Philippe Sollers

The U. S. Now: A Conversation

Kristeva: I feel that my view of the United States isnt completely French and may consequently appear too idiosyncratic. I actually went to the United States with almost the same desire for discovery and change of surroundings that took me from Bulgaria to Paris ten years ago. I had increasingly the impression that what was happening in France-due to developments of terminal Gaullism on the one hand and to the rise of forces of the so-called masses or petit-bourgeois masses on the other-was making the history of the European continent predictable. So that if ones interest was rather the breaks within history, culture, and time, one had to change continents. I tried as well to make this change through an interest in China, understood as an anarchist outbreak within Marxism. But the trip to China made me finally understand that this was instead a reissue, somewhat revised perhaps, but a reissue nonetheless, of the same Stalinist or MarxistStalinist model. It was therefore curiosity and the desire for some other solution to the impasse of the West that took me twice to the United States and once again for a third and longer stay. It was a journey, but not necessarily to the end of night, that is, not necessarily with an apocalyptic or desperate vision. It was more a trip in an attempt to understand, perhaps also with a particular and subjective perspective. Two things struck me during my first brief visits, and these impressions were intensified during the semester I spent at Columbia University. First, I think that American capitalism-which everyone agrees is the most advanced and most totalizing in the world today-far from undergoing a crisis (and it was during crisis periods, notably the Yom Kippur War, the energy crisis, the Watergate crisis, and the crisis of the last presidential election) is a system of permanent salvage, of

H: An Extract

rebound now and then you have to purge the atmosphere time for effort in re verse swim against the stream to see clear purity also has its charm funny thing theyll be defending t soon like a vice you know grade super aerated go on sursum corda visibilium et invisibilium be puck allora tu sei T?ngelo d?lia morte why not look what a beautiful painting alberegno second half of the 14th i love those blue gold skies laminated veiled we are here in a time at once linear cyclic infinite finite with transfinite thus limited in limitlessness two pictures father screws daughter making son who attacked by second principle dies and fecun dates his mother evil knows no space but only half of the time its in vain that the druze tries to slow the stars in the end comes hie nunc which cuts the run a

An Interview with Philippe Sollers

Philippe Sollers is a controversial figure in French letters today. Editor of the left-wing journal Tel Quel, a periodical which has published some of the most daring critical and philosophical as well as political speculation (and polemics), Sollers is a prolific novelist and critic. He is also a protean figure capable of quick volte faces. His creative life began when at the age of 21 he published his first novel Une Curieuse solitude, an initiation narrative deriving largely from what he himself calls the classical French tradition but one which owes as much to Georges Bataille as it does to Marcel Proust. Though this book has been dis avowed by its author, it bears witness to his precocious verbal gifts and his re markable ability as a storyteller. The middle-class boys premier amour with an unpredictable Spanish servant is somewhat more than the conventional tale in this genre. Appropriately, it is the only novel by Sollers that has been translated into English (A Strange Solitude, 1959). Sollers later fiction consists of a series of highly structured but plodess verbal tours de force, attempts to develop the lyrico-epic style which he described in this interview and which is best illustrated by the passage from H published in this issue of The Iowa Review. A continuing series of permutations of language as a medium for semi-narrative forms and carefully integrated political state ments, these novels have led to, rather than derived from, an appreciation of writer-heroes like Joyce, Pound, Mallarm?. Sollers fiction has also tended to justify his position as leader (along with the novelist-critic Jean Ricardou and the brilliant and playful experimentalist Maurice Roche) of the post-New Novel ists, a tendency loosely called the New-New Novel. The confusion generated by this tag has led Sollers to suggest that this movement be rebaptized The Wake in a punning play on Joyces tide. It is perhaps important, since these writers and others like them are receiving an increasing amount of critical attention here and in France, that we not con fuse them with the original New Novelists, most of whom might be called ob jectivist anti-novelists, whose work derives more or less directly from the central novelistic traditions they deliberately modify. The group represented by Sollers and centering around Tel Quel is more directiy inspired by novelists and poets of the fringe, writers tending to violate the very ground rules of narration as well as the canons of taste and thereby discovering new uses for language. Among their heroes are the prose poet Lautr?amont (Isidore Ducasse, 1846 1870), whose sadic visions inspired the early Surrealists; the playwright Antonin Artaud (1896-1948), who insisted on the role of theatre as a ritual implicating the audience in representations of its own impulses; and the recendy rediscovered novelist-poet-essayist Georges Bataille (1897-1962), who preached the accep tance of the negative urges as essential to communal health, writing moving books based on paradox and hyperbole. Batailles novel Le Bleu du ciel is a mas