Philippe Sollers - Work

Work

After his first novel A Strange Solitude (1958), hailed by François Mauriac and Louis Aragon, Sollers began, with The Park (1961) the experiments in narrative form that would lead to Event (Drame, 1965) and Nombres (1968). Jacques Derrida analyzes these novels in his book Dissemination. Sollers then attempted to counter the high seriousness of Nombres by producing in Lois (1972) which featured greater linguistic vitality through the use of wordplay and a less formal style. The direction taken by Lois was developed through the heightened rhythmic intensity of unpunctuated texts such as Paradis (1981).

Sollers's other novels include Women (1983), Portrait du joueur (1984), Le coeur absolu (1986), Watteau in Venice (1991), Studio (1997), Passion fixe (2000), L'étoile des amants (2002), which have all introduced a degree of realism to his fiction to the extent that they make more recognizable use of plot, character and thematic development. They offer the reader a clear fictional study of the society in which he or she lives by reinterpreting, among other things, the role of politics, media, sex, religion, and the arts.

In all these novels Sollers's interest in Chinese civilization plays an important part. From the late 1960s on, he studied Chinese and employed ideograms increasingly in his writings. He especially exemplifies this view in the subtitle of Lois, a Chinese ideogram representing both "France" and "Law."

There is a musical quality to his writing even more striking than the references to the other arts. Vocalisation, or his preference for the spoken word, has always been a priority for Sollers. The combination of music, voice and theater is especially found in opera. The kind of opera associated with Sollers should properly be called opera bouffe because of its sense of humour and love of irony: opera bouffe is a comical farcical type of opera from which the genius of Mozart sprang. In many ways Sollers is doing the work of the opera bouffe or drama giocoso in his novels since Women (1983). Since Lois, the writing is musical: the references to the music in these books are innumerable. In Women: "Whoever understands nothing about music, understands nothing about metaphysics."

The focus on the spoken language also draws Sollers toward James Joyce. Sollers is so fascinated by Joyce's style that he and Stephen Heath collaborated to translate Joyce's Finnegans Wake into French. In January 1975, Sollers gave a lecture to an international symposium on Joyce, claiming Finnegans Wake as "the most formidable anti-fascist book produced between the two wars". However, Joyce is much more than poetry for Sollers. Since both were educated by Jesuits, Joyce and Sollers have strong ties to Catholicism. As Sollers indicated in Paradis, Joycean Christianity, like Sollers' Catholicism, involves both the comic and the pathetic.

The novel Paradis has a particular flavour because the narrator is similar to a troubadour singing the story of postmodern times. The self seems to disappear as word games, puns, neologisms and misspellings create a text that is hallucinatory and humorous in its juxtaposition of seemingly incongruous words and phrases. There are constant references to orchestras and symphonies, thus suggesting that there is an innate structure to what appears at first glance to be a chaotic text. The text's life is much like the sexuality of the writer. There is a rhythm, very much like radar or sonar, according to which the text responds to its need to enjoy itself and also to reproduce itself. The physical drives and desires of the human body lead it toward variations of paradise.

His novels Femmes (1983) and Portrait de joueur (1984) have achieved a certain popularity. The first was translated into English as Women by Barbara Bray and published by Columbia University Press (1990). Philip Roth's comment on the cover of Women says that Sollers is a "master of good-natured malice, a kind of happy, lively, benign Céline."".

One of the reasons for the popularity of these books by Sollers is the sense of humour he exhibits with his narrative voice about the culture in which the voice thrives.

In his writing, Sollers has a place of predilection, a place that unites together the whole of his personal pantheon: Venice, Da Ponte, Vivaldi, Tiepolo, Tintoretto, Tiziano, Veronese, Monteverdi... and then Casanova "the man whose name is synonymous with Venice", Vivant Denon and the Countess Albrizzi In intimate experiences, expression, erudition, Sollers reveals the splendours of the Serenissima in a very personal Dictionnaire amoureux de Venise (2004).

In 2000 Sollers published Passion fixe, a love story both immoral and moral.

In 2006 he published Une vie divine. The narrator, a professor of philosophy, is entrusted with the task of discovering a world philosophy that would not exclude the religious dimension of humanity. Through his research and discussions with the two women in his life (one intellectual and the other frivolous) he discovers that only one thinker is strong enough to found a project of world philosophy: Nietzsche. In this novel, Philippe Sollers rises against contemporary nihilism – literature which he sees as locked into misfortune and melancholy – to which he contrasts promises of life and happiness. A political and philosophical novel, Une vie divine is both serious and humorous writing on the possibility of being happy. Nietzsche versus Schopenhauer. Praises of joy alternate with sadness and ambient defeatism.

Sollers also sees himself and his novels in an 18th-century lineage with philosophes like Diderot and Voltaire; so his break with tradition is not all-encompassing.