Philippe Sollers
Encyclopedia
Bordeaux
Bordeaux is a port city on the Garonne River in the Gironde department in southwestern France.The Bordeaux-Arcachon-Libourne metropolitan area, has a population of 1,010,000 and constitutes the sixth-largest urban area in France. It is the capital of the Aquitaine region, as well as the prefecture...
, France
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
) is a French writer and critic. In 1960 he founded the avant garde journal Tel Quel
Tel Quel
Tel Quel was an avant-garde magazine for literature, founded in 1960 in Paris by Philippe Sollers and Jean-Edern Hallier.-Overview:...
(along with the writer and art critic Marcelin Pleynet
Marcelin Pleynet
Marcelin Pleynet was born in Lyon, France in 1933. Writer, essayist, poet, he was Managing Editor of the influential magazine Tel Quel from 1962 to 1982, and co-edits the journal L'Infini with Philippe Sollers. He was Professor of Aesthetics at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts in...
), published by Seuil, which ran until 1982. In 1982 Sollers then created the journal L'Infini
L'Infini
L'Infini is a French journal for literature, founded in 1983 in Paris by Philippe Sollers as a follow up of the magazine Tel Quel.The magazine was first published by Éditions Denoël but later on by Gallimard....
published by Denoel which was later published under the same title by Gallimard for whom Sollers also directs the series.
Sollers was at the heart of the intense period of intellectual unrest in the Paris of the 1960s and 1970s. Among others, he was a friend of Jacques Lacan
Jacques Lacan
Jacques Marie Émile Lacan was a French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist who made prominent contributions to psychoanalysis and philosophy, and has been called "the most controversial psycho-analyst since Freud". Giving yearly seminars in Paris from 1953 to 1981, Lacan influenced France's...
, Louis Althusser
Louis Althusser
Louis Pierre Althusser was a French Marxist philosopher. He was born in Algeria and studied at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where he eventually became Professor of Philosophy....
and Roland Barthes
Roland Barthes
Roland Gérard Barthes was a French literary theorist, philosopher, critic, and semiotician. Barthes' ideas explored a diverse range of fields and he influenced the development of schools of theory including structuralism, semiotics, existentialism, social theory, Marxism, anthropology and...
. These three characters are described in his novel, Femmes (1983) alongside a number of other figures of the French intellectual movement before and after May 1968. From A Strange Solitude, The Park
The Park
The Park may refer to:* The Park , a 2003 horror film directed by Lau Wai Keung* The Park , a 2007 Chinese film...
and Event, through "Logiques", Lois and Paradis, down to Watteau in Venice
Watteau in Venice
Watteau in Venice is a novel by French author Philippe Sollers published in 1991 by Editions Gallimard, and translated by Alberto Manguel, published in 1994 by Charles Scribner's Sons. This novel is a meditation on Venice and on the ebb and flow of our new global culture, its seductive games,...
, Une vie divine and "La Guerre du goût", the writings of Sollers have often provided contestation, provocation and challenge.
In his book Writer Sollers
Writer Sollers
Writer Sollers is a short book published in 1979 by the French literary critic Roland Barthes. In his discussion of the controversial French writer, Philippe Sollers, Barthes raises critical issues of central importance such as the nature of narrative, the theory of language, the problems of...
, Roland Barthes
Roland Barthes
Roland Gérard Barthes was a French literary theorist, philosopher, critic, and semiotician. Barthes' ideas explored a diverse range of fields and he influenced the development of schools of theory including structuralism, semiotics, existentialism, social theory, Marxism, anthropology and...
discusses the work of Phillippe Sollers and the meaning of language.
Sollers married Julia Kristeva
Julia Kristeva
Julia Kristeva is a Bulgarian-French philosopher, literary critic, psychoanalyst, sociologist, feminist, and, most recently, novelist, who has lived in France since the mid-1960s. She is now a Professor at the University Paris Diderot...
in 1967.
Work
After his first novel A Strange Solitude (1958), hailed by François MauriacFrançois Mauriac
François Mauriac was a French author; member of the Académie française ; laureate of the Nobel Prize in Literature . He was awarded the Grand Cross of the Légion d'honneur .-Biography:...
and Louis Aragon
Louis Aragon
Louis Aragon , was a French poet, novelist and editor, a long-time member of the Communist Party and a member of the Académie Goncourt.- Early life :...
, Sollers began, with The Park (1961) the experiments in narrative form that would lead to Event (Drame, 1965) and Nombres (1968). Jacques Derrida
Jacques Derrida
Jacques Derrida was a French philosopher, born in French Algeria. He developed the critical theory known as deconstruction and his work has been labeled as post-structuralism and associated with postmodern philosophy...
analyzes these novels in his book Dissemination. Sollers then appears to have attempted to counter the high seriousness of Nombres by producing in Lois (1972) a greater linguistic vitality through, for instance, the use of wordplay and a less formal style. The direction taken by Lois was developed through the heightened rhythmic intensity of the unpunctuated texts such as Paradis (1981). Sollers's other novels include Women (1983), Portrait du joueur (1984), Le coeur absolu (1986), Watteau in Venice (1991), Studio (1997), Passion fixe (2000), L'étoile des amants (2002), which have all introduced a degree of realism to his fiction to the extent that they make more recognizable use of plot, character and thematic development. They offer 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 until then, 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 in his writing. The combination of music, voice and theater is especially found in opera. The kind of opera associated with Sollers should properly be called opera bouffe because of that sense of humour and love of irony: opera bouffe is a comical farcial 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 with his novels since Women (1983). Since Lois, the writing is music: the references to the latter are innumerable. In Women already: "Whoever understands nothing about music, understands nothing about metaphysics."
The focus on the spoken language is one which also draws Sollers toward James Joyce
James Joyce
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century...
. Sollers is so fascinated by Joyce's style that he and Stephen Heath have collaborated to translate Joyce's Finnegans Wake
Finnegans Wake
Finnegans Wake is a novel by Irish author James Joyce, significant for its experimental style and resulting reputation as one of the most difficult works of fiction in the English language. Written in Paris over a period of seventeen years, and published in 1939, two years before the author's...
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. Both educated by Jesuits, Joyce and Sollers have strong ties to Catholicism
Catholicism
Catholicism is a broad term for the body of the Catholic faith, its theologies and doctrines, its liturgical, ethical, spiritual, and behavioral characteristics, as well as a religious people as a whole....
. As Sollers indicated in Paradis, Joycean Christianity
Christianity
Christianity is a monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus as presented in canonical gospels and other New Testament writings...
like Sollers' Catholicism participates in the comic and the pathetic.
The novel Paradis has a particular flavour because the narrator is similar to a troubadour singing the story of postmodern times. The self appears to disappear as word games, puns, neologisms and misspellings create a text that is hallucinatory and humorous in its juxtaposition of seemingly incongruous words and phrases. There are constant references to orchestration and symphony, thus suggesting that there is an innate structure to what appears, at first glance to be a chaotic text.
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 humain 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
Philip Roth
Philip Milton Roth is an American novelist. He gained fame with the 1959 novella Goodbye, Columbus, an irreverent and humorous portrait of Jewish-American life that earned him a National Book Award...
's comment on the cover of Women says that Sollers is a "master of good-natured malice, a kind of happy, lively, benign Céline
Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Louis-Ferdinand Céline was the pen name of French writer and physician Louis-Ferdinand Destouches . Céline was chosen after his grandmother's first name. He is considered one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century, developing a new style of writing that modernized both French and...
."".
One of the reason for the popularity of these books by Sollers is the sense of humour that he exhibits with his narrating 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
Venice
Venice is a city in northern Italy which is renowned for the beauty of its setting, its architecture and its artworks. It is the capital of the Veneto region...
, Da Ponte
Lorenzo Da Ponte
Lorenzo Da Ponte was a Venetian opera librettist and poet. He wrote the librettos for 28 operas by 11 composers, including three of Mozart's greatest operas, Don Giovanni, The Marriage of Figaro and Così fan tutte....
, Vivaldi, Tiepolo, Tintoretto
Tintoretto
Tintoretto , real name Jacopo Comin, was a Venetian painter and a notable exponent of the Renaissance school. For his phenomenal energy in painting he was termed Il Furioso...
, Tiziano, Veronese
Paolo Veronese
Paolo Veronese was an Italian painter of the Renaissance in Venice, famous for paintings such as The Wedding at Cana and The Feast in the House of Levi...
, Monteverdi... and then Casanova "the man whose name is synonymous with Venice", Vivant Denon and the Countess Albrizzi... 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 tender and moving love story, undoubtedly the most intimate written by the author, at once immoral and moral.
In 2006, he published Une vie divine. The narrator, a professor of philosophy, was entrusted with the task of reflecting upon a world philosophy that would not exclude the religious dimension of humanity. Throughout his research and discussions with the two women in his life (one intellectual and the other frivolous) he discovers that only one thinker is strong enough to found a project of world philosophy: Nietzsche. In this novel, Philippe Sollers rises against contemporary nihilism – literature in deadlock, misfortune and melancholy – to which he contrasts promises of life and happiness. A political book and philosophical novel, Une vie divine is serious and humorous writing on the possibility of being happy. Nietzsche versus Schopenhauer. Praises of joy versus sadness and ambient defeatism.
Sollers also sees himself and his novels in an eighteenth-century lineage with philosophes like Diderot and Voltaire
Voltaire
François-Marie Arouet , better known by the pen name Voltaire , was a French Enlightenment writer, historian and philosopher famous for his wit and for his advocacy of civil liberties, including freedom of religion, free trade and separation of church and state...
; so his break with tradition is not all-encompassing.
Essays
- "Discours Parfait" - Gallimard, 2010
- "Vers le Paradis" - Desclée de Brouwer, 2010 (with DVD)
- "Guerres secrètes" - Carnets nord 2007
- "Fleurs" - Hermann éditions 2006
- Dictionnaire amoureux de Venise, 2004
- "Mystérieux Mozart" - Plon 2001
- "Éloge de l'Infini" - Gallimard, 2001
- "Francis PongeFrancis PongeFrancis Jean Gaston Alfred Ponge was a French essayist and poet. In many ways, he combined the two — essay and poem — into a single art form.-Life:...
" - Seghers éditions, 2001 - "Francesca WoodmanFrancesca WoodmanFrancesca Woodman was an American photographer best known for her black and white pictures featuring herself and female models. Many of her photographs show young women who are nude, who are blurred , who are merging with their surroundings, or whose faces are obscured...
" - Scalo Publishers 1998 - "Casanova l'admirable" - Plon 1998
- "La Guerre du Goût" - Gallimard, 1994
- "Liberté du XVIIIème" (Extract from La Guerre du Goût) - Gallimard, 2002
- "Picasso, le héros" - Le cercle d'art 1996
- "Les passions de Francis BaconFrancis BaconFrancis Bacon, 1st Viscount St Albans, KC was an English philosopher, statesman, scientist, lawyer, jurist, author and pioneer of the scientific method. He served both as Attorney General and Lord Chancellor of England...
" - Gallimard 1996 - "SadeSadeSade, or SADE can mean:* Marquis de Sade, the eighteenth century aristocrat, writer and libertine* Sade , a French film starring Daniel Auteuil as the Marquis de Sade* Sade , a Nigerian-British smooth jazz band from the 1980s...
contre l'Être suprême" - Gallimard 1996 - "Improvisations" - Gallimard, 1991
- "De Kooning, vite" - La différence 1988
- "Théorie des Exceptions" - Gallimard, 1985
- "Sur le Matérialisme" - Seuil, 1974
- "L'Écriture et l'Expérience des Limites" - Seuil, 1968
- Writing and the Experience of Limits - Columbia University Press, 1982
- "Logiques" - Seuil, 1968
- "L'Intermédiaire" - Seuil, 1963
Novels
- L'Éclaircie - Gallimard, 2012
- Trésor d'Amour - Gallimard, 2011
- Les Voyageurs du temps - Gallimard, 2009
- Un vrai roman, Mémoires - Plon 2007
- Une Vie Divine - Gallimard, 2006
- L'Étoile des Amants - Gallimard, 2002
- Passion Fixe - Gallimard, 2000
- Un amour américain - Mille et une nuits, 1999
- Studio - Gallimard, 1997
- Le cavalier du Louvre, Vivant Denon - Plon 1995
- Le Secret - Gallimard, 1993
- La Fête à Venise - Gallimard, 1991
- Watteau in VeniceWatteau in VeniceWatteau in Venice is a novel by French author Philippe Sollers published in 1991 by Editions Gallimard, and translated by Alberto Manguel, published in 1994 by Charles Scribner's Sons. This novel is a meditation on Venice and on the ebb and flow of our new global culture, its seductive games,...
-Scribner's, 1994
- Watteau in Venice
- Le Lys d'Or - Gallimard, 1989
- Les Folies Françaises - Gallimard, 1988
- Le Cœur Absolu - Gallimard, 1987
- Paradis 2 - Gallimard, 1986
- Portrait du Joueur - Gallimard, 1984
- Femmes - Gallimard, 1983
- Women - Columbia UP, 1990
- Paradis - Seuil, 1981
- H - Seuil, 1973
- Lois - Seuil, 1972
- Nombres - Seuil, 1966
- Drame - Seuil, 1965
- Event - Red Dust, 1987
- Le Parc - Seuil, 1961
- The Park - Red Dust 1986
- Une Curieuse Solitude - Seuil, 1958
- A Strange Solitude - Grove Press 1959
Interviews
- L'évangile de Nietzsche - Cherche Midi 2006
- Poker (interviews with Ligne de risque)- Gallimard, 2005
- Voir écrire (with Christian de PortzamparcChristian de PortzamparcChristian de Portzamparc is a French architect and urbanist. He graduated from the École Nationale des Beaux Arts in Paris in 1970 and has since been noted for his bold designs and artistic touch; his projects reflect a sensibility to their environment and the town is a founding principal of his...
- Calmann-Levy, 2003 - La Divine Comédie - Desclée de Brouwer, 2000
- Le Rire de Rome - Gallimard, 1992
- Vision à New York - Grasset, 1981
- Interviews with Francis PongeFrancis PongeFrancis Jean Gaston Alfred Ponge was a French essayist and poet. In many ways, he combined the two — essay and poem — into a single art form.-Life:...
- Seuil 1970
Available in English
- Mysterious Mozart - University of Illinois Press, 2010
- Writing and Seeing Architecture (with Christian de PortzamparcChristian de PortzamparcChristian de Portzamparc is a French architect and urbanist. He graduated from the École Nationale des Beaux Arts in Paris in 1970 and has since been noted for his bold designs and artistic touch; his projects reflect a sensibility to their environment and the town is a founding principal of his...
) - University Of Minnesota Press, 2008 - Watteau in VeniceWatteau in VeniceWatteau in Venice is a novel by French author Philippe Sollers published in 1991 by Editions Gallimard, and translated by Alberto Manguel, published in 1994 by Charles Scribner's Sons. This novel is a meditation on Venice and on the ebb and flow of our new global culture, its seductive games,...
- Scribner's, 1994 - Women - Columbia University Press, 1990
- Event - Red Dust, 1987
- The Park - Red Dust 1986
- Writing and the Experience of Limits - Columbia University Press, 1982
- A Strange Solitude - Grove Press 1959
Further reading and literary criticism
- Roland BarthesRoland BarthesRoland Gérard Barthes was a French literary theorist, philosopher, critic, and semiotician. Barthes' ideas explored a diverse range of fields and he influenced the development of schools of theory including structuralism, semiotics, existentialism, social theory, Marxism, anthropology and...
, Writer SollersWriter SollersWriter Sollers is a short book published in 1979 by the French literary critic Roland Barthes. In his discussion of the controversial French writer, Philippe Sollers, Barthes raises critical issues of central importance such as the nature of narrative, the theory of language, the problems of...
, 1979, (ISBN 0-485-11337-6) - Jacques DerridaJacques DerridaJacques Derrida was a French philosopher, born in French Algeria. He developed the critical theory known as deconstruction and his work has been labeled as post-structuralism and associated with postmodern philosophy...
, Dissemination, 1983, (ISBN 0-226-14334-1) - Julia KristevaJulia KristevaJulia Kristeva is a Bulgarian-French philosopher, literary critic, psychoanalyst, sociologist, feminist, and, most recently, novelist, who has lived in France since the mid-1960s. She is now a Professor at the University Paris Diderot...
, Polylogue, 1977, (ISBN 2-02-004631-8) - Michel FoucaultMichel FoucaultMichel Foucault , born Paul-Michel Foucault , was a French philosopher, social theorist and historian of ideas...
, Distance, aspect, origine: Philippe Sollers, Critique n° 198, novembre 1963 - Malcom Charles Pollard, The novels of Philippe Sollers : Narrative and the Visual, 1994, (ISBN 90-5183-707-0)
- Philippe Forest, Philippe Sollers, 1992, (ISBN 2-02-017336-0)
- Eric Hayot, Chinese Dreams: Pound, Brecht, Tel Quel, 2004, (ISBN 0-472-11340-2)
- Hilary Clarke, The Fictional Encyclopaedia: Joyce, Pound, Sollers, 1990, (ISBN 0-8240-0006-4)
External links
- http://www.philippesollers.net/
- http://www.pileface.com/sollers/ The other source about Sollers