The name flies off by itself, like a balloon without a string. By detaching my name, I discontinue myself (I desacralize myself). If each one of us were to explore his name like this, we should leave our infatuation behind us and everything would perhaps work much better in the ‘communication’ that we talk so much about. The whole of tonal music is linked to the idea of construction (of ‘composition’). Now, the readability of a work can in a certain way be assimilated to tonality. There is the same reign and the same explosion.* A new way of listening, a new way of reading are in search of themselves, are beginning, both of them atonal. And what is overturned, in both cases, is the development (of the theme, of the idea, of the anecdote, etc.), that is to say memory. The text is without memory, and the sensual figure of this sovereign amnesia is the timbre. H (like a piece of music by Webern — Sollers refers to it explicitly) is a scale of timbres (not for one moment is the voice deprived of its timbre). It scatters itself, explodes, forms

clouds of dust, like Debussy’s Jeux. Since that particular Debussy, since Webern and the musicians who came

afterwards, ‘theme-and-development’

have disappeared

from music. Similarly, in H, there is not an ounce of rhetorical fat. This new practice makes ‘composition’ vain and empty (even if the book does have a secret pattern, 3 ‘..and you would like tonality to continue no but. . p. 184).

[79]

(H,

Over Your Shoulder

like a game). Length (how many classical genres, both in music and literature, owe their definition to the size of the works involved?) is no longer relevant. The Sollersian layer is no different from the short piece by Webern, from the haïku and the fragment. Because there is no punctuation, it is inferred that there are no sentences. And this is true. People are beginning to see the meaning of the Sentence as suspect — to realize, that is to say, that the sentence is a linguistic artefact; that it is by no means certain that living speech contains sentences; that the supposedly logical division of discourse into sentences implies an ideology, installs a tyranny of the signified; that in a certain way the sentence is always religious, and that any attempt to call it into question is always repressed, on academic or psychiatric grounds. H thus constitutes a certain putting of the sentence on trial. And yet what is substituted for the Sentence is not its mechanical opposite, a babbling or a jumbling up of words. A third form is making its appearance, keeping the powers of seduction which the sentence has in language, but avoiding the way it cuts up and closes down — that is to say, in short, its power of representation. H weaves not sentences, but syntactic

movements, scraps of intelligibility, stains of language (in the sense that this word could have in the calligraphy of a Jackson Pollock). What is it then, linguistically, which is ousted from this text? It is not -so much punctuation (when all is said and done, a superficial lack) as the wrapping up, the fitting together, the overlapping of propositions, that is to say the period (an Aristotelian object). Is not the literary sentence an act of putting together? Sollers’s text has not been put

[80]

Over

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together. It is the composition (the rhetorical order) which is thwarted and held in check, not the bombardment of instantaneous representations.

In the file of press cuttings on H, there is virtually not a single article which does not begin by commenting on the typographical singularities of the book (no punctuation, no capital letters, no division into paragraphs). Let me, too, talk about the Text before it is read. We are offered a continuous, close-knit, apparently flawless utterance. This utterance can be received in two different, opposing ways. If the reader’s imagination is airean (in the sense that Bachelard understood the word), this constantly close-packed text will make him feel stifled (it should be said, in passing, that in order for

a text to exist it has to be rejected by certain bodies, by certain readers; there is no universal reading, there is no _ universal body: the body of desire — the reading of desire _ is immediately differentiated). If, on the contrary, the reader’s imagination is liquid, everything changes; the becomes image represented by the typography

favourable, exalting, it becomes the image of a lubricating bath, of the liberating jet, of the utopianly infinite orgasm. This text of physical bliss is nevertheless not idyllic. It has something implacable about it, like a Bach finale. This utterance means

in fact: the text is

setting out, it does not get there (it is not ‘functional’,

‘profitable’, it places itself in a logic, a sexuality, which are detached from any (pro)creating end). The cause, the end, the act of speaking to someone, are dismissed — but so is the subject as well. The author does not wait around to continue to see the effect of what he has just

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said. He has no consideration for the reader, no consideration for himself, he does not keep a watch over language.

Writing (in total contrast here to ‘literature’) is the tension of the body trying to produce language which cannot be situated (it is the dream of a degree zero of discourse). Nevertheless — paradox or dialectic — you can desituate language only by using language as one of the stages through which you pass, language always being ‘what has already been heard’. You therefore need a dialectic of the memory which puts itself forward and destroys itself. This is the function of the ‘reference points’ in H. They are reminders of what is going on, ready-made syntagmas, minute ‘condensation of knowledge’, vaguely identifiable scraps, life buoys of readability, brief flocculations of readability issuing from the discourse of other people. Often, very often, the social memory emerges above the surface, but only immediately to disappear again. Plagiarism is broken, pulverized. Memory floats, will not stay still. A new language is born within language, a grund (back-

ground), a moving, electrified screen, on which no rep-

resentation stands out; the memories of language abound, but they are never halted, never caressed. You have to recognize that with language, nothing really new is ever possible. There is no spontaneous generation — alas, language too is always filial. Consequently, the new radical (the new language) can never be anything but old language pluralized. No force is superior to the

plural.

H contains a large number of syntagmas that are made

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in this way: ‘a spinning top of liquid diamond’, ‘hung with yellow pears filled with wild roses’, ‘take this daffodil huddle against the vault in the moss’, etc. All these syntagmas are linked with something very important in the theory of writing, which is the passage of sensual objects into discourse. It is in fact necessary (for our pleasure) for certain signs to have a kind of re-

ferential weight. It is also essential that, in overcoming the absence of the word (like the essence of Mallarmé’s rose, absent from every bouquet), the sensual substance of words should in places compel language to weave into its fabric a few physical effects, a few metonymies (from the signified to the signifier), a few memories (of touch, of physical pleasure, of taste). There are ‘passages’ like this in Chateaubriand (the orange trees in the Vie de Rancé)

and in Bataille (the bowl of milk in

L’Histoire de l’œil). This phenomenon enables the grace of physical presence to descend indifferently on to different schools of writing and in different times. Austere texts become abruptly heavy, take in a slight (and

sudden) tumescence, and are rescued from boredom. | like seeing the owl’s plumage appearing in Hegel (‘it is

only at dusk that the owl of Minerva takes its flight’) and I like seeing in Marx the silhouette of the weaver and the tailor (illustrating the contrast between concrete and abstract work). The beneficial effect of these passages stems from the fact that the sensual is always readable. If you want to be read, write sensually. Now, in H such passages abound, made freer and still more dazzling by the slackening in the grip of the sentence. For once the Sentence has been taken away, the Word reigns, Cratylean. You ask yourself: did humanity begin with the single word or did it go straight on to the

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Sentence? I should imagine myself that men immediately and simultaneously hit upon Language, Sentences and Law; and that the brilliance of the word, its girdled sensuality, the civilized return of the Referent, can happen to discourse only as a disorder which has been conquered. I would also note that unlike the Sentence the solitary word, the Word which is King, is open to no ‘interpretation’. It is the Law, it is meaning which can be interpreted. It is with the Sentence, with meaning, that

the bloodstained war of languages begins.

There is only reliable way of distinguishing l’écrivance from /’écriture. When language is used to transmit ideas or information — as in l’écrivance — it can be summarized. When used for its own sake — as in l'écriture — it cannot. H obviously puts forward the idea that any ‘summary’ should be treated with the ultimate in disgust. One of the textual functions of H is to outwit abstraction, conservation, classification. H in the Bibliothéque Nationale? I should be interested to know under

which section it would be classified. How do you write an article of literary criticism? You read the book through, you make notes, you make a plan, and you write. Here, this isn’t the right way. H takes you to the limit of commentary. It doesn’t allow ‘the general idea’. Hence the fragments with which I am presenting you. They alone, it can be hoped, will prevent the production,in the commentary of this ‘fantasma of unity’ that H precisely sets out to dissolve. The recourse to fragments (remember that they are always there to avoid an unwanted consistency) dispenses me from having a thesis to put forward on Sollers’s work, a

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reference to prepare. Although I have been enjoying him for a long time, on each occasion I get on to his work while it is still moving. These fragments are the steps which this movement takes. It is what a ‘fellowtraveller’ does. When a text ‘produces the impression’ of a certain meaning there is nothing else to be said about it (it is the negative principle of ‘Jouissance’ — finding one’s delight). What is commented on here is not, in a strict sense of the word, Sollers’s text but more the cultural

resistances which it encounters. We no longer ask Why has he written? but How should we read him? How should we read what people tell us here and there is unreadable? H, like Lois, should remain suspended, maintained in a certain amazement of reading (it is a curious thing that the hostility which has too frequently greeted this book has not been accompanied by any expression of surprise. It is an old French reflex: ‘People don’t take us in’, ‘What if we were taken for fools?’ Like Gribouille, jumping into the water to avoid getting wet, many a critic jumps into a lack of understanding for fear of looking stupid. Real stupidity is never amazed at anything. It must be said that to be amazed would already be falling in love, amazement being the shy beginning of delight). In former times, criticism was more naive — or franker. Postulates confronted one another face to face. The Catholic clan attacked Gide because he was a Prot-

estant, and this was said quite openly. Today, authors are disparaged only indirectly. This disparagement has ceased to be based upon simple arguments (which

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doesn’t prevent it from being simple-minded should the need arise). The target for the attack has been moved. People pretend to attack lures, dummies. The criticism aimed at H enables some of these lures to be identified. ‘Novelty’, for example, is not attacked head-on. This was previously done with impunity, but it would nowadays be seen as bad form. Anyone doing this nowadays would be accused of nostalgia for the past, and the press likes to appear ‘young’. You place the burden of refusal on to your opponent. ‘H claims to be New, but it’s not as new as all that.’ Then there follows a reminder of other books which have appeared without punctuation (in the cultural mass of humanity, you can find examples of everything). This argument allows you to get in three blows at the same time: by dissociating H from what is really new, I affirm my hostility to the author; I deny that I am myself opposed to novelties; and I let it be understood that I am a very cultural person. It is a homeopathic procedure: a small dose of anecdote protects you against the dangers of real History. Fashion is another lure. ‘H is just an effect of fashion.’

The text is thus reduced to a superficial phenomenon (Fashion is frivolous) with no mind of its own and deserving little esteem (there is an implicit contrast between Fashion and the elevated morality of those deep, sincere and stable values that we call humanist). This reduction, which a whole school of criticism uses as a weapon to puzzle us, denies that what is New can have links with social movements in their widest form. But in fact, there is no such thing as an insignificant event in History. What people follow (let’s nevertheless not exaggerate the role of fashion in H!), what is attacked and

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defended, what provokes desire and resistance, can indeed be transitory. But it doesn’t disappear without having moved what was written in the past, without altering it, without making it impossible. There are snobs who support the avant-garde? But what Proust’s Madame Verdurin defended was not Saint-Saéns or Ambroise Thomas, but Wagner and Debussy! Snobbery can be a tiny bourgeois machine working against the bourgeoisie itself, and it is in this respect that it can play a (modest) historical role. Another lure, which is close to the one I have just discussed, is the idea of a ‘clique’. According to this view, H is the sophisticated, esoteric product of a small group of intellectuals who are said to live triumphantly off the barriers they themselves have erected, cut off from the great mass of public opinion. This is obviously putting matters exactly the wrong way round. The cutting off of the work carried out in H — which is wide-ranging, deep, a long way from any cutting off of the formalistic project — has been done from the outside. Its failure to communicate has been decided by other people. ‘Clarity’ or ‘obscurity’ are not natural qualities. They are attitudes which the reader decides to adopt. Surely a truly liberal and intellectually honest approach would start by saying: ‘If you are incomprehensible, this is because I am stupid, ignorant or ill-disposed?’ It takes two to fail to communicate. The final tactical attacking move is a particularly sly one (it really is the crowning point of any attempt at exclusion). It consists of preaching to the opponent on his own ground. Bourgeois newspapers will thus say to Sollers: ‘What you are writing, when all is said and ” done, is bourgeois. What you are doing in no way serves

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the Revolution.’ These strategists are quite unperturbed as they take on the role of prosecuting counsel on behalf of the very cause they are attacking. They thus deprive their opponent of every ally, from whatever direction this ally might come. They make their opponent the prisoner of his origin at the same time as they deprive him of the benefit of choice. ‘There’s nothing you can do about it, you'll always be middle-class. Don’t count either on your friends (you are inexpiably different from them) or on your enemies (you terrorize them)

Criticism really makes a mess of things here: it credits you with what you don’t want. Thus there is a minor journalistic trick which consists of systematically dissociating publications which are all part of the same project. On the one side they put Philippe Sollers and Julia Kristeva, on the other the person writing this article. The compliments addressed in passing to the latter are thus thought to make the rejection of the former more ‘effective’. ‘We're not attacking a theoretical choice’, they say, ‘for all such choices are deserving of esteem. It’s a manner, a style, a discourse.’ Amalgamating people together is a well-known tactic when putting authors on trial. Here we have the Opposite approach: separating them from one another. There is, we are told, a good avant-garde and a bad one. The ‘good’ avant-garde makes no directly political declarations; it writes in a classical manner.

The ‘bad’

avant-garde... (I would refer you to what I have written above about critical lures). The right way of judging would obviously be to put the shared theoretical

attitudes (which are considerable) on one side and the

tactical differences (which do not denote opposition) on

the other. It would, in other words, be to see modernity

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as a system in which different elements are joined together. If I were a theoretician of literature, I should virtually give up concerning myself with the structure of works. This can, basically, exist only in the eye of that strange animal the metalinguist, whose physiological property (a very interesting one, moreover) it is. Structure is a little bit like hysteria. If you pay attention to it, it becomes a reality. If you pretend to ignore it, it goes away. There are in fact two sorts of phenomenon: those which stand up to being looked at (the realm of ‘what is secret’) and those which are produced by being looked at (the realm of ‘what is for show’). I have come round to preferring what is for show (fiction) to structure, since the aim of all structure is to constitute a fiction, what Bacon calls ‘a theatrical ghost’. What we therefore have to concern ourselves with in the text (in the work) is thus the actor. Now, the person who acts the text is the reader; and this reader is plural (‘for my name is Legion’ said the Devil). For a text, there

are a multitude of readers. They are not only different individuals but also, in each body, there are different rhythms of intelligence, according to the day, according to the page. In order to give an idea of this plural, let us distinguish in the reading of H between three fields of differences, three orders of reading. The first field is an individual (corporeal) one. It involves trying out various approaches on H. I can read the text first of all by ‘diving down’ on it: I fly over the page and dive down — by chance, by intuition or by magnetic attraction — on a savoury, shocking, probSecondly, I can syntagma. lematic, noteworthy

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‘appraise’ it, delicately taking hold of a whole band of the text and savouring it. Thirdly, I can ‘unroll it (this is the ordinary way of reading, the legal one, in which I cruise along: I unroll the volume from end to end, like a novel, going forward at the same speed, whatever my pleasure or my boredom may be). Fourthly, I can ‘fly low’ over it (minutely reading each individual word, being lavish with my time, putting myself, as you might say, in the position of a close commentator of the text. Here, I must point out one of the paradoxes of H. The typography, which is the same from end to end, implacably linear, ought to lead to a faster reading, as if it were the case that in this cinematographic machine, meaning and representation could appear only at a certain speed. However, quite the opposite happens. A slow, close, conscientious reading makes H into a deep, subtle book. Each section is intelligent, casting a sideways light on places other than itself. H is at one and the same time both a great, smooth, oratical layer and a Japanese box, full to infinity with haïkai. H has two pulses: a ‘popular’ pulse, in the sense that one speaks of a ‘popular’ song, swift and lively; and a critical pulse, that of a learned man reading obstinately, that is to say, lifting his head. Fifthly, I can read H from high up in the sky (looking at the whole book as a distant object, as a pretext for a series of reflections in which I replace it in its historical background: theory of the text, resistances, History, the future, etc.).

The second space in which I can read H is a sociological one. I then refuse to separate it from its critical reception. I consider the book as a textual act, linking to this act the reactions which it provokes, as if the ‘reaction’ formed part of the text itself. And the precise

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historical function of this particular text is to demonstrate the antagonism at work nowadays in the consumption of symbolic products. The third space is an historical one. The text offers itself to readers who do not live within the same period in which it is to be read, even though they may belong to the same generation as Sollers. Some of them try to read H as a novel, and are disappointed; others as if it were poetry, and are disappointed; others belong to the avant-garde of the 1930s; others finally try to see what it would look like from the future. They try to read H like one of tomorrow’s texts (even if, tomorrow, it will not be that particular text), knowing that the move into the

future is not necessarily a move forward; that it involves a dialectical interplay of movements backwards and of misunderstandings. A reader of Dante or of Rabelais is doubtless closer to H than is one of Malraux’s readers. Often, those who are nearest and the furthest away, the youngest and the oldest, those who belong most to the people and those who are the most aristocratic, meet in the same place. Finally, there can be transitional readers. They see in H a movement away from what can nowadays survive only by being constantly repeated and towards what they do not know and will not know (I see myself as one of these readers). This is how the reader turns into a cloud of dust in History.* When will the critic have the right to talk about a book with affection without being suspected of favouritism? When shall we be free enough (freed from a false idea of 4 ‘...the turning of the subject into a cloud of dust in ‘History’ (Sollers).

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objectivity) to include in the reading of a text the knowledge that we might have of its author? Why — in the name of what, by fear of whom — should I cut off the reading of a book by Sollers from the friendship which I might have for him? There are nevertheless few men who give the same impression as he does of being one and the same text, the same woven texture, in which writing and everyday language are both caught up. For some people, life is textual. 1 have even, as an extreme example of this, known writers without books, men whose behaviour, language, body, way of organizing their life proclaimed the certainty of a genuine text,

produced all the same effects on me as a text does. You must read H, not looking directly at the book as though it were an object which was kept and contemplated and consumed in the absence of any subject, but over the shoulder of the person writing it, as if we were writing it at the same time as the author himself.

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Since the Renaissance, knowledge has been dominated by a freedom: the freedom to conceive, compose and write encyclopaedias. However, there is a book by Flaubert which brings this possibility to a derisory end: Bouvard et Pécuchet is the final farce of encyclopaedic knowledge. As the etymology of the word suggests, forms of knowledge do indeed circulate, but without ever stopping. Science has lost its ballast. Nothing means anything any more: not God, nor Reason nor Progress, etc. And then, language makes its entry, and another Renaissance announces itself: there will be encyclopaedia of language, a whole ‘mathesis’ (basis of knowledge)

of forms,

of shapes,

of inflexions,

of

questions, threats, types of mockery, quotations and puns. All the movements which were earlier herded together, held captive and put into quarantine by being attributed to Rabelais, to poetry, to the Baroque, are gradually becoming the only texture (the only text) of the human subject. This is how I read H (and some of the texts which are contemporary to it): as an encyclopaedia of language, a Comedy of Sentences, a longing for a Renaissance. History does repeat itself, of course. But — and this must be repeated — as a spiral. There is no Nature acting * Published in Tel Quel, No. 57, 1974.

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Situation

as a guarantor to this new Renaissance. The great Encyclopaedia of (verbal) Matter has been launched without a safety net. Where, then, does the risk come from? From the fact that language, which is what its substance happens to be, is also the actual Law. Every law inevitably gathers itself together in language, thus expressing all transgressions and all denial of transgression in linguistic form. In the last resort, language is the only place in which Bataille’s recommendation, defended by Sollers in Logiques, can be put into practice. Language, in other words, is the only place in which we can suspend interdicts without abolishing them. This is what Sollers does: he suspends interdicts without abolishing language. (‘The story had suddenly begun with my decision to change languages within the same language.’) It is this internal externality (raising the bar of the Sentence while still keeping his eyes fixed upon it) which is equally displeasing to the guardians of the Law and to those who call it into question. Sollers’s texts thus form part of a tearing apart, a contradiction, as we politely say in order to designate from afar off the impossible abruptness of language. This is what I always come back to in H: I am fascinated by the enigma of a discontinuous continuity (or the other way round); the ‘subjects’ (what the English call ‘topics’, the Romans called ‘quaestiones’) run, leap, dis-

appear without advance notice, providing this ceaseless striation. The leaps and bounds of these texts, analogous in a way to the fascinating excesses of an oscillograph (announcing the unheard-of) are nevertheless carried away, rolled up in one single wave (a song) which can be nothing but language in its pure materiality, freed with unbelievable ardour from the

[94]

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metaphysic of content, of representation, of sentences. This continuous flow of language has nothing of the smoothness of oil. It is rather that of a musical engine, often the manner of Bach (I myself had an acute awareness of what the text, of what textuality means, in the valley of a wadi in

Morocco. There rose from it a whole stereophonic range of Virgilian sounds — birds, the distant cries of children, the rustlings of orange trees — but also, throughout the day, the monotonous hum of a pump. This is what the countryside is, what the text is: an idyll accompanied by some machine, a whole texture of old-fashioned, romantic, cultural values

with the angry acceleration of a motor scooter tearing across it). Ican define this enigma more closely: the general pattern of a Sollersian text is made up of a tension between the traces left behind by a (broken) subject and the furious

movement of a racetrack carrying everything away. You have to write straight using the letter Z, the Devil’s letter. There is a general line (‘as though we had all entered into the great striated river’). Let us, old Europeans, still condemned to talk — not to construct — immediately accept this shaking of the foundations of writing as part of the revolutionary project. It is this ‘immediate future’ which Sollers’s work maintains. Just try changing things around: what would happen if he didn’t write? We should then have only the choice between conformity (of the right, of the left) and mere prattling. There would be nothing taking us forward. What grief would there then be, what suffocation, what yawning!

What he does is to hold the threads together at the same time. He goes forward in two guises, aiming at one and the same time at the social and at the textual future. He does not turn back on language that has gone before. He keeps all of us, friends and enemies alike, alive.

[95]

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of a series of sudden palinodes which he never explains, thus producing a kind of ‘electrical interference’ which disconcerts and annoys intellectual opinion. What does this mean? I should here like to make two remarks. The first is that, by his ‘oscillations’, it is obvious that

Sollers calls into question the traditional role of the intellectual (his ‘role’, not his ‘function’). From the moment he emerged as a social entity (that is to say, * From a lecture on Le Neutre (The Neutral), given at the

_ Collège de France on 6 May 1978.

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since the end of the nineteenth century, and more precisely since the Dreyfus case) the intellectual has been a kind of prosecuting attorney on the side of the angels. I am naturally not trying to call into question the need for the intellectual to act as he does. What does interest me is the possibility of disturbing the splendidly robed figure of an impeccably clear conscience. Now it is perfectly obvious that Sollers practises a ‘life writing’, and introduces into this writing what Bakhtine calls a ‘carnival-like dimension’. He suggests to us that we are entering into a phase of deconstructing, of deconstructing not the intellectual’s action but his ‘mission’. This deconstruction can take the form of a withdrawal but also that of a jamming, of a series of decentred statements. All that Sollers is doing is, in fact, putting into practice a remark in the People’s Daily, quoted as an introduction to an issue of Tel Quel: ‘We need wild devils, not tame sheep’. The jolt deliberately given to the unity of intellectual discourse is imparted through a series of ‘happenings’, aimed at disturbing the superego of the intellectual as an emblem of Fidelity, of the moral Good — at the cost, obviously, of an extreme loneliness. For the ‘happening’ does not form part of that practice which I would one day like to see analysed in a study

which might be called ‘The Ethology of Intellectuals’. The second remark is that through a music which is, as it were, made frenzied through Oscillation, there is in

Sollers, I am convinced, a fixed theme: writing, devotion to writing. What is new here is that this inflexible submission to the practice of writing (a few pages of Paradis every morning) no longer forms part of a theory of Art for Art’s sake, or a measured and ordered commitment (novels, poems on one side; signatures on the

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other); it seems to go through a kind of radical madness of

the subject, an endless series of unending and unwearying involvements. You are present at a mad struggle between the ‘inconclusion’ of attitudes, these being exaggerated of course, but whose succession always remains open (‘I have nothing definitive’) and the weight of the Image, which invincibly tends to solidify; for the destiny of the Image is immobility. To attack this immobility, this mortification of the image, as Sollers does is a dangerous, extremist action whose extremity inevitably recalls the gestures of certain mystics such as El Hallaj, gestures which are incomprehensible from any common-sense point of view. The intelligentsia puts up a very strong resistance against Oscillation, while it is very happy to accept Hesitation. Gidean hesitation, for example, was very well tolerated, since the image remained stable: Gide produced, as it were, the stable image of something moving. Sollers, on the contrary, wants to stop the image solidifying. In short, everything takes place, as it were, not on the level of content, of opinion, but on that of images: it is the image which the community always wants to save (whatever community it may be), because it is the image which is its vital substance and is becoming more and more so. In its state of overdevelopment, modern society no longer feeds on beliefs (as if did formerly) but on images. The Sollersian

scandal is caused by the fact that Sollers attacks the Image — seems to want to prevent, from the very outset, the formation and stabilization of every image; he rejects the final image possible: that of ‘the-man-who-tries-everypossible-direction-before-finding-his-definitive-way’ (a noble myth of progress on life’s way, of initiation: ‘after much wondering, my eyes opened’). Sollers becomes, as they say, ‘indefensible’.

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_ [101]

Index

Althusser, Louis

14

Derrida, Jacques 5,26 Duchamp, Maxime 72

Amis, Kingsley 14 Aragon, Louis 1 Artaud, Antoine 7, 8, 22,71

Eliot, George

Auden, W.H. 16 Ayer, Aak. 29

Eliot, T.S. 16 Engels, Frederick 24

Bach 81,95 Bakhtine 98 Balzac 18,19 Barthes, Roland demands on reader 26,

Flaubert, Gustave 20, 93 Foucault, Michel 5, 7,26 Freud 9, 26, 28

62-3

literary preferences 4-7,

18

Genette, Gérard 5,20 Gide, André 18, 85, 99 Glucksmann, André 11

18-20

personal details 17, 18 translating, problem

with 5—6,48,29

Beerbohm, Max 25 Boom Town Rats 24 Camus, Albert 18, 70 Céline, Louis-Ferdinand 23 Cervantes 52 Cézanne, Paul 70 Chateaubriand, René 83 Chomsky, Noam 64

Dante 40, 41, 59, 65,91

Hegel 83 Henriot, Emile 2 Homer 45

L’Infini 3 Kafka 97 Kandinsky 72 Khadaffi 11 Koestler, Arthur 11 Kristeva, Julia 5, 17, 22, 88 Lautréamont 8, 22, 71 Leonardo da Vinci 66

[103]

Index Lévy, Bernard-Henri

Simon, Claude 18 Sollers, Philippe Works discussed: Drame 7,21, 39-67 Femmes 13, 14

11

Mallarmé, Stéphane 9, 71, ei Mao Tse Tung 8, 9, 13, 24 Marxism 9, 24, 26, 28, 83 Mauriac, Francois 1, 17

H 7,75-92 Le Parc 2

Paradis 3,7,35 Nietzsche

Lois 7, 23,24

7

Orwell, George

11, 29

Picard, Raymond

27, 28

Picasso 72 Plato 46

Pollack, Jackson 80 Poussin, Nicholas 61 Proust, Marcel 1, 16, 36, 49,

Logiques 22, 69-74 Une Curieuse Solitude 1 Literary aims 6, 26 Meaning of name 78 Political views 8, 11, 26 Views on Barthes 15 Views on China 10,35 Solzhenitsyn 10

87 Tel Quel Introduction Revel, Jean-Frangois

11

passim Todorov, Tzvetan

Robbe-Grillet, Alain

18, 49,

Tolstoy 19

Racine

27, 28, 56, 70

61 Roussel, Raymond Russell, Bertram

71

21

Voltaire 28, 70

29

Sade, Marquis de 7, 22 Sarduy, Severo 21 Sartre, J.-P. 9, 18, 49 Saussure, Ferdinand de 22,28

Webern 79 Wood, Michael Yeats, W.B.

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