The Novels of Philippe Sollers: Narrative and the Visual (Faux Titre)

FAUX TITRE Etudes de langue et littérature françaises publiées

THE NOVELS OF PHILIPPE SOLLERS: Narrative and the Visual

sous la direction de Keith Busby, M.J. Freeman, Sjef Houppermans, Paul Pelckmans et Co Vet

Malcolm Charles Pollard No. 90

/ la'*'

Amsterdam - Atlanta, GA 1994

Introduction

One characteristic of modernism is a questioning of the relationship between the plastic or linguistic sign and the reality that these signs may appear to represent. A commentator noted: La pomme de Cézanne est belle, mais le principal souci du peintre n'est pas qu'elle ressemble à une pomme: c'est l'agencement d'un certain nombre de signes plastiques, en dehors de toute homologie précise avec la réalité, qui constitue ici la valeur esthétique.1 Caws has identified the same preoccupation in the course of her research into Tel Quel, the group and journal directed by Philippe Sollers between 1960 and 1983: The sign, whether painted or written, has become opaque and therefore visible, so that the interest formerly attaching to content now attaches to the language and the structure of the text or canvas.2 Examples of such an interest can be found in Jean Ricardou who, with articles like 'Plume et caméra' and 'Page, film, récit', produced studies of the formal differences between sign systems, and in Jean-Louis Schefer, whose book called Scénographie d'un tableau is a structural analysis of a painting in which linguistic categories define visual space (through the use of, for example, letters and charts).3 Sollers has shared with other contributors to Tel Quel this preoccupation with language. Given the doubts as to the referential function of the linguistic sign and the concomitant preoccupation with language and its structures, what is one to make of Sollers's numerous allusions to visual 1. Jean Bloch-Michel, Le présent de l'indicatif'(Paris, 1973), p.193. 2. Mary Ann Caws, 'Tel Quel. Text and Revolution', Diacritics, spring 1973, 28 (p.5). 3. Jean Ricardou, 'Plume et caméra'. Problèmes du nouveau roman (Paris, 1967), pp.69 79. 'Page, film, récit'. Problèmes, pp.80 8. Jean louis Scheter. Scénographie d'un tableau (Paris, 1969).

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Introduction

art in his novels, his extensive body of critical writing on art, and a statement such as the following that opens Vision à New York: 'Plus j'écris, plus je vois' (p.9)? It is perhaps owing to the dominance of linguistics in structuralist debates that critics have been reluctant to treat the subject of the visual in Sollers's writing, for fear of appearing to produce a thematic study that would be totally inadequate in responding to the range of the writer's concerns. Although the present study does not set out to define the differences and similarities between linguistic and plastic sign systems, neither does it treat reductively the visual as a theme within Sollers's fiction. Considerations of the visual are certainly not exhausted simply because the notion of representation has become problematic, indeed to accept this view would be to dismiss an entire area of Sollers's fiction. The word visual in the title of this book is to be understood as covering two distinct categories. Firstly it relates to the strongly image-oriented nature of society and secondly, to various forms of visual art and more especially painting. The distinction between these two meanings will be upheld throughout. Sollers's novels invariably display a hostility towards the conventional images that society produces and it is on the basis of this hostility that he creates an alternative scene within the space of the text in which visual art has an important role. The first category of the visual owes a good deal to the analyses of Guy Debord and in particular to statements such as the following from his text entitled La société du spectacle: 'Le spectacle n'est pas un ensemble d'images, mais un rapport social entre des personnes, médiatisé par des images'.4 The spectacle is not for Debord simply a peripheral aspect of life, but rather the form by which social relations are now mediated in capitalist society: Il n'est pas un supplément au monde réel, sa décoration surajoutée. Il est le coeur de l'irréalisme de la société réelle. Sous toutes ses formes particulières, information ou propagande, publicité ou consommation directe de divertissements, le spectacle constitue le modèle présent de la vie socialement dominante. Il est l'affirmation omniprésente du choix déjà fait dans la production, et sa consommation corollaire.5

Introduction

conventions necessary to the development of capitalism: 'la critique qui atteint la vérité du spectacle le découvre comme la négation visible de la vie; comme une négation de la vie qui est devenue visible'.6 Sollers salutes the Situationist movement with which Debord was associated, in particular because of this recognition that images have become the dominant form by which social relationships are determined. As a consequence he perceives it to be necessary for a writer such as himself to put the spectacle at the centre of his preoccupations: Ils ont montré concrètement qu'un intellectuel révolutionnaire devait être comme un poisson dans l'eau du débordement contestataire et, surtout, un spécialiste de la compréhension du spectacle, le spectacle étant la nouvelle dimension de l'adversaire idéologique suprême, absolu.7 Sollers's hostility to conventional images promoted by the spectacle has been recognized by Barthes: Sollers au contraire veut empêcher l'image de prendre. En somme, tout se joue, non au niveau des contenus, des opinions, mais au niveau des images: c'est l'image que la communauté veut toujours sauver (quelle qu'elle soit), car c'est l'image qui est sa nourriture vitale, et cela de plus en plus: sur-développée, la société moderne ne se nourrit plus de croyances (comme autrefois), mais d'images.8 Sollers considers the normative tendencies of the spectacle to be detrimental to the imagination, and thus to me writer and visual artist alike. This brings us to consider art, which constitutes the second category of the visual. If the spectacle provides the dominant form of image in society, art is called upon by Sollers to offer one form of what is in this book called a counter-image. Thus art becomes a vital ally for the narrative in its attempt to maintain a contesting presence in the face of the spectacle. Sollers's creative incorporation of visual art in the text accords art a function more substantial than that of mere representation. In attempting to define this function of visual art as a counter-image one is reminded of Artaud's idea of a theatrical spectacle reborn:

The spectacle gives a reductive image of life in its promotion of 6. La société du spectacle, p. 12. 4. Guy Debord, La société du spectacle (Paris, 1971), p. 10. 5. La société du spectacle, pp. 10-11.

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7. Délivrance (interviews with Maurice Clavel) (Paris, 1977), pp.51 -2. 8. Roland Barthes, Sollers écrivain (Paris, 1979), pp.88 9.

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Introduction SPECTACLE: Il y a une idée du spectacle intégral à faire renaître. Le problème est de faire parler, de nourrir et de meubler l'espace; comme des mines introduites dans une muraille de roches planes, et qui feraient naître tout à coup des geysers et des bouquets.9

Within this broad distinction between the two fundamental categories of die visual lies the more specific question concerning both the role of fiction in society and the images that are given of writers and texts by media commentators and academics. Sollers is often suspicious of the latter, believing that they too assert a normative influence that would domesticate the vital non-conformism of the novelist. Thus the connotations of the word visual extend to include questions relating to the image of literature promoted by Sollers as well as those images promoted by critics that are often in conflict with the former. That questions relating to the image of literature can be considered within the context of the spectacle is supported by, for example, Sollers's creative manipulation of what can loosely be termed autobiographical detail. Such manipulation is one important device by means of which narratives confront the spectacle and more precisely the images attributed to his fiction by commentators. The reader of this book will notice the composite form of the four main chapters, each one being introduced by a section recounting aspects of Sollers's biography that relate to the period in which the novels under discussion were written. These anecdotes are drawn principally from Sollers's fiction and interviews, a combination of sources which renders distinctions between the facts and fiction of biography extremely ambiguous. Such ambiguity is actively encouraged by Sollers as he reworks anecdotes in a number of different contexts. It is therefore my contention that one should see Sollers's fictionalizing of autobiographical information in terms of Debord's notion whereby the spectacle produces a society that is 'irréelle'. The unreality characteristic of die spectacle is subverted by Sollers as he creates a visibly fictional persona (even the word Sollers is a pen name) the details of which do not make up a consistent whole: Je m'arrange, à travers mes livres et dans ma façon de vivre, pour que cela soit impossible, sauf en simplifiant grossièrement. Mes romans sont une mythobiographie, faite pour brouiller les pistes en donnant trop de pistes. Un écrivain est celui qui rend sa biographie impossible. L'autre solution serait de la contrôler entièrement de son vivant, comme l'ont fait Joyce et Freud. En ce sens, je suis pour la 'biographie officielle' dont on choisit l'auteur. Lequel? 9. Antonin Artaud, Oeuvres complètes (volume IV) (Paris, 1964), p. 117.

Introduction

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Dans mon cas, je vois des auteurs possibles, mais ce sera pour plus tard: ils ont entre sept et dix ans.10 It is not difficult to see that the subversion of identity which Sollers encourages in the interests of his fiction makes it all the more difficult for commentators, be they professional or academic, to impose an image that is at all convincing. Sollers is thus freed from the necessity of having to conform to any preconceived image. This point motivates the structure of the three main chapters, where the biographical preamble is not intended as a factual background on the author that would substantiate the subsequent discussion of fiction. The preamble serves rather to highlight the ambiguity surrounding one's conception of identity in the age of the spectacle, especially when the identity in question is that of a well-known character who appears regularly in the various media. So as to highlight this idea of autobiographical detail being consciously elaborated within the scene of fiction as a response to the spectacle, I will follow Sollers in his spelling of the word 'bio-graphie' in Logiques: 'biographie, écriture vivante et multiple' (p.31). Bio-graphy remains distinct from a conventional biography in that the former contains a recognition of the ambiguous distinction between fact and fiction in the spectacle's treatment of the question of identity.' ' Sollers's novels do not passively represent the spectacle's undermining of identity, as they bring about a subversion of it for specifically literary ends. The displacement of identities that occurs in fiction provides a scene of narratorial freedom. In the development of this freedom both the creative use of bio-graphical detail and the incorporation of visual art are important elements. They contribute to the promotion of counter-images that are not governed by the notion of representation: bio-graphy does not simply indicate the presence of the author in the text any more than references to art merely decorate the narrative. Both bio-graphy and visual art are closely interrelated with Sollers's narrative forms. For this reason it is necessary to make, as a vital preliminary to any discussion of the visual, a more general examination of the narrative for each of the novels upon which attention is to be focused. 10. Philippe Sollers, 'Une biographie officielle', Le Figaro (Littéraire), 19 mars 1990, p.8. 11. Allan Thiher has identified a similar function of autobiography in fiction: 'Contemporary explorations of the self as a kind of autobiographical fiction are accompanied by a linguistic consciousness that places in question an easy acceptance of the pronoun "I" and the fiction it (osiers' Words in Reflection (Chicago, 1984), p.136.

Introduction

Introduction

Narrative form is itself never anything but highly conspicuous in Sollers's texts, so one cannot treat the subject of the visual without first analysing in detail the narrative of the text to which it is intimately related. The prominence of textual considerations in Sollers's writing makes it impossible for one to conceive of, for example, a purely thematic treatment of the visual, without any attention being paid to narrative devices.

have been reintroduced as themes in a fictional context. The detail contained in the preambles to subsequent chapters is often less overtly factual, treating as it does issues of literary concern with reference to the persona of Sollers. Hence the categorical distinction between the preamble and the main body of the chapter will become progressively displaced, to illustrate the fundamental point that bio-graphical detail and fiction are finally inseparable. This contention is corroborated in places when details that relate to Sollers's bio-graphy also appear in the course of the discussion of novels in the main body of the chapters. The use of die term bio-graphy thus highlights the extent to which we cannot as readers escape the images that mediate our relationship with the writer and his texts.

Reading the novels written by Sollers since 1958 one certainly gains a keen sense of the more general changes in French literary and intellectual attitudes during that period. After the relatively conventional Une curieuse solitude (1958) Sollers began, with Le pare (1961), the experiments in narrative form that would lead to Drame (1965) and Nombres (1968), novels that bear the influence of linguistic and psychoanalytic theories fashionable at the time. He 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 more recent novels include Femmes (1983), Portrait du joueur (1984), Le coeur absolu (1986), and La fête à Venise (1991), 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 media, politics, sex, religion, and the arts. The first chapter of this book deals with Le parc; the second chapter with Drame and Nombres; it also contains a discussion of some important developments in the intellectual climate that affected Sollers and the image of his literature between the late 1960s and the early 1980s, with some more general comment on his novels of this period. The third chapter concerns a selection of his most recent fiction specifically Femmes, Le coeur absolu, and La fête à Venise. The chronological treatment of the novels coexists with the bio-graphical preambles in which anecdotes and issues relating to the period in question are drawn from a number of different sources. The fact that these sources are not necessarily contemporaneous with the novels treated in the chapter could be taken as a sign of the texts' capacity to subvert images and identity. For in reiterating or even modifying bio-graphical anecdotes in later texts Sollers asserts the right of fiction to subvert the chronological order diat otherwise generally governs our conscious lives. The reader will also notice a shift within these short bio-graphical preambles to each chapter. That which precedes Chapter One is broadly factual, highlighting various details from Sollers's youth which can be said to have influenced his general perceptions as a writer or else which

1

In Chapter One a distinction is established between Sollers's Le parc and the nouveau roman of Robbe-Grillet. Whereas the latter often appeared to welcome the urban spectacle into his narrative, the narrator of Le parc more or less shuns all such images. In this novel the counterimage is created on the basis of a narrative in which the writing process is itself highly visible. The narrative becomes conspicuous through for example the numerous references to the narrator's orange exercise book. That writing remains distinct from the spectacle is suggested by the park, which acts as a metaphor for the scene of writing. Not only is the park topographically remote from the rest of the city but it is also associated wim experiences of exhilaration and of dreams. One is encouraged therefore to see an affinity between the liberating counter-image produced by writing and the Freudian dream-image. Even with this early text there is evidence of the great value Sollers places on Freud, which value is openly acknowledged in a later statement on the importance to his fictional writing of psychoanalysis: 'Sans Freud, je n'écris pas. [...] En conséquence, mon effort portera, en particulier, sur une mise en fiction de l'interprétation psychanalytique'.12 The second part of Chapter One treats three of the texts in L'Intermédiaire. In one of these, 'Lecture de Poussin', Sollers adopts Poussin's idea of the two 'regards', where a second, critical eye is brought to deepen the experience of one's initial impression. The text on Poussin offers another example where the image, in this case the first impression of the painting, is modified by one's critical faculties in a reinterpretation of one's perception. The two 'regards' will be considered as a variation on the theme of the image and counter-image.

12. 'Deux entretiens sur la poïétique de la fiction' (interview with Michel Zéraf t'a), Recherches poïétiques, Il (1976), 65 73 (p.69, p.71).

Introduction

Introduction

In Chapter Two the discussion centres on the more radical narrative forms that develop in Drame and Nombres. In the 1960s Sollers appeared determined to banish from his novels traditional notions of representation. It is no longer possible to uphold the distinction made with respect to Le pare between allusions to the writing process and broader narrative themes, for the two are in Drame and Nombres indistinguishable. This produces a particularly abstract mood in the novels which is encouraged by Sollers's apparent equating of representation with a compliant attitude to the spectacle. In terms of the spectacle, he considered the avant-garde text to be a refusal to satisfy the demands of the market for easily consumable products: 'Ce reproche d'être "difficiles" à lire vient d'un esprit de consommation immédiate...'.13 The violence of the language in these novels is intended to bring about a destruction rather than a representation or endorsement of society and its spectacular images. The hostility to the image is sustained by a subversion of narratorial identity in the complicated use of personal pronouns, as in Drame for instance where the identities of narrator and reader are split respectively between je/il and tu/elle. The undermining of a cohesive narratorial perspective consititutes a literary adaptation of certain Lacanian psychoanalytic principles which are valuable in challenging the psychological make-up of character. Such undermining is important in the context of this study because through the introduction of themes of illness and violence or through the elaboration of pronominal identities, the narratives tend to reduce the authority traditionally invested in narrator and character. The absence of psychological motivation and description of physical characteristics support the narratives in their rejection of the representational function of the novel, which point is also related to the notion of bio-graphy whereby the conventional signs of identity are subverted as a means of checking the influence of the spectacle. This rejection has a clear parallel in visual art where abstract painters sought to overturn the conventions of figuration and the mimetic function of art. In the course of this chapter the analogy between Sollers's narratives of the 1960s and abstract art is accordingly developed. In Drame even indications of a possible topography such as the port and the forest have no apparent referential value. The four pronominal figures of je/il and tu/elle that define the space of narratorial interaction in Drame are supported by other abstract structures with four points or sides, such as the compass, the chessboard and the walls of a theatre. The strangeness of the narrator's conception of theatrical space and the recurrence of allusions to horizontal and vertical axes provide the abstract framework

of the text's counter-image that stands in opposition to notions of representation and the spectacle. The geometry of these abstract narratives is confirmed in Nombres through the presence of diagrams and Chinese ideograms by means of which the phonetic order is interrupted by the intervention of graphic elements. The analogy with abstract art is extended in a discussion of the relevance of Rothko's paintings to the geometric forms of these two novels. Chapter Two also includes a discussion of the ways in which Sollers moved away from geometrically-ordered narrative forms. Although the novels written in the 1970s are not discussed in any great depth I will nevertheless offer some analysis of a growing irreverence of tone, an absence of any visible signs of punctuation and an insistence on the importance of the voice in narrative. These characteristics are interpreted as symptoms of Sollers's desire to redefine his fiction in such a way as to make redundant the images that had accrued in Nombres. The videorecordings on Sollers made by Jean-Paul Fargier offer an excellent example of the counter-image where for example the writer's chanting of Paradis is intercut with a multiplicity of images that parody the spectacle. Fargier does not present a passive representation of Sollers's text, for his videos revel in the freedom provided by a formally unconstrained narrative.

13. 'Tel Quel aujourd'hui' (interviews with Jacques Henric), France Nouvelle, 31 mai 1967, 21-2 (p.21).

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Chapter Three begins with an examination of how Sollers fictionalizes the intellectual and commentator, figures who are always in danger of imposing an image on him and his fiction. In Femmes for example famous individuals from Parisian intellectual life are treated in fictional terms as characters within the spectacle. This amounts on the part of Sollers to a clever subversion of their authority to treat the subject of fiction: they are now a part of literature. A similar effect is produced by the criticisms made by commentators of previous novels that are reincorporated into the fictional narrative of Le coeur absolu to suggest that the role such commentators play and the comments they make are all part of the broader social fiction of the spectacle. The role of bio-graphy becomes still more important in these novels: the undermining of identity that has always characterized Sollers's attempts to avoid having to conform to an image is extended to the relationships between character and narrator within and among various novels. Although certain details of Sollers's bio-graphy can still in places be recognized there is an essential indeterminacy that frustrates any attempt to identify the persona of Sollers in the text. The basic opposition between the image of the spectacle and the counter-image in the text is mirrored in this last chapter by the notions of

Introduction

Introduction

contract and counter-contract. The numerous sorts of images that Sollers's narrators invariably see as pernicious, such as stereotypes perpetuated by the spectacle and normative images of literature, have in common the fact that they seek to bring expressions of wayward thinking within the bounds of convention by imposing a tacit contract upon the individual. This type of contract is confronted by the counter-contract which in Femmes, Le coeur absolu and La fête à Venise assumes three different forms. Will, the American narrator of Femmes, enters into an agreement with a French writer called S. whereby the latter is to have the narrative published under his own name. This ploy encourages an indeterminacy of identity of the sort alluded to above, that symbolizes a freedom from the pressure Will believes is being exerted on him to conform. The importance of painting that offers a scene for the narrator's counter-contract is provided by the work of Willem de Kooning. Reference will in the course of the chapter be made to Sollers's book on de Kooning. S., the narrator of Le coeur absolu, creates a secret society in Venice. With its written Articles the secret society provides the novel with a countercontract that again provides a degree of freedom from social constraints and the spectacle. This text will be discussed together with Sollers's book on Fragonard. Froissart, the narrator of La fête à Venise, is a writer who is also employed by a gang involved in stealing works of art. He occupies an apparently ambiguous position both within and against the spectacle, but the highlight of the novel comes with his ingenious incorporation into the narrative of an imaginary painting by Watteau that represents a clear gesture of defiance to the spectacle.

Venise do not break however the underlying continuity of this book's themes in spite of the changes that they necessitate in one's treatment of them. The fundamental changes in Sollers's fiction could be defined as a move from abstract to figurative forms of expression which has been made possible by an understanding that figurative forms are as capable as abstract forms of offering a counter-image in the text that is subversive with regard to the spectacle. The fact that figurative art is not necessarily limited to a servile and representational role in the narrative is shown by the work of painters like Fragonard and Watteau that operates as successfully in this respect for Le coeur absolu and La fête à Venise as does that of Rothko for Drame or Nombres. The study in this book of Sollers's novels based on their relationships with the spectacle, bio-graphy and visual art is intended to demonstrate that fictional narrative maintains an interesting relationship with the visual even if notions of representation have become problematic.

to

I have insisted on the importance of recognizing the close interrelationship between the language and structure of Sollers's narratives and the various uses of the word visual. It is in part because Sollers appears always to have been hostile to the idea of narrative as a representation that one is obliged to conceive of a more substantial role for the visual in his texts. This interrelationship needs to be emphasized particularly for the novels of the 1960s which actively promote geometric and abstract counter-images that are dependent on considerations of narratorial identity and structure. With the novels discussed in Chapter Three it does become possible to develop what is apparently a more immediate interrelationship between narrative and art in their subversive alliance against the spectacle. This impression of immediacy is enhanced by Sollers's use of plot and the numerous allusions to painting in the more recent novels which coincide with his writing several books on painters such as De Kooning and Fragonard. The obvious differences between novels like Nombres and La fête à

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Bio-graphy 1936 - 1964

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Chapter One Bio-graphical preamble (1936-1964) Sollers was born Philippe Joyaux in Talence, a suburb of Bordeaux, in November 1936. His family's business (in household metal goods) brought Sollers into the middle of the wider social conflicts which led to the creation of the 'Front Populaire' in the year of his birth. The French language seemed split within itself by the violently conflicting discourses through which class confrontation and industrial strife were expressed. The sense of upheaval he considers as being characteristic of his early years was primarily a consequence of the Second World War, which began in his infancy and affected Bordeaux to the extent that the city's identity was threatened. The social disintegration suffered by the region in the first ten years of Sollers's life produced a peculiar multiplicity of languages, so that he came to recognize not only French, and Spanish owing to the proximity of the border, but equally the German brought by the occupiers who requisitioned his parents' house, and the English of the Allied troops: 'Les parachutistes anglais cachés dans les caves. Chuchotements français dans les étages, cris allemands au rez-de-chaussée, silence anglais dans le vin'.1 This period seems to have confirmed in him the justice of the strong Anglophiliac and Girondist traditions of the area; the Bordeaux which Sollers describes in the Vision à New York interviews is one that feels itself to be very much apart from the rest of France. In the following passage a childhood episode is recalled: En tout cas, ma famille était contre Pétain et les nazis: je me rappelle avoir reçu, de mon père et de ma mère, la consigne de ne pas chanter "Maréchal nous voilà", avec les autres enfants, dans les réunions de groupe, ou à l'école. Je sortais donc du rang, à ce moment-là, et me taisais. C'est une expérience qui m'a beaucoup impressionné (cinq ans) (p.37). Thus he sees Bordeaux as a victim of the disgrace brought about by national policies, which in turn leads him to reassert the idea of the region's historic difference from the rest of France:

1. Philippe Sollers, Carnet de nuit (Paris, 1989), p. 16.

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L'Aquitaine, l'ancienne Guyenne, Bordeaux, deviennent le point d'aimentation, à la fois marginal et central, de toute une mythologie de l'art de vivre en train de disparaître rapidement en Europe et dans le monde entier. Bordeaux est un signe de ralliement "sudiste".2 An important part of his eulogy of Bordeaux relates inevitably to wine and its power as a symbol that confronts the absurdity and inconstancy of life: Et l'absurdité désormais acquise et fondée comme une évidence. Sauf le vin, peut-être, patient dans les caves, indifférent, calme, mystérieusement puissant, barriques et bouteilles bien rangées dans les profondeurs obliques, pendant qu'on se massacrait là-haut et sous la mer, d'une extrémité à l'autre, sous tous les méridiens et dans toutes les langues.3 This is a perception that has remained with Sollers long after the disappearance of the specific war-time conditions of his childhood, and one which helps to formulate his attitude as a writer. Sollers's image of Bordeaux goes to create a France within a France, an alternative space within which to develop the narrative on the basis of a certain antagonism towards the authority of the French State, and which at the same time allows him to express sympathies which place him and his work on a broader horizon: La France? Méfiance. Taxes, commissions, limitation des libertés... A bas Jeanne d'Arc, Louis XIV, Mazarin, les Jacobins, Napoléon et l'Empire... Vi vent les princes Condé ou Conti, Louis XV et l'Angleterre, toujours...L'Espagne, s'il le faut...4 The fragility of his origins is symbolized by the fact that the family home in Bordeaux was subsequently bulldozed to allow a supermarket called SUMA to be built: Et le démocratique et rutilant SUMA a pris leur place, avec ses 2. Philippe Sollers, Théorie des exceptions (Paris, 1986), p. 184. 3. Philippe Sollers, Portrait du joueur (Paris, 1984), p.97. For Sollers on wine see the interview with Pierre Boncenne and Alain Jauhert entitled 'Le chauvinisme bordelais de Philippe Sollers', Lire, 135 (décembre 1986), 107-8. 4. Portrait du joueur, p. 40.

Chapter One

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stations d'essence et ses panneaux de verre transparents, et ses escaliers roulants menant aux paradis d'aujourd'hui, chaque produit trouvable à l'endroit qu'il faut parmi dix autres produits semblables, ni pires ni meilleurs.5 It is little wonder therefore that Sollers would become a critic of capitalism and of the spectacle produced to support it! The other important setting in Sollers's life is the île de Ré, where his family had a holiday home that was destroyed by the Germans in 1942, and where to this day he still returns to spend free time. He has a similar relationship with the island as he does with Bordeaux, one in which the local identity is considered more important than that of the French nation, and this allows Sollers to be both a part of and yet apart from the country in which he lives: Et c'est pour cela qu'il me semble pouvoir mieux dire ici la vie de l'autre monde, celui du marché, du calcul, des rapports de force, des désirs, des agitations. Il est loin, cet autre monde, et pourtant très proche. On en est sorti, mais on peut l'avoir sous microscope. On le cadre enfin. On le voit. A l'envers. On peut en écrire le roman.6 The île de Ré figures in certain novels, as in Femmes where it is described as 'un petit côté Long Island...' (p.455), so that it becomes an internalized setting from another country. Or else it is alluded to as a scene that encourages other forms of atypical behaviour for a Frenchman: 'Regarder la télévision française avec le son de la B.B.C. anglaise est aussi un amusement' ,7 Sollers's insistence on certain geographical locations is rather more ambiguous than it may appear, for even as it suggests a celebration of the writer's biological and sentimental origins, the fact that such locations are characterized by dissolution and conflict can equally be seen to represent quite die opposite of a firm notion of origin. The political and linguistic upheaval that has already been mentioned combines with the proximity of the ocean to both Bordeaux and the île de Ré, to evoke less an origin than an escape route for the writer's imagination. Sollers would thus become

Bio-graphy 1936 - 1964

15

the Girondist standing with divided loyalties at the edge of the Republic, neither xenophobic nor proudly provincial, but with the sense of perspective necessary to analyze the complexes and complexity of his country's Republicans, much as would a foreigner from, say, Italy, China, or the United States of America. The literary value of an ambiguous origin like Bordeaux or the île de Ré can best be illustrated by two instances of childhood intoxication in front of the written page. The first comes from Le pare, as the child sneaks his atlas away to bed, where he has the luxury of being able to invent words and stories to match the illustrations: Mais ce qu'il aimait surtout, c'était trouver, pour certaines illustrations, des légendes inédites. Ou encore, ces images organisées de manière à découvrir, révélé parfois sous un angle précis, un personnage caché dans le décor et tout d'abord invisible (p.45). The second instance comes from Sollers's preface to Vision à New York, when he recounts an experience he had at the age of eight, where the words in a geography book began to decompose in front of his eyes: Sous mes yeux, là, sur la page du cahier de géographie, une soudaine décomposition est en train de se produire. Les lettres commencent à se détacher de la surface, à respirer, à vivre, à danser; elles sont l'ombre portée d'un son que je n'entends pas mais qui me traverse (p. 10). Both these examples point to geographical space as providing a scene not of stability or certainty, but of vertigo, excitement and imagination, where things are not as they may seem according to everyday experience. The young Joyaux was a sick child, suffering from an otitis that required a number of operations, as well as from asthma. Illness has one advantage for the child in that it allows him to be excused from unwanted obligations: Mais, après tout, la maladie était une façon supplémentaire de se protéger, de se renfermer entre nous. Une manière, là encore, de prendre la vie à l'envers, par ses points de fuite, sa doublure.8

5. Portrait du joueur; p. 130. 6. Théorie des exceptions, p. 194. 7. Théorie des exceptions, p. 194. On watching television without the sound see also Le lys d'or (Paris, 1989), p. 194, Improvisations (Paris, 1991), p.55, and Portrait du joueur, p. 268.

Along with the war, these illnesses of ear and lung left perhaps the greatest impression: 'Je ne me rappelle pas avoir eu un corps complet, 8. Portrait du joueur, p. 131

Chapter One

Bio-graphy 1936 - 1964

fermé'.9 Such physical deficiencies are given a peculiarly literary significance by Sollers, as he implies that writing somehow resulted from illness, that by experiencing the weakness of the body he developed a greater sensitivity to language:

where Sollers was preparing his entry into the Ecole Supérieure des Sciences Economiques et Commerciales in 1955, and from where he was finally expelled for gross indiscipline and for the reading of forbidden (surrealist) books. Episodes relating to this period at Versailles are alluded to by the narrator of Portrait du joueur, such as when he takes the name of the school paper in vain: 'Servir... Titre dont j'avais dit publiquement qu'il évoquait un bulletin pour Maîtres d'Hôtel... Non serviam!...' (p.77). The non serviam recurs elsewhere, as if to become a sign of Sollers's challenge to authority.12 The Jesuits made worthy opponents, it is claimed, since by giving the narrator poor marks for his dissertations and making him read them out before the class, the teachers were paying an unintentional tribute to his unorthodoxy: 'Hommage à ce qu'il ne faut pas faire. Salut de la vertu au vice, ou réciproquement'.13 This establishes a clear opposition in the mind of Sollers's narrator between the language of one's education and die surreptitious, and in his case surrealist, texts which are to be studied if one is to escape one's background and training.

16

Par ailleurs, le souffle est quelque chose, eh bien, qui, avec l'oreille, apprend les structures essentielles - ce qui fait que je suis, comme on dit, un écrivain. Donc, de ce point de vue, j'ai l'impression que, sans écrire, je me suis trouvé dans la position d'avoir à former tout de suite un corps qui serait fonction, un jour, d'une écriture possible.10 The identification of illness with literature recalls not only the sickly narrator of A la recherche du temps perdu, but also the precocious and sick young narrator from Bordeaux of Mauriac's Le noeud de vipères, so that one could almost speak of illness becoming a literary convention. It is developed as a theme in Sollers's fiction by the way for example in which a novel such as Le coeur absolu makes use of the narrator's illness: Les voix cassées que je n'entendrais pas aussi bien, dans la vie courante, sans mes histoires enfantines d'oreilles, quand le coeur battait directement dans le tympan, quand l'espace entier n'était plus qu'un papillon fou, un pouls tendu de souffrance, voilà, il faut queje raconte ça, c'est la clé... (p.32). The importance to Sollers of the perspective or distance from events that is provided by themes of geographical origin and illness, becomes apparent in anecdotes concerning his education. One could say that the guiding principle that has determined his development as a novelist was already in place at an early stage:

17

Sollers's first published work was the short story entitled 'Le défi' (1957), which would also form the basis of his first novel Une curieuse solitude produced the following year. 'Le défi' and Une curieuse solitude were both received with enthusiasm by the literary establishment. 'Le défi' appeared in a collection of work by young writers under the direction of Jean Cayrol. François Mauriac was not alone in being enthusiastic; by 1958, and the publication of Une curieuse solitude, Aragon, Emile Henriot, and others had also written praisingly of Sollers. As he was still a minor, Joyaux had to choose a pseudonym in order to have his work placed. In Portrait du joueur the reader is given die meaning of the pen name Sollers:

Ce qu'il faut dire, c'est en effet la guerre. Entre quoi et quoi? Eh bien, entre le point de vision, justement, et le reste, tout le reste. Entre cette pointe de fuite, d'effraction, de subversion sans raison, et la grande machine à reproduire le décor et la règle.11

"Tout entier art." Du latin sollus (avec deux 1!) et ars. Sollus est le même radical que le grec holos. Sollers, sollertis... Adjectif. Sollertia, substantif. Sollerter, adverbe. De même qu'on a dit Homo erectus, Homo Habilis ou Homo Sapiens, on pourrait très bien parler, en suivant le fil, d'Homo Sollers. Qui culmine dans l'esthétique incessante. C'est dans l'ordre évolutif, il me semble? (p.211).

One such confrontation took place at the Jesuit school in Versailles,

Elsewhere Sollers has given additional reasons for having chosen the

9. Vision à New York (interviews with David Hayman) (Paris, 1981), p.47. 10. Vision à New York, pp.47-8. 11. Vision à New York, p. 11.

12. See La fête à Venise (Paris, 1991), p. 152, and Les folies françaises (Paris, 1988), p.73. 13. Portrait du joueur, p. 77.

Chapter One

Le parc

name: that the root of the word has been associated with Ulysses, signifying one who is cunning, ingenious, who shocks opinion and does not remain in his allotted space.14 The various meanings that Sollers himself has identified with his name give a clear indication of his preoccupation which is to work for an aesthetics that challenges conventional order. The fact that he developed this conception of art and literature so young, and that he has remained faithful to it, runs counter to the general view of him as one who is forever changing. The fact that Sollers is a neologism produced for the purposes of fiction supports the argument which will be made throughout this book, namely that as far as this particular writer is concerned, the value of literature can in part be measured in terms of the extent to which it establishes a liberation from the notion of identity upon which social conformism is founded. Not only does the use of a pseudonym suggest a sympathy with others like Stendhal and Lautréamont, but more importantly it brings about a sort of displacement of the author's individual existence, which reflects the distinction being made between a conventional biography and the present bio-graphy. This displacement will be discussed in greater detail especially in Chapter Three, where it will be seen that one of the most recent novels has a narrator simply called S., who is in some ways similar to Sollers, but who can in no way be considered as identical to him. In his article on Sollers's H, Barthes too saw the significance of the novelist's playing with his name:

of his history of illness Sollers was called up for the Algerian war. Refusing the draft, he spent three months in military hospitals, where he went on hunger strike and even feigned mental illness.

18

Lorsqu'il déplie son nom (signifiant majeur), Sollers, évidemment, ne reporte pas sur sa "personne" les significations du Nom (comme faisaient les nobles en se glorifiant de l'étymologie de leur patronyme, ou comme le proposent aujourd'hui les almanachs de prénoms). Le Nom est ici un départ digressif, la rupture d'une métonymie: c'est en délirant (voire historiquement) sur son propre nom (sur son nom propre), que le sujet se désempoisse de sa personne: le nom part tout seul, comme un ballon sans fil; en détachant mon nom, je me discontinue (je me désacralise).15 Again as with the narrator of Le noeud de vipères, Sollers's early experiences provoked a rebellion against religion; and as from 1960 he established a circle, not like Mauriac's narrator at the café Voltaire, but around Tel Quel. The journal had not been long established when in spite

19

L'Algérie, chausse-trape infectée... C'était la fin, on rapatriait les blessés, il en arrivait pour tous les goûts, têtes, bras, jambes, aveugles, borgnes, traumatisés, amnésiques... On les amenait par camions, le matin, depuis la gare... Tout ça clandestin, la honte...16 This description by the narrator of Portrait du joueur is followed by an account of the confrontations with a military psychiatrist: On s'installait face à face, là, tous les trois jours, comme deux joueurs d'échecs... Il savait que je simulais, bien entendu, mais la seule façon de le faire douter de sa certitude était précisément de la pousser à bout, d'en rajouter, d'avoir l'air heureux de cette complicité menaçante... Petit à petit, je le voyais hésiter, lâcher prise, commencer à poser en lui-même l'équation: pas fou du tout, c'est-à-dire complètement fou.17 It is an episode that has been recounted more than once by Sollers, and is significant above all in that it provides a concrete example of how illness, or the feigning of it, can provide the means of escaping unwanted social obligations, and of exempting oneself from the institutionalizing effects of training. The situation was finally resolved by the personal intervention of André Malraux, then Minister of Culture, which led to Sollers being freed. In reply to the letter Sollers had written thanking the minister Malraux wrote: 'c'est moi qui vous remercie, Monsieur, de m'avoir permis de rendre, une fois au moins, l'univers moins bête'.18 Le parc Le parc is probably the closest Sollers comes to writing a novel in the form of the nouveau roman if, with Ann Jefferson, we take the latter to be the product of a crisis of attitudes with regard to traditional notions of 16. Portrait du joueur, p.51.

14. 'Aller-retour dans le système Sollers' (interview with Jean-Paul Enthoven), in De Sartre à Foucault (Paris, 1984), 302-15 (p.307). 15. Sollers écrivain, p.60.

17. Portrait du joueur, p.52. See also Vision à New York, pp.68-70, and Femmes (Paris, 1983), p.326, p.430. I 8. Vision à New York, p.70 note 1.

Chapter One

20

the genre: The nouveau roman is a solution to the crisis as well as a manifestation of it, for it proposes a redefinition of fiction in exactly those areas where it was regarded as most atrophied or problematic: plot, character, narration and representation.19 Published in 1961, three years after the more traditional Une curieuse solitude, Le parc earned Sollers the Prix Mediéis. The novel is indebted to aspects of the nouveau roman even as it shows signs of the ways in which subsequent experiments such as Drame will create a new departure. The following discussion of Le parc will therefore be prefaced by an outline of Sollers's changing position with respect to the nouveau roman; such conclusions as are reached will enable one to see it as a text in which some of the important personal characteristics of his writing are developed for the first time. One such characteristic will be treated through an analysis of the way in which Sollers elaborates a notion of the visual that does not share the fascination of the nouveau roman for contemporaneous experiments in the cinema. Discussion of Le parc will also be related to his two othe'r books of this period: the collection of writings L'Intermédiaire and the commentary entitled Francis Ponge. The inclusion of texts by writers such as Alain Robbe-Grillet and Michel Butor in the early issues of Tel Quel is evidence of a recognition that the nouveau roman was still relevant to the younger generation of novelists and theoreticians associated with the journal. The most obvious debts that Sollers owes to Robbe-Grillet lie in the fact that the latter's fiction had sought to dispose of psychological motivation as the dominant force organizing the narrative and to subvert the conventions governing the representation of time and space in the text. In undermining plot and character Robbe-Grillet set a trend from which those at Tel Quel would draw perhaps the most radical conclusions. Sollers begins his 'Sept propositions sur Alain Robbe-Grillet' with the following sentence: 'Francis Ponge l'a fait remarquer: qu'arrive-t-il à un homme sur le point de tomber, saisi de vertige? Il regarde au plus près'.20 Such a beginning is significant in that it recognizes the importance of Ponge (who is referred to again later in the article), it helps one to understand Sollers's position vis-à-vis the nouveau roman, and his

19. Ann Jefferson, The Nouveau Roman and the Poetics of Fiction (Cambridge, 1980), p.208. 20. Philippe Sollers, 'Sept propositions sur Alain Robbe-Grillet', in L'Intermédiaire (Paris, 1963), pp. 149-56 (p. 149).

Le parc

21

writing in Le parc. The falling man offers an attractive metaphor for the writer in so far as they are deemed capable of sharing a perception of the world as it presents itself in the fleeting light of the moment. If this is so, then the attempt to capture the detail of that moment by means of language becomes the most pressing, if impossible purport of writing. The justification for the writer's existence would be based on his efforts to create a method or textual order out of a series of such moments, through what Sollers calls: 'l'évaluation précise de ce qui nous entoure comme ultime effort pour ne pas tomber et ne pas mourir' (p. 149). Since it is rationally impossible to achieve, any order of this sort is underscored by an essential precariousness and unreality that would henceforth become a legitimate feature of the writer's activity. This relationship of the writer to his eye that Sollers sympathetically attributes to Ponge allows one to establish what will become an important distinction between the work of these two writers and the nouveau roman of Robbe-Grillet. In Le présent de l'indicatif, his book of essays on the nouveau roman, Jean Bloch-Michel writes that if the author aims to frustrate any possible psychological interpretation of the text the result is an immediate but limited form of visual experience. So according to him, the nouveaux romanciers: 'avaient pour intention première d'exprimer une certaine manière de voir le monde, en s'interdisant de regarder audelà de ce que l'oeil peut percevoir', which produces 'l'opacité sans signification que ce monde offre à la perception visuelle' (p.21). One could thus say that the narrative supports the spectacle of modern society by offering a sort of screen on which is projected an ever-changing, if flat, sequence of images. Furthermore, Bloch-Michel considers the extensive use of the present tense ('le présent de l'indicatif) in the nouveau roman as constituting a near subservience to visual forms of expression on the part of writers who have for example been willingly seduced by the cinema, widi the consequence that they may have neglected to exploit the richness of verbal discourse that is available to them as novelists. A case in point would be Resnais' 'L'Année dernière à Marienbad', for which film Robbe-Grillet wrote the scenario. The film is particularly successful in creating the effect sought by the writer through a series of images which reconstitute 'ce monde des objets qui n'est que l'obsession de leur présence' (p.72). The dream-like atmosphere which governs the statuesque characters and the temporality of 'Marienbad' is evidence for Bloch-

22

Chapter One

Michel that the theory of the nouveau roman is best realized in film.21 Although for this particular film Robbe-Grillet's scenario establishes a setting that is visibly remote from modern French society, Bloch-Michel implies that the nouveaux romanciers have set themselves an objective compatible with the tradition of realism in literature in that they seek faithfully to represent elements of contemporary experience: 'Ils reproduisent l'inauthenticité profonde qui est désormais celle des êtres humains soumis à la pression des moyens d'information, de la culture des masses' (p.42). Perhaps this comment relates less to the film than to Robbe-Grillet's general use in his novels of written and visual stereotypes (in newspapers and on advertising boards, for example), that provide the reader with scenes not of illumination but of confusion as he seeks to unravel the plot. According to Bloch-Michel's analysis, a novelist like Robbe-Grillet finds himself in an ambiguous position with regard to society (or more precisely to 'la société du spectacle', to use the term which the present study is emphasizing), in that he displays both complicity and hostility towards it. Both Robbe-Grillet and Sollers might stand charged on this point since Tel Quel, by its very title, seems to have identified itself closely at the outset with the nouveau romancier's objective to write the world as it is. Yet even in the early 'Sept propositions sur Alain RobbeGrillet' Sollers interprets the relationship between character and world in a quite different way to Bloch-Michel (Sollers is here referring to RobbeGrillet's Dans le labyrinthe): Et le moi, loin de chercher à se dissoudre dans le monde, est comme la tache aveugle d'un monde qui se voit. La liberté, alors, consiste à refuser les choses beaucoup plus qu'à les accepter et se retrouver en elles, par-delà leur forme, pour exister à leur place dans un lieu indéfini (p. 154). This suggests that for Sollers, the novel must certainly not limit itself, as Bloch-Michel would have it, to what die eye can see, for the precise reason that once one has disposed of the omniscient narrator or psychologically cohesive character, the notion of a seeing eye becomes effectively meaningless. For if there is no unified psyche to coordinate the impressions received by the eye, then one clearly has less justification for basing the narrative on sense perception. So Sollers could be said to have recog-

Le parc

23

nized the undermining by the nouveau roman of narrative, plot and character, but to have conceived of this undermining as a fundamental challenge to the image. This is confirmation of the attitude that was stated above, by which Sollers and Ponge were said to promote writing as the impossible desire to capture a moment. To look 'au plus près' is clouded in uncertainty, and precludes any lasting faith in the image one sees. If Bloch-Michel had reservations about the nouveau romancier's complicity in the world of the image, Sollers would also come to adopt a more openly critical attitude to it as the 1960s progressed. Whereas in 1960 Sollers was in many ways sympathetic to the direction taken by die nouveau roman, by 1968 he had diverged from the course of writers whom he now saw as having become entrenched in producing a decadent form of novel : En fait, il reste presqu'entièrement dépendant, par son idéologie, du naturalisme et du psychologisme existentiel. Ce n'est pas parce qu'un réaménagement formel intervient que l'idéologie est forcément modifiée. C'est presque toujours le même manège visant à être plus ou moins fidèle à un soi-disant réel, à une "sensation" originelle, à un courant de conscience répétitif, à une parole plus ou moins absurde. On ne sort pas du mécanisme bloqué d'un rapport au langage comme expression.22 In 1970 he had the following to say about the nouveau roman: 'Il s'agit la plupart du temps d'une philosophie de la sensation, de la perception qui renvoie à une "vision du monde"'.23 Whilst Sollers would continue to build a dialogue with the visual, he was concerned not to subordinate his language by attempting to render it transparent in a celebration of the image. By this time Sollers was developing clear points of reference through his readings of Lautréamont, Mallarmé and Joyce, and for him the nouveau roman had failed to acknowledge the lessons to be learnt from the experiments of these writers.24 It is a sign of Sollers's own changing perspective that, whereas at the beginning of the 1960s he had seemed to welcome the nouveau roman's apparent neutrality or attempts at objective description as an alternative to Sartrean 'engagement', as the

22. 'Autoportrait' (interview), Magazine Littéraire, 18 (mai 1968), 38-9 (p.39). 21. For Sollers's view of Resnais and 'L'Année dernière à Marienbad' see 'Enquête', Premier Plan, 18 (1961), 25-35. For his view on Robbe-Grillet's book and film L'Immortelle, see 'Le rêve en plein jour', Nouvelle Revue Française, XXI (1963), 904-11.

23. "Tel Quel tel quel' (interview with Jean-François Josselin), Le Nouvel Observateur, 2.3 novembre 1970, 44-5 (p.44). 24. 'An interview with Philippe Sollers' (with David Dayman), The Iowa Review, 5/4(1971), 91-101 (p.94).

24

Chapter One

decade progressed he increasingly adopted a critical tone because of the novelists' apolitical position. In an important interview, published by the Magazine Littéraire in 1972, Sollers made the point clearly enough by stating that the nouveaux romanciers had failed to develop the political and theoretical implications that their initial challenge to the literary tradition had promised.25 The much more recent novel Femmes makes yet another criticism of the nouveau roman, claiming that it is fit only for providing students with models for grammatical exercises: 'Il y a désormais les romanciers pour les diplômes moyens du Texas ou du Wisconsin... Exercices grammaticaux... Passez du présent à l'imparfait...' (p.549). This long line of criticism demonstrates the direction taken by Sollers's views on the nouveau roman, which is intended to help the reader understand the reasoning behind his first tentative expressions of discord at about the time of Le pare, as well as the more open hostility of later years. It has already been seen that Sollers alluded more than once in his article on Robbe-Grillet to Francis Ponge, and it is perhaps through Ponge that one can gain a clearer idea of Sollers's understanding of his own role as a novelist at this time. In his presentation and commentary on some Ponge texts Francis Ponge (1963), Sollers makes several points which are helpful when one considers his own subsequent literary production. Firstly, there is the way Ponge crosses beyond any simple limit of poetry: 'nous ne trouvons pas chez lui de séparation bien nette entre prose et poésie, théorie et pratique' (p. 13). Secondly, although Ponge privileges particular objects in his poetry, he couples this with an exact and highly conspicuous use of language, making it impossible for one to ignore 'sa position fondamentale quant à la parole, au langage [...] cet intérêt quasi exclusif pour les choses, comme la garantie de son intérêt pour les mots' (p. 14). Thirdly, Ponge's preoccupation with objects brings to inevitable prominence the visual in the text, but again this is never achieved by an attempt to forget or render language invisible: 'nous réapprenons à voir, à entendre, à toucher, à sentir, dans l'ordre de notre seul critère stable: la parole' (p.28). Finally, because language and what it refers to can never be reconciled, Ponge maintains a sense of strangeness to mark the impossible task of the poet; language can never become that visible object, but paradoxically it is probably closest to doing so when it recognizes this fact:

25. 'Philippe Sollers: ébranler le système' (interview with Jean-Jacques Brochier), Magazine Littéraire, 65 (juin 1972), 10-17 (p. 12). I would like to thank Magazine Littéraire who offered me a copy of this issue even though it was out of print.

Le pare

25

Ponge veut se méfier même de sa rigueur. L'impossibilité du poème va être ainsi comprise dans le poème, brisant le discours à l'instant où il s'organise trop bien; relation de bataille, de corps à corps avec l'objet, où l'être tente de jouer tout entier en se ménageant un obstacle suprême et comme une absurdité particulière, du moins représentée, incarnée (p.30). For Sollers the work of Ponge and the nouveau roman, at least in its early form, were of interest in so far as they emphasized language. If some of Robbe-Grillet's earliest novels, such as Dans le labyrinthe, were to be applauded, it was because they were built on a Ponge-like sense of detail which, far from making a fetish of the object or image, brought one back instead face to face with language and a recognition of the absurd impossibility of one's function as a writer: Mais nous sommes dans ce labyrinthe, soumis à ses retours, à cette confusion intentionnelle de miroirs qui ne reflètent que nous et notre chemin (le langage, l'écriture) sans rien, au-delà, que la mort.26 Even at the beginning of the 1960s therefore, one major difference between Robbe-Grillet and Sollers lay in the latter's growing insistence on the tragic nature of writing, not in the fate of such and such a character, nor in the tragedy of a particular event, but in the tragedy of language itself: 'Et le langage lui-même, dans sa manière de se refuser, n'est-il pas déjà tragique?'.27 That this difference was reflected in a divergence of attitudes towards the visual has become evident already through the metaphor linking writing to the perception of the falling man, that seems well-suited to Sollers but rather alien to Robbe-Grillet; similar points of divergence will also be seen in the course of the following discussion of Le parc to introduce into Sollers's novel a tone in many ways distinct from that of the nouveau roman. One could try to assemble the disparate elements of Le parc in order to make of it the sort of story that it is patently not. We see a man looking out at the city's life from the balcony of his fifth-floor flat. Is he a solitary figure wishing he were somehow involved in that life (with the woman who lives on the other side of the street; or as a man of action who features in the war reports in the newspapers)? Or is he a soldier 26. 'Sept propositions sur Alain Robbe-Grillel', p. 150. 27. 'Sept propositions', p.153.

Chapter One

Le parc

whose endangered life leads him to dream about a return to civilian life, and a quiet existence with the chance of some love-affair? Le parc offers many alternative perspectives to the reader, but it also makes demands which go beyond the choosing between alternatives of this sort. The narrator, the young man and the woman, inhabit a narrative that is characterized by a labyrinth of recurrent themes and images, where it is ultimately impossible to give a categorical account of events. Le pare shares certain characteristics with the nouveau roman, the sort of characteristics which lead the reader to wonder about the basic organization of the book. The narrative plays with the conventions of time and space. It gives rise to questions such as: "What importance should one attach to the possible psychological markers of the narrator which are littered throughout the text?", "To what extent is the narrator involved personally in the scenes he narrates?", and so on. As with the nouveau roman, the narrator abdicates any responsibility for the presenting of objective information. So alternatives as to what a woman is doing and thinking are more than once introduced by the neutral 'peut-être' and 'ou bien'. Her mood is described at one point as 'elle rêve, elle est gaie, elle est triste, elle ne sait pas où je suis, elle pense avec soulagement à mon absence...' (p. 15). Not only are we offered no objective information, we are presented with differing, even contradictory, details about character. The protagonists take the form of a 'je', an 'if and an 'elle', with no use of proper names; they have a pronominal rather than individual or psychological existence in the novel, and this is emphasized by the way in which the narrative can move from one to another in the space of a sentence or two as when, for example, at one point the 'if is perhaps metamorphosed into the 'je' :

in this passage as the 'je'? It is ultimately impossible to be certain, for the use of the two personal pronouns seems governed only by an association with tense ('if with the past tense, and 'je' with the present tense), that is developed within a complex network of apparently insignificant spatial relationships ('intérieur' and 'extérieur'; 'droite' and 'gauche'). This passage is typical of Le parc in that pronominal identity is primarily defined in terms of grammatical distinctions (in this case between two different tenses). It is these forms of grammatical distinctions, as opposed to individual human identities, that Jean Ricardou interprets as underpinning the use of personal pronouns in Sollers's novel. For example, he identifies the 'je' as the subject in writing that remains distinct from the human figure of the author, and the 'if/'elle' as pronominal objects rather than as individuals:

26

Dans le veston de toile, chaque objet se trouve à sa place habituelle. Intérieur: à droite, le portefeuille qui contient l'argent (il aimait palper, sentir la peau de lézard finement annelée, luisante), le stylo bien accroché à la doublure; à gauche, l'autre portefeuille, plus épais, où se trouvent les papiers, les lettres. Extérieur: à droite, les clés, les allumettes, les cigarettes; à gauche, le carnet de cuir, les lunettes noires. Je vérifie aussi le contenu des poches du pantalon: à gauche, le mouchoir; à droite, le porte-monnaie; m'assurant avec la main de la présence des objets qui, au cours de la journée, seront employés tour à tour (pp. 103-4). Is the 'je' going through the pockets of 'if, a (possibly dead) friend, as the past tense in 'il aimait palper' might suggest? The passage could possibly be related to the novel's vague themes of war and death. Yet if so, how does one explain the final sentence which states that the objects 'seront employés tour à tour'? Does the 'if then refer to the same figure

il

Mais le Je? Pris lui-même dans la trame de l'écriture, annexé par le monde scriptural, il ne saurait renvoyer à un "antécédent" du monde quotidien et notamment à l'auteur. Face aux personnages pronominaux objets, il figure une sorte de personnage pronominal sujet. Il est la loi incarnée de l'écriture.28 It is as though the narrator, by offering the reader some limited and provisional means of coming to terms with the text through the use of these pronouns, is tempting one to hang onto such markers, only to withdraw or at least to modify them in subsequent passages. Illness regularly threatens to surface as a major theme in the narrative, in passages such as the following: 'ces comprimés que je tiens dans le creux de la main' (p.43); and 'La douleur, seulement, est plus nette, en pleine poitrine' (p.61). It is perhaps one of the book's most important themes since it offers a possibility of unity but equally by its very thematic nature threatens any continuity. 'Mais, corps plus lourd, brusquement, c'est la même douleur, rapide, qui retient mon souffle, me laisse en suspens quelques secondes et qui, l'autre fois, dans l'escalier...' (p.24). In this last instance, the illness overtly introduces a temporal, indicator, relating present to past; but in promoting the materiality of the body, the theme of pain and illness also points to the body's vulnerability and transience. Is the theme of illness something that allows one to build up some sort of cohesion in the story, or is it an image of that tragic impossibility that was mentioned above in relation to Ponge, whereby writing must seek to capture the momentary perception of a falling man? Do the themes of sickness and pain, commandos, death and war, relate 28. Problèmes du nouveau roman, p.65.

28

Chapter One

to personal experience, or to the make-believe sequence of a film, 'quelques images du film où un commando de dix hommes, [est] perdu au milieu d'une forêt montagneuse' (p.43), or even to stories on the front page of a newspaper (p.88)? Does the narrator in fact know the woman, or is it a purely imaginary relationship? Fragments of a love story, from a story of war, are these in any way real, or just entertainment? Does the newspaper article report on a prior event or, more sinisterly, does it invent a sequence of banal or negative images that has repercussions elsewhere in the text? All these uncertainties make the reader highly conscious of his or her own response, leading one to reflect upon the fact that one's view of the narrative will always be influenced by the context in which a particular fragment is presented, as well as the motives that lie behind such a presentation. For this is not a narrative in which the reader is encouraged to place his faith in the master's (narrative) voice. On the contrary, here we are brought to consider not only what is being written, but also the manipulation that inevitably accompanies any form of narrative building. The mood of uncertainty, which we experience when trying to identify the narrator and the characters, extends well beyond those figures and into the sort of description used, for example, to evoke the urban environment: in the uniformity of the buildings; in time, where day merges into night and back into day without our noticing it; in the music from numerous cabarets that spills over into the street, forming a continuous flow of sound with neither direction nor origin. Here, it is difficult to distinguish one flat from another: 'Un salon, une salle à manger, une cuisine, une autre cuisine, un autre salon...' (p. 11). The choice of detail and the style of description used in evoking this urban landscape do sometimes recall the nouveau roman: the neon sign; the use of visual similes such as 'comme une projection photographique' (p.32); the apparently arbitrary but indirectly related detail: three pill bottles (p.43), three paintings (p. 16), and three knocks on the wall (p.60); or a red atlas (p.45), a red carpet (p.60), and a red night light (p.61). Any such elements would equally help to create the mood of a novel by Alain Robbe-Grillet. Yet one thinks also of the novels of Flaubert, where description can function ambiguously, not content simply to build up an image in the reader's mind, but seeking actively to employ language that creates a languid mood of 'ennui' to reflect say Emma Bovary's view of life with Charles. It would be equally possible to see Sollers's urban landscape in terms of a Flaubertian 'ennui' through the paradox whereby narrative is produced to frustrate the development of any interesting or original image, looking as it does to portray instead a sense of sameness and anonymity. As the narrator looks at the flats on the other side of the street, he sees a couple:

Le parc

29

Oui, rien ne va m'échapper si je m'assieds dans le petit fauteuil traîné sur le balcon étroit où je peux, de biais, allonger les jambes, les poser sur la galerie de fer forgé aux feuillages figés le long de tiges symétriques, courbes, rondes, recourbées, noires (p. 12). This passage, coming as it does at the beginning of Le parc, gives an indication of how to read what follows, and makes one wonder from the outset what sort of order one ought to seek to establish during one's reading. The alliteration and the poetic flow of these lines seem to suggest that it is irrelevant, indeed impossible, to make any useful distinction between the various flats or between the couples who inhabit them. 'Une sorte d'ubiquité permanente caractérise chacun des éléments de ce monde', is how Ricardou puts it.29 This prompts the following question: "What if the only real order lay in the structure of the language used to describe them?", or more precisely, "What if such order as we may see in the image were nothing more than the order of words on a page?". So when we read 'et les oiseaux, les hirondelles qui ont mené pendant le crépuscule leurs vols compliqués, se séparent, traversent à tire-d'aile cette large trouée de ciel après la pluie' (p. 12), we would imagine not only these birds, or even possibly a reflection of the various couples, but also surely a metaphor for the work of the narrator with his observant eye and exercise book. For, as I will go on to show, even the reference to the time of day ('le crépuscule') is inscribed in the order of his writing, with the text being divided in terms of the categories of night and day. Le pare is written in numerous short passages with no recognizable chapters. Spatially speaking the only substantial break comes about halfway through the novel (p.82). Accordingly Ricardou identifies two halves of the book, the first part (up to page 82) corresponding to night, and the second part (from page 83) corresponding to day. This simple order is made more complex however by references to an autumnal night (on p. 14) and to a spring day (on p.84), which means that there is a break in the flow of time between night and day.30 In an interview published later, Sollers would give another explanation which further complicates the novel's structure. If Ricardou had recognized that the presence of two different seasons (autumn and spring) operates to interrupt the flow of chronological order, Sollers introduces another division: c'est qu'il s'agissait de deux parties d'un cahier, celle de gauche 29. Problèmes du nouveau roman, p.66. 30. Problèmes du nouveau roman, p.63.

30

Chapter One étant la nuit, celle de droite le jour. En conséquence, les choses se recoupaient et se recouvraient au fur et à mesure que j'écrivais.31

In fact, these various schemata all operate as breaks in narratorial continuity, undermining the conscious act of the narrator having chosen the book and having divided it into two parts. 'A chaque fois qu'une face sera "enclose" dans l'autre, nous serons au plus près de l'essentiel.'32 The point here seems to be that writing is a process the qualities of which tend not to remain confined to the logic of conscious decision making. This is confirmed by the symbolic significance of the two categories night and day, for the night is a breaker of the perception and consciousness of day: 'nuits interminables où il fallait empêcher une fausse continuité de s'établir' (p.66). The night has the power to disturb patterns of thought in the woman, assuming an active role that overcomes her as if physically pushing her into a dreamy sleep: Et la nuit, maintenant qu'elle redresse la tête, appuyant sa nuque sur le coussin rehaussé d'un geste vif, la nuit pénètre en elle, brouille ses pensées, ses souvenirs; elle ne voit plus que des mouvements sans suite, des rues et des visages sans contours, puis c'est le noir, et elle ne songe plus qu'à respirer profondément... (P-15). The breaking in of night and with it writing, upon day and the conscious patterns of thought, has also been alluded to in a much more recent text by Sollers significantly called Carnet de nuit, where he writes that: 'La trace d'une ligne est la nuit' (p.7). Contradictory or multiple references to time do not offer the only barrier to the establishment of a possible chronology. For the narrative of Le pare is built around an orange exercise book, which represents a second layer of writing, a commentary upon the act of writing which is both distinct from the narrating of the novel we are reading and yet directly analogous to it. The orange exercise book is not the one which we have in our hands, it forms a second spatial dimension to complement the two temporal dimensions of day and night. Each mention of the narrator's orange exercise book draws attention to the visual and formal qualities as well as to the significance of the words written in it. We are provided with much information concerning the

31. 'Entretiens sur l'art actuel' (interview with Pierre Daix), Les Lettres Françaises, 29 juillet 1965 [4-5] (p.5). 32. Problèmes du nouveau roman, p.67.

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31

book: it was chosen for its colour; the sentences are written in blue-black ink with an old-fashioned pen; the words are finely written, close together, and leaning to the right, taking up only three-quarters of the page (p.21). We are by these references constantly being distracted from what the words might have to say, as such considerations take second place to the appearance of the book and the materiality of the writing. Surprisingly, this does not give rise to a rambling sequence of unrelated or anecdotal passages since, in the absence of the conventional binding agent of psychological interaction, these repeated allusions to the act of writing are what holds the novel together. There are passages where the only link between 'je', 'if and 'elle' seems to be traced by a series of allusions to writing (pp.26-8). Writing could be said to determine spatial relationships, as of that between the narrator sitting on his balcony and the couple in the flat on the opposite side of the street. But it can also operate temporally, as when one passage written in the present tense and detailing the narrator's book, pen, and writing, gives rise to another written in the past tense and recalling the childhood writing lessons in which the teacher told the boy how to form his letters correctly (p.21). So the process or act of writing provides a temporal as well as a spatial link between the various elements of the narrative, acting as an ordering intermediary in the novel between the subject and experience. Indeed, at one point things are described as flowing from left to right, as if in total sympathy with the logic of writing: the wind: 'on le voit pousser de gauche à droite'; the writer's hands: 'la main gauche dans la paume de la main droite'; and the sea: 'de gauche à droite, derrière nous, la mer, pourtant immobile, semble couler puissamment' (p. 142). So as to prevent these elements forming too much of a pattern, and thus emasculating the power of language to disturb, there is a level in Le parc that corresponds to what Sollers has already been seen to call in Ponge's poetry 'l'impossibilité du poème [...] brisant le discours à l'instant où il s'organise trop bien'. For example, the narrative can suddenly annihilate all notion of time (or rather chronology) as it does when it equates the child's writing materials with those of the narrator: 'C'était le même bois brun, ciré; le même cahier de couleur orange; c'était la même encre, le même effort' (p.22). To be more precise, time is not necessarily annihilated but we are rendered ultimately uncertain about it as our understanding depends entirely on the ambiguity of one word: 'même', and whether we take it literally or not. The reference to writing can join or tear sequences apart, as it does on page 82, when a passage on war is abruptly intercut with a note that the end of the page is approaching. Writing must not try to conceal the work involved in its construction, but should make explicit a dual process of creation and destruction: il fallait bien détruire cette suite complaisante, engourdissante;

32

Chapter One déchirer, déchirer, jeter, faire place nette, recréer l'espace qui s'élargira peu à peu, qui s'épanouira en tous sens (p.73).

A further distinction can now be made between Le parc and the nouveau roman of Robbe-Grillet, namely that Sollers's novel is distinctive in so far as the act of writing is itself highly visible. Where RobbeGrillet's description often tends to make the reader acutely aware of the visible, often film-like, characteristics of an object or scene, Sollers's description promotes above all a highly conspicuous image of the writing process. It would be premature to conclude from this that as a result Sollers reintroduces a degree of subjectivity into his narrative that is absent from the nouveau roman. This raises the complicated question of the relationship between writing and subjectivity which will become an ever greater issue in the 1960s as Sollers follows some of the lessons of Lacanian psychoanalysis, a relationship that will be discussed in die following chapter. A number of different themes treated so far in this chapter all point to a peculiar mood in Le parc. The night overcomes the woman's consciousness as it draws her into dream and sleep. Pain creates a theme that constantly threatens to destroy, (as it seems to in one passage when it provokes a shift from the first person to the third person pronoun: 'Je lui ai montré l'endroit. [...] Et c'est alors qu'il a eu ce malaise si bref (p.35), whereas it is normally the 'je' who is identified with sudden pains of this sort). The narrative, through its accent on writing, creates ambiguity that undermines the order imposed by our conscious perception of the world, leading us into another framework that is constituted by extreme experiences. This is the case for the narrator at several points in the novel, such as when he imagines walking on and on: porté au-delà de mes forces où une précision inconnue prend ma place, où un ordre me pousse en avant, toujours plus loin. Je ne vois rien alors, je n'entends rien, ou plutôt j'atteins une telle confusion de détails que c'est l'inaperçu qui s'exprime en moi par hasard (P-19). In all these ways, writing becomes closely associated with the different experiences of the extreme, through themes of, for example, the night and sexuality. These are all important elements in the creation of the text's counter-image. It is in such a context that one should see the significance of the park, as the narrative's creation of a different scene, a strange place which remains distinct from the urban landscape. The park is a privileged metaphor for writing, a place which allows the writer to experience a sense of freedom and exhilaration, an intoxicating loss of selfhood, in an

Le parc

33

apparently ordered scene: Et je cours à travers la nuit tiède colorée de lumières, j'atteins le parc désert à cette heure, je cours dans les allées obscures, je saute sur les bancs, les chaises de fer, les renversant; je cours, plus léger, libre, parmi les arbres, le visage rejeté en arrière, perdu, me perdant, et souffrant malgré tout de ne pouvoir rester avec ce que je perds, avec rien (p.20). It is at night when the park is at its most splendid, a deserted, even forbidden territory, that it becomes 'au milieu de la ville encore bruyante et lumineuse, le centre du soir' (p.31). The title of Ricardou's article on Le parc, 'Les Allées de l'écriture', reinforces the view that the park is a metaphor for writing in that the tree-lined paths offer the writer a scene of freedom and self-expression analogous to that which he seeks to create on the page of his book. It has been suggested that night, and through it the experience of dreaming, are incorporated into Le parc, to become an important element in the building of narrative. There are numerous passages in the novel which by mentioning dreams confirm this view, such as the following: Mais cette nuit d'automne restera enfin la même, et je serai encore assis, le stylo à la main, pour l'unifier, la poursuivre, tracer entre elle et moi cette phrase interrompue, reprise, jamais sûre que de sa suite rêvée (p.39). In the following pages, this dream element of the text will be drawn upon to point out an analogy with the Freudian notion of dream images. Not only does the Freudian splitting of the individual psyche into various agencies (such as the conscious, the unconscious and the preconscious) offer a valuable means of interpreting the narrative structure of Le parc, but also the visual basis of the dream seems to present itself as a suitable metaphor for the sort of image that Sollers seeks to establish in his text to counter that of the spectacle. It has been shown that the writing process tends to create structures which escape the conscious control of an omniscient narrator; one could imply that, given this absence of a unified perception, the textual image cannot be the innocent product of the narrator's mind's eye. This in turn brings us to an essential point concerning the nature of Sollers's textual counter-image, in so far as it will be seen to be neither purely subjective, nor subservient to an image-based society (as Bloch-Michel considered Robbe-Grillet's texts to be). The Freudian (and by extension Lacanian) perspective is far more interesting because it helps one dispose of the pretension whereby writing is considered to be a tool of consciousness in the creation of an objective description. Before

Chapter One

Le parc

continuing this discussion of Le parc it will be useful to make a digression in order to analyse those aspects of Freud's work on dreams which are essential to the present context. The digression is justified since the problems provoked by Freud's preconceptions about the visual in relation to language (preconceptions that he overtly extends to include the visual arts and poetry) will lead one to consider an alternative perspective that may take more account of the specificity of these forms of expression.

it would mislead the analyst in search of the latent meaning of the dream. To reach his goal, the analyst must transpose the images into language; he uses language to interpret the images which in turn allows him to bring the latent dream-thoughts to consciousness in the analytic session. This involves an implied association (or identification?) between the latent dream-thoughts and the analyst's language in so far as the former becomes 'immediately comprehensible' to the latter. As Freud writes:

In his major work The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud testifies to the remarkable richness and diversity of dreams:

obviously we can only form a proper judgement of the rebus if we put aside criticisms such as these of the whole composition and its parts and if, instead, we try to replace each separate element by a syllable or word that can be presented by that element in some way or other. The words which are put together in this way are no longer nonsensical but may form a poetical phrase of the greatest beauty and significance (p.382).

34

there are few of us who could not affirm, from our own experience, that there emerges from time to time in the creations and fabrics of the genius of dreams a depth and intimacy of emotion, a tenderness of feeling, a clarity of vision, a subtlety of observation, and a brilliance of wit such as we should never claim to have at our permanent command in our waking lives. There lies in dreams a marvellous poetry, an apt allegory, an incomparable humour, a rare irony.33 Despite this 'clarity of vision' and 'marvellous poetry', or perhaps because of it, the analyst has to discount to a certain extent the visual ity of the dream as he sets about interpreting its significance. For there is, owing to the operations of censorship, an essential incompatibility between the dream-image and the dream-thoughts, an incompatibility which forms the basis of the analyst's work as far as dreams are concerned. The manifest dream is primarily visual, a symbolic image of unconscious and repressed desire. However, these images of the latent content are not to be taken literally, because for desire to become represented in a dream, a degree of distortion through the dream-image is inevitable if that desire is to escape total censorship. Thus, unlike the latent dreamthoughts which are 'immediately comprehensible, as soon as we have learnt them', the pictographic forms of the dream-content need to be: transposed individually into the language of the dream-thoughts. If we attempted to read these characters according to their pictorial value instead of according to their symbolic relation, we should clearly be led into error (pp.381-2). Although the various constituent visual parts of the dream may bear some apparent relation to one another, this relation has to be discounted, since 33. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (London, 1976), p.129.

35

It is interesting to note here in passing that Freud values the resultant discourse not only for its significance but also for its 'beauty' and poetic value. In his discussion of representation (one of the operations by which a dream-thought is transposed into the manifest content), Freud makes a clear analogy between the shortcomings of the dream-image as compared to discourse, and those of the visual arts as compared to poetry: The incapacity of dreams to express these things must lie in the nature of the psychical material out of which dreams are made. The plastic arts of painting and sculpture labour, indeed, under a similar limitation as compared with poetry, which can make use of speech; and here once again the reason for their incapacity lies in the nature of the material which these two forms of art manipulate in their effort to express something (pp.422-3). It must be said that Freud's view of the visual arts, as that which is an imitation of an imitation, and which can at best aspire to express something of the meaning that poetry communicates, is a highly traditional one. Freud's claim about the visual's 'incapacity' as compared with discourse creates a problem however, since if the dream-image is not granled any ability to express logical relations, surely the discourse employed in the process of psychoanalytic interpretation risks becoming a purely arbitrary practice, applying a logic which has no meaning for the visual. So Freud is forced to admit that the dream-image can, but only to a limited extent, produce a semblance of logic:

36

Chapter One just as the art of painting eventually found a way of expressing, by means other than the floating labels, at least the intention of the words of the personages represented - affection, threats, warnings, and so on - so too there is a possible means by which dreams can take account of some of the logical relations between their dreamthoughts, by making an appropriate modification in the method of representation characteristic of dreams (p.424).

Having modified the claim by which the manifest content cannot reproduce any of the dream-thoughts' logical relations, to admit some limited logic into the manifest dream-content Freud thereby authorizes his own discourse to intervene through its act of interpretation. We saw that in the dream the visual is the predominant form taken by unconscious drives as they try to force their way through to consciousness. That they partially succeed in penetrating the dream is due to a lessening of resistance in sleep which nevertheless causes a distortion of the drives. Thus the image is a visual distortion of the drive, a distortion produced through, for example, condensation and displacement. The dream-image gives a distorted picture that analytic discourse has to unravel. In the dream the visual may be predominant, but it is not however the only form by which the unconscious drives manifest themselves: Dreams, then, think predominantly in visual images - but not exclusively. They make use of auditory images as well, and, to a lesser extent, of impressions belonging to the other senses. Many things too, occur in dreams (just as they normally do in waking life) simply as thoughts or ideas - probably, that is to say, in the form of residues of verbal presentations (p. 114). Perhaps it is this linguistic component that allows the dream to contain some limited logical relations. If, as Freud claims, the visual forms have only a limited capacity for expressing the relationships between elements, it is indeed curious that he chooses a particularly visual metaphor to describe die relationship between the different systems: we are justified in assuming the existence of the systems (which are not in any way psychical entities themselves and can never be accessible to our psychical perception) like the lenses of the telescope, which cast the image. And, if we pursue this analogy, we may compare the censorship between two systems to the refraction which takes place when a ray of light passes into a new medium (P-771).

Le parc

37

The ideas on the relationship between the latent dream-thoughts and the manifest visual content which Freud expresses in The Interpretation of Dreams are echoed in other of his texts. For example, in the Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, he writes of 'the difficulty of giving an account of dreams', which is 'due to our having to translate these images into words'.34 The difficulty comes from the fact that dream-images are a distortion of their stimulus, thus analysis attempts a sort of translation of its material: the dream-element is not the right thing, but only takes the place of something else - of the genuine thing which I do not know and which I am to discover by means of the dream-analysis (p. 140). Freud continues with the same idea in another text, claiming that 'The visual components of word-presentations are secondary', and that: the relations between the various elements of this subject matter, which is what specially characterizes thoughts, cannot be given visual expression. Thinking in pictures is, therefore, only a very incomplete form of becoming conscious. In some way, too, it stands nearer to unconscious processes than does thinking in words, and it is unquestionably older than the latter both ontogenetically and phylogenetically.35 This last point will be worth retaining when in the next chapter we come to consider Lacan, since Freud states that the visual has a greater affinity with the unconscious than do the structures of language. Are the perceived shortcomings of the visual due to its inherent incapacity fully to represent latent dream-thought structures (as Freud insists), or are they due primarily to the intervention of censorship? If the latter were true, it would reassert the value of the visual since at least some representation slips past the censor, even if it is distorted, whereas the dream-thought in its original, latent form (with which the analyst's discourse identifies) could not escape censorship at all. Yet it is clear that Freud needs to see the dream-image in terms of a distorted representation of latent dream-thoughts in order to authorize the intervention of his own discursive analysis. By rethinking these last two possibilities in conjunction with one

34. Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (London, 1973), p. 118. 35. Sigmund 1'reud, On Melapsychology (London, 1984), p.359.

Chapter One

Le parc

another, would it not be possible to argue that an analysis of the dreamimage should not merely conceive of the latter as a representation of logical, if repressed, patterns of thought, but should concentrate more on its capacity to be disruptive of patterns of logic and discourse and also (the two points are related) should concentrate on its capacity, however limited this may be, to escape censorship? Instead, therefore, of positing analytic discourse as that which employs the dream-image in order logically and consciously to re-establish the order of the latent dreamthoughts, one would be led to question whether there might not in fact be a compelling contiguity between logical discourse and censorship, a censorship created by the forms and patterns of logical constraints, to which the visual does not so readily succumb. This possibility would even seem to be supported by Freud's own admission that what he calls 'thinking in pictures' is 'nearer to unconscious processes' than 'thinking in words'. If this is so, then the problem relates less to the inability of the visual to express these thoughts than to language's difficulty in finding a form suitable for representing, or analysing, these images in its discourse. In short, might not the problem in interpreting dream-images lie more with the rational preconceptions of Freud's discourse than with the nature of the images themselves? Might there not be some characteristic of the dream-image that allows it to escape censorship, and which analytic discourse cannot account for? A preliminary conclusion to this discussion of the visual in psychoanalytic theory would suggest that it is in so far as analysis creates a certain rational framework that these workings of the unconscious escape it. We have seen how Freud associates speech (and, presumably analytic discourse) with poetry, against visual art. However the necessary distinction would appear to be not between on the one hand speech or poetry and on the other hand the visual, but between on the one hand the visual or poetry and on the other hand rational discourse. Whereas the former have the capacity to evade censorship by confronting the law of repression (sexual and linguistic), the latter tends to reproduce it. If our definition of the visual dream-content, as being the scene of repressed desire where desire finally becomes visible, is pertinent, then the affinity this has both with visual art and poetic discourse offers a valuable context for the study of these forms of imaginative activity. The various points on Freud which have been made above have a bearing on the subject of this book. For the narrative form of a novel such as Le parc and the notion of a textual counter-image which is neither an idealist construct nor a banal product of the spectacle, Freud's work on dreams offers a particularly interesting framework. At the same time, his ambiguous attitude towards the visual in dreams, and his view of the dream-image's 'incapacity' as compared to discourse, which develop out of a traditional conception of the visual arts (as a representation of a

representation), perhaps lead his theory away from the unconscious forces it seeks to free from repression. In retaining certain Freudian notions therefore, I will not hold the visual arts in a purely subordinate role to language, any more than I will define narrative discourse in terms of its commonly perceived duty to represent the visual experience of perception, but will rather attempt to demonstrate how the novel and the visual arts can combine in a postmimetic order by virtue of a common threat they pose to established patterns of logic and perception. The problems that Freud encounters with the visual will help one define such a relationship.

38

39

A vital part of Le pare is its technique of multiplying the temporal and spatial references until they seem to lie next to one another despite their contradictions, and this is reflected in the novel's epigraph from Rousseau about a park being a composition of disparate parts where everything seems natural except the assemblage. The non-resolution of contradictory elements is of course one of the defining characteristics of the dream-image, which lends a Freudian tone to the narrative: comme s'il voulait persister dans l'entre-deux au-delà des limites permises, conserver chaque seconde à l'intérieur de la suivante (et, en même temps, devenir leur succession instantanée, leur invisible différence imagée par le décor); comme s'il tentait de pousser le regard à un point de rupture insoupçonné, provoquer la crise décisive, supprimer le spectacle ou, au contraire s'y transférer... (p. 79). Here again, by analogy with Ponge's metaphor of the falling man providing a method for the writer, this 'point de rupture' could be described as Sollers's own method; it is a Freudian method perhaps, with the 'entredeux' as a state akin to that between consciousness and sleep where a dream may take shape. In 'Les Allées de l'écriture', Jean Ricardou elaborates upon the peculiarity of the written image in Le pare. The mental visual imagination in everyday life 'suscite des images évolutives selon un flux dont l'évolution repose sur une evanescence continue', whereas the imagination in written forms is of a different nature: 'Le fragment écrit n'est pas fuite, mobilité, disparition; il est inscription, référence stable'.36 Another distinguishing feature of the image in a written description is that it forms 'une synthèse différée. Les détails qui se fondaient dans l'image s'y trouvent exhaussés, individualisés, éclairés', contrary to visual and mental images 36. Problèmes du nouveau roman, p.58.

40

Chapter One

which have in common the fact that they become 'une synthèse immédiate en laquelle chaque détail perd son autonomie' (p.58). The synthetic unity which Ricardou attributes to mental images comes about through each image effacing another, unlike descriptive images 'tendant à peupler l'imaginaire d'autant de séries d'images analogiques qu'il y a de détails, et cela, autant de fois que la pensée se réfère, à son gré, au fragment de base' (p.59). Ricardou illustrates this in Le parc with an extended analysis of the use of the adjective 'rouge' which appears in numerous different contexts, creating an instance of what he calls 'cette multiplication intense, obsessionnelle' (p.59). The deferred synthesis of the written image retains a certain autonomy, implying a particular notion of time and one that, like dreams, can support contradiction between constituent elements, whilst the obsessive feature of recurrent images suggests a dream-like overdetermination. In this way one could develop Ricardou's argument to suggest an affinity between Sollers's textual counter-images and the Freudian notion of dream-images, that are both unlike the consciously produced mental images, and also perhaps the social images of the spectacle within which our conscious existence is played out. So it would not seem to be an exaggeration to claim that one of the keys to Le parc lies in its treatment of the Freudian unconscious. D'imposer, sans l'admettre, une contradiction, transformée en principe nouveau d'identité par une impalpable logique inconnue... Face et revers, nuit et jour; ou plutôt, à la charnière, face et nuit, revers et jour: ni l'un ni l'autre; les deux à la fois (p.135). Having gone into some detail about the ways in which Sollers attempts to produce a textual counter-image, a scene with certain affinities with the work of Freud on dream-images, I will now go on to consider some specific ways in which the narrative relates to particular visual images such as paintings. The uncertainty produced in the narrative by the instability of character and narratorial voice is one of the techniques, it has been seen, by which is created a heightened awareness of the narrative as writing. The effect of this is particularly striking for example in a passage (pp.53-4) that describes the narrator's eyes which, far from developing into a psychological study of what is perceived, is instead an elaboration of the colours and form of the eyes themselves. In no sense are we looking through the eyes of the narrator: we are offered nothing more than a look at them. This is one way in which the text produces its deferred synthesis, through the break in the immediacy of the apparently natural bond between the subject and the object of his perception: Le regard guetté entre le commencement du regard et sa réflexion

Le parc

41

pourra-t-il jamais devenir sensible (c'est de là qu'il faudrait partir), ne l'a-t-il pas été à mon insu, sans que je puisse en occuper la place? [...] Encore une fois l'image me regarde, les yeux de cette image; et, encore une fois, l'inconcevable espace se reforme entre nous (pp. 147-8). As with Ponge, language will never attempt to disguise the distance separating itself from the object's visuality, and the otherness of the object or image is confirmed through a conspicuous style that draws the reader's attention towards the narrator's role as a viewer rather than simply trying to present a transparent image of what is seen. Language itself thereby becomes a highly visible intermediary between the writer and his experience of the image. Referring to one of the three paintings on his bedroom wall, the narrator of Le parc describes three figures - two men and a woman (corresponding perhaps to 'je', 'if and 'elle'), as somehow standing apart from the scene behind them: [ils] semblent poursuivre un entretien ou des discours parallèles sans rapport avec le spectacle qui se déroule derrière eux. Non qu'ils n'y participent de quelque façon, mais plutôt comme énigmes, comme équivalences ambiguës (leurs gestes sont trop larges, trop visibles, et que disent-ils?); placés tel un choeur sur le côté de la scène, mais rien ne leur échappe, on le sent, il suffirait qu'ils se retournent, lèvent la main... (p. 16). Later (pp.64-5) a similar scene recurs, but this time in a photograph radier than in a painting. Here the narrator specifies that the characters are adopting conventional poses, turned away from the picturesque landscape behind them, staring at nothing in particular so as to comply with die lighting requirements of the photographer. What these two passages have in common is the resistance they represent to the notion of the spectacle. By drawing an invisible line to separate the characters from the scene surrounding them, the narrator destroys the apparently conventional correspondence between the two. This breaking up of homogeneity is pursued as die means to promote the text's alternative perspective which, it has to be emphasized, is generally opposed to the social representations of the spectacle. The contrast between the two is clearly expressed in the following passage, where shades of pink, grey and blue endow the (unnamed) painting with an unusual logic: cette toile où nul spectacle réel n'est identifiable; où, plutôt, s'ébauchent, croirait-on, des scènes partielles et sitôt interrompues, des lieux à peine indiqués par un détail coloré mais reliés par celle

42

Chapter One couleur même, lieux qu'un fil invisible réunit; formes dont la composition ordonnée selon des principes cachés mais rigoureusement ressentis, constitue un spectacle en formation, une clé pour tout spectacle, et, en somme, une sorte d'image apparente et souterraine - fermée - de l'illimité (p. 134).

The paintings which Sollers chooses to discuss, or in some cases invents, are inevitably more complex than the images of the spectacle. Painting is a privileged point of reference for the writer, offering a richness of experience akin to that which he wishes to explore in his texts and a complexity of structure that allows his language to explore it. To support this one has the comments of Sollers in an interview given in 1965: 'comme un peintre tire les conséquences des dimensions de sa toile, je suis parti d'un espace matériel du papier, et par conséquent d'un espace mental'.37 That the richness of painting attracts the narrative, enticing the latter to establish a discourse with it, is borne out in the following passage that is worth quoting in full: Dans le fond du tableau, comme par une fenêtre invisible (ou que le peintre a oublié de dessiner) s'étend, sans la moindre transition, une allée à l'aspect funèbre plantée d'arbres gris récemment taillés (c'est l'hiver) avec, en son milieu, une fontaine au vaste bassin. Personne ne passe dans cette avenue où s'échappe sans doute la mélodie de l'orgue (à moins qu'elle soit la traduction visible, pour les deux partenaires, d'une évocation commune, ou encore, pour le spectateur seul, le signe que l'extérieur, au même moment, est en violent contraste avec cet intérieur luxueux et chaud). Quoiqu'il en soit, une telle coexistence d'éléments disparates - mais qu'on sent obscurément reliés - accentue l'aspect ambigu de la scène, prolonge le malaise, libère un sens difficilement accessible - mais d'autant plus puissant -, fait vivre, en un mot, la représentation qui se charge peu à peu de significations, de propos retenus, de signaux imperceptibles; la fait vivre, protégée, au premier plan, sans qu'aucun des personnages semble se douter le moins du monde que l'espace, derrière lui, est ouvert (pp.114-15). This passage also demonstrates that painting does not remain a distant source of inspiration for the narrative, but that it provides the alternative scene wherein the narrative is free to develop its thematic preoccupations. Thus in this particular instance, the painting allows the narrator to establish his familiarly ambiguous spatial coordinates ('extérieur' and 'intér37. 'Entretiens sur l'art actuel', p.5.

L'Intermédiaire

43

ieur', 'visible' and 'invisible'), in a framework tolerant of 'une telle coexistence d'éléments disparates' (a characteristic it shares with the Freudian dream-image that supports contradiction), but most tellingly of all it incorporates the park (the narrator's presence in which, it should be remembered, I have identified as an analogy for the act of writing). L'Intermédiaire The fictional and critical texts (written between 1957 and 1962) contained in L'Intermédiaire might be read in parallel to Le parc, since the two books share much in mood and style. This view is supported by the author's note on the back cover of L'Intermédiaire, describing the book as '[une] recherche de l'unité dans la variété', which complements the epigraph (from Rousseau) for Le parc referred to earlier. The comments made thus far on the visual and painting in this novel lead into a discussion of three texts from L'Intermédiaire. For Sollers, the term 'intermédiaire' could be said to refer to writing, the symbolic matrix between the subject and the physical world or between the subject and his experience of art.38 The various texts that make up L'Intermédiaire are related to one another, Sollers claimed in response to a question about the book's unity: Il est vrai que l'unité de ce livre est dans la recherche d'un état intermédiaire entre le rêve et la réalité, ce qui n'est pas la poésie, mais un certain caractère poétique. Je pars toujours d'une espèce de choc, qui peut être très caché, très muet, mais qui est occasionné par une réalité. Et alors j'essaie d'expliquer ce choc. Je raconte pourquoi on sort de soi en même temps que l'objet vient vers 39 vous. Sollers introduces the collection of essays in the following way: Qu'il s'agisse de peintures ou d'événements fortement réels (cependant à la limite du rêve), de réflexions ou de descriptions glissantes,

38. In a later interview Sollers would refer to the literary signifier as one that does not have to choose between seriousness and frivolity, between sense and nonsense: 'Il n'a pas à se décidabiliser. Il est ce corps intermédiaire' (Vision à New York, p. 151). 39. 'Sollers acceuille le jeune l-'lauherl' (interview with Bernard Pivol), Le Figaro (Littéraire), 9 mars 1963, p.2.

44

Chapter One c'est toujours l'état intermédiaire vers un lieu de renversement qui est provoqué, subi, poursuivi (p.8).

This 'état intermédiaire' would seem to be a state in which the subject is as if drawn out from his own individuality, in the face of an experience which, as with Proust, can be extreme or banal. Whatever the experience (the ones I have chosen to discuss below relate to a response to the threat of death, the contemplation of a loved painting, and a critique of Poussin), his responses to these privileged moments have as their common link not only the fact that they are endowed with a peculiar force, but also that they become subjects of writing. He will try to reach them knowing that his desire is impossible but knowing also, as was said of Ponge earlier, that his language is given the greatest force when it recognizes that fact. This explains how the text provides a 'lieu de renversement' in a momentary disruption of consciousness. The remainder of this chapter consists of a discussion of three short, youthful texts from L'Intermédiaire, each of which creates the sort of scene in the text that I have identified as being one of Sollers's major preoccupations. In 'La Mort, au printemps' (1958), the narrator simply describes how he was overtaken by illness while being transported home urgently one evening, and then the period of slow recuperation during which he is presented with a vision of the world quite different from that of everyday experience. The intermediary state, reminiscent almost of a prolonged Proustian privileged moment, is brought on by illness, and the threat of death, the extremity of which provokes in him a heightened sensibility. Having returned home to his bed, the first thing that the narrator notices is the play of light entering the room through the curtains, creating flitting figures remarkable in that:

L'Intermédiaire

45

manifestation furtive d'un pouvoir que je possédais à mon insu, d'un talent négligé peut-être, et qui avait été révélé par une facilité inattendue' (pp. 12-13). As with Proust, habit, continuity and the conscious recourse to one's memory are all enemies of the most intense experience which attempts to overcome the poverty of one's everyday contact with the world. Although the latter can in no way be recreated by the intellect, there are two associated ways in which it can be sensed: firstly by a keen visual imagination and secondly by writing. It comes even with the most simple of activities, as when drinking from a glass of wine for example: 'Il y aurait ce geste de ma main dans la lumière pour amener le verre à mes lèvres' (p. 14). As the narrator regains his strength so he seems to re-enter the world inhabited by everyone else. He sees the objects of his room that he had called into question slowly reform themselves as if to underline the fact the normality has been re-established. Je pensais que j'aurais tout le temps de revenir sur ce plaisir, de l'analyser, de le surprendre; les premières phrases qui en seraient l'image se formaient dans mon esprit et je les murmurais, mais sans m'arrêter à aucune comme si je pouvais me reposer sur elles et que la facilité de leur composition, déjà, ne me retînt plus (p. 18). Thereafter, things appear to have returned to normal, although the narrator senses that as a result of the experience life will never be quite the same.

c'était leur volonté propre, leur affirmation d'une forme qui, malgré la fragilité, la rapidité d'une existence sitôt compromise, s'offrait ainsi le plaisir d'une complication et d'une harmonie (p. 10).

Coming into the museum from a walk on a cold November's day, passing in front of various paintings, the narrator of 'Bras de Seine près de Giverny' (1959) is drawn to a painting by Monet that induces in him a feeling of vertigo. Knowing that the painting is there, he cannot from the first moment stare openly at it because he is afraid that too aggressive an approach will force it like a loved person to flee, or destroy the hidden sense of its aura:

This is the first sign of another existence, to which one is generally blind in the course of a normal day: 'Malade, je sortais de cette existence comme un dormeur de son sommeil', that creates an ambiguous sensation, and that makes him doubt his own self: 'on eût pu dire qu'un personnage imaginaire avait pris ma place pendant un temps, occupant tous les postes clés de moi-même' (p. 12). Yet the vital key to his life remains concealed, impossible to recall at will:

On ne verra bien que ce qu'on a d'abord entrevu. Parce qu'il semble qu'alors on ne dépense pas toute son attention dans le premier contact - forcément incomplet - et que l'on réponde à la difficulté d'un spectacle complexe par la réserve et la prudence du regard, mettant à atteindre une oeuvre la même entreprise de séduction, les mêmes détours, les mêmes fausses indifférences qu'à s'approcher d'un être vivant (p.22).

l'annonce ou la promesse d'une perfection indéchiffrable, comme la

It has become a cliché to talk about the light in the Impressionists'

Chapter One

L Intermédiaire

paintings, but Sollers here, as in other texts of L'Intermédiaire, makes of light the guiding sense of his experience, not the light which we all take for granted, but the creative light of an uncommon experience. Shortly after the passage I have just quoted, the text becomes a page of short phrases and single-sentence paragraphs, giving an ethereal mood to the impressions. It begins thus:

but is related nevertheless to the themes of this chapter. The art of Poussin was brought to the fore by the Louvre's major exhibition of 1960 and the work of the colloquium associated with it; it is likely that this encouraged Sollers to contribute to the debate. Of the three texts it is 'La Lecture de Poussin' that forms the most direct association between text and painting with Sollers claiming even that Poussin can be read. Sollers first describes the actions of a reader:

46

Voyons, il est clair que tout ici dépend de la lumière. Elle reste aérée, suspendue. Elle ne pèse pas, elle balaierait, elle raserait plutôt (les herbes, les surfaces), quoiqu'absente. La lumière ne vient pas, on ne lui donne pas de source, elle est là, partout présente, exaltante (doucement), sans qu'on sache comment. Le soleil ne peut être seul à provoquer ce bain, cette infusion, cette étendue toute-puissante de clarté. Superflu, il n'est, si l'on veut, que la signature de l'artiste dans un tableau (étranger au spectacle, et pourtant sa cause, son auteur). Cette lumière échappée, répandue, si richement diluée, est le paysage (pp.23-24). What is it about the dark blue and pale green that make them stand out from the painting as if calling him to approach? Why does he feel at a loss to explain it, a loss that seems suddenly to pervade his body, and his being? Et n'est-ce pas que ma sensation diffère indéfiniment sa cause, tâtonne, s'élargit à tout mon être, tendu enfin dans un plaisir qui semble exister pour un moment dans un espace intermédiaire entre le tableau et moi, et où nous déléguons chacun nos qualités communes? Ainsi le regard violent crée-t-il son propre écran qui me cache ce que je vois. Ainsi voulons-nous être émus, sans rien perdre de notre vision. Or les oeuvres qui vivent en nous longtemps, douloureuses et irrésolues, le font par ce cortège confus qu'elles provoquent, par cette insatisfaction, cet agacement qui nous restent lorsque nous avons tenté de parler d'elles, par cette ombre lumineuse qu'elles préservent et qui nous retient (p.25). To lose oneself at such a moment is the basis of the thrill which the experience hints at: 'Vieux rêve: cesser de vivre au moment où l'on vit le plus' (p.26). The third and final text from L'Intermédiaire to be discussed in this chapter is called 'La Lecture de Poussin' (1961). Unlike 'La Mort, au printemps' and 'Bras de Seine à Giverny' it is not a fictional narrative,

Al

on part de la gauche pour aboutir à la droite, et ainsi de suite dans un mouvement de parfaite horizontalité qui progresse en éléments distincts et séparés les uns des autres - reliés les uns aux autres par une nécessité logique; la totalité d'une page (ou d'une phrase) disparaissant, après avoir joué, dans la compréhension ou la sensation qu'on en a (car les mots ont beau persister à l'arrière-plan, ils s'annulent dans une somme à la fois vague et précise qui n'existe pas) (p.77). He then goes on to claim that one has a broadly analogous experience when standing in front of Poussin's pictures since they too are readable in their essentially horizontal organisation. Thus the viewer follows: la démarche d'une expression et d'une structure nécessaires, la syntaxe et les mots remplacés par les formes et les couleurs, certaines mises en évidence et soulignées (comme le substantif ou les verbes) dans, si j'ose dire, un "espace fort" de lumière (p.77). In stating that Poussin can be read, Sollers is following established commentators on the painter such as Walter Friedlaender, who writes of the 'Funeral of Phocion' that: everything is clearly cut, in almost geometrical form; the space is delimited, and every object may be seen and understood. One can almost "read" these landscapes as Poussin planned his figure paintings to be read.40 In this painting the viewer's gaze is led down from the top of the painting by a series of horizontal lines, as though he were reading a text: from the thin line of darker cloud, to the more or less straight line of buildings spanning the background, to the path in the foreground along which two men carry the corpse of Phocion. In a footnote, Sollers makes the comment that the reading of the painting could also, of course, operate in 40. Walter I'riedlaender, Poussin (London, 1966), p. 176.

48

Chapter One

more than one direction, unlike most written texts: 'En S ou bien en Z'. 41 Also unlike a written text, with a Poussin painting: la somme existe au premier abord, somme plane et parfaite, insaisissable, qui remplit aussitôt la capacité de notre attention (amorce de la vision: un lieu est créé "en nous", limité et complet, divers, comble) (pp.77-8). That this first contact does not exhaust one's response to the painting is suggested by the word 'somme', meaning both 'sum total' as well as 'general survey' or 'overview'. Although the painting immediately captures the attention, it carries with it something elusive and imperceptible that appeals less to the senses than to the critical faculties. This forms the second degree of contact: '[on] s'enchaîne insensiblement par la science de la modulation, du contraste ou du complément: c'est alors un va-etvient du tout à la partie, du mouvement partiel à la somme immobile' (p.78). Again, the choice of words is both appropriate and subtle: 'modulation', here used for the critical reading of a painting, has various meanings embracing music but also language. Sollers is claiming an analogy between text and painting on the basis of the fact that both written and painted surface are structured, being made up of distinct elements that are related by some overall logic. Of course, Poussin is the ideal painter to fit Sollers's purpose in this article; not only are many of Poussin's themes taken from literature, but also his theory of painting is highly developed. Taking the artist's idea of the 'deux regards' (the 'aspect' or perception and the 'prospect' or rational understanding of what is seen) Sollers reads the paintings as a synthesis of sight and conception, the result of which 'semble achever l'espace, dérouter le temps' (p.78). The attraction of Poussin lies in this combination, made explicit in his theory, of an overtly critical reinterpretation of the sense impressions which creates artistic order. As Sollers writes: 'Voir, c'est l'évidence, c'est donc après avoir vu, puis regardé, voir à nouveau' (p.78). Such a re-viewing is central for a work which on one level, has its own composition as its subject (p.81). Sollers uses this broad t framework to see beyond the apparently cold and dull qualities of Poussin's painting, which is the characteristic perhaps most often attributed to him:

41. L'Intermédiaire, p.107 note 1. One could note, in passing, the correspondence between this passage and Barthes' later text S/Z, which also aims at producing readings that cut across established patterns.

L'Intermédiaire

49

Voyons d'abord cet aspect "terne" des tableaux de Poussin. Indéniable, il semble pourtant annoncer, au contraire d'une apparence proprement lumineuse, je ne sais quelle clarté seconde et globale, et seulement visible pour l'esprit (l'esprit qui voit le corps, de l'intérieur) après la traversée d'un obstacle matériel (p.80). Thus the viewer is initiated into the fullness of the painting, not shocked or dazzled, in a way similar to the narrator who sought to implicate himself in Monet's view of the Seine. Another instance such as this is in the picture of the shepherd (presumably 'Et In Arcadia Ego'), where Sollers points to the importance of the hidden, as the shepherd seems to be tracing his own shadow in the letters of the tomb that contains his predecessor: 'comme un miroir qui ne renverrait que le sens de la vision qui l'interroge' (p.87). Space often seems to dominate time, a domination that produces: ce ralenti, lenteur et silence liés comme en rêve, dont me semblent frappées ces images; de là, chez ce réaliste (qui étudie la nature, les objets, copie, décrit, avec une exactitude passionnée), un effet d'irréalité ou de réalité choisie et montée, juxtaposée selon une logique secrète, cachée et proprement poétique (p.93). Yet this dream is no more the simple antithesis of reality than are any of the other experiences recounted in L'Intermédiaire: Une nuit, en rêve, je me suis trouvé dans une galerie inconnue tendue de noir, où les tableaux de Poussin étaient accrochés à l'envers. La voix d'une femme invisible me faisait remarquer que l'écriture abstraite ainsi révélée était parfaitement lisible. En fait, je voyais les toiles en rêvant comme je les vois réellement (c'est-àdire renversées sur la rétine). Endormi, je voyais donc en esprit dans mes yeux (p. 105). The thematic continuity between the paintings makes Sollers think of poems where: 'les mêmes éléments seront transposés et variés jusqu'à l'obsession' (p.84), making one aware of them primarily as bodily elements rather than as independent psychological beings. He chooses to emphasize the figures, calling them 'glorieux, davantage que physiques' who, in their proliferation 'constituent à l'intérieur de la toile une vive fugue charnelle' (p.85). This would be one curious way in which the order for which Poussin is famous is contradicted by an element of violent and sexual disorder such as for example in the bacchanal figures. I quoted earlier from the description of a painting in Le parc to show how Sollers attempted to institute a break between the characters and their

Chapter One

L'Intermédiaire

background, and in a sense Poussin could be said to be doing something similar by his use of light to delineate space. As Walter Friedlaender writes:

ting that may well remain indistinct or even desert him altogether. This is the case for the narrator confronted by Monet's painting of the Seine:

50

He distinguishes layers in light and space; to delineate the figurai and landscape elements, he uses a clean light that strikes and reflects rather than saturates; he creates dynamic complexes of color; and, by fixing all details with almost geometric precision, he builds up a landscape that is classical in the fullest sense - clear, balanced, and measurably and intelligibly limited.42 The interest of Sollers's text on Poussin lies not so much in its originality, for it mostly elaborates upon Poussin's theory and established research on the painter. 'La Lecture de Poussin' remains of interest because it explores some of the basic themes of the present study. Poussin's two 'regards', where the 'prospect' constitutes a critical reinterpretation of the initial 'aspect' of perception, has a parallel in the comments made on the role of description in Le parc. There, it may be recalled, different layers of meaning were discerned so that the birds, for example, could be seen as a metaphor for the writing of narrative. Given the attention Poussin pays to the organization of his pictorial space, one cannot help but be conscious of the fact that each figure or building is very much an element of a detailed structure. In promoting a visual aesthetics of the mind, rather than simply seeking to paint what is visible, Poussin's art also has a relevance to Le parc in the way that the novel tends to reinvent categories of day and night in conjunction with the seasons. This is no doubt what leads Sollers to write of 'un présent intégral' (p.93), as Poussin blurs seasonal difference by for instance painting foliage on trees when the season in which the painting is set suggests that this is factually inappropriate (p.92). Here, the classic distinction between Claude and Poussin would be confirmed: in the former there is a painter devoted to creating a highly visible luminosity and in the latter a painter whose paintings admit of day and night, spring and autumn. The texts of L'Intermédiaire are not unlike Le parc in that writing is often presented as a precarious activity. The various experiences of L'Intermédiaire all pose a threat to writing even as they point inexorably towards it. To put it another way, they deal with experiences that destroy the individual's normal perception of the world, but from the relative insecurity of his new position he is allowed a glimpse of a possible wri42. Poussin, p.78.

51

Sa forme et son absence de forme font lever en moi mille débuts de phrases, mille chantonnements intérieurs, mais sans mots, comme si je connaissais l'exacte musique qui lui correspond, mais non les paroles. A son égard, je suis entre deux mondes, entre l'informulé et le trop de l'expression, à un niveau où le langage est en marche du fond de moi sans qu'il puisse jamais me parvenir. Mais n'est-ce pas la meilleure preuve de ce paysage, hésitant entre ses couleurs, dissous, pas encore décidé, pur? J'aime cet intermédiaire: l'impossible rêverie d'une phrase, d'une seule phrase (p.27). A set of relationships is being established between writing, dreams (and by association the unconscious), and the visual. The counter-image that the text seeks to promote in opposition to that of the spectacle is based in the imagination on which creative art forms are based; any such image is not to be considered in isolation from the narrative itself. The distinction is made clearly enough in an interview Sollers gave in 1963: 'Le langage des images ne m'attire pas. C'est avec l'écriture que je me trouve en pleine liberté. L'imagination est iconoclaste'.43 Neither Le parc nor the texts oí L'Intermédiaire make an idol of the image. Le parc has decidedly textual preoccupations relating to narrator and character, however much it plays with their conventional functions in the novel, as well as to time and space: 'tout se déroule, en effet, en quelques secondes mais occupe un temps interminable, et les phrases, à bon droit, peuvent représenter successivement une durable simultanéité' (p. 124), comments the narrative as though upon itself. Far from worshipping the image, Le parc shuns it in favour of a different sort of perspective or counterimage, by courting art and highlighting language's own opacity. As an article in L'Intermédiaire puts it: 'Voilà sans doute où commence la vision, dans cette mémoire qui relaie l'attention et désormais l'imagine audevant du visible' (p. 160). The association of Freud's work on dreams with this alternative visual scene in the literary text is useful in preventing the latter from being considered an idealistic escape from society, but rather a valid and rewarding response to it. Si le rêve, la folie, la nuit ne marquaient l'emplacement d'aucun seuil solennel, mais traçaient et effaçaient sans cesse les limites que 43. 'A la confluence secrète du surréalisme et du nouveau roman' (interview with Jean Gaugeard), Les Lettres Françaises, | 2 I | mars 1963, p.4.

52

Chapter One franchissent la veille et le discours, quand ils viennent jusqu'à nous et nous parviennent déjà dédoublés?44

Here, following Foucault, one could see the categories of dream, night and the imagination not as some far off ideal world, but as part of the fabric of the text.

Chapter Two Bio-graphical preamble (1965-1982) The broad period covered within this second chapter is for Sollers characterized by a greater subverting of literary conventions and by a contesting of his own role as perceived by certain critics. Thus a difficult form of writing combines with an aggressive mood at Tel Quel when one of the primary objectives was to destroy images of writers and writing compatible with the spectacle. Sollers met Julia Kristeva not long after she arrived from Bulgaria to study in Paris at the end of 1965. Kristeva's own autobiographical novel Les Samouraïs (1990) offers one way of viewing her relationship with Sollers (they would later marry and have a son), through the characters of Olga and Hervé Sinteuil. On arriving in France, Olga finds her strongest impressions centre on the intellectual excitement generated by the group at the journal called Maintenant (otherwise Tel Quel). Olga is first impressed by the passion widi which the discussions are fuelled and in the middle of these discussions is Hervé Sinteuil with his theories on revolution, culture, and the individual: Que la transformation de la société est une supercherie si elle n'est pas transformation des individus. Que les individus - il disait "les sujets" - sont des "êtres parlants", et que c'est leurs manières de dire qu'il fallait commencer par transformer. D'où le rôle révolutionnaire de la littérature, de l'avant-garde en particulier; ce n'était ni de l'ésotérisme ni de l'art pour l'art, mais une "opération chirurgicale" d'une finesse inouïe dans les tissus les plus fins du corps social, les tissus de la parole, du style, de la rhétorique, des rêves (p.35).

44. Michel Foucault, 'Distance, aspect, origine', in Théorie d'ensemble (Paris, 1968), pp. 11-24 (p. 19).

This description reflects the development of a tone quite different from that to be found in Sollers's earlier, less political texts. Yet his adoption of an increasingly theoretical language combined with his promotion of revolutionary politics can be seen to have its origins in the critics' reactions to his first published works. In terms of our observations on the spectacle, one could say that Sollers was anxious to avoid being seen as an orthodox writer whose work represented the views of society as a whole. He therefore set out to contradict any such image that may have been formed by his previous texts and the critics' interpretations of them. The response to 'Le défi' and Une curieuse solitude promoted Sollers, it

Chapter Two

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may be recalled, from being an unknown twenty-two-year-old to being the heir to an established literary tradition. Emile Henriot, in his weekly column for Le Monde, introduced 'un très bon livre, un grand talent, et un écrivain'.1 It is not difficult to see what motivated this enthusiasm, for in the 1950s many in the literary establishment felt that the standards of literature were being threatened by the rise of the nouveau roman of writers such as Alain Robbe-Grillet. By comparison the as yet more conventional narrative of Sollers still appeared to address itself to a recognizable community shared both by writer and reader: 'ce jeune Sollers tout à coup m'accroche en me parlant de moi, c'est-à-dire de vous, directement'.2 The sentimental journey through youth with which Une curieuse solitude dealt must have offered welcome respite to the critic bewildered by the radical experiments of other young writers. One can detect a certain relief in Henriot's critique: 'Il a, comme d'emblée, trouvé sa méthode, sa forme, son langage: ce sont ceux de bons écrivains de toujours, les amateurs de vérité' .3 Whatever Sollers's feelings might have been about his book at the time of its publication, there can be little doubt that responses such as that of Henriot encouraged him later (see for example the 'Avertissement' in the J'ai lu edition of 1970) to denounce his first novel as the product of a bourgeois culture. It is an episode that is repeated more recently in fictional form in Femmes, where the narrator mentions his friend S. in the following terms:

novel marked Sollers's first challenge to the values of the literary establishment, one which he has seen fit to introduce into several later texts: 'J'ai choqué profondément le sentiment national, le sentiment qui veut qu'on joue le jeu, qu'on s'intègre, qu'on accepte la filiation qu'on vous tend, la place qu'on vous donne'.4 If one recalls the episodes that took place at the Jesuit school in Versailles, one inevitably feels encouraged to draw a comparison with Sollers's position here as he expressed his lack of enthusiasm at the prospect of being recruited as the voice of tradition and good taste. By the mid 1960s he had established for himself a quite different reputation to that which he had been offered by Henriot. This was the period when the controversies began for which Tel Quel would become famous. Confrontation followed confrontation, interspersed only with exclusions from Tel Quel, for although the discord at times involved people from outside the group, internal conflicts were so common that one has the impression that they were actively encouraged. It was also apparently necessary to exceed modesty and mere common sense at every turn with a view to upsetting as many people as possible! Indeed as Kristeva writes of her fictional Sollers: 'Sinteuil avait le talent de transformer un désaccord littéraire en procès global de la société' (p.310). Was the atmosphere entirely orchestrated by Sollers's desire to create a parody of avant-gardist behaviour? One could almost believe this to be the case, so rehearsed do the controversies now appear. However, the language of revolution could not conceal a more libertarian strain within the group which was in conflict with the parti Communiste. Tel Quel followed Sartre in developing an ambivalent attitude towards the communists, which continued until the group broke away definitively upon mounting evidence of an increasingly stagnant and bureaucratic Soviet system, a system which was supported unquestioningly by the PCF. As Hervé Sinteuil says to Olga, there can be no question of submitting the journal to the authority of the politicians:

54

S. a eu la même expérience quand il a été propulsé, a vingt ans, comme un jeune écrivain d'avenir simultanément par Mauriac et Aragon... Il n'aime pas trop parler de cette époque... Il en a honte... Comme il a honte du petit roman qu'il a publié à ce moment-là et qu'il a tout fait pour retirer de la circulation... (p.280). I would suggest that the markedly contrasting receptions given to Une curieuse solitude and the nouveau roman, were an important factor that encouraged Sollers subsequently to disown his novel, and that this is of wider significance to the extent that it helped in subsequent novels to develop his attitude to tradition and experiment. The rejection of his own 1. Emile Denriot, 'La vie littéraire', Le Monde (des livres), 5 novembre 1958, p.8. i. 2. 'La vie littéraire', p.8. 3. 'La vie littéraire', p.8.

55

Et, pour cela, tes histoires de carnaval, rire et mort, ambivalence et j'en passe, l'érotisme et autres expériences intérieures, ils n'en ont rien à foutre. Mieux: arrêtez-moi ça au nom de la Révolution! (p. 80). This sums up rather neatly the conflict on the Left at around the time of May 1968, when the PCF lost credibility because of its inability to recognize the desires of young people. Olga knows that Hervé's style 4. Vision à New York, p.77. Sec also Femmes, p.280 and Krisleva's Les Samour Aft (Paris, 1990), p.75.

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1965 - 1982

57

would make it impossible for him to be an official mouthpiece for the PCF. If he had not been prepared to receive the crown of humanist tradition offered by those who had praised Une curieuse solitude, neither was he going to submit to an equally stultifying role within the communist movement:

nous décidons de nous vivre nous-mêmes et quoi qu'il nous en coûte comme fiction, et c'est alors que se produit un renversement décisif, scadaleux sans doute, mais dont la nature singulière constitue l'expérience littéraire. La littérature n'est rien si elle ne touche pas ce renversement.6

Hervé était extrémiste parce que son rythme avalait les étapes, les enchaînements, les transitions, et allait droit au spasme. Il pressentait les nouvelles tendances. Ou, carrément, se trompait. Un idéologue, lui? Soutenir les avancées, oui. Mais assurer les transmissions, se plier à la patience du pédagogue ou du militant? Jamais! (p. 143).

By thus immersing his own identity in that of his fiction, the novelist rejects the notion that fiction is merely a finished product. At the same time he parodies and subverts the logic of the spectacle by substituting a generalized fictionality for the latter's generalized image as conceived by Debord. This brings about a strange displacement whereby truth dressed In the garb of fiction (the novel), is substituted for falsity posing as truth (the spectacle).

As defined by Kristeva and the rest of Tel Quel, avant-garde literature was one form of discourse, or signifying system, among others that were variously social, political and cultural. For writing was not an optional accessory to, or a diversion from, the serious business of political revolution, but the vital context for an understanding of one's condition and the scene of a possible revolution in thought that was considered to be a necessary prerequisite for a more general revolution in society. For the writer, this established the context where his own biography could come into contact with his function as a producer of language: la littérature n'est pas opposée à la vie, mais c'est tout au contraire dans la mesure où le langage est notre réalité, où seule la littérature existe, que l'on peut à bon droit parler de biographie.5 In this process the identity of the writer is not confirmed as it would be in a conventional biography, rather it is subverted by being placed widiin the context of a broader fiction. It thus becomes a bio-graphy that denies the spectacle its images and offers instead an alternative view of identity in language. This view will be explored in the remainder of this chapter but one already has an impression of it in the way that bio-graphical details are incorporated into fiction. Through the developing pattern of these short preambles in which the reader's attention is drawn to Sollers's bio-graphy, I am aiming to clarify the extent to which the writer's existence is to be viewed ever more in terms of textual perspectives. This relationship is expressed most interestingly in 'Le Roman et l'expérience des limites' (1965), where Sollers proposes a necessary proximity of the two as a means of confronting the tendency of the spectacle to marginalize and emasculate fiction: 5. Roger Laporte, 'Bio-graphie', Critique, XXVI (1970), 813 20 (p.818).

The 1970s was a period in which Sollers produced Paradis, which is for some his most significant work. Earlier in this preamble it was stated that the writer's identity was becoming ever more implicated in terms of textual perspectives. Guy Scarpetta has seen a similar process at work in the language of texts such as Paradis: D'où ces effets de distance interne, de montage (chaque énoncé peut être perçu comme une citation, un second degré, même les plus ouvertement biographiques), et la pulvérisation incessante entraînant le rire. C'est l'écriture, et elle seule, à l'exclusion de toute appartenance, de toute communauté, qui définit ici les "identités".7 The idea of identity being located within a generalized fictionality that was becoming evident in the 1960s texts Drame and Nombres is clarified In later books such as Lois, H and Paradis. In the bio-graphical preamble to Chapter One it was shown that the name Sollers is adopted for peculiarly literary purposes and that the connotations of the name reflect Sollers's perception of his role as a writer. His original surname Joyaux reappears in the course of H where it Is played with in a way that supports my general contention that identity

6. Philippe Sollers, Logiques (Paris, 1968), p.234. 7. Guy Scarpetta, Eloge du cosmopolitisme (Paris, 1981), p.180. Diane Sherzer makes a similar comment as she writes of: 'a crossroad of significations and of Hounds, [...] a host of disparate entities which branch out into history, literature, geography, and mythology as well as biography', Representations in contemporary French fiction (Lincoln, 1986), p.64.

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59

The anecdote related in this passage where Joyaux is mocked at school recurs in Portrait du joueur although instead of Joyaux the narrator is here called Diamant:

Antonietta Macciocchi's book on China.8 By the early 1970s, the Maoist discourse of permanent revolution had attracted some in the group, who used it as a way of introducing a new element into the debate on the Left: 'nous en sommes arrivés à un moment où s'indique une possibilité de liaison dialectique entre transformation du langage et transformation révolutionnaire, pratique, sociale'.9 Whilst at this time Sollers still remained attuned to Maoist principles, it would not be many years before this affiliation also was renounced. The visit to China in the spring of 1974 by Sollers, Kristeva, Marcelin Pleynet, François Wahl and Roland Barthes is an event that has received much attention, in Kristeva's Les Samouraïs for example, where a long chapter is devoted to the Chinese experience. Although the visit no doubt fascinated those like Sollers who had long been students of Chinese civilization, it also led to disillusionment with a political system that had appeared to offer an alternative to the Soviet model:

Diamant? Au tableau!... Résolvez-moi vite cette équation... Décidément, messieurs, ce Diamant n'est pas une perle!... Alors quoi, vous séchez? Vous êtes dans le noir? Diamant noir? Comment dites-vous? Dément? Damant? Dormant?... (p.31).

et j'ai vu, petit à petit, à travers les phrases, que nous autres, à gauche ou à l'extrême-gauche, nous étions tous d'impossibles idéalistes, des imposteurs, en un sens; que nous ne représentions rien par rapport à la moindre expérience vécue.10

Although insignificant in itself this anecdote is used interestingly in Sollers's fiction. Whereas the reader might expect to be given biographical details that help him or her understand the nature of the writer, the detail is in this case used to quite different effect. The displacement, both through the different forms of writing in H and Portrait du joueur and through the different names of Joyaux and Diamant, forces the reader's attention to the written and fictional context. This is one more example of a bio-graphical detail that frustrates the tendency of images relating to the writer to form in one's mind. The recounting of bio-graphy thereby privileges the page as a scene for the provisional establishment of identity and does not simply present anecdotes as fodder to be taken out of context and consumed in any spectacular treatment of for example authors and their lives. The period of transition covered by this chapter is also marked by Sollers's abandonment of former political allegiances. In the period following 1968, Tel Quel's, position was peculiar by virtue of its insistence on the importance of changes in language and culture as the prelude to revolution, and it was on these grounds that the group broke with what it saw as the conservatism of the parti Communiste. The final break with the PCF came ostensibly when the latter banned from its festival Maria-

It was in 1976 that Sollers wrote a letter to Le Monde in which he expressed his disappointment at events in China." In distancing himself from the Chinese experience, Sollers elsewhere admitted that they had been misguided to use 'la langue de bois des militants politiques, qui est une chose dérisoire. Je la connais, je l'ai employée'.12 Thus came the understanding that this discourse was illusory as far as China had been concerned and that its objective was unlikely to be realized in modern-day France. From then on Tel Quel would progressively shed its old political perspectives, opining that although there were many who claimed to follow Marx, there now appeared to be no system, no party even, that could justifiably claim to be inspired by his vision. As Sollers later said

is redefined in fictional terms through a written bio-graphy: le nom lui-même suffisait pour les exciter pourquoi parcequ'on y entend à la fois jeu joie juif jouissance par exemple ce joyaux messieurs ce joyaux que voulez-vous n'est pas une perle ou alors joyal noyau boyau aloyau ou alors sans x mais non pas joyeux joyaux avec un x comme xylophone ça n'ratait jamais vrais caniches borgnes serrés en nombril alors quoi vous pourriez pas vous appeler dupont martin ou chou-fleur comme tout le monde voyons si vous êtes à la hauteur dites-moi mais c'est pas brillant comme performance et ainsi de suite (p. 10).

8. Herbert R. Lottman, 'Marx à la mode - and wilted', New York Times Book Review, 31 October 1971, 36, 38, 40 (p.40). 9. 'Philippe Sollers: ébranler le système', p.13. 10. 'Correspondance' (interview), in Alain Jouffroy, Le Gué (Paris, 1977), pp.61-143 (p.108). 11. 'Correspondance', Le Monde, 22 octobre 1976, p.3. 12. Au-delà du dialogue (interviews with Edgar Laure), (Paris, ll)77), pp.85 6.

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Chapter Two

dismissively: 'j'ai fait un stage dans la mécanique', or as the narrator of Femmes writes: 'je faisais de la figuration révolutionnaire'.13 At one point in Portrait du joueur (p. 144) the narrator writes of a collective drowning or 'nounoyer' of those who allowed themselves to be subsumed by the rhetoric of the group. Henceforth Sollers adopts in his texts a more humorous attitude towards politics, as in the following passage of Portrait du joueur where the narrator Philippe Diamant finds himself invited to the Elysée for an audience with the President, whereupon his only struggle is with the latter's dubious literary taste and the effects of too much Saint-Emilion: Je remue la tête approbativement... Je me rendors... Bon Dieu, c'est plus fort que moi... Catastrophique... Il s'attendait sans doute à ce que je prenne des notes? A ce que j'écrive un article le soir même? L'abstention des intellectuels! Le grand silence des déserteurs! Pas déserteur, non! "Terrain schizoïde aigu"! J'ai mon livret! Je peux le montrer! Diamant, Philippe. Né le 28 novembre 1936 à Bordeaux. Numéro de Sécurité Sociale: 1.36.11.33.522.022. Payant mes impôts! Ne faisant même que ça, comme tout le monde! Présent sur le terrain de la production! Du redéploiement industriel! De l'effort national dans les techniques de pointe! Défendant, illustrant, couvrant d'une gloire fraîche et moderne la langue française! Mieux que Sartre! Plus que Malraux! Sexuellement compétent! Faisant jouir, avec une délicatesse mais aussi une maîtrise consommée, des personnalités de premier plan! Autre chose que de gagner des élections! D'apostropher le Panthéon! De participer à des Congrès ou de rédiger des programmes! O ingratitude de la République! O Athéniens que faire pour mériter vos louanges! (pp.64-5). Despite such an apparently fundamental change as this rejection of the politics and the group identity that had previously inspired Tel Quel, Sollers continued with a literary project that remained coherent. For this reason one is justified in seeing metadiscourses such as politics not as the essential force in Sollers's fiction, but as a transient form that he exploits to reflect and develop his greater continuity of purpose as a novelist: Donc, ces regroupements de collectivités, ponctuels et rapides, autour de Tel Quel - le structuralisme, le maoïsme - ne sont jamais que les symp-

13. Vision à New York, p. 16 and Femmes, p.27

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tomes de ce qui conteste très profondément l'ordre existant.14 This claim finds support also in the total disinterest Sollers expresses for explaining or justifying the ideological utterances of an earlier period, thereby refusing to endow them with anything more than a localized, highly contextualized significance. At times a regret for past obsessions does find expression in the more recent novels like Femmes: C'était l'époque où mon goût de la littérature avait fini par m'apparaître comme superficiel, insuffisant, coupable... Quelle idée!... J'avais attrapé le virus... Le microbe nihiliste... Le doute de soi, systématiquement injecté par le parti philosophique... La honte de soi, du plaisir, de l'égotisme, du jeu, de la liberté, du libertinage... Mon dieu, mon dieu, quelle erreur... (p. 101). Similarly, the narrator of Le coeur absolu is questioned on his political past: Alors, c'est vrai, c'est bien vrai, vous reniez toutes ces vieilleries, le marxisme et sa sinistre doctrine? Mais oui, mais oui. Vous regrettez vos affreuses conneries? Votre monstruosité irresponsable? Votre aveuglement devant des millions de morts? Et d'abord qu'estce que vous alliez faire en Chine? - Un peu de vélo à Shanghai (p.186). The theme is also present in La fête à Venise, where the narrator expresses most overtly his refusal to see any need to justify his past: Longtemps, je me suis laissé intimider, dérouter, au point de m'acharner sur des choses aussi inutiles que sombres. J'ai chassé ma nature, elle est revenue au galop. Voyons: ai-je bien le droit de parler ainsi; ai-je bien eu mes saisons en enfer; ai-je subi facariâtrerie de base? Oui. Dois-je cependant rougir en pensant à telle ou telle de mes actions? Non. Suis-je sûr d'avoir toujours eu mes raisons? Oui encore. Mon cas est désespéré? J'espère (p.137). Yet in spite of these periodic reflections upon the past, it does remain true that as a reader one is not encouraged to look for any logic of continuity among the metadiscourses, but led to seek it in Sollers's conception of literature that through its constancy docs transcend the distinctive periods. The quotations from these three novels anticipate something of 14. Improvisations, p.89.

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Chapter Two

the discussion within Chapter Three, but they are also relevant to this chapter in that they express clearly the lighter mood that begins to develop in the Sollers of the 1970s. By the end of the 1970s, Sollers's desire was to develop new forms of discourse which analyzed the subject and society, though without resorting to the clichés of ideologies that had fallen into disrepute. These new forms of discourse at times appeared to promote individualism. Even in 1976, when his discourse was still dominated by Marxism and dialectical materialism, Sollers had nevertheless been wary of the potentially repressive nature of the collective, as was shown by his refusal to endorse the activities of the socialist writers' union SELF.15 In the early 1980s moreover Sollers was promoting a reasoned, if perhaps controversial, affirmation of individuality, to which he opposed the notion of collectivity irrespective of political colour: Nous avons tous vécu, dans les vingt dernières années, un vertige de l'identité, ce besoin d'affiliation, d'identité déléguée. Je crois que tout cela est fini. Il n'y a pas de communauté, de communauté sexuelle notamment, il ne peut pas y en avoir. Il n'y a que des individus. Il pourrait y avoir communauté peut-être pour lutter contre la loi sociale si elle était répressive, mais comme aujourd'hui elle nous laisse en paix, de grâce un peu de liberté dans la description des comportements individuels!16 The sentiments expressed in this passage represent an interesting development of Sollers's position. Whereas in earlier periods the perceived threat to literature often appears to have come principally from the stereotypes perpetuated by the spectacle, it can now also be perceived as coming from Sollers's own previous theoretical collaborations and political interventions. The changes in Sollers's attitude from the late 1960s to the period leading up to the publication of Femmes in 1983 are symptomatic of broader changes within the Parisian avant-garde. Whereas previously such figurehead movements had enjoyed a privileged role in the development of modern art and literature, more and more intellectuals were now prepared to question the notion of a cohesive elite and to take more seriously the military connotations of the word 'avant-garde'. As early as

15. 'Pour ou contre le syndicat des écrivains' (interview with Jean-Jacques Brochier), Magazine Littéraire, 111 (avril 1976), 29 31 16. 'Sollers anarchiste' (interview with Jean .laci|ues Brochier), Magazine Littér aire, 193 (mars 1983), 51-2 (p.52).

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1974 for example, Sollers was reassessing the conventional wisdom that automatically equated a radical form of literature with a radical ideology. The cases cited to challenge this identification were on the one hand Céline, who had combined radical form with an ostensibly reactionary politics and on the other hand Aragon, whose avowedly radical politics had not prevented his writing from following in the line of bourgeois tradition.17 In anticipation of Chapter Three, one could quote de Kooning, who in 'Content is a Glimpse...' said that: 'At one time, it was very daring to make a figure red or blue - I think now that it is just as daring to make it flesh-colored'.18 One may also recall at this point that Sollers had previously criticized Robbe-Grillet's later work, saying that there is nothing inherently radical or progressive about formal experimentation. That this revival of concern for individual experience was a common preoccupation in the years following a widespread disenchantment with Marxism among intellectuals is demonstrated by others like BernardHenri Levy who, in Eloge des intellectuels, discussed the relationship between literature and socialist 'engagement', writing that to abandon the latter does not render literature futile or lightweight. On the contrary, as an expression of this solitude literature becomes a terrible, tragic affair, a face to face encounter with death, crime, error, and madness: Tous ceux qui, acceptant de se taire pour laisser parler leurs livres, savent que l'art ne peut avoir d'autre objet que de décrire le fond d'horreur, de carnage ou de catastrophe sur quoi se déploie depuis toujours l'aventure de l'humanité. Ils sont tous d'accord, oui, pour penser que la littérature n'a jamais parlé que du mal; que le mal, réciproquement, n'a jamais été mieux dit que par la littérature; et que c'est là, dans cette diabolique réciprocité, que les livres trouvent leur plus authentique pouvoir (pp.75-6). All this is not to say that there is nothing important in society for the writer to comment upon, but rather that there is an absence of great, easily identifiable issues of social discord to excite the collective 'engagement' of intellectuals. Sollers's novels after Nombres do raise many issues, for instance the conflict between various community or group interests and those of the individual, but these relate to a general state of affairs ('le mal') rather than to a localized, political context, and are

17. 'L'avant-garde aujourd'hui' (interview with Marcelin Pleynet), in Ecrire... Pour quoi? Pour qui? (Dialogues de France Culture, ?.) (Grenoble, 1974), pp.69-96 (p.84). 18. Harold Rosenberg, Willem de Kooning (New York, l"73), p.205

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therefore less likely to attract concerted attention. As a result, they are not issues best dealt with by preconceived patterns of logic; 'le mal' is a condition widi which the novelist must come to terms, without merely supplying discourses, as Femmes vividly puts it, for 'les foules magnétisées a priori du PC...' (p.280). Although the novels Lois, H and Paradis are thus the products of an avant-garde mentality, they do nevertheless contain within them elements of the themes raised in diis bio-graphical preamble which are in the context of this study important for two reasons. Firstly, to the extent that they reflect Sollers's awareness of images that he and his writing attract, such themes present further evidence that changes in his attitudes are best treated through our notion of bio-graphy rather than through a conventional biography. Secondly, these changes in political outlook coincide with the decline in Sollers's fiction of the geometrically abstract counter-images of Drame and Nombres. In the remainder of this chapter I will examine closely the role played by such counter-images in Sollers's novels during this period. Drame The chapter division of this study is in a sense misleading, for Sollers's next novels Drame (1965) and Nombres (1968) develop many of the experiments that are already evident in Le parc. This last text, it may be recalled, institutes a split in the narrator's persona through its adoption of various pronominal identities, so that one cannot say with any certainty that the narrator is synonymous with either 'je', 'if or 'elle'; it also begins to confuse the boundaries that conventionally delimit the genres of poetry and the novel; and it draws attention repeatedly to die physical and material reality of writing by making the reader aware of the narrator's orange exercise book with its squared paper rather than, as is often the case in novels, simply presenting a product whose construction itself remains invisible. On the basis of such characteristics, Le parc begins to establish Sollers's textual counter-image that challenges the notion of representation and the images of the spectacle. These characteristics apply equally to Drame. It is a novel that also shares something of the absti act mood of Le parc; this is not to say for example that there are no references to location, for they are numerous: there is the port, the ocean, the forest, and the aerodrome, to name but four. However, these locations all remain somehow intangible or even arbitrary in that they have no obvious significance for events in the narrative. Despite the continuity between novels, there is a clear difference in that Drame is far more radical than Le parc. For in the latter novel the narrator's preoccupation with writing does generally remain distinguishable from the scenes it breaks in upon, and is as a consequence relatively

Drame

65

simple to recognize (as in the allusions to the narrator taking up his pen, or to the orange exercise book, for example). This is no longer the case with Drame, because such scenes as are narrated are truly indistinguishable from the fate of the writing subject and his narrative. The following is a case in point which, since it takes up the theme of night much present m Le pare, does not represent too obscure a beginning: Il est dans la nuit qu'il est. Il la tient en quelque sorte en réduction, sous son regard - mais lui-même y a disparu (il vérifie en somme qu'il n'y a pas de "sujet" - pas plus que sur cette page) (p. 121). This undoubtedly confronts the reader with a sense of his own disorientation, a sensation which is exacerbated by a number of other narrative techniques to be explored in this chapter. It is necessary to draw attention to such techniques because they are the basis on which an analogy will later be established between on the one hand the narratives of Drame and Nombres and on the other geometric forms and abstract art. It is the way in which these novels build on the highly visible counter-image of the writing process in Le parc that allows one to make this analogy. Sollers seems to claim through this series of novels that there is an elaborate interrelationship between genres, as there is between texts. The theatrical title of his novel Drame for example, which reflects the fact that a certain conception of theatre is essential to the development of geometric and abstract counter-images in the narrative, is a symptom of his desire to change the form of his writing by calling into question the distinction between genres. He was certainly not the only writer to challenge the boundaries defining genres at this time. Other contributors to Tel Quel did much the same thing, such as Marcelin Pleynet with his Les Lignes de la prose, and Denis Roche with Récits complets, which are both titles of what might elsewhere be called poetry. Sollers explained that this was an important feature of the group's writing: De plus en plus, dans son activité critique comme dans ses choix textuels, la revue devait être à notre avis une entreprise beaucoup plus totalitaire - et porter sur le phénomène global de Y expression (du langage).19 In this context, the use of the word 'totalitaire' brings to mind a passage by Artaud in which he seeks to define the language he desires for the theatre, as: 19. Philippe Sollers, 'L'expérience Tel Quel'. les Lettres Françaises, 23 janvier 1964, 4-5, (p.5).

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Chapter Two ce langage nu du théâtre, langage non virtuel, mais réel [qui] doit permettre, par l'utilisation du magnétisme nerveux de l'homme, de transgresser les limites ordinaires de l'art et de la parole, pour réaliser activement, c'est-à-dire magiquement, en termes vrais, une sorte de création totale, où il ne reste plus à l'homme que de reprendre sa place entre le rêve et les événements.20

I will in the following part of this chapter seek to ascertain what motivates the choice of a theatrical title (Drame), looking at the scenario this produces in terms of narrative and notions of representation. The metaphor of theatre henceforth becomes vital to Sollers's writing, leading one to recall a short passage in Mallarmé called 'Sur le théâtre' which is worth quoting in full because it seems close in spirit to the preoccupations of Sollers in the 1960s: Je crois que la Littérature, reprise à sa source qui est l'Art et la Science, nous fournira un Théâtre, dont les représentations seront le vrai culte moderne; un Livre, explication de l'homme, suffisante à nos plus beaux rêves. Je crois tout cela écrit dans la nature de façon à ne laisser fermer les yeux qu'aux intéressés à ne rien voir. Cette oeuvre existe, tout le monde l'a tentée sans le savoir; il n'est pas un génie ou un pitre, qui n'en ait retrouvé un trait sans le savoir. Montrer cela et soulever un coin du voile de ce que peut être pareil poème, est dans un isolement mon plaisir et ma torture.21 The theoretical points, some of which have now been introduced, concerning the text's hostility to the concept of representation and its desire to create a radical discourse by challenging the unity of narrative voice, are to provide the basic context for the discussion of our main theme namely the narrative's relationship to the visual. It is by means of this challenge to a cohesive perspective that the narrative comes to produce its counter-image. The Freudian theory of dreams that supported an enquiry in the last chapter into the function of the visual in Le pare, and of paintings by Monet and Poussin in L'Intermédiaire, will be replaced for the duration of this chapter by certain points relating to Lacan's psychoanalytical theory that are pertinent to considerations of representation and language. Such points will be related to a peculiar notion of theatrical space that undermines representation in Sollers's texts, and to an analogy with abstract visual forms and in particular the paintings of Mark Rothko.

20. Oeuvres complètes (IV), pp. 110-11. 21. Stéphane Mallarmé, Oeuvres complètes (Paris, P)45), pp.875 6.

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If the development of geometric structures and a strange conception of theatrical space can be likened to the abstract artist's rejection of traditional landscape painting, the use of pronominal identities together with themes of violence, illness and silence encourage a similar comparison with abstract treatments of portrait painting. Such themes will support the notion of a bio-graphy which tends also to undermine the possible formation of naturalistic images of the author. These various axes will come to prominence through a discussion of the language of Drame and Nombres, novels that I would suggest mark Sollers's most violently hostile response to the spectacle. Le récit rouge: ce qui, à travers les lettres et les corps, se superpose à soi-même, ne cesse de s'armer, de se presser, de se surmonter, et c'est verticalement qu'il faut le voir lutter et se transformer, montant dans toutes les directions de son propre infini sans images, de sa force doublée qui se coule en creux dans vos yeux, vos tympans, vos langues, vos dents, votre enlisement, votre sentiment du temps (p.57). These theoretical texts are not easy reading, but it is to be hoped that by the end of the chapter, once the significance of words and phrases in the passage quoted, such as 'verticalement' and 'sans images' have been put into context, the reader will understand that the difficulty he or she encounters is a consequence of Sollers's desire to lead one beyond the conventional expectations one has as a reader. Drame begins with the problem that the narrator's consciousness of his own identity has a debilitating effect on the capacity to narrate. His desire is to lose himself in the flow of words, to become those words, but if consciousness precedes the act of narration, how is this to be achieved? 'Aucun début n'offre les garanties nécessaires de neutralité. Son corps est visiblement occupé par des appels inutiles' (p. 11). In the stumbling uncertainty of the opening paragraphs, the narrator vainly seeks a beginning that would provide an adequate expression of his desire, but succeeds in expressing nothing more than an inauthenticity that appears to be inherent in discourse, and this produces the repetition of the word 'manqué' at the end of the first two paragraphs to describe the attempts: Ce qu'il veut, il le veut sans délais, sans détails. Pas question d'être quoi que ce soit dans tel endroit limité cl fixe, pas question d'expliquer ni de constater. Opération chimique plutôt: décoller, isoler... Manqué (p. 12).

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Chapter Two

Then, albeit temporarily the narrative does begin to adopt its rhythm and does so in the knowledge that the problem can never be definitively resolved, as witnessed in the recurrence later in the text (p.56) of the line quoted above ('Aucun début n'offre les garanties'...). The narrator recognizes that he has the elements - a man, a city, a woman - necessary to build a narrative (to breathe life into the story, as the expression goes), and tell a tale more or less like any other. But of course this is not his purpose, as is made explicit in the following passage: Ce qu'il faut défendre: une sorte de netteté exubérante, maintenant, tout près, gravitant sur et sous la page, tournant avec sa face nocturne à l'intérieur du mouvement qui le fait parler, l'anime, l'irrigue, lui permet de respirer, le double et conduit sa main (p.61). Perhaps the most immediate thing to strike the reader of Drame is its structure. The book is made up not of chapters, but of a series of fairly short passages which alternate between a third-person narrative and a first-person narrative. Until almost the end of the novel, each passage of third-person narrative concludes with the phrase 'Il écrit:', whereupon the first-person narrative intervenes with a passage enclosed within quotation marks. Following this, the cycle begins once more with a thirdperson narrative. In all, there are sixty-four passages, or 'chants' as Sollers calls them in his note on the book's cover. These passages, or chants, into which the text is divided, recall not only the black and white squares of a chessboard (a point to which I will return) but also, given Sollers's interest in the Orient, the structure of the / Ching.22 Is the alternation of 'je' and 'if simply intended to produce a dialogue as between two characters in a play? It seems not. If we are to follow the theatrical metaphor, we could begin to hint at something of Drame's intent by pointing to the obvious facts that the actor is not the same as the role of his character in the play, and that each production can differ in its interpretation of the text. Sollers, in writing of 'la scène de la parole', refers to 'il' as the 'choeur' and 'je' as the 'individu' (see the back cover of Drame).23, Many different interpretations have been offered as to the function of these two pronouns. For example, Champagne sees the 'if as

22. Sollers explains the influence of Taoism on his work in Théorie d'ensemble p.72. 23. Cover notes are for these novels a valuable source of information about Sollers's intentions. The tone of such notes is in the cases of Drame and Nombres so similar to that of the novels themselves thai they could he considered an integral part of the text.

Drame

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signifying the id and the 'je' the ego, but he then limits his assertion by writing that the two 'do not specifically refer to the same functions as the id and ego of Freud'.24 In fact it is difficult to see in the 'if the unrestrained pulsions of the id, however the latter is defined. For Heath, they signify 'histoire' and 'discours'.25 Certainly, both psychoanalysis and structuralism have provided many binary terms which could be made to fit into the framework devised by Sollers here, and their relevance could not be disputed in a novel that is clearly marked by these theories. Yet in offering a reading of Drame it is worth making the point that even though id and ego, 'langue' and 'parole', 'histoire' and 'discours', are all doubtless in play, by identifying a particular term with either 'je' or 'if one risks imposing too rigid a pattern on the text. As has already been seen, Sollers tends to undermine binary oppositions (like night and day) by incorporating disruptive elements such as dream, excess and the visual. That he retains the same objective for Drame seems clear from the following: La lecture se développe ainsi sur deux plans, chacun devenant la cause mais aussi l'effet et la réflexion de l'autre, spectacle muet et rapide où deux discours se croisent, se coupent, se contestent et s'entraînent mutuellement.26 There are even rare occasions on which the spatial categories separating 'je' from 'il' break down; although these are not common enough to throw doubt on the basic organization that has been outlined, they do suggest there is a disruptive element in the text (this will be discussed more fully in subsequent sections). So, the division between 'je' and 'if should be seen, not just as determined by dichotomies in structuralist or psychoanalytic jargon but, more importantly, as one way in which the narrator begins to submerge himself in the body of the text. Sollers has described both Drame and Nombres as being: la recherche d'une coïncidence aussi serrée que possible entre l'acte d'écriture et le récit; l'acte dictant le récit, le récit racontant 24. Roland Champagne, 'The Texts and the Readers of Philippe Sollers' Creative Works from 1957-1973' (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation. The Ohio State University, 1974), p.55, p.64. 25. Stephen Heath, The Nouveau Roman: A Study in the Practice of Writing (London, 1972), p.228. On the function ol 'je' and 'il' see also Jean Ricardou, Pour une théorie du nouveau roman (Paris, l')7l ), pp 215 51 26. Drame cover notes.

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Chapter Two facte... Mon désir, à ce moment-là, est de construire un mécanisme de mouvement perpétuel, le monde s'écrivant et se lisant, le livre devenant monde... J'ai l'impression de toucher, en traçant les mots, un fond géométrique, algébrique, "magique"... Ni dedans, ni dehors... Ni conscient, ni inconscient...27

This objective raises questions as to the function of the narrator. Whereas one might normally expect some form of distance to be established between the narrator and the events recounted, so that the reader could follow the narrator's sense of perspective, in the case of Drame one has just the opposite impression of a narrative that develops in constant proximity to the events it narrates. At one point the narrator states: 'J'habite cet épisode au point de ne pas pouvoir le décrire' (p. 19), not because the episode is ineffable or somehow beyond language, but because he feels indistinguishable from it, he has no consciousness of it that could extend beyond his narrating. The structure of Drame and its use of personal pronouns provide the basis in this novel for abstract and geometric counter-images, by rendering the narrative process highly visible. As Barthes writes: des deux moitiés traditionnelles, l'acteur et le narrateur, unies sous un je équivoque, Sollers ne fait à la lettre qu'un seul actant: son narrateur est absorbé entièrement dans une seule action, qui est de narrer; transparente dans le roman impersonnel, ambiguë dans le roman personnel, la narration devient ici opaque, visible, elle emplit la scène.28 Barthes may be overstating the case by writing that 'son narrateur est absorbé entièrement dans une seule action', for this does not take account of the difficulty of narrating. The narrator does not simply immerse himself in one scene after another, but struggles in an almost constant state of dissynchronization with language. Although the scission of 'je' and 'if is the most prominent feature of the text's organization, it would probably not in itself contribute much to the 'mécanisme de mouvement perpétuel' without the pronouns 'elle' (for the third-person narrative) and 'tu' (for the first-person narrative) which interact with these first two narratorial voices. 'Elle' is probably a lover, clearly a reader, for the narrator addresses her in phrases like 'je t'écris' (p.27); and 'Ton regard s'arrête et glisse sur les signes écrits, tu refais le

Drame

trajet de leur arrivée, tu passes, immobile, au-dessus de ce qui est dit' (p. 138). Yet the female figure of 'elle' and 'tu' is not a mere catalyst, nor an individual psyche passively consuming the product (the book). That she is active in the building of the first-person narrative is shown by phrases like: 'Il s'agit de trouver les phrases où tu peux apparaître' (p.59); and 'à nous deux nous formons une phrase oscillante, obscure, qui capte et renvoie le moindre signal...' (p.75). For a narrator who has no delusions of omniscience ('il habite en elle, il ne saurait entièrement la remplir' (p.82)), a dialogue of sorts is a necessary precondition for his narrative discourse. However, one ought perhaps to think of them not as two individuals ('je'/'if and 'tu'/'elle') where the use of two pronouns for each would reflect their different functions in the text, but as four pronominal and nodal points on a map representing the space of narratorial interaction: 'Sans cesse en train de lire et d'écrire, c'est-à-dire de subir et d'agir, de comprendre et de vouloir'.29 The form of this map, as the four figures become in a sense abstract, will be seen later in the chapter to constitute a rejection of the widely perceived raison d'être of the novel as a form of representation. The four pronouns will thus be related to the question of the visual by association with other four-sided forms in Drame and Nombres such as diagrams and the theatre. Like Le parc, Drame is a novel preoccupied with inscribing a sense of the writing process in its pages. The role of 'elle' is to limit the narrator as proprietor of his text, implicating his narrative in a discourse with its reader that prevents it from becoming inflexible: 'Tu sauras voir ce que je dis, préciser, ajouter, effacer, te servir de ce qui t'entoure, animer en un mot les coulisses du mouvement' (p. 18). This is not merely to formalize the reader's freedom to interpret what is read, because the implications go much further than that. The claim being made is that the reader is in a sense a writer, and that the writer too is a reader, because each new text is a rewriting of other texts: 'Citations, références, langage vieilli, déplacé; fil repris, interrompu, continué sous d'autres récits, d'autres langues; phrase unique qui n'en finit pas de se corriger...' (p.26). The phrase 'la véritable histoire' recurs throughout the novel, alluding to the story of this writing process: tout continue et commence, recommence, respire et se respire en lui: ce qui est détaché, ici, en surface, ne peut rien enfermer, chaque phrase s'éteint dans une autre phrase qui la contient... Comme si la véritable histoire ne pouvait pas être dite (p. 115).

27. Vision à New York, pp. 100-1. 28. Sollers écrivain, p.20.

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29. 'Entretiens sur l'art actuel', p.5.

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Chapter Two

This 'véritable histoire' is the 'drame implicite' (p.61): 'c'est elle que j'essaie de dire, elle qui probablement dit tout, depuis toujours, silencieusement' (p.46). If language is conceived less as a tool of expression than as a system of relationships, then no one text has the autonomy necessary to support its claim of absolute authenticity. Once more, the writer is being led to renounce any claim to having conscious mastery over his language. This fact can be seen in the text in two notable ways. The first of these is the narrative's peculiar internal distancing from itself that is quite unlike any conventional narratorial perspective, for not only does it quote from other texts, but it also encloses words or phrases in quotation marks in a seemingly arbitrary manner: Il ne sait comment nommer ces gestes sans noms, comment, par exemple, traduire l'expression "à pieds joints" dont l'équivalent devrait dessiner un certain mouvement exact, "en plein dans la cible" (pp.24-5). Another example is: 'Nous vivons ensemble aujourd'hui, dans cette ville ("aujourd'hui", mais enfin quoi "aujourd'hui"?)' (p.26). In both these instances an internai distance is created in the narrative, although it is not that of an omniscient narrator having an objective perspective on events, but that of a narrative uneasy of the referential value of words. This point is best demonstrated by a passage in Nombres that directly equates the use of quotation marks with the problem of meaning: Je restais tourné vers le fossé qui ne passe pas par les yeux, qui ne saurait un instant se changer en trace et en nombre, vers le noeud, l'enchevêtrement, le ravin, l'inutilité des mots "noeud", "enchevêtrement", "ravin"... (p.57). It is probably in this context that one can best understand the ubiquity of the word 'silence' (which is used more than twenty times in Drame). Being unable to write some impossibly whole text, since language 'ne peut rien enfermer', the narrator is led to see that silence becomes an essential part of writing (perhaps like certain forms of Oriental music for which the silence between notes is said to be as significant as the actual notes one hears): silence que rien, aucune violence, aucune négation ne sauraient atteindre puisque dans chaque cri il est à l'intérieur du cri, dans chaque refus ce qui se refuse. C'est en lui, par lui mais toujours apparemment sans lui que l'ensemble a lieu, le mol "silence" est à peine la trace de son reflet, mot vers lequel les autres mots s'ache-

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73

minent et vibrent (couleurs s'achevant dans le blanc)... (pp.65-6). This function of silence within language can be related to the concept of intertextuality because although any one form of articulation has an immediate context in the narrative, it is also part of a more general textuality. It is both of and beyond the text. Silence thus forms a source of ambiguity in the text whereby each articulation can be seen both as construction and destruction, affirmation and negation. It also presents another example of how Sollers undermines opposites, because the repeated opening of his text through the incorporation of other references destroys its semblance of autonomy and allows an awareness of an internal silence to develop within discourse. Internal distancing, intertextuality and the theme of silence are all important elements in the narrative's discouragement of the formation of figurative representations of identity in the text. Having presented these general points concerning the narrative and its structure, I will now go on to consider the importance of a psychoanalytic perspective in contributing to the counter-image in the novel. As in Le pare, where the dream-image offers the narrator a visually enriching experience that remains distinct from the spectacle, so too in Drame should the dream-image be considered vital to the narrative and its counter-images. The language of the dream that dominates Drame is rooted in the body and its functions: 'Je voyais mon sang, et le rêve avait lui-même l'épaisseur lente du sang...' (p. 116). As an introduction to the next part of the chapter, here is a brief summary of the recurrence of certain key words or phrases to demonstrate their importance to Drame. Firstly, of those words associated with sleep, die most common are: 'le sommeil' (used at least seventeen times), 'dormant' (used at least six times), 'le réveil' (used at least six times), 's'éveiller' (used at least five times), 'se réveiller' (used at least four times), and 'le rêve' (used at least twenty-one times); to which can be added others such as 'endormie', 's'endort', and 'le dormeur inévitable'. The reader cannot help but become aware of the high incidence of this vocabulary in the dense narrative of a relatively short novel. A second category of words in this language of sleep and dream indicates more clearly its value in creating a certain indeterminacy, hence the following phrases: Tavant-soninieif, 'à moitié réveillé', 'demi-sommeil', 'je dors à demi' and 'entre veille et sommeil'. Sleep and dream are not fixed states which can be identified anil categorized in the narrative, because the words associated with them recur so often and in no recognizably chronological pattern. The difficulty is clearly compounded by the use of this second category of phrases, which brings about a reversal

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Chapter Two

Drame

or blurs the distinction between being asleep and being awake. Such ambiguity is not confined to sleep and dream as themes in the text, but covers the entire narrative. Therefore, one can now add a third form of ambiguity to those already discussed (i.e. that operating at the level of narrator and character; and that of the intertext producing a movement of construction and destruction): the problematic distinction between the states of sleeping and waking. Having maintained the general prominence of the dream in Drame, I will now go on to look at one particular example which at the beginning of the book could be said to instigate the narrative. This dream occurs when the narrator is looking for a start, and to escape the inevitable 'manqué'. Significantly, it is at the end of this passage concerning the dream that the 'tu' appears for the first time, and one could conclude from this that it is the dream itself that produces the narrator's subsequent division (into 'je' and 'il') which will really produce the conditions for the narrative to begin. This is confirmed by the content of the dream, which starts when the narrator arrives at a library:

and 'tu' into the narrative. Secondly, the first figure that leads the second one forward is marked with the words 'impossible' and 'mort', whilst this second figure, apparently alive, is described as being 'imaginaire'. All this finds its most succinct expression in a later passage: 'Le corps, dans la pensée qui se rêve, pense contre lui-même, se perd...' (p.116). The dream-image provides (within a highly textual setting) the scene where the narrator first escapes the debilitating effects of his consciousness on the capacity to write. One is led to think of 'The Library of Babel', where Jorge Luis Borges writes that 'The Library is unlimited and cyclical' .30 Drame is perhaps similar in so far as it promotes the library as a locus of the imagination that precedes the act of narrating. In an interview which took place shortly before the publication of Drame, Sollers indicated that the whole question of the subject was becoming increasingly important in his writing:

74

Il entre (mais non par la porte, à travers le mur, plutôt, par l'un des livres de l'étagère la plus haute dont, maintenant qu'il est parvenu au sol, il ne peut déchiffrer ni le titre ni l'auteur) (p. 13). Having entered, presumably vertically and as though walking, through a shelved book, he then finds himself in a horizontal position just above the table, and at this point there is the first sign of his scission: il est en même temps étendu, mort, à la place que je viens d'indiquer, et - comme dans une image projetée - légèrement au-dessus de lui-même. Le jeu consiste en ce que le second personnage (vivant et imaginaire) tourmente le cadavre réel (p. 13). This is the first time 'je' appears in the text, slipping in almost imperceptibly during the recounting of the dream. Immediately following this comes a reversal by which the dead figure takes the other ('vivant et imaginaire') by the hand: Or, sans transition, l'impossible arrive, la logique est niée d'un trait: le mort vient de prendre le faux vivant par la main, il se dresse, l'entraîne, la peur envahit comme visiblement l'image qui s'anéantit (p. 13). There are two important points worth retaining about this dream. Firstly, the reversal which concerns the two figures, whereby the apparently dead figure takes the lead, coincides with the introduction of the 'je'

Dans la mesure où je tente de vivre la disparition du "moi" (et avant tout du moi psychologique, possédant et réducteur), je pourrais vous répondre que ce sont justement les représentations de Y autre qui présentent à mes yeux le maximum d'intérêt, ou encore la représentation qu'il se fait de mes propres représentations.31 Drame is the first of Sollers's novels really to reflect the importance of psychoanalytic combined with linguistic theories. It has been shown that Sollers forms a distinction between the 'if and the 'je', and that this is essential to the subject of narrative. In 'Fonction et champ de la parole et du langage', Lacan makes the distinction between the 'moi', or ego, and the voice of the 'je' in discourse: C'est donc toujours dans le rapport du moi du sujet au je de son discours, qu'il vous faut comprendre le sens du discours pour désaliéner le sujet. Mais vous ne sauriez y parvenir si vous vous en tenez à l'idée que le moi du sujet est identique à la présence qui vous parle.32 To borrow Lacan's statement from the beginning of Ecrits, one could say that for Drame 'c'est l'ordre symbolique qui est, pour le sujet, consti-

30. Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths (London, 1970), p.85. 31. Philippe Sollers, 'Premières réponses à l'enquête sur les représentations erotiques', La Brèche, 7 (1964), p.99. 32. Jacques Lacan, Ecrits (Paris. 1966), p. 104

Chapter Two

Drame

tuant'.33 Yet it is to another of Lacan's texts that I will now turn in order to develop the reading of Drame in terms of geometric counter-images and in particular of the theatre. That for Lacan the symbolic order is 'constituant' can be seen in his interpretation of Poe's story called 'The Purloined Letter'. The present study will limit itself to pointing out certain aspects of the interpretation which are relevant to the discussion of Drame, and will not attempt to rehearse the debate which followed Jacques Derrida's famous criticism of Lacan's seminar.34 In discussing Poe's story, Lacan repeatedly uses the word 'drame' and, in a sense which is not alien to Sollers's novel, he points to a doubling of the narrative in the drama and the commentary upon that drama:

In Poe's story of the stealing of the Queen's letter and the various attempts at concealment and retrieval, there are two fundamental scenes: the first, which takes place in the royal boudoir when the letter is first stolen by the minister, Lacan calls the 'scène primitive', whilst the second, in the minister's office where the letter subsequently lies, marks a return of the repressed in repetition (p. 12). The purloined letter is, to use Lacan's word again 'constituant', '[un] pur signifiant', which motivates '[Y] automatisme de répétition' (p.16). As it passes from hand to hand, the letter seems to dictate each character's position in the narrative, so as to make each one exchange his or her role. Lacan's point is that the letter functions in relation to the characters' unconscious; their individual identities are determined by the successive positions they are led to occupy by its circulation. Within the framework of these two scenes, there is a triadic structure: 'Donc trois temps, ordonnant trois regards, supportés par trois sujets, à chaque fois incarnés par des personnes différentes' (p. 15). At the first point (occupied by the King, then by the police) is conventional blindness: 'd'un regard qui ne voit rien' (p. 15). It is no coincidence perhaps that those to occupy this point are the holders of power; yet they seem destined not to know what is happening. Certainly, in the case of the police, mere is a detailed description of their efforts to find the missing letter. Yet Lacan makes clear that theirs is what he calls 'l'imbécillité réaliste' (p.25) (what one might otherwise call conventional wisdom), and that they will not find the letter because they are looking for it in the wrong place, i.e. they are taking it for granted that the letter is literally hidden, whereas it can in fact be seen on the minister's mantelpiece. At the second point (occupied by the Queen, then by the minister) is: 'un regard qui voit que le premier ne voit rien et se leurre d'en voir couvert ce qu'il cache' (p. 15). At the third point (occupied by the minister, then by Dupin, the detective and hero of the story) is a different conception of what is visible: 'qui de ces deux regards voit qu'ils laissent ce qui est à cacher à découvert pour qui voudra s'en emparer' (p. 15). The repeated allusions Lacan makes to the 'drame' are coupled, significantly for this study, widi an insistence on sight or, to be more precise, on visibility and invisibility, intuition and conventional blindness. It is in this seminar, one of Lacan's rare discussions of literature, that the points about language, the visual, and representation come together in a most interesting way. Not only does he insist on the importance of the narratorial voice, without which there would be no 'mise en scène' and the action would remain 'invisible de la salle', but he also makes a definite contrast between the various 'regards', and in particular between the conventional blindness of authority (the King and the police) and Dupin, whose intelligent 'regard' leads him to recover the letter for (he Queen. The fact that both the minister and Dupin write poetry, whilst the Prelect

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Dès le premier abord, on y distinguera un drame, de la narration qui en est faite et des conditions de cette narration. [...] La narration double en effet le drame d'un commentaire, sans lequel il n'y aurait pas de mise en scène possible. Disons que l'action en resterait, à proprement parler, invisible de la salle, - outre que le dialogue en serait expressément et par les besoins même du drame, vide de tout sens qui pût s'y rapporter pour un auditeur: - autrement dit que rien du drame ne pourrait apparaître ni à la prise de vues, ni à la prise de sons, sans l'éclairage à jour frisant, si l'on peut dire, que la narration donne à chaque scène du point de vue qu'avait en le jouant l'un de ses acteurs.35 So for Lacan, the 'drame' is not just limited to the events of the story, but is formed from the relationship of these events, i.e. from the circulation of the letter, to the narrative structure. The temptation to read Drame in terms of Lacan's paper is heightened if one recalls a passage in Le parc that is itself reminiscent of Poe's tale, a fact which confirms 'The Purloined Letter' as a text of intertextual significance here: Je me tiens au fond de la pièce sans qu'elle me voie, et elle continue de lire une lettre qui semble la troubler beaucoup. Puis un homme entre, elle cache vivement le papier dans le sous-main de cuir (p.56). 33. Ecrits, p. 12. 34. On this subject see Barbara Johnson, 'The Frame of Reference: Poe, Lacan, Derrida', in Yale French Studies, 55-6 (1977), 457-505. 35. Ecrits, p. 12. The following page references in the text are to this seminar on Poe's story.

11

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of the Police considers poets to be not far short of being fools, is also rightly pointed out by Lacan as being significant. One could add that Dupin's preference for thinking with the light turned out is also compatible with the distinction I am establishing between the different 'regards', and the opposition between the blindness of convention and a poetic intuition that produces the text's counter-image. To return to Sollers's Drame one can now, on the basis of the above digression, develop the points made earlier relating to ambiguity. Three general categories of ambiguity have been identified in the text: at the level of narrator and character; in the intertext's dynamic of construction and destruction; and between the categories of sleep and waking. In the first case, it was claimed that this tends to produce an abstract form of narrative made up of four nodal points. In the second case, a form of silence is incorporated into the articulation of the text. In the third case, I asserted that the language of ambiguity (promoted by phrases such as 'entre veille et sommeil') is not limited to sleeping and waking, but that it permeates the entire narrative. Between them, these categories of ambiguity account more than anything for the difficulty one experiences in reading the text. As a means of resolving this difficulty I will in the following pages develop an analogy between the non-mimetic discourse of the narrative and certain forms of abstract visual expression. Reading passages such as the following: 'Tu marches ici, tout près, dans l'autre pièce (sur l'autre rive, de l'autre côté de ces mots), invisible, les yeux peut-être fixés au-dehors' (p.33), one quickly becomes aware of an ambiguity or indeterminacy of place which is an important characteristic of Drame. To complement the detailed listing made earlier that illustrated the recurrence of allusions to sleeping and waking, here are some other, more general phrases, which are similarly subjected to much repetition: 'l'autre côté', 'l'envers' and 'le même côté'. Related to this category is the repeated naming of the points on the compass, especially 'ouest' and 'est' and, paradoxically given previous references to the indeterminacy of opposites, the much-repeated noun 'le mur' (used over twenty times). There are two passages in particular which emphasize the value of these points for the subject of this book, each of which I will now quote in full before highlighting the important detail. Comme si, écrire, c'était rendre faux, mais d'une fausseté qui échappe à celle qui se trame sans cesse aux environs, seule façon de faire appel à une précision instable, signes entr'aperçus dans la lumière et l'ombre (cela bouge sans cesse dans la marge et au fond des yeux, cela ne veut pas être dit et garde sans fin ses distances), puisqu'ici les murs se rapprochent, on ne peut pas l'oublier, et dehors, voilà, plus rien n'est compris... Ce passage est trop

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calme. De quoi ai-je besoin, maintenant? De n'importe quelles phrases et plutôt de lents gestes privés de sens, loin, de l'autre côté du sommeil... J'ai oublié ce que je voulais en commençant, je voudrais ici et en avant d'ici ne plus rien vouloir... Il me semble que je suis à la frontière des mots, juste avant qu'ils deviennent visibles et audibles, près d'un livre se rêvant lui-même avec une patience infinie, renvoyant à lui-même par une réflexion passive et trop riche - livre où chaque situation, y compris la plus violente, se laisserait prendre (je veux bien disparaître en lui, entouré de cette forêt, à présent) (p.87). This passage brings together several points made so far. There is the language which creates various sorts of ambiguity, as in 'les murs', 'l'autre côté du sommeil' and 'se rêvant'. Then there is the sense of an inevitably 'faux', or inauthentic nature of writing. A possible structure of the text is presented, 'une précision instable', where hints of a topology surface through words such as 'dehors' and 'les murs', only to be disrupted as the passage continues to 'la frontière des mots' where meaning has not yet been established, like the word 'forêt' which remains curiously devoid of significance, an abstract notion with no apparent geographical or spatial significance. This mood is also a feature of the second passage, where any tendency to create a definable scene is neutralized by an irregular image of the text: Images mal imitées dont il retrouve le jeu à proximité du sommeil (il se tient sur le bord, cette fois), formant une doublure tremblante des situations les plus douteuses: tout se passe comme si un décollement infime dénonçait l'absence de profondeur, et le fond, ici, n'est que répétition déroutée, soumise, ce qui est indiqué entre les lignes est plutôt la présence incompréhensible d'un sol très proche et entièrement autre, avec lequel on a cependant partie liée de manière obscure, obscure parce que la plus simple, la plus impossible à saisir... Elle, de son côté, raconte une poursuite à travers des écrans successifs, les murs ou les portes devenant le plus souvent autre chose, par exemple un paysage à la fois ouvert et fermé (un lac entouré de montagnes) et elle sait qu'il est inutile de s'engager dans ces pièges transparents, dans ces fausses sorties, ces issues en trompe-l'oeil, ces plans mensongers qui se substituent interminablement les uns aux autres... Ils parlent ainsi dans l'ombre, un matin. Or, ce qu'il revoit aussitôt, c'est un épisode isolé, vertical, celui de la voiture découverte avançant en rase compagne dans le matin gris (pp.70-1).

Chapter Two

Drame

Once more, there is the peculiar use of language, as in 'sommeil' and 'les murs', words that in spite (or because ?) of their ambiguity, seem to impose themselves far more than any passing reference to particular events or features of the landscape. The grounds on which this is based are identified with the page on which the words are written, as in the clause 'ce qui est indiqué entre les lignes est plutôt la présence incompréhensible d'un sol très proche et entièrement autre'. What these two passages have in common is the sense they give of an oddly geometric form taking shape in language, that emerges through the failing light of represented forms (such as 'forêt', and 'un lac entouré de montagnes'). This is given in the second passage by the numerous allusions, both explicit and implicit, to the horizontal and vertical axes: 'un sol très proche', 'un lac', 'des écrans successifs', 'les murs', 'les portes' and 'vertical'. This last word is used in an apparently strange way, but the episode is called 'isolé' and 'vertical' because it cuts in on the flow of horizontal lines (i.e. the text). The two passages are also similar in so far as the geometric or abstract form that seems to emerge in the text, is set in clear opposition to any notion of representation: 'Images mal imitées', 'l'absence de profondeur', and the 'sol très proche et entièrement autre' of the page confront 'ces pièges transparents', 'ces fausses sorties', 'ces issues en trompe-l'oeil', and 'ces plans mensongers'. This emergence of a geometrical counter-image through the two axes recalls the library dream at the beginning of the book. One may recall that the figure enters the library through one of the shelved books, and therefore presumably vertically, before experiencing in a horizontal position the scission of selfhood. In the light of the passages just quoted, this should be seen as an elaborate image, with the scission being a sign of the subject's fate in the transforming process of writing and reading.36 All the detail that has been elaborated so far, of a geometric design in Drame based on the vertical and horizontal axes, stems from the fundamental order imposed by the sixty-four passages alternating between 'je' and 'if, with its clear analogy in the game of chess. There are references to 'cet échiquier mobile' (p.21), 'cet échiquier invisible' (p.73), 'les damiers de terre' (p.55) and 'carrés surchargés' (p.75). In a text from which descriptive detail is markedly absent the words 'noir' (especially as in the expression 'sur fond noir') and 'blanc' are used repeatedly, as in for example: 'ce moment noir' (p.71); '"La terre" est donc là, au loin,

comme une draperie noire, flottante...' (p.77); 'façades noires' (p. 143); and 'le mur blanc' (p. 144). Of course, earlier modernist writers such as Nabokov in The Defense have also been attracted to the idea of chess.37 Barthes has written that the image of the chessboard structuring Drame points to a certain arbitrariness, in that the 'je' and the 'if, even as they occupy a position in the text, never seem to be necessarily rooted to that position and can easily come to assume another.38 This transitoriness recalls the movement of characters in Poe's tale a factor which, according to Lacan, demonstrates the workings of the letter on the subject and his unconscious. Just as the identities of the characters in 'The Purloined Letter' are determined by their position with regard to the circulating letter, so too are those of the pronominal figures of Drame determined by their position on the chessboard of a page. If one considers the arbitrariness and transience in the positions of the various pronouns ('je', 'tu', etc.), together with the by now familiar claim that Sollers tends to subvert categorical opposites (here in the chessboard we have an opposition between black and white that brings to mind the night and day of Le parc), then one has a clear image of the narrative's operation in Drame:

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36. Kristeva describes her notion of 'géno-texte' in terms of a vertical cut in the text: 'Ce qui s'ouvre dans cette verticale est l'opération (linguistique) de génération du phéno-texte. Nous appellerons cette opération un géno-texte en dédoublant ainsi la notion de texte en phéno-texte et géno-texte (surface et fond, structure signifiée et productivité signifiante)' Semiotika (Paris, collection Points 1969), p.219.

il

Chaque pièce bougée (gestes, mots) remue invisiblement la partie entière, s'accumule, fait tomber d'autres pièces ou les consolide, change et accomplit l'ensemble, provoque l'inconnu, réagit sur lui... (p. 124). Another of Drame's most favoured words is 'tableau'; in particular one could point to the repeated expression 'l'envers des tableaux' (as on p.58). When the narrator comes to define the narratorial perspective in visual terms, it is in the following way: 'Il s'agit plutôt d'une danse d'avant les images, d'un dessin qui oublierait d'arriver jusqu'au dessin, et s'enlèverait, se perdrait avant d'apparaître...' (p. 117). This supports our idea of likening the textual counter-image to abstract art on the basis of their common challenge to mimesis. Like the nouns of places which have no visible significance and remain isolated in the text ('port', 'océan', 37. See The Nouveau Roman: A Study in the Practice of Writing, p.229 on the importance to Saussure of chess as an image for the language system, and to Roussel as an image of time projected into space. See also Thiher's Words in Reflexion, especially the chapter entitled 'Play'. 38. Barthes writes: 'Sollers alterne ces deux modes selon un projei formel (le /'/ et \cje se suivent comme les cases noires et blanches d'un cchiquici ) dont la rhétorique même dénonce le caractère volontairement arbitraire (toute rhétorique vise a vaincre la difficulté du discours sincère)' Sollers écrivain, p .'.'

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etc.), colours also have a strangely detached, vague quality devoid of referential value: 'ainsi dans les bleus et les verts mêlés d'ocre, là où le ciel, l'herbe, l'humidité, la terre, les feuillages laissent venir une ville blanche au fond, un pont et des ruines' (p. 154). This is underlined by the fact that the two most important colours of Drame, black and white, are not truly colours at all. 'Le Mur du sens' is the title of an article Sollers wrote about the paintings of Mark Rothko and the similarity of some of the points he makes in this article to the narrative stance of Drame helps to confirm the tendency of this discussion to draw an analogy between Sollers's text and the logic of some abstract art. So far, particular words and phrases have been identified that create a sense of disorientation in the novel, such as 'l'autre côté' and 'le mur', suggesting that they are inspired by an opposition to the notion of narrative as representation. In 'Le Mur du sens', Sollers treats in a similar language the development of the abstract as a liberation from the constraints of figurative forms: Le discours des formes ayant disparu, subsiste cette note intense et absorbante où le proche et le lointain coïncident. Il s'ensuit, du côté sensible - qui persiste - une détonation générale, tandis que de l'autre, intelligiblement, la libération s'accomplit. Comme si l'esprit avait passé outre à un obstacle majeur, et poursuivait maintenant, en silence, sa navigation unitaire. Cela ne va pas sans un vaste plaisir, plutôt sombre d'ailleurs, dramatique, tendu. L'important, cependant, était d'en arriver là: en un mot, de passer le mur.39 So the wall here is built on a distinction between the figurative and the nonfigurative, with the latter being experienced in silence, in the absence of an all too visible form which is abandoned in favour of what one might call the invisible form of abstract art. For both Sollers and Rothko, this invisible form or structure becomes a preoccupation. Could this not facilitate an interesting comparison with Poussin's distinction between the two 'regards' discussed above, with abstract painting representing an ascendancy of the 'regard' of the intellect? In any case, Sollers does seem to be making an implicit analogy between his own writing of the time (i.e. Drame), and the revolution instituted by abstract painters, in so far as they both question the workings of a mimetic order that would conceal the material qualities of painting behind the figure, 39. Philippe Sollers, 'Le Mur du sens', Art de France, 4 [1963], 239-51 (p.241) For Sollers on Rothko see also 'Psaume' in Théorie des exceptions, pp. 159-63.

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and of narrative behind the story: D'un côté, la peinture et la "réalité" en système d'échanges. De l'autre, la peinture comme réalité. D'un côté, une expression complexe pour une idée simple (le "sujet", disons). De l'autre, une expression simple pour une idée complexe.40 Sollers is here rephrasing Rothko's own statement: 'We favor the simple expression of the complex thought' .41 Given the importance to Sollers of the unconscious and his youthful appreciation of the surrealists, it may seem surprising that he has not devoted time to the visual artists of that movement. Yet in specific terms, his conception of the unconscious was almost always too Freudian and Lacanian to be reconciled with that of Breton, whom Sollers accused of having misunderstood Freud.42 This has an indirect parallel in the development of Rothko; as Diane Waldman explains in her book on the artist: The Surrealists sought archetypal images to represent the highly charged world of their subconscious minds. But the future Abstract Expressionists developed a vocabulary of signs, not to symbolize the super-reality of the real world merged with dreams and the unconscious but to express the reality of a revolutionary abstract art. They released themselves from the past when they abandoned their commitment to the primitive and the literary and consecrated themselves to the realm of pure painting.43 The tangible link between literature and art is broken by abstract painting, since painters such as Rothko no longer seek inspiration from symbols or themes derived from literature. Sollers seems to be writing the reverse side of the same leaf, using colour and form in an abstract way in Drame so as to move away from the creation of a figurative image or a language that would limit itself to describing or discussing visual art, and to reject the idea of a dream as a sequence of symbols an understanding of which would provide the key to the richness of the individual's unconscious, to produce instead his own form of pure writing.

40. 'Le Mur du sens', p.242. 41. Quoted by Diane Waldman, Mark Rothko (London, 1978), p.39. 42. 'Sollers' (interview), in Jean Ristat, Qui sont les contemporains (Paris. 1975), pp. 147-57, (p.154). 43. Mark Rothko, p.43.

Chapter Two

Nombres

Many of Rothko's early paintings, regardless of whether they are of human figures or of landscapes, bear the same title: 'Untitled'. Later, as in 'Untitled' (1939-40), the human faces begin to merge into one another and are incorporated as if into a frieze. The blurring of individuality is complemented by a vagueness wherever titles do refer to a setting, as in 'Aquatic Drama' and 'Primeval Landscape'. Some paintings are given figures, such as 'Number 26' or 'Number 18'; others combine pure colour with the abstraction of figures, as in 'Number 61 (Brown, Blue, Brown on Blue)'; yet others combine non-referentiality with figures, as in 'Untitled (Number 7)'. Numerous paintings bear titles containing words which can be both colours and physical objects, such as 'Earth', 'Rose', 'Plum' and 'Ivory'. In all these cases Rothko is freeing his work from the constraints of a representational function, in ways which are not dissimilar to Sollers's use of language in Drame. Waldman also points to Rothko's fascination with the theatre and the influence it had on the themes of some of his paintings, especially in the 1940s. She quotes him as saying: T think of my pictures as dramas; the shapes in the pictures are the performers'.44 The performers are incorporated into and become identified with the structure of horizontal and vertical lines which become ever more prominent:

choice of Drame for the title of a novel, the choice of non-referential titles by abstract painters such as Rothko apparently seeks a similar subversion of painting's genres. Rothko's work, with its structures based on the horizontal and vertical axes, and with the significance it attaches to the word 'drama', does offer an interesting angle for approaching Drame. Rothko's taste for titles containing the word 'Number' now leads into the next section of this chapter which will concentrate more on Nombres.

84

Rothko asserted this stability as well as the flatness of the picture plane by working with strictly horizontal-vertical axes, crossing his vertical canvases with horizontal bands upon which he placed vertically oriented shapes.45 The emphasis on axes can for certain paintings even be reflected in the title, as in 'Horizontal Vision' (1946). We have seen how the image is abstracted into writing for Sollers, and how hints of a setting such as the port seem to be of no particular significance. Waldman interprets similarly Rothko's painting entitled 'Number 24' (1948): where the top edge of the middle block of color suggests a horizon line, and die gentle curves or sloping contours of the beach or countryside are alluded to, but not specifically depicted.46 Just as a desire to confuse the distinctions between genres lies behind die 44. Mark Rothko, p.22. 45. Mark Rothko, p.48. 46. Mark Rothko, p.50.

85

Nombres Through the detailed analysis of the language of Drame, several distinct points have been converging. Firstly, the ambiguous use of nouns or phrases such as 'le même côté', 'l'envers' and 'le mur' in association with sleep and dream produces an indeterminacy whereby the themes do not remain tied to identifiable episodes but pervade the entire narrative. This has in turn been related to the transitory position of the pronominal figures in a narrative governed by abstract forms developing out of the squares on a chessboard. The space produced by such forms makes no pretence at concealing a certain artifice and, by not remaining tied to the mimetic order ('le même côté'), it does manage to glimpse of 'la véritable histoire'. This now creates an interesting situation in that a visible artifice may become the necessary backcloth for the reality of the narrator; such artifice is supported by Sollers in Drame and in Nombres by the metaphor of theatre, and it is to this that I will turn next. Already in Le parc theatre was a privileged metaphor as Hallier recognizes in his article on that novel when he writes about a current of 'théâtralisation'.47 In particular one may recall the child creating a theatrical scene (p.46), and the night being seen as a theatre (p.52). In Drame it is through the library dream that the notion of theatre is introduced: Alors, le rideau se lève, il retrouve la vue, s'évade, se regarde aux prises avec le spectacle qui n'est ni dedans ni dehors. Alors, il entre comme pour la première fois en scène. Théâtre, donc: on recommence (p. 14). By the time Sollers comes to write the 'Programme' for Logiques in 1967, the correspondence between text, theatre and a questioning of representation is established at the centre of the writing practice: 47. Edern Hallier, 'Rêver, écrire, lire', Cahiers du Sud. 366 (l l )62), 2'Hi 307 (p.303).

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Chapter Two Sa pratique est à définir au niveau du "texte" dans la mesure où ce mot renvoie désormais à une fonction que cependant l'écriture "n'exprime" pas mais dont elle dispose. Economie dramatique dont le "lieu géométrique" n'est pas représentable (il se joue).48

The drama in writing no longer relates to the scenes or events it expresses, but to the dynamic of textual production. This motivates my use of the word geometry, not to signify any sort of rigid formalism, but to define a provisional framework or set of axes on which the narrative builds, which explains the repeated references Nombres makes to circles, squares, and cylinders as in, for example: Ma figure cylindrique des phrases en retard' (p.20). Fundamental to a theatre-like stage in the text are the many allusions to the horizontal and vertical axes. However these allusions do not produce a precisely delimited space such as that contained within the theatre's boards and walls, but tend to create in the reader's mind an image of abstract space that unlike the theatre building has no inside and no outside. If the two axes that can be combined to produce the text's four sides (what this means exactly for Nombres will be explained later ), suggest a possible form of spatial organization for the text, there are also other cadres that are compatible with this. Four pronouns, or nodal points, artused in Drame ('je', 'tu', 'if, and 'elle'); then there are the four points of the compass that exist as abstract orientations in the novel (with particular emphasis on 'ouest' and 'est'), such as: 'les reflets des éclairs le guident vers la côte, à l'ouest...' (p. 135); and 'du côté ouest où s'étendent les terrains déserts...' (p. 158). Writing, in our European languages at least, moves from left to right, or metaphorically from west to east. and this seems to present the narrator of Nombres with an image by means of which the Western dynamic of writing can be questioned inter nally, for with each word he writes, he slides inevitably as if towards dieEast: L'orient glissant ainsi sous la page, étant là au commencement ci s'évanouissant pour revenir transformé par son occident, mais à son tour ne le laissant pas intact, s'infiltrant en lui et l'empoisonnant dans sa phrase, l'ensemble continuant à tourner (p.81). Such an image supports the concept of negativity or contradiction within language in so far as that, with each word he inscribes in his French text, the narrator simultaneously seems to take one step further in an opposite direction, through an interaction of East and West that pro

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duces the text. In line with this, there are references to the vertical, suggesting Chinese, where writing works along a vertical rather than a horizontal plane, that is from north to south. One should interpret therefore these allusions to the horizontal and vertical, such as one finds in Drame: 'l'extrémité verticale de l'eau' (p.136) and 'la tempête et le ciel vertical comme poussant la mer dans le noir' (p. 150), in terms of the flow and breaking in upon the flow of Western writing. This verticality, as a metaphor of the disruption of narrative continuity, and of the representational function of language, is also referred to in Sollers's article on Rothko 'Le Mur du sens', where he writes of the painter's work as: [une] fresque immédiate redressée dans l'espace au lieu d'être développée dans le temps - elle joue à la fois sur le mode interne de la vision (la mer n'est-elle pas debout au fond de notre oeil?) et sur la fonction d'incorporation, qui intitule, dignifie et sacre: par son amplitude, elle comprend immédiatement le spectateur et le répartit, l'exalte selon elle.49 Here, the vertical axis is also a reaffirmation of the spatial over the temporal, akin to an opening out within the text's chronological development from line to line. The repeated use of the word 'colonne' in Nombres ('la fureur se retient comme un torrent changé et formé en colonnes de mots' (p.53); 'une colonne vide' (p.56); 'la colonne des nombres' (p.69); 'sentir la colonne d'os s'assouplir en vous' (p.73); 'les colonnes chiffrées' (p.80); and 'une colonne transparente' (p.100)), relates this vertical eut in narrative continuity to the structure of a peculiarly textual theatre.50 So the theatre could be said to provide an abstractly geometric framework, which in a sense takes the novel outside its own parameters as if towards a different genre, or territory and, through the implicit references to artifice, makes it less concerned with representation than with what has already in Drame been called 'la véritable histoire': 'Rendant les mots capables de raconter eux-mêmes ce qu'ils voient - les plaçant en regard les uns des autres - et aussitôt la véritable histoire s'annonce...' (p. 127). It has been seen that Sollers creates spatial ambiguity (as in the phrase 'deux côtés de la scene'), and this inevitably makes one think of Artaud, especially since in Logiques Sollers devotes an essay to him, entitled 'La Pensée émet des signes'. Here he interprets Artaud's ideas on theatrical

49. 'Le Mur du sens', p.247. 48. Logiques, p.9.

50. For an extended treatment of the word 'colonne' in Nombres sic Jacques Derrida, IM Dissémination (Paris, 1972), pp.378-86.

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space as a challenge to the integrity of the conventional spectacle: Supposons un espace où il n'y aurait plus que des sujets: plus de spectateurs, rien que des acteurs, et tous compromis du même côté, sans exclusion possible. C'est cet espace de la pensée, abolissant toute dualité, que le langage (étant lui-même cette non-dualité) nous impose, et c'est cet espace dont Artaud a vécu et souffert le sens (pp. 134-5). In particular, one is led by Sollers's use of the theatre metaphor to recall certain passages in Artaud's 'Le Théâtre et son double', such as the following: LA SCENE. - LA SALLE: Nous supprimons la scène et la salle qui sont remplacées par une sorte de lieu unique, sans cloisonnement, ni barrière d'aucune sorte, et qui deviendra le théâtre même de l'action. Une communication directe sera rétablie entre le spectateur et le spectacle, entre l'acteur et le spectateur, du fait que le spectateur placé au milieu de l'action est enveloppé et sillonné par elle. Cet enveloppement provient de la configuration même de la salle.51 As Artaud goes on to write, in the absence of a spatially defined stage area, the action will potentially be able to reach out to the four corners of the theatre. In his redefinition of audience and stage, Artaud seems to be an ally of Sollers in his challenge to the categories of reader and writer. This is especially true of Nombres which in its own way seeks to destroy any simple perspective or standpoint from which the text might be read, in favour of multiplying the number of possible readings and of emphasizing the totality of a context that subsumes character and individuality. This is reflected in the strangeness of theatrical space in Nombres as in the following example where a painting on the wall, a window and a person speaking from the aisle all make the scene quite unlike that of any ordinary theatre: je voyais la salle, les auditeurs, et celui qui parlait debout dans l'allée centrale, détourné vers les fenêtres frappées par le son... Un tableau était accroché au mur et le bas de ce tableau, d'un bleu plus intense, était donc la région des additions et des divisions... (p.28).

51. Oeuvres complètes (IV), pp. 114-15.

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Elsewhere the spatial limits of the theatre are denied: 'je vous propose d'arriver directement sur la scène et de passer dans la salle qui dépend immédiatement de la scène tout en restant ici, couchés dans la nuit...' (p.52). The strange characteristics of this theatrical space of the text and the geometric forms promoted through an insistence on for example the vertical and horizontal axes are both vital elements in the development of an abstract counter-image within the text. In the section of 'Le Théâtre et son double' entitled 'Théâtre oriental et théâtre occidental' (a title that is all the more interesting given what has already been said of Sollers's textual axes), Artaud denounces the obsession the West has with psychology in theatre, that is at the expense of the plastic and the physical. This obsession, and the conventions of clarity in language by which it is generally expressed leads according .to Artaud to produce a sort of blindness: Tout sentiment puissant provoque en nous l'idée du vide. Et le langage clair qui empêche ce vide, empêche aussi la poésie d'apparaître dans la pensée. C'est pourquoi une image, une allégorie, une figure qui masque ce qu'elle voudrait révéler ont plus de signification pour l'esprit que les clartés apportées par les analyses de la parole.52 This idea of an emptiness which conventional discourse seeks to conceal but which poetic discourse must seek to address will by now be a familiar one, it being a constant feature of Sollers's writing that helps to define his attitude to notions of representation and the visual. From around the middle 1960s Sollers comes increasingly to view this emptiness of conventional language in association with the concept of class conflict, as in the following passage from Nombres: 'la classe dominante tient rigoureusement tous les fils du récit et établit sa domination sur les conditions de reconnaissance de ce récit...' (p.79). Working in terms of Marxism and dialectical materialism, as in Logiques, he identifies class conflict with the confrontation in language brought about by me avant-garde's challenge to notions of 'lisibilité': 'la crise même, et la révolution violente, le saut, de la lisibilité' (p. 10). The fact that the development in Sollers's texts of a radical concept of theatrical space is contemporaneous with his claim that conventional discourse is a weapon in the hands of the ruling class supports the view that counter-images, in this case those related to theatre and geometric and abstract forms, are developed as a gesture of opposition to society and more specifically to the spectacle. 52. Oeuvres complètes (IV), p.86.

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Nombres is made up of one hundred sequences which are grouped together in fours. The numbers by which these sequences are ordered reflect therefore not only the linear (or else horizontal) flow (from one to a hundred), but also the interruption into the linear produced by the four sides of each group (from one to four). So the book's opening sequences are as follows: 1, 2, 3, 4, 1.5, 2.6, 3.7, 4.8, 1.9, etc. The first four sequences could be thought of as a sort of introduction, as die time and space necessary to begin, much in the same way as the narrator of Drame did not immediately find his beginning through the library dream (this interpretation is supported by the fact that other features of the narrative, such as the separation of tense according to sequence, are not formed from the outset). The grouping of sequences into fours thus breaks in upon the horizontal development of the text by introducing a vertical axis, giving the reader the impression of a series of squares. In structuralist language this dual logic could be described as the syntagmatic, or linear order, which runs from one to one hundred, and the paradigmatic, or vertical order, which runs from one to four.53 The important point to retain about this structure of Nombres is that the numbering is another mechanism allowing Sollers to introduce patterns disruptive of chronological order in the narrative. The structural organization is also to be seen as significant at the level of intertextuality because it refers the reader not only to Dante (there are one hundred cantos in the three books that make up Divina Commedia (1 +33 + 33 + 33)), but also to another text written by Sollers at about the same time as Nombres. The 'Programme', a sort of manifesto with which Logiques opens, immediately makes one aware of a formal similarity with Nombres, in that the four headline points it makes (written in capital letters) are each subdivided into four parts and numbered: I. 1.1. 1.2. 1.3. 1.4. II. ILL II.2. etc.54 After the structuring of sequences, the second obvious feature of Nombres concerns the use of tense. If one considers the text as a series of four sequences, the first three sides of each square are in the past (imperfect) tense, whilst the fourth side is in the present tense and is contained within brackets. Sollers has given the following interpretation of how the text is intended to operate: 53. Barthes writes: 'nous disposons, devant la narration, de deux embryons d'analyse: l'une fonctionnelle, ou paradigmatique, qui tente de dégager dans l'oeuvre des éléments noués entre eux par-dessus le pas-à-pas des mots, l'autre séquentielle, ou syntagmatique, qui veut retrouver la route - les routes suivies par les mots - de la première à la dernière ligne du texte' Sollers écrivain, p. 15. 54. Kristeva's 'L'Engendrement de la formule' includes an analysis of the function of numbers in Sollers's text. Semiotika, pp.217 310

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le jeu entre imparfait et présent (trois séquences à l'imparfait, une séquence au présent) structure l'inégalité du rapport entre histoire et discours: un récit vient du passé se faire déchiffrer sur la scène présente de la lecture elle-même comprise dans le théâtre de l'écriture qui fait pour ainsi dire arriver le texte depuis le futur. Il s'agit donc, à la lettre, d'une machine à désintégrer le temps, à pulvériser l'espace.55 The structure oí Nombres is a direct consequence of Sollers's theory of the narrator, in which he is very close to Lacan's ideas on the subject in language. One has seen that at the beginning of Drame the problematic question of the narrator's identity is resolved by the counter-images of the library dream. It has also been suggested that the four pronominal identities are in the two novels related to four-sided or four-pointed abstract structures such as the theatre and the compass. Nombres also places the question of identity at the centre of its narrative hostile to representation. The points made in the following pages on the function of pronominal identities in Nombres will subsequently be related to the novel's counterimages. The non-figurative quality of such identities and Sollers's use of diagrams encourages an analogy with Lacan's 'Schéma L' which in turn leads one into a consideration of the role of other graphic elements in the text such as Chinese ideograms and unconventional punctuation. I have argued that Drame seeks to put the subject into play in language, and that this subject has no existence independent of, or prior to, that of the scene produced by the text. The threat posed by the presence of an active reader to the autonomy of the narrator, through the incorporation of 'tu'/'elle' (reader) and the split between 'je'/'if (narrator), has been shown to create an interesting dynamic of construction and destruction in the novel.56 The reader of Drame discovers points at which the formal constraints of the novel are broken down, as when the 'je' enters the 'if passage amidst talk of changing sides (pp.31-2). Similarly, there is a point at which 'elle' appears side by side with 'toi' (p.151). These instances are 55. Théorie d'ensemble, p.74. Sollers seems to take as his starting point the distinction between 'histoire' and 'discours' established by Emile Benveniste in Problèmes de linguistique générale (Paris, 1966), in the section entitled 'L'Homme dans la langue'. Benveniste's comparison in the same book (pp.251 7) of the functions of, on the one hand 'je' and 'tu' and on the other hand 'if, is echoed in the pronominal identities of Drame. 56. Sollers has spoken in similar terms about his experience ol writing: Me von lais vraiment me séparer de mon corps, devenir uniquement l'entrelacement des syllabes, des lettres...' Vision à New York, p. 101.

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important not only because they help prevent the narrative from becoming formally rigid, but also because they deny the figure any sort of stability that could lead to a resurgence of individuality. Once again the effect that this creates is to incorporate a form of silence into the graphic reality of language, as is the case in the following passage:

T-0-U-I-A-I-' (p. 15), which in French approximates to the sound of Julia (I-O-U-I-A). There could surely be no clearer example of a named figure having a purely linguistic presence in the text. All these instances help to promote one of the novels' general preoccupations, which is at one point made explicit by the narrator:

Son histoire n'est plus son histoire, mais simplement cette affirmation: quelque chose a lieu. Il essaye de devenir le centre de ce nouveau silence, et en effet tout vient hésiter et se déséquilibrer dans ses environs... Les paroles, les gestes (à côté de lui, dehors), retrouvent leurs racines géométriques: il entre dans un graphique généralisé. Parallèlement, il a l'impression de toucher l'enveloppe, le voile - ou plutôt le milieu nutritif où chaque chose baigne sans le savoir. A tel point que les acteurs lui apparaissent maintenant comme gainés d'inconscience, auréolés sombrement... (p. 132).

Le problème étant le suivant: comment transformer point par point un espace en un autre espace, l'imparfait en présent, et comment s'inclure soi-même dans cette mort, c'est-à-dire non pas conserver son corps mais incessamment au-delà des muscles retrouver l'air sans conscience ou encore toucher comme une couleur l'énergie granulée, lisse, la surface d'engendrement et d'effacement... (p.64).

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This passage is typical for us in its creation of spatial ambiguity ('à côté de lui, dehors') in connection with an allusion to geometry, the unconscious, as well as to silence. Just as in Drame, where the figures of 'je' and 'if do at times escape the laws governing their respective categories, so too in Nombres the present tense (generally a feature of the fourth side), slips into the second side (p.20) and into the first side (p.35). Certain passages that are repeated (especially towards the end where there is an ever greater repetition of phrases from the beginning of the novel), similarly shift from one side of the square to another. The undermining of character and identity is also manifested in other ways. Since the characters are only identifiable by pronouns it is impossible in some passages to be certain whether the use of 'if or 'elle' does in fact refer to a person or not. If 'elle' is a character, she is also a room : 'C'était pourtant la chambre, on ne pouvait en douter. Elle venait de se reconstituer en surface' (p. 14). Does 'elle' refer here to the transformation of the 'ancienne chambre' (p. 13) into the theatre, or to the transformation of the woman into the space of the room, which is quite feasible if one thinks of Freudian symbolism that relates womanhood to the room? Similarly, in another passage, 'elle' could be 'une phrase' (or even 'une pensée' or 'une colonne'), as all these nouns appear in close proximity as though to detach the neighbouring 'elle' from any one of them in particular: 'rien ne vient expliquer cette phrase, c'est elle qui vous regarde...' (p. 16). The dedication of Nombres to Julia offers a specific example of the novel's promotion of the idea that identity is to be defined in terms of discourse. In the book's dedication the name Julia is written in Russian letters. Then, near the beginning of the text, there is a series of vowels:

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Given that Sollers has embarked on a dismantling of the space of representation, then the subject of that representation cannot be endorsed by the use of any figurative referents, and this obviously has consequences for his images and dreams, as well as for his discourse and identity: Dans Nombres, le morcellement corporel, le fait que le corps soit écrit dans son démembrement permanent et son effervescence cellulaire, constitue une attaque en règle du conditionnement idéaliste du corps comme image, parole et identité.57 This hostility to idealism leads the narrator of Nombres to emphasize constantly the physical proximity of the text to the body: 'Ce texte était donc celui de mes couilles et je sentais le sperme et le sang venant et restant au fond' (p.49). Nombres threatens to extend its undermining of identity by the violence of its language, as in the widespread use of words such as 'blessure', 'coupure', 'brûler', and 'douleur'. There are numerous references to 'rouge', evoking blood and revolution, such as: 'une entaille rouge sombre' (p. 14); 'un couteau rouge' (p.50); 'les grappes rouges qui rappellent le vin du réseau sanguin' (p.50); and 'le moment rouge' (p. 104). The emphasis on blood in for instance 'son propre sommeil sanglant et sourd' (p. 12) is also related to the violence of or against the body: 'une veine éclatant sous la tempe' (p. 11), or to the violence of sex: 'il fallait prendre pied, être désarticulé, laminé, cassé, découpé...' (p. 18). One extraordinary and recurrent image is that of the head being cut off: the beheading of a king (p.29); 'La tête vue coupée' (p.84); and 'Je voyais la tête coupée mais toujours vivante, la bouche ouverte sur le seul mot qui 57. Théorie d'ensemble, pp.75-6.

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ne saurait être prononcé ou capté' (p. 18), are but three examples. The last example is typical in that it relates violence, in the cutting off of the head, to discourse. Other examples of this correlation include 'je revenais défiguré mais parlant' (p.43), and 'une syllabe n'existant dans aucune autre langue connue, un nom pour toujours acide me brûlant la gorge, les dents' (p. 19), where language occasions violence on the body. Is the violence perpetrated on the physical body a necessary prologue to the impossible discourse desired by the narrative? This is probable given Sollers's hostility towards both individual characterization and conventions of representation in the novel. It would explain the violence as an attack on the way description conventionally builds up the appearance and psychological make-up of character in the narrative, but also as being related to the geometric forms cutting a vertical axis into the language of the individual: 'cette coupure, ce recul sans cesse présents et à l'oeuvre; comme les lignes se dispersent et s'enfoncent avant d'apparaître retournées à la surface morte où vous les voyez' (pp. 15-16). The capacity in both Drame and Nombres of pronominal identities to shift from their allotted categories within the text and the various forms of undermining or even violence to which such identities are subject are to be seen as further instances of the narratives' refusal to incorporate representations. For if the words 'forêt' and 'port' have no apparent referential or symbolic value in the text the pronominal identities arccharacterized by a similarly abstract quality that is akin to the abstract artist's rejection of figuration in painting. These various passages in which the narrative subject is undermined become more significant if one considers them in the context of the relationship between psychoanalytic theory and the question of representation. Considering the theatre in purely Freudian terms, one thinks first of the symbolic meanings of buildings and their parts whereby the housesymbolizes the body, pillars or columns the legs, and the gateway an orifice, or rooms symbolize women. Or else one recalls the dream of Elise L.,. where she is in the theatre of which one side of the stalls is completely empty.58 All these examples suggest the importance of structured space to the dream-image in classical psychoanalytic theory. As for the theatrical metaphor in Nombres, Sollers could have had in mind those empty stalls when he thought of the open, fourth side of his own text. It is also possible that he was thinking of the other scene of Freud's unconscious when he wrote that: 'Le théâtre s'adresse directement à "l'inconscient" alors que "la vie" le refoule'.59 What Sollers is doing in novels

like Drame and Nombres is attempting to bring the unconscious to centrestage, and not to view it as an oddly peripheral state. It is considered vital to language and the subject, and is not limited to the thematics of such and such a dream within the story. With regard to language Sollers has himself made an analogy between the roles of writer and psychoanalyst. He once said in an interview: 'On peut écrire des livres qui se taisent à ce point que la société est forcée d'en parler de plus en plus', before going on to liken the writer to the psychoanalyst: 'Lui aussi garde le silence. Mais ce n'est pas un silence neutre, c'est un silence qui fait parler. Je conçois l'écriture comme une sorte de thérapeutique froide...'.60 The four sides of Nombres which Sollers, it may be recalled, defined in terms of 'histoire' and 'discours', could be seen as one form of this therapy, with the open, fourth side of the text creating the conditions for a novelistic form of analytic discourse. This enquiry into the subject in Sollers's fiction is establishing that there is a threat to identity which is accompanied by a peculiar scission. This produces a specific category of what has previously been called internal distancing, with Nombres following Drame in creating a psychoanalytical perspective that distances the character from himself. In the following example this is achieved through the use of quotation marks: 'Plaçant le mot "je" dans son glissement de toujours...' (p.59). Elsewhere, a similar effect is produced, as in: 'l'atome "je" semble monter, descendre ou remonter parmi vous comme un fil vertical' (p. 105). Both these examples produce an effect quite opposite to that of speech marks, if the latter are to be taken as the sign of an individual extending himself by externalizing his thoughts. Here on the contrary the punctuation marks imply a negation of individuality. The internal distancing of the subject produced by quotation marks is underlined by the repeated use of the verb 'doubler', such as: 'Nous étions doublés depuis le commencement' (p.40); and 'nos phrases doublaient l'effet du parcours' (p.41). More specifically, the idea of the subject's doubling is in Nombres vital because it recognizes the reality of the split psyche (in Freudian terms, as between the ego and the id, or otherwise as between the conscious and the unconscious):

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58. The Interpretation of Dreams, p.462, p.471 and p.541. 59. Logiques, p. 137.

Il fallait donc nous compter maintenant non pas comme deux en un, non pas comme deux par rapport à un, mais littéralement comme quatre, deux parallèles à deux marchant ensemble sans se regarder ni se remarquer... (p.71).

60. 'Philippe Sollers, mandarin ou révolutionnaire'' (interview with I rançois Bott), Le Monde (des Livres), 13 juillet 1968. I II (p II)

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This should be seen as part of the process undermining the psychological coherency of character in Nombres: 'il fallait être au moins deux, à présent, pour toucher cela... Il fallait passer l'un et l'autre de l'un et l'autre côté de ce qui n'a pas de côtés, pas d'ombre...' (p.48). In order to understand what Sollers means by this, one could perhaps mention Lacan's 'Schéma L', which he elaborates in the course of his seminar on Poe's 'The Purloined Letter'. Having related the 'drame', which Lacan's text emphasizes, to the novel of the same name, we are now offered by the 'Schéma L' a second point of contact between Lacanian psychoanalysis and Sollers's fiction. Whilst it is beyond the scope of this book to enter into the complexities of Lacan's thought, it is nevertheless worthwhile drawing attention to one or two general points which will help to further the reading of Nombres. Lacan draws a Z-shaped diagram the four points of which are made up by the 'S' (the Subject), the 'autre' (Imaginary), the 'moi' (Ego), and the 'Autre' (Symbolic). The 'autre' and the 'moi' form the diagonal axis which constitutes Lacan's Imaginary, i.e. the identifications the ego makes with the 'autre', and which remains distinct from the Symbolic. However, the direction of the arrows that relate the points to one another on Lacan's diagram, indicates diat any relationship between 'S' and 'Autre' is necessarily mediated by this diagonal axis where the ego is situated. As Benvenuto writes, the fact that the 'S' - 'Autre' interaction is mediated by the Imaginary line ('autre' - 'moi'), means that: 'The truth is thus always being 'purloined', and the subject is constantly drawn to the four corners of the scheme' .61 Whilst not wishing to make too much of this diagram, since the nature of Lacan's intervention is obviously quite different to that of Sollers, one can nevertheless comment on its general pertinence to our subject. Given that for both Lacan and Sollers, the subject's identity is indistinguishable from his or her situation in the field of language, the first point of convergence between the two writers lies in a common denial of any dualistic interpretation of the psychic process as of between two autonomous individuals. In both Drame and Nombres there is a move to create a framework which displaces the subject in discursive interaction. The library dream of Drame, which allows the narrative to begin, is particularly clear on this point: it is as though the act of splitting that takes place through the dream is a precondition of subjecthood and, in broadly Lacanian terms, marks the narrator's entry into the Symbolic, whereupon his narrative can begin. Having escaped the reign of the 'moi', or ego, the narrator of Nombres is thrown to the four corners of the text through the 61. Bice Benvenuto and Roger Kennedy, The Works of Jacques Lacan. An Introduction (London, 1986), pp. 100-101.

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Lacanian process of discursive interaction: Je n'étais plus devant les mots, confronté à eux, moi de mon côté, eux du leur: passés dans la même profondeur, roulés dans la même matière, nous restions suspendus, ouverts, sans savoir si nous étions deux... (pp.20-1). This passage recalls Lacan's diagram, which is made up of four points but has no centre; just as Artaud's imagined spectacle would reach the four corners of the theatre, so the subject is constantly being drawn over all points of the map. Lacan thus offers another four-pointed topology to accompany the others already identified in Sollers's texts, such as the points of a compass, the pronominal identities, and the sides of a text. Having drawn attention to the very visual nature of Poe's story, apparent in the simultaneous revealing and concealment of the letter, one should not forget that in his own text Lacan too plays a game with visual forms. The use of diagrams is certainly not unrelated to Lacan's analysis of language, as Malcolm Bowie suggests when he writes that: The best diagram would be the one that could perfectly outmaneouvre the conventional timelessness and two-dimensionality of the diagrammatic imagination while making a stronger kind of sense than ordinary analytic prose. Language is no longer selfevidently the best way of modelling the time-structures that lan62 guage imposes Despite Lacan's reputation for identifying the unconscious with the structures of language, the presence of diagrams in his text could be interpreted as an acknowledgment of Freud's statement, alluded to in the last chapter, that pictures have a greater affinity with the unconscious than do words. Lacan's resorting to a diagram marks another point of convergence with Sollers, whose Nombres makes use of various graphic forms that function as abstract counter-images. There are in fact four diagrams in Nombres, and they all fall on the fourth sides of squares: 4.8, 4.24, 4.48 and 4.52. The first demonstrates the open fourth side of the square; the second demonstrates that the square has no middle or focal point; the third demonstrates the textual dynamic or movement between the sides (transformation over formalism); and the fourth demonstrates the doubling, or superposition, whereby there is no one logic (or axis) governing the text. In the sequence containing the first diagram (4.8.) there is a description of the 62. Malcolm Bowie, Lacan (London, 1991), p. 188.

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four sides in which the first three are called 'visibles': trois côtés visibles, trois murs, si l'on veut, sur lesquels s'inscrivent en réalité les séquences - enchaînements, articulations, intervalles, mots -, et une absence de côté ou de mur défini par les trois autres mais permettant de les observer de leur point de vue (p.21). This is interesting because even though the other three sides are called visible, it is the fourth side (presumably not visible) which is the scene of the diagrams in the text. Cette quatrième surface est en quelque sorte pratiquée dans l'air, elle permet aux paroles de se faire entendre, aux corps de se laisser regarder, on l'oublie par conséquent aisément, et là est sans doute l'illusion ou l'erreur. En effet, ce qu'on prend ainsi trop facilement pour l'ouverture d'une scène n'en est pas moins un panneau défor mant, un invisible et impalpable voile opaque qui joue vers les trois autres côtés la fonction d'un miroir ou d'un réflecteur et vers l'ex térieur (c'est-à-dire vers le spectateur possible mais par conséquent toujours repoussé, multiple) le rôle d'un révélateur négatif où les inscriptions produites simultanément sur les autres plans apparais sent là inversées, redressées, fixes (p.22). The fourth side, essential in producing the textual dynamic, is both deforming and invisible. Its role is that of 'un révélateur négatif. In situating the diagrams within its sphere, Sollers gives them a complex role, so that they cannot simply be reduced to illustrations or mere representations in the text. This brings one back to a point raised earlier in the chapter, about the totality of the scene in relation to Artaud. The paradox is that because there is no longer a localized stage, but rather a gener alized scene, the diagram has itself to remain invisible so as not u> become an image (a representation); it must signify 'la sortie de la scène représentative', and be part of 'le travail qui détruit toute "vérité" specta culaire ou imaginaire'.63 The diagrams in Nombres introduce a different, graphic element into the text that appears to be capable of reordering the text. This brings ñuto consider another aspect of the visual that Sollers incorporates into Nombres in his desire to question the concept of representation, namely Chinese ideograms. The established order of Western language, its punctuation and spacing set a pattern quite different to that which exists in Chinese. In a well-known passage of The Interpretation of Dreams, 63. Nombres cover note.

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Freud compares the dream to Chinese script: dreams 'frequently have more than one or even several meanings, and, as with Chinese script, the correct interpretation can only be arrived at on each occasion from the context'.64 The reason for the interest in languages and cultures of the Orient that developed in the 1960s and 1970s for many of those associated with Tel Quel, is given in the following account by Kristeva: Dans la langue chinoise, les rapports habituellement établis entre référent-signifiant-signifié se trouvent modifiés. Comme si, sans se hiérarchiser, ces trois termes se confondaient, sens-son-chose fondus en un tracé - en un idéogramme - se disposent comme les acteurs fonctionnels d'un théâtre spatial.65 Sollers has said that in Nombres the Chinese ideograms form a 'matrice thématique': 'Le plus souvent l'idéogramme chinois vient en fin de séquence comme butoir et répète (transforme) les dernières propositions rédigées en français'.66 The graphie sign breaks in upon and transforms the phonetic. As with intertextuality, where the precise origin of the extract may remain anonymous (because the notion of a precise, localized origin is being challenged), so too with Sollers's use of Chinese ideograms, the essential point is to consider the effect on the reader of suddenly seeing an Eastern ideogram in the middle of a novel, rather than their individual meanings: Les traces chinoises, même si on en reçoit seulement le choc inconscient, sont là pour marquer en somme le retour du refoulé, un fonctionnement qui frappe à la fois de l'intérieur et de l'extérieur (avant la représentation ou après elle) notre système linguistique et commence à le repenser, à le dépasser.67 The use of ideograms should be seen in conjunction with all the other textual markings, spacing, and unconventional forms of punctuation in the novel. The diagonal stroke (/) is often used to mark an intertextual insertion, or sometimes a blank, but is always the sign of the text opening up: 'Air / / A cause d'une parole dite dans une autre langue, accentuée,

64. The Interpretation of Dreams, p.470. 65. Julia Kristeva, Le langage, cet inconnu (Paris, collection Points 1981), p.79. 66. 'Philippe Sollers: écriture et révolution' (interview with Jean (iaugeard). Lu Quinzaine Littéraire. 49, 15 avril 1968, 3-4 (p.4). 67. Théorie d'ensemble, p.78.

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répétée, chantée - et aussitôt oubliée -, je savais qu'un nouveau récit s'était déclenché' (p. 12). Like the word 'geste', there is also the word 'trait', and these could both be understood as signifying the graphic but non-representational sign in the text, the silence which replaces the image, especially since the 'trait' is identified with the ideogram and the East: 'A l'est, portant avec lui d'un seul coup tout le passé effacé, la simple force indestructible du trait' (p.37). In the final pages of this section, I will look at some of the specific ways in which the language of Nombres sustains such an anti-representational gesture. At the basis of this is a particular form of the general doubling and distancing diat affect the subject of the narrative (as in the placing of 'je' and 'moi' between quotation marks), and which relates to perception. In places this distancing leads to a split in the apparent naturalness of the unity between the subject and his eyes, such as in: 'je voyais mes yeux' (p. 11); 'le rideau qui vous sépare de vos yeux' (p.42); and 'son oeil capté' (p.74). Elsewhere, it takes the form of a problem within the immediacy of the usual relationship between the subject and what he sees: 'je ne voyais plus que par moments ce que je voyais' (p. 13); 'ces yeux engloutis et vides' (p.99); and 'le regard perdu' (p.74). Yet beyond these specific examples is a much broader claim that defines the narrative's hostility to the ¡mage, namely that the eye stops short of seeing what really matters: 'chacun commençait à comprendre qu'il y avait toujours eu le même feu éloigné des yeux' (p.48); 'les formules des cellules imperceptibles à l'oeil nu' (p.80); and 'le volume se réduisant jusqu'au point mouvant qui précède l'oeil' (p.82). Or, to put it in specifically cultural terms, that which society gives us to see is not really worth seeing, hence the novel's denial of the mimetic obligation whereby the narrative pursues instead 'l'histoire impossible à voir' (p. 117) and 'l'intérieur suspendu et perdu de vue' (p. 118). The problems relating to perception are maintained and supported in at least three different ways by this fragmented text: firstly, by the internal contradiction within a phrase, secondly, by the contradictory connotations between different passages which cause the word repeated to be emptied or have its meaning rendered abstract, and thirdly, by the use of what could be called neutral adjectives, for example 'vide', 'transparent', or 'blanc'. Exemplifying the first form of contradiction, the internal contradiction within a phrase, are examples such as: 'jusqu'à la pierre qui n'est pas la pierre' (p. 124); or else one could point to the association of blood and whiteness in phrases such as: 'sang blanc' (p.82) and 'voyant clairement le texte se détailler sous nos yeux et en même temps disparaître à chaque instant dans le blanc, l'océan chaud et lent de métal, de sang' (p.40). As for the second form of contradiction, namely the contradictory

connotations that exist between different passages, there are many cases of especially prominent nouns being given at times positive, and at other times negative, connotations. Here, for example, the form of the circle can be seen as both positive, as in the following quotation with its allusion to a taoist-like 'way': 'le cercle blanc qui était la voie' (p. 19), but also as negative, like the circuit of the rat race: 'Piège incessant, accueillant et lent, cercle se refermant sans bruit derrière mes épaules, sphère où ils se mettaient à respirer et à m'appeler...' (p. 102). Another example ¡s provided by the often-used word 'geste' which, being associated with writing, generally has positive connotations: 'l'ensemble des gestes violents et lents' (p.24); but which can equally be overtly negative: 'savoir se révolter encore et encore, ne jamais renoncer, ne jamais accepter le geste de se courber et de censurer' (p. 116). The third form of contradiction is perhaps less obvious, but it is widespread and certainly contributes to undermining the certainty of the sense of perception. Here, such an effect is achieved by attaching neutral adjectives to nouns, as if to efface or negate those nouns' ability to create an image in our minds. In the case of 'vide' and 'transparent' we have already seen that they are used to describe the 'colonne' of the text and the theatre. 'Transparent' is equally important, as in the following two cases, where it is used to demolish the solidity or permanence of form, and to transform it: 'j'étais donc arrivé au fond du travail, et comme sur une roue transparente inclinée partout, je voyais l'inscription se faire, se reprendre' (p.49); and:

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je devais faire comprendre que je ne pensais plus à rien, que j'étais devenu un simple geste permanent de l'espace, et c'était comme si un sourire sans bouche me guidait, me faisait tourner sur un cylindre transparent traversant les mondes et leurs temps... (p.55). To stress the interrelatedness of all these forms of contradiction I will return to the word 'blanc' for the last examples of a neutral adjective. Not only can 'blanc' describe blood, or a circle, but it can be used in an attempt to wipe out entirely any image from one's mind: 'Sur le bord volcanique et calme du blanc' (p.12); 'les lèvres blanches' (p.24); 'vos écrans blancs' (p.25), are three such instances. This last category of words and phrases, those which have been called neutral, are of course particularly important for this study because the use of language such as 'blanc' encourages a mood of abstraction and not the development of an image. In 'The Purloined Letter', the police divide up and number the entire surface area of the minister's apartment in their attempts to locate the hidden letter. The numbering of Nombres has quite the opposite effect, since it tends to multiply rather than compartmentalize the textual topo

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graphy. Although the word 'theatre' has recurred throughout this part of the chapter, Sollers is obviously not concerned with celebrating representations or images. The theatre to which he refers is one which attacks the notion of representation on its own ground; it is not a definable space, but an element that introduces vertigo into the stability of time and space. In discussing Drame and Nombres at times apart and at times together, I hope to have demonstrated both the interrelatedness and the transformation between the two novels. The development of pronominal identities in an abstract framework that has affinities with Lacanian psychoanalysis, the undermining of such identities by the themes of violence, destruction and silence, provide the lines along which the narrative's non-figurative and geometric counter-images are formed. Lois, H, Paradis Reading Sollers's interviews of the early 1970s, one senses both continuity (in a preoccupation with the subject of narrative discourse) and novelty (in the desire to employ a more dynamic language). Speaking about Lois (1972) the year after its publication, he said that: 'l'essentiel pour moi, à ce moment-là, était d'atteindre un tourbillon de langue, une autre scansion signifiante qui fasse surgir massivement le poudroiement du sujet dans l'histoire'.68 Structurally speaking, whilst Lois develops out of Nombres, with the text being divided into six books, and each book into twelve (unnumbered) sequences, it is a far less restrained novel. The clearest clue as to the nature of the development is given in the cover notes: 'La structure du volume est inapparente', where the word 'volume' should be taken as meaning both book and geometric space. Less rigidly structured, Lois leads towards H (as in Histoire, Hydrogen, and Hash), and Paradis, neither of which has any visiblepunctuation whatsoever, relying on the reader's voice to create a provi sional order. Sollers has said that with Paradis: pour la première fois, je suis engagé dans quelque chose qui n'a aucune limite pré-conçue, alors que les livres précédents avaient des parcours sensiblement réglés, presque prédéterminés. C'est le non-fini qui m'importe désormais.69

68. 'H' (interview with Jacques Henric), Art Press, 3 (mars/avril 1973), 17-19 (p. 17). 69. 'Deux entretiens sur la poïétique de la fiction', p.66.

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Jacques Derrida had, by the time Sollers moved from the geometrically ordered space of Drame and Nombres into the 'tourbillon de langue', produced influential new theories, as he sought to establish in his texts the interrelationship between literature and critical theory or philosophy. The journal Tel Quel published several major articles by Derrida during the 1960s, prior to their appearing in book form. Thus 'La Parole soulflee', 'Freud et la scène de l'écriture' and 'La Pharmacie de Platon' ail first appeared in the journal. Although Derrida remained on the margins of the group (as one would expect!) there was a period in the late 1960s when his enquiry into the West's 'logocentrisme' and his work on 'la différance' offered a new direction to those like Sollers who were keen to free themselves from the constraints of their structuralist legacy. There can be little doubt that Derrida's work lies behind some of Sollers's thinking at this time, as can be seen in the following passage where the proclaimed non-polarity between the signifier and the signified is reminiscent of the Derrida oí De la grammatologie: Le texte n'imprime pas un sens préalable, il imprime aux mots un mouvement incessant de sens. Il n'y a pas de "sens unique". Et c'est pourquoi tout a lieu dans la profondeur signifiante qui est le signifié.70 The impact of Derrida's philosophy is also evident in an article written by Sollers in 1967 for Cahiers du Cinéma on Jean-Daniel Pollet's film 'Méditerranée', where he discusses the ways in which Pollet makes it impossible for the viewer to distinguish between dream, imagination, perception and memory: 'Toutes ces distinctions sautent et on trouve une sorte de communauté dédoublée, où justement ne se pose plus la distinction veille/sommeil, imaginaire/réel, dedans/dehors'.71 This article is interesting because it confirms the assertion made during the discussion of the counter-images in Drame and Nombres that the undermining of conventions governing narrative form leads Sollers in the 1960s to make an analogy with abstract art forms, as he writes of: le pouvoir "magique" du film que j'ai essayé, par un texte sans "images", un texte en quelque sorte "abstrait" (c'est-à-dire placé comme sur la surface aveugle de l'image, sur le tain du miroir

70. 'Philippe Sollers: écriture et révolution', p.3. 71. Philippe Sollers, 'Une autre logique', Cahiers du Cinema, 1X7 (ll)(>7), Î7 8 (p.38).

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qu'est l'image) de scander et de réciter sous forme de double.12 It is also interesting because it expresses a clarification of the divergence of his views on art from those implicit in the nouveau roman, a divergence that began to be evident in Le parc, and which now takes on a more Derridean tone, in particular through the notion of an ever-deferred presence in language: L'art aujourd'hui est peut-être celui de la présence, non pas de l'enregistrement en direct de quelque chose qui "se passe", mais un art, un cinéma de la présence différée: présence littérale et en même temps partielle, une présence qui présente une absence et, ici, un film qui manifeste un autre film invisible dont la parole injectée dans le film raconte les glissements.73 This shows that the argument has moved on from the grounds covered in the debate involving Bloch-Michel and 'L'Année dernière à Marienbad', where the novelist seemed to be faced with a straight choice between on the one hand a subordination to the perpetual immediacy of society's image-based live show and on the other hand an unequivocal and hostile aloofness from that society. Now, owing in part to the work of Derrida, the writer has more subtle options available, and this is reflected in Sollers's novels through what I have called the indeterminacy of opposites. As for Derrida, the essay about Nombres called 'La Dissémination', which first appeared in the journal Critique in 1969, lends his work a relevance in the context of the contemporary novel. In his choice of title, Derrida no doubt underlines the use of the word in Nombres: 'la dissémination sans images' (p.61); 'Au milieu de la dissémination des appareils, des informations...' (p.71); and 'Germes groupés et disséminés, formules de plus en plus dérivées, avec, partout à l'oeuvre, le geste de soutenir, de revenir, de couper et de transformer' (p. 102). For Nombres, 'la dissémination' is one form of the physical process that is the production of language. Derrida's 'La Dissémination' was undoubtedly the culmination of his association with Sollers. In it Derrida rejects for himself the image of the philosopher as embodiment of the truth. Instead, his text apparently interacts with that of Sollers, confusing the line separating theory and fiction. Sollers acknowledged the value of such a relationship, as compared to the paternalism of Mauriac and Aragon which he experienced at the outset of

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his writing career: 'Foucault, Barthes, Derrida ou Lacan ne m'avaient pas fait, eux, des propositions de paternité, mais des propositions de fraternité et de dialogue'.74 Philosophy's renunciation of its claim to absolute truth would appear to be a necessary precondition for this fraternity and dialogue; in return Derrida can claim for his work a relevance with regard to contemporary literature. As Enthoven puts it in his interview with Sollers: pour Derrida, ou Barthes, Sollers est une aubaine, car il leur prouve qu'un texte peut fonctionner comme leurs théories disent qu'un texte moderne doit fonctionner. Ce système de légitimation réciproque fut d'une efficacité absolue.75 Yet as 'la déconstruction' turned into a fashion, its followers dazzled by verbal tours de force, one witnessed a proliferation of faithful cadets all ambitious to join the avant-garde. Meanwhile Derrida's theoretical rigour was often reduced by those who copied him to a tedious stylistic device whereby, for example, one had to introduce one's text with an apology for introducing. Despite the efforts of those associated with Tel Quel, including Derrida, to strike at the notion of influence (for instance through the notion of intertextuality), one can now say, quite straightforwardly, that 'la déconstruction' has influenced and maintained the reputation of entire university departments. As Sollers has said: La crise, le débordement que Derrida a produit peut être productif, mais seulement s'il n'est pas à son tour encerclé par une utilisation universitaire. Car il faut distinguer entre le travail considérable accompli par Derrida et le "derridisme" qui s'est développé à une allure galopante.76 The point is being made not to indict Derrida, but rather to highlight the consequences of the institutionalization of 'la déconstruction' and the stultifying effect that it may have indirectly on the reader's perception of Nombres. Given that Sollers appeared to associate the provisional abstract structures that in Nombres produce an indeterminacy of space and identity with the work of Derrida, it is reasonable to assume that his subsequent move away from such geometrically-ordered narratives was in part 74. 'Aller-retour dans le système Sollers', p.312. 75. 'Aller-retour dans le système Sollers', p.312.

72. 'Une autre logique', p.38. 73. Tine autre logique', p.38.

76. 'Transformer le statut même de la littérature' (interview wilh Rojer Pol Droit), Le Monde (des Livres), 14 juin 1973, p.23.

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provoked by a desire to distance himself from a fashionable 'derridisme'. Sollers's more recent comment on the subject supports this view: Mais l'Université a décidé que je ne devais pas être vivant après 68, parce que j'avais donné de grands espoirs au désir que les choses fonctionnent de façon idéale entre la philosophie et la littérature, de telle façon que la littérature soit en quelque sorte l'illustration de la philosophie. Ce que je ne pense pas.77 In the light of these comments, the work of Guy Debord offers what is perhaps a more interesting and productive means of pursuing our reading of Sollers's texts. Debord and others who gathered within the Situationist International movement are certainly relevant to Sollers, not only because he often shares with them an analysis of the spectacle-based nature of contemporary society and culture, but also because in the immediate context of May 1968 the Situationists, like Sollers and the rest of Tel Quel, questioned the structure of representations: Debord's recognition that the question of politics in the cinema cannot be limited to a question of "content" but is always already also located in the very structure and operation of the representation leads him to link - in a manner reminiscent of the contemporaneous theoretical work of the Tel Quel group - ideological critique with modernist formal radicality.78 Recognizing that the image is becoming ever more important in the development of social structures and relationships, Sollers understood that an attack on such images must form an essential part of the revolutionary critique. Such a perspective is evident at times in Nombres, as the following quotation confirms: et je prévoyais maintenant ceci: la multitude mettant fin au spectacle, sortant des lieux surveillés et clos, se dispersant dans les rues, et à partir de là les rapports commençant à vibrer, le travail devenant la transformation brisée dégagée par la surface mobile où j'étais projeté à part... (p.70).

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Nombres seeks to overcome a sense of the inauthenticity of lived experience, something which is founded in the oppressiveness of the spectacle: 'j'attendais et le spectacle s'annonçait comme un fragment plus lourd demon attente, formait une voûte pour cacher ce qui allait avoir lieu...' (p. 14). For Debord too, the spectacle is marked by an essential inaulhenticity, which is the form of our alienation: 'Le spectacle en général, comme inversion concrète de la vie, est le mouvement autonome du nonvivant'.79 Not only does Nombres employ the word 'spectacle' which is the key word in books such as Debord's La société du spectacle, but it also adopts the related word 'détournement', as in: La multiplication des écrans comme emblèmes de ce nouveau règne n'était elle-même qu'un signe, un symptôme, appelé d'ailleurs à recouv/ir les murs pour faire oublier le fait d'oublier et de s'effacer... Non: le détournement avait lieu avant toute vision, au creux le plus creux de toute vision, au centre de l'iris légèrement dilaté, au bout de chaque oeil (p.39). Against this, the Situationists develop their own concept of 'détournement' (a key word for them), one which: proposes a violent excision of elements - painting, architecture, literature, film, urban sites, sounds, gestures, words, signs - from their original contexts, and a consequent destabilization and recontextualization through rupture and realignment.80 If novels after Nombres become more irreverent, and at times jocular in their rebelliousness, it is in part because Sollers, taking his cue from Debord's analysis of the debilitation of society caused by the spectacle, seeks to unsettle the reader's perception of himself and his fiction. One is therefore tempted to see in Lois, H, and Paradis a Situationist gesture of at least two sorts: firstly, in that the irreverence directed at academics, philosophers, or indeed any promoters of theoretical systems, is a means of reasserting fiction's independence from the influence and images perpetuated by such theories; secondly, that the explosive and very vocal language of Lois, and the absence of visible punctuation in H and Paradis, are yet more signs of an abstract textual counter-image that paradoxically plays a similar role as the highly geometric forms of Nombres.

77. Improvisations, p. 104. 78. Thomas Levin, 'Dismantling the Spectacle. The Cinema of Guy Debord', in On the Passage of a Few People Through a Rallier Brief Moment in Time: The Situa tionist International, 1957-1972, edited by Elisabeth Sussman (Cambridge, Massa chusetts, 1989), pp.72-123 (p.94).

79. La société du spectacle, p.9. 80. Elisabeth Sussinan, 'Introduction', in On the Passage of a Lew People, pp.2 15 (p.8).

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Lois, H, Paradis

Four years separate the publication of Lois from Nombres. Sollers would later say that he had come to find Nombres too ascetic and too structured.81 Lois certainly marks the beginning of a freer use of language, yet the solemn tone of the cover notes that announces the passage from the square of Nombres to the cube of Lois, hardly prepares the reader for the linguistic jamboree of word games and puns in Sollers's novel, for which he would doubtless be proud to have Rabelais, Joyce and Freud recognized as ancestors. Even at a most superficial level it is clear that for Sollers provocation and irreverence are essential both as ingredients of fiction and in the role he himself plays in French letters. With Lois however a change becomes evident in that the text is humorously irreverent. Here are just a few examples of recalcitrant wordplay from that novel. First, there are words relating to the work of academics in the 'unifarcité' (p.44), 'cacadémiciens' (p.56) and of intellectuals who grind away on the backs of their masters' innovations: 'C'tructure, ç'tructure que de trucs qui durent en ton nom!' (p. 113), and:

one two, one two'. Sollers's musical intention is also demonstrated by the title given to a short passage of H which appeared in Tel Quel (no.51) a year prior to being published in the novel. The title was 'Das Augenlichf which title is taken from Webern's cantata. The wide range of discourses covered by the polysémie Paradis, including the sexual, scientific, political, sociological, and theological, cannot help but make the reader think of Dante's similarly encyclopedic narrative in Divina Commedia, even more so as it too was written in some ways unconventionally (being for instance in Tuscan rather than in Latin). Although Lois is already less regularly punctuated than Drame and Nombres, the eruption of the voice into Sollers's novels, coupled with the move away from a textual geometry, results in H and Paradis having no signs of punctuation whatsoever. Whereas punctuation normally maps out space in the text, the absence of it can produce a sense of vertigo in the reader as he or she first opens the book. This effect is not unlike that described in relation to Nombres, where the use of Chinese ideograms seems to pull at the borders between words, taking the reading of the text in an unanticipated direction, as from north to south. The absence of visible punctuation thus in itself becomes another form of counter-image. The major point of interest in all this for the present study is that Sollers's discarding of the visual signs of punctuation is significant in terms of his antagonism towards representational images in the text. One could say that a novel such as Paradis disarms the eye of perception, with all its visual preconceptions of texts, by offering a sort of invisible punctuation which surfaces only in the act of reading. This establishes a subordination of the eye to the voice: 'Bien sûr, l'oeil perçoit le texte comme non ponctué. C'est un piège'.82 I used the phrase 'no signs of punctuation' advisedly. Sollers prefers to speak not of an absence of punctuation but rather of a distinction between manifest and latent punctuation:

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Les bourgeois ronchonnent, ces sacrées cochonnes, mais ça tient le coup, ça s'réforme en tas, faut des trucs tout neufs, d'Ia philonalyse, d'Ia psychosaphie, de l'oraculisme et du laquoinisme (p.55). Then there are those whose philosophy is inspired by '[une] conne essence' (p.27); or 'l'annulyste' (p.87) whose psychoanalytic practice is 'freuduleux' (p.49), and phrases such as 'You never made a more freudful mistake' (p.85). It should be clear from these examples that the purpose of such wordplay is to demystify philosophy and psychoanalysis by introducing them into the novel. Even names which have positive connotations for Sollers's texts are not spared, such as: 'Vicobruno' (p.25) and 'docteur flacon' (p.68). If this irreverence can be interpreted as a Situationist gesture designed to frustrate the coagulation of an image of Sollers and his novels, then so too can the vocal language of Lois as precursor to the next two unpunctuated novels. Although Nombres can be identified with the cultural climate of 1968, Lois, with its use of popular language, and a rapid, often spoken style, makes a further leap away from authoritative narratorial discourse. Lois, through a greater importance attributed to the voice, leads Sollers away from a strict geometric organization of narrative towards a new insistence on rhythm. In Lois, for example, the line 'wan sui, wan sui, wan suî, wan suî' (p.32), initially looks like another Chinese implant, until one reads the text aloud and hears 'one two, one two,

i;

Je dis que la ponctuation manifeste fait la preuve d'une certaine limite métaphysique, dans la mesure où quelque chose du rythme du sujet reste pour lui "dehors", en représentation, capté par l'exhibition de son image spéculaire.83 Sollers seems to be claiming that the latent punctuation of a text like Paradis, on the other hand, engages the writing directly with the reader's voice, by discouraging any mediation through representational images: 'La ponctuation, absente du graphisme, m'est restituée par les intonations 82. Vision à New York, p.211

81. Vision à New York, p. 106.

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83. '//', p. 18.

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de sa voix. J'entends la virgule, le point et l'exclamation que je ne vois pas'.84 Sollers has likened the storing and processing of language in Paradis to the workings of a computer: 'qui va traiter des zones de mémoire très étendues de la culture et de l'histoire du langage humain et de ses significations'.85 Seen as a computer, Sollers's Paradis represents metaphorically: 'ce qu'on pourrait appeler la technique de l'inconscient lui-même (accumuler, transformer, calculer)'.86 This analogy for the novel's endless and seemingly superimposed levels of meaning, when taken together with Sollers's description of its punctuation as latent, is stongly reminiscent of the multiple, half visible traces of the wax slab in Freud's 'mystic-writing pad'. It is with 'A Note upon "The Mystic-Writing Pad'" that Freud finds one of his most satisfactory metaphors for, on the one hand, perception and consciousness and, on the other hand, the unconscious.87 The toy, the mystic-writing pad, or magic slate, is a good model for Freud because its surface can receive stimuli over and over again. Since it is wiped clean every time, this surface is akin to the perception-conscious system in that it does not retain the traces of these writings or stimuli. However, if one looks carefully one sees that the wax slab underneath, i.e. the unconscious, does retain the traces of previous imprints.88 This offers yet another variation on the theme of the two 'regards' first encountered in the course of the discussion of Poussin in Chapter One, where it is not the most visible image (here, that of an unretained surface imprint of the perception-conscious system), but the partly visible, complex (unconscious) set of traces on the wax slab underneath, which is the focal point of interest in the text. The film maker Jean-Paul Fargier has worked with Sollers to produce a number of video-recordings; their first collaborations date from 1980 with 'Paradis vidéo' and 'Sollers au Paradis'. Here, Paradis is introduced as being:, 'le dernier Journal Télévisé avant l'Apocalypse. Ou le premier après. A l'article de la résurrection'. To accompany Sollers's text, Farg84. Jean-Paul Enthoven, 'Aller-retour dans le système Sollers', p.313. 85. Théorie des exceptions, p.202. 86. Théorie des exceptions, p.206.

Lois, H, Paradis

ier produces an unconventional juxtaposition of images that is much more than a visual representation of the words. As Sollers wrote in Sollers vidéo Fargier (the book of their ventures), the purpose of such collabora tions is to bring out the relationship between the word and a possibleimage of it: J'ai toujours recherché, dans la langue, la manière dont le son se change en image, - d'où il vient, pourquoi, comment, et jusqu'où. L'écriture, pour moi, est la proie de la parole qui n'est pas une ombre mais un sillage lumineux vocal sans cesse à reprendre et à vérifier. [...] L'image, donc, sort du son et y rentre: je rêve quemón corps lui-même est un moment de ma voix, je veux faire sentir le roman de ce moment.89 To underline this close relationship Sollers in the same text employs the pun: 'On voit ce qu'on voix' (p. 12). The image of Sollers's live readings communicates his preoccupation with the text's aural basis. The physical demands of an uninterrupted reading, the breathlessness and sweating, become an especially prominant part of the event. Not that Sollers does not pause for breath. In fact the value of his filmed readings is to demonstrate that, far from being the monotonous and featureless landscapes one might from a superficial look at the text expect, the unpunctuated narrative of Paradis does permit a great variety of rhythms and tempos. They also demonstrate that one can find a certain freedom from the lack of formal barriers that impose breaks and thereby moderate the physical investment of the reader. In 'Paradis vidéo', Fargier directs his camera at Sollers from a number of different angles which are then edited into one image on the screen. Sollers's live reading takes place with him standing on a stage whilst surrounded by a circle of eight television screens. Six of these emit a number of composed images or 'images préparées', the seventh offers a direct image of Sollers reading, and the eighth is similar but in black and white under a 'colorisateur'. As Fargier writes: 'Tout se passe comme si le Sollers de profil et le Sollers de face n'avaient pas devant les yeux la même chose. Effet d'ubiquité chu, en fait, du texte même de Sollers'.90 Whilst parodying the growth of the screen as the scene of man's experience, this confronts the pretensions to objectivity of spectacular images. Sollers makes a clear distinction between Fargier's visual images and those of the spectacle:

87. Metapsychology, pp.427-34. 88. Derrida's 'Freud et la scène de l'écriture', in L'écriture et la différence (Paris, collection Points 1967), pp.293-340, is of interest here. Derrida shows how Freud moved from a mechanistic to a graphic model for the psychic apparatus.

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89. Sollers vidéo Fargier (Montpellier, 1988), p. 11. 90. Sollers video Fargier, p. 17.

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La voix endormie dans l'image c'est précisément l'hypnose de notre temps. Donc 'Paradis vidéo' est une opération d'anti-hypnose. Quand tu rêves, tu parles. Ce que tu vois ce sont des mots que tu es en train de prononcer. Mais comme tu n'es pas là au lieu où tu les prononces, tu crois être dans les images.91 This clearly represents in another form our distinction in the visual between the textual counter-image and the images of the spectacle. There could be no clearer image of the aesthetics Sollers espouses than to watch him in these videos, for not only is there an inventive and exacting interaction between text and image, but also the mere presence of Sollers reading, sweating, and chanting his seemingly unreadable passages has a hypnotic effect which draws one into the words that the voice throws out. The refusal of Fargier merely to illustrate the text but to rethink it in visual terms is a fundamental characteristic of our notion of the counterimage. It has been shown that Sollers makes the voice pre-eminent in Paradis and that this is supported by an absence of visual punctuation in the text and by Fargier's videos that are consistent with the notion of a textual counter-image. These are all interesting elements in Sollers's renewed attempts both to confront representational images of the spectacle and to avoid himself becoming typecast in the wake of Nombres. However, in his preoccupation with the voice Sollers extends his claims for it in a way that overrides any distinction between the spectacular image and the textual counter-image inspired by visual art:

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example, which is taken as being: 'des sons dans l'espace'.93 Then there is video, especially important given Fargier's association with Paradis. But here too, Sollers sees nothing but discourse: 'Il ne faut pas oublier que la vidéo, c'est de la parole'.94 When Sollers then claims that Paradis is a sculpture, what significance does this have? Can sculpture be defined purely in terms of language?95 One can see that Sollers insists on bringing a critical eye to painting, not unlike that of Poussin's second 'regard'. The importance of this in terms of avoiding a passive, consumeristic attitude towards visual art, was outlined in a discussion with the politician Edgar Faure, when Sollers said: 'le problème n'est pas seulement de regarder de la peinture. Si on ne sait pas la "parler", c'est comme si on ne voyait rien. C'est la culture-consommation-alibi'.96 Although one could agree with this general sentiment, the immediate problem remains, namely that his tendency at this time to define visual art strictly in terms of language can be reductive. In a perfectly justifiable desire to confront the dominance of the spectacular image in society, is not Sollers in danger also of condemning great art, such as that of Tintoretto and Botticelli, to a predictable and subordinate role with regard to the text? Fortunately, this reservation does not prevent the collaboration with Fargier from being extremely interesting and, as the 1980s progress, Sollers develops what remain perhaps his most exciting scenes of interaction between visual art and the novel.

Le verbe est au commencement de tout. La peinture et la musique n'en sont qu'une célébration. C'est la Bible qui s'entend d'abord chez Bach, comme c'est La Divine Comédie qui doit d'abord s'entendre chez le Tintoret ou chez Botticelli. Dans Paradis, j'ai voulu faire, avec des mots, une hymne à la voix.92 Is one to conclude from this that Sollers is so obsessed with the word and so hostile to the spectacular image, that he cannot relate to painting or sculpture other than by subjecting them to the authority of language? It could be argued that his overriding concern is apparently to accommodate the art he appreciates into his pattern of thinking on the text. This suspicion is illustrated perhaps by comments he has made on the lingam, for

91. Sollers vidéo Fargier, p.23. 92. 'Aller-retour dans le système Sollers', p.314.

93. Philippe Sollers, 'Alain Kirili. Le sculpteur et la liberté', Art Press, 79 (mars 1984), p.26. 94. Sollers vidéo Fargier, p.26. 95. 'Philippe Sollers. Femmes pourquoi un roman "réaliste"?' (interview with CaÜierine Francblin), Art Press, 66 (janvier 1983), 34 9 (p.34). 96. Au-delà du dialogue, p. 127.

Bio-graphy 1983 -1992

Chapter Three Bio-graphical preamble (1983-1992) Throughout this book it has been argued that details relating to Sollers's bio-graphy are significant in terms of his literature and its attempted subversion of the spectacle. Sollers is highly conscious of the way the media tends to impose certain patterns of thought upon the public, and of the fact that these forms can at times have an important bearing on the public's perception of writers and fiction. With regard to Sollers, this subject of the relationship between the writer and the media has in the last decade grown in interest given the fact that he has come to assume an ever more visible role. For instance in December 1988 he received from Jacques Chirac the 'Grand Prix de la Ville' (of Paris) for his contribution to literature.1 . Not only has he become a figure of much greater authority, for example as a member of the reading committee at Editions Gallimard and as a regular contributor to Le Monde (des livres), he has also appeared regularly on television, making appearances on programmes such as Apostrophes, Caractères, Bouillon de Culture and Ex Libris, as well as the popular Ciel mon mardi. These appearances seem carefully measured to present an image of the writer that reflects the tone of the latest novels. The well-cut blazer, the cigarette in its holder, and the ostentatious rings combine invariably with an ironic glint of the eye, the short bursts of eloquence, and the smile of complicity. As a result, it is as though the viewer had before him the joyous agitator of one of Sollers's novels, one who seems to play the role that is expected of him, yet who voluntarily betrays an essential lack of faith in that role. He has become as one commentator described him: [la] figure inimitable et pourtant archétypale de l'intellectuel d'aujourd'hui, maître es séduction et grand bouffon devant l'Eternel, Sollers a sauvé son âme en brisant les barrières qui séparent la roublardise de l'innocence.2

1. Anonymous, 'Les Grands Prix de la Ville', Le Monde, 8 décembre 1988. p.34. 2. Gilles Anquetil, 'Le cas politique. Profession: histrion', Les Nouvelles Litlér aires, 27 janvier 1983, p.26.

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The short article entitled 'Le Dandy' in which Sollers describes the figure of the dandy as he would appear today exemplifies the problem one faces in considering Sollers's own role: Le dandy, bien entendu, pense que l'Angleterre a toujours raison, en tout et sur tout, partout et à tout instant. Le dandy français, par exemple, pense que Trafalgar est une grande victoire de la civilisa tion. Il déteste Jeanne d'Arc et Napoléon. Il ne boit que du bordeaux, mais sans le faire remarquer (sauf s'il est au contact de la populace intellectuelle). Il ne peut être que catholique c'est-à-dire catholique anglais, minoritaire, sachant pourquoi la vision de Shakespeare est celle-là, et pas une autre. Un dandy d'aujourd'hui, par exemple, ne peut qu'avoir été maoïste. Il est évidemment papiste de nos jours. Il est très traditionnel et très moderne, mais il abomine la mode et le modernisme.3 It would appear that Sollers is here describing himself since the elements of his definition all relate directly to previous aspects of his bio-graphy. The passage is intentionally paradoxical however in that whilst he claims to abhor fashions, he situates within the image-conscious domain of the dandy the theological and political discourses that characterize specific periods of his past. When one adds to this the clear provocativeness for a French readership of his extreme Anglophilia one finds further support for the suggestion made earlier that such discourses and contentious statements serve primarily to establish the platform of dissent Sollers deems necessary for literature. In 'Le Dandy' Sollers creates a figure that appears to be a self-portrayal even as he subverts the factual value of details presented by discussing them in the context of the image-conscious dandy. A similar ambiguity exists if one considers the way in which Sollers's interviews and television appearances seem to support the fictionalizing of a bio-graphy that in his novels functions as a subversion of the spectacle. In providing the spectacle with fictionalized images Sollers promotes the ambiguity of his narrative discourses that are both a form of fictional artifice treating social reality and a renewal of fictional realism treating social forms of artifice. In other words a narrative that recognizes the essential mediation of the spectacle in social relationships can claim to be realistic in that it is one form of artifice confronting another form of artifice. In their subversion of the spectacle the narratives of Sollers's more recent novels induce a confusion of fact and fiction that has been seen to 3. Philippe Sollers, l e Dandy', L'Infini, 14 (printemps 1986), 3 4 (p.3)

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be fundamental to the notion of bio-graphy. One example of this was instigated by an article on Sollers in Paris-Match written by Jean-Edern Hallier. To readers avid for titbits concerning the lives of famous people Hallier offered a tongue-in-cheek presentation of his friend (or rival?) as a family man: 'l'écrivain Philippe Sollers habite (avec sa femme Julia et son fils David) un appartement près des jardins du Luxembourg à Paris'. 4 Sollers's reply to this article entitled 'Je suis un faux débauché' cornes in Le coeur absolu where the narrator refers to an article by Fafner (Hallier) in Scratch (Paris-Match): 'et celui, habilement dissuasif, de Fafner dans Scratch: "S.? Un faux débauché. En réalité, je le sais, il passe tout son temps en famille"...' (p.37). Hallier's article, which for readers of Paris-Match gave an insight into Sollers's real life, was as its author doubtless knew, never anything but fiction posing as truth. The way that the spectacle claims to present the truth (in this case the truth of Sollers's life that contrasts with the abundance of sexual encounters experienced by his narrators) is subverted in Le coeur absolu by the article being integrated into the fictional context of the novel. The uncertainty of the distinction between fact and fiction within fictional narrative is also to be found in the ambiguity created between different texts. In Le coeur absolu for example the narrator called S. is asked whether he really did meet the Pope, as was described in Femmes, to which he answers: 'C'est quand même un roman, vous savez...' (p. 176). The narrator of Femmes is called Will, which fact complicates one's understanding of the episode. Is it S., Will or Sollers speaking here? Had S. given a positive answer to the question this would have simply implied that he and Will were the same narrator. As it is his answer preserves the essential ambiguity relating to identity in the narrative: it maintains the fictional link between the two narrators without making them synonymous with one another and it keeps open the possibility that the meeting with the Pope did in fact take place, since if the two novels do not have the same narrator then the only link between them is the figure of Sollers whose name features on the books' covers. Another example of this uncertainty concerns a passage in Le coeur absolu where a woman scientist called Ruth sends S. a letter in which she suggests that they should meet. She does so on me strength of his stated partiality for scientists:

j'aimerais vérifier cette affirmation. Jouerez-vous le jeu? (p.248).

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vous avez déclaré récemment, en réponse au questionnaire Marcel Proust, que, dans la vie réelle, vos héroïnes préférées étaient "les scientifiques, toutes les scientifiques". En tant que scientifique, 4. Jean-Edern Hallier, 'Philippe Sollers: "Je suis un faux débauché'", ParisMatch, 8 mars 1985, 22-3 (p.22).

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In fact it was not S. who had written of his liking for female scientists, but Sollers. The relevant question and answer are to be found in the 'Réponses au questionnaire Marcel Proust' in Sollers's Théorie des excep tions: 'Vos héroïnes favorites dans la vie réelle? - Les scientifiques, toutes les scientifiques' (p.308). One should note how the word 'réelle' slips into a fictional context where the narrator benefits from an answer given by Sollers to a question raised in a non-fictional text. One final example originates in Portrait du joueur, a novel that contains a series of erotic letters written to the narrator by a woman called Sophie. The narrator of Le coeur absolu is questioned about the authenticity of the letters in a way that suggests he was the original recipient in the earlier novel. At one point the narrator has a discussion with Sigrid about the passages in Portrait du joueur. Firstly Sigrid says: '- Cette femme, dont vous avez prétendu qu'elle vous écrivait des lettres... Sophie...', to which S. replies: '- Pourquoi "prétendu"?'. Then Sigrid says: '- Vous avez pourtant fabriqué, avec un ami, une fausse interview d'elle?', to which S. replies: '- Peut-être, mais ça ne prouve rien' (p.70). This is an allusion to an interview that appeared in Art Press in 1985 called 'Entretien avec Sophie', for which it appeared that Jacques Henric had set up a meeting with the heroine, and in which he asked her questions about her role in the novel and her real life.5 If S. is to be believed and the interview was indeed invented by Sollers and Henric, then this adds another twist to the relationship between fiction and reality. It would clearly be foolish to try to separate fact from fiction in this story, yet it does appear that fiction is capable of operating a curious reversal. Whereas something that seemed factual (for example the interview in the magazine) is said to be fictional, what seemed fictional (Sophie's letters) turn out to be real. Having said that, in the narrative of Le coeur absolu we remain in the sphere of fiction, and there is no certainty that S.'s word is true either. The references to previous texts by Sollers (or, to be more circumspect, to texts which sound very similar to previous texts by Sollers) are also contained in comments relating to the ways in which these were reviewed by critics. This obvious fascination with the workings of the media circus and especially of literary journalists is a feature of Sollers's work especially at around the time of Le coeur absolu. It is interesting to recall that Guy Debord did much the same thing as Sollers when he produced a film called 'Réfutation de tous les jugements, tant élogieux 5. Jacques Hemic, 'Entretien avec Sophie', Arl Press. 89 (lévrier ll>K5), M 1

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qu'hostiles, qui ont été jusqu'ici portés sur le film "La Société du spectacle"', which was, as the title suggests, concerned with the critics' reactions to a previous film he had made based on his observations on the spectacle.6 By reincorporating comments made by functionaries of the spectacle into subsequent fictional texts Sollers draws attention to the fact that commentaries play an important role in the creation of myths and that they are an integral part of the generalized social fiction of the spectacle. The critical epithets, taken from journalists' articles, which the narrator of Portrait du joueur piles up in the following passage almost cancel each other out, and we are left with a list of senseless but musical words whose rhythm defies the reader to take them seriously:

Editions du Seuil to Editions Gallimard, a company that has been called the central bank of French publishing. The novel and the move led many to believe that Sollers had simply retreated from the avant-garde, but whilst it is true that Femmes appears to have a relatively conventional form, and in fact quickly became a best-seller, it would be wrong to conclude that Sollers had abandoned his long-term preoccupations with experimentation for a comfortable early retirement into popular fiction. Not only would his formal experiments continue with Paradis II (1986), but Femmes itself is a vehicle for the discussion of some ideas (on sexuality and theology, for example) similar to those contained in the so-called difficult texts. Thus whereas the language used in Paradis is intended to be taken as a direct embodiment of the complex, seamless reality Sollers was concerned to analyse, Femmes, along with subsequent novels such as Portrait du joueur (1984) and Le coeur absolu (1987), could be considered an exploration of specific scenes within this reality. As Bernard Sichère writes: 'on pourrait dire que si Paradis est le jeu, Portrait, comme Femmes, en démontre l'effectivité, les ressorts et les conséquences'.7 Femmes even refers to Paradis, generally by using the title of Comédie (for example on page 80), which makes a neat bridge with two other famous works of encyclopedic dimensions by Dante and Balzac.8 Le coeur absolu also refers to a computerized, encyclopedic text not unlike Paradis (p.261). What remains almost constant, from Le parc to the most recent novels, is the fact that Sollers suggests that painting offers another scene, an alternative to the spectacle that constitutes our notion of the counterimage. One can however detect a shift in his position in the 1980s as he seeks to distance himself from what could be interpreted as a moralistic rejection of the spectacle. Given its ubiquity, does it in any case make sense to be simply against the spectacle, any more than it does to be against oxygen? Whereas earlier texts by Sollers can arguably be said to have tended to produce a categorical rejection of the spectacle and to promote an arcane and at times hermetic narrative with which to confront it, latter novels seem primarily concerned not to communicate an impression of moral disdain that could be interpreted either as escapism or as making the text sacred. The narrator of Les folies françaises expresses this point in a comment critical of his biographer:

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Tenir son image, son rôle... Le mien? Bouffon, histrion, provocateur, plagiaire, faussaire, gamin attardé, clown, irresponsable, obstiné (je cite) à fabriquer des volumes gluants, pavés mous, flasques fatras, méduses amorphes... Trop intelligent pour être sensible... Pas assez sensible pour être vraiment intelligent... Vapeur! Virevolte! Ersatz! Plaisantin! Farceur! Ludion!... Sous ceci! Infra-cela!... Chien savant! Retourneur de vestes! Sauteur! Jongleur! Cascadeur!... Moi si appliqué, si sérieux!... Moi, au fond, si patient, calme, véridique, fidèle!... Ce que c'est que d'être systématiquement méconnu! (p. 16). The problems that people seem to have in accepting Sollers's flippant attitude to the so-called serious subject of politics stem from a failure to understand Sollers's view of literature. He is neither a politician nor a philosopher, and has never sought the kind of respectability such a role can give. What influence Sollers does have is of a quite different order, and it has always been based in a conception of literature as an irreverant activity. In these terms, his personal conduct, his acts of provocation, his seeking out of controversy and polemic, all make eminent sense. He therefore takes delight in, and in a perverse way even encourages, the multiplication of criticism and attacks to which he has become subject. By reinserting criticism of one novel in a later novel Sollers underlines the recalcitrance of fiction in an age dominated by the spectacle.

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Il dit oeuvre comme s'il disait âme. Une "oeuvre" menacée par la Femmes Femmes (1983) was Sollers's first novel following his move from 6. Levin, On the Passage of a Few People, p. 99.

7. Bernard Sichère, 'Apologie du Joueur', L'Infini, (p. 107).

Il (été l('X5), 105 110

8. Eor other allusions to Paradis in Femmes sec p.84 and p.334.

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Chapter Three pub? L'écriture anéantie par les clips? Le rythme effacé par la téléchoc? C'est leur rêve moral: moi-pas-pub-marginal-écrire-noireconnerie-désespérée-subl ime (p. 65).

The mood of Femmes is worldly; as Will states in his comment on family life, one has to experience it to understand it: 'Je suis un homme d'expérience. Je ne parle pas à la légère, en amateur. Qu'est-ce qu'un homme qui n'est pas passé par là? Un rêveur...' (p.51). A similar refusal to become detached from the world is evident in Portrait du joueur: 'Un récit ne vaut que par ce qui aura tenté de l'empêcher de l'écrire' (p. 105). This attitude produces a more complex interaction between the world of the narrator and that of the spectacle, as in Le coeur absolu where he is working on a Japanese television adaptation of Divina Commedia, or in La fête à Venise (1991) where the narrator is involved in the theft of paintings, an activity which is identified by the narrative as being encouraged by 'la société du spectacle', or again in Femmes where Cyd, one of the.narrator's favourite female characters, works as a media journalist. Her employment in the spectacle gives the narrator access to 'les dessous de l'information' (p.69), and allows him to discuss: [f] unification de la planète dans la caméra... Filet atomique à mirages... Sécrétions... Strip-tease truquée... Maya de l'électronique... Pavlov... Un autre monde dans le monde, celui du show... Et tout est showable... (p.70). In an interview Sollers supported the attitude prevalent in these texts: Refuser de faire confiance à un publicitaire, c'est ne pas se rendre compte qu'il est aujourd'hui un homme savant, beaucoup plus qu'un professeur ou qu'un prêtre, un homme sachant comment se produisent maintenant les valeurs.9 Although Sollers remains critical of the spectacle, in the novels I am about to discuss narratorial freedom is forged through an internal opposition within the spectacle, rather than in a Utopian space beyond society. This internal opposition, taking on three different forms in the novels upon which I am concentrating, can perhaps be expressed most interestingly through the notion of what will be called the contract and countercontract. It is a theme that will be developed at length in the course of the chapter and one that provides in these novels the framework for the more 9. 'Enquête: Epouseriez-vous un écrivain?' (interview with Pierre Boncenne), Lire, 97 (octobre 1983), 26-7 (p.27).

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general categories of image and counter-image.10 The novels from Femmes onwards introduce further forms of a counter-image at the centre of the writing project. It may be recalled that in novels like Drame and Nombres, the formal experiments are designed above all to bring about a freeing of textual space and chronology through a questioning of the framework of representation, or as Nombres had it the walls of the theatre. Subsequent novels, starting with Femmes, produce a renewed interaction with painting and sculpture, being popula ted with the figures of, for example, de Kooning, Picasso, Rodin, Fragonard, and Watteau. Will, the narrator of Femmes, resists the pressure he feels is being exerted by the arbiters of political and moral propriety for him to control his sexuality. As a good Freudian, he interprets the repression operating in contemporary society as fundamentally sexual, and as being supported by the dominant images of the spectacle. The pressure to conform could thus be said to form a sort of social contract; in opposition to this, and by association with certain forms of painting, Will establishes a countercontract with his friend S. that creates a scene of narratorial freedom. This scene is the basis for a series of textual counter-images that relates Femmes to for example the work of de Kooning. A constant feature in the analysis of art in Sollers's novels has been the assertion that there is more to painting or sculpture than an appeal to the eye, and what is in Femmes called '[le] stéréotype optique' (p.29). This follows an aesthetic principle implicitly repeated in his texts, whereby art has the power to disturb the conventional forms of the spectacle, that it stands in opposition to this reality and therefore has no business trying to represent it. Since art should break rather than encourage any relationship that would have it become a mirror to the world, so it should disturb the apparently natural tie between its form and the corresponding human sense (of the eye, in the case of visual art). In Femmes, for example, there is a passage on Bernini's sculpture: 'Ce n'est pas des astres qu'il s'agit, mais de l'invisible, ou plutôt du trop visible pour être visible' (p.249). This notion is no doubt linked to Sollers's long-standing perceiving of the visual arts primarily in terms of language: visual art makes an appeal to the poetic imagination (the 'invisible' or 'trop visible') and saves itself from the recuperation as mere image in the spectacle. And where else is this imagination better rendered than in literature? In the

10. Le lys d'or (1989) also makes use of a sort of counter-contract. In this novel the narrator enters into a contract to write an autobiography: Monsieur Simon Rouvray s'engage à écrire pour Madame de Laume un récit de sa vie, de ses idées, de ses fantaisies, aussi libre qu'il le désire. Cet ouvrage, qui ne peut pas être inter ieur à cent pages dactylographiées, devra être terminé dans les deux ans a compter de la signature du present accord' (pp.34 5).

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same novel the issue is approached from the contrasting point of view of television and fiction through a discussion between Will and Cyd on the problems standing in the way of a televisual adaptation of Sade's Juliette ou les prospérités du vice, where Will expresses reservations as to the possibility of a successful visual representation: Que tout se passe à l'audition, avant la vue, ou plutôt dans une visibilité fibrée, invisible... Que si c'est trop visible, découpages en morceaux, sang qui coule, cervelles explosées, hurlements, c'est le contraire de l'excitation qui a lieu... Inhibition... Refoulement... Qu'il faut donc seulement "voir" ce qu'on écoute... (pp.239-40). Le coeur absolu is a text that relates not only to Sollers's earlier writings, but one that also undertakes, through its narrator S., a more general rethinking of the past, especially the pre-revolutionary period of eighteenth-century France, to seek inspiration for a freer narrative form. Sollers's narrator unashamedly promotes a gratuitous lifestyle, under which one would class the activities of the writer, the libertine, the musician and the painter. However, Fragonard, the secret society, Casanova, the exchange of billets-doux, Mozart and the libertine are not the objects of a naive nostalgia, even if Sollers does promote them as instances of a symbolic richness, a cultural and sexual freedom which contrast starkly with a perceived nihilism, puritanism, and ambient poverty in society. This contrast again forms the basis of a distinction between the social contract and the counter-contract, as the narrator establishes an opposition between on the one hand the world of the spectacle (media, entertainment and communication), and on the other hand 'Le coeur absolu', which is the name given to a secret society set up by himself and four other characters. The spectacle, very much present in Le coeur absolu, is thus countered by another world which mixes writing with art (especially that of Fragonard), the gratuitous and the absurd. In Le coeur absolu we find the narrator incorporating in his writing de Kooning's mediod of painting with his eyes closed, which thus becomes a symbol of the sort that has just been highlighted with regard to Femmes: 'j'écris à l'aveugle, je ne vois plus les lettres, visière mentale approximative glissée sous le front' (p.306). Or again, when the colours of the evening sky over Milan recall Tiepolo's ceiling: 'quand il l'a peint sur le dos, dans l'église, il a dû tout simplement fermer les yeux et laisser aller son poignet en pensant aux débuts de soirées de l'autre côté du mur...' (p.421). This is one analogy which binds the experience of writing to the other arts, a blindness to convention that is in some ways the basis of poetic insight: - Quand la vision s'éteint?

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- Le coeur se souvient (p.413). La fête à Venise is Sollers's more recent novel. Froissart, its narrator, is in Venice to be present when in an illegal transaction a painting by Watteau is transferred from one boat to another just off the coast. This novel also develops a form of counter-contract in which painting is at the centre of the narrator's attempt to create an alternative, non-spectacular scene in the text. La fête à Venise takes a similar view to the other two novels with a claim that the image acts essentially as a depressant: Soyons techniques: l'image, en elle-même, est dépressive. Moins elle imprime et plus elle déprime. Facile à comprendre: elle bloque le sexe en puberté, excitabilité sans satisfaction. Jouir, au contraire, entraîne un "trou noir" (effondrement du fantasme réalisé), un spasme et une échographie tremblée mais palpable (p.214). In the previous chapter it was seen that developments within Lois, H, and Paradis are important in that by establishing a pre-eminence of the voice, abandoning all visible signs of punctuation, and adopting an irreverence of tone, the narratives are relieved of a representational function and are able to avoid giving the impression that the texts' purpose is to illustrate the theoretical positions of others such as Derrida. These two distinct points concerning representation and theory came together after Nombres. Thus a preoccupation with the spectacle and the textual counter-image becomes associated with a desire on the part of narrators for narratives themselves not to be recuperated, not to have an image forced upon them, as well as a desire on the part of Sollers not to become tied to the stereotype of avant-garde author. I will continue the discussion of Femmes by introducing the characters and analysing how this roman à clef makes such a recuperation henceforth much more difficult as it directly addresses the question of famous intellectuals (and figures such as the author) and their existence as mediated by the spectacle. Will, the narrator of Femmes, is a Catholic American from the Southern States, his wife, a Bulgarian psychoanalyst called Deborah, and they have a son called Stephen. There is a French writer called S., whose friendship with Will is important to the novel's structure, because it is he who will ultimately have Will's novel Femmes published under his own name. This agreement forms the basis of a counter-contract, whereby the two figures maintain 'une alliance technique' (p.34) according to which they also discuss various issues in the course of the writing. The importance of this counter-contract will be elaborated below. There are also a number of women wilh whom the narrator has affairs or relationships: lot example Cyd, an English television and film journal

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ist; or Ysia, a Chinese woman working for her country's cultural services (the fact that she always appears forbidden to talk about her work is no doubt an intentionally ironic detail, in that it contrasts with Sollers's own very vocal support for China in the past!). The roman à clef aspect of Femmes helps to particularize other characters: Flora, a Spanish anarchist who pursues Will with the intention of getting him to provide her with ideas and rewrite her work; Elissa: 'je la trouvais, moi, de plus en plus toc, apprêtée, affectée, à côté de la plaque... Maniérée à vomir...' (p.350); and Bernadette, who, although not without certain positive qualities ('elle était intelligente, son ambition la poussait à l'invention' (p.64)) represents nevertheless an extremely negative presence in the novel: 'on avait l'impression qu'un morceau de méchanceté catégorique, chimiquement pur, était tombé là, devant vous... ' (p.61). As well as these recognizable female characters, there are a number of others drawn mainly from the French intellectual scene such as: Werth, the critic whose name recalls Goethe's romantic hero Werther, Fais the psychoanalyst, Lutz the philosopher, Boris the agitator, and Malmora the novelist." Femmes does go further than Lois in its irreverent attitude towards the intellectual, making at least one implicit claim that had come to be quietly outlawed by the generation of thinkers influenced by structuralism, namely that anecdotes relating to the personal behaviour of a writer are significant when one comes to consider his or her texts. So, for example, the murderous state of mind in which the character Lutz finds himself with regard to his wife, is taken as a perfectly acceptable subject which reveals his more general state of mind: Je crois qu'il en avait une peur bleue... Résumons-nous: je les ai toujours vus trembler devant leurs femmes, ces philosophes, ces révolutionnaires, comme s'ils avouaient par là que la vraie divinité se trouve là... Quand ils disent "les masses", ils veulent dire leur femme... Au fond, c'est partout pareil... Le chien à la niche... (p. 106). The detail of famous individuals' lives that Femmes examines, often concerns important moments relating to women, sex or death, which makes such details especially delicate or even taboo. Lutz's state of mind prior to strangling his wife is portrayed with great vividness:

11. The characters correspond perhaps to the following people: Flora (MariaAntonietta Macciocchi), Elissa (Hélène Cixous), Bernadette (Antoinette Fouque), Werth (Roland Barthes), Fais (Jacques Lacan). Lut/ (Louis Althusser), Boris (Jean Edern-Hallier), and Malmora (Alberto Moravia).

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Oh la cohabitation de la honte et de la haine, de la répugnance et du mépris, envers de l'idéalisation d'autrefois, quand l'autre devient le bruit insupportable d'un ronflement, d'un robinet, d'une chasse d'eau, quand le corps de l'autre n'est plus qu'une croûte couverte de plaques d'irritation et qui voient, et jugent!... (p. 106). Then there is the passage recounting the period towards the end of Werthe's life: Tout l'ennuyait, le fatiguait de plus en plus, le dégoûtait... Les demandes des uns, les supplications des autres; l'atmosphère de malveillance implacable qui entoure la prostitution douce; la niaiserie dépendante des garçons exigeant sans cesse d'être assistés, maternés, poussés, pistonnés... (p. 131). ll

The effect on the reader of such passages as these is at once to demystify the figures described. The tendency to treat intellectuals as oracles is countered in Femmes by a novel istic move which considers them to be fallible mortals, subject to the same weaknesses, ambitions, and failings as any other person. Furthermore, the novel implies that the myths surrounding them are doubly misleading since intellectuals are generally in no position to provide the answers expected of them: 'Que même là où ils étaient parvenus; à cette place tellement désirée par les autres il n'y avait rien... Rien à voir; rien à comprendre... ' (p.216). It is not difficult to understand that what Sollers is doing with the names and characters of others in Femmes is essentially the same thing he has on countless occasions done with his own name. He is claiming that as public figures in a highly mediatized context these characters more than anyone else have a mythical and even fictional existence. The episodes of their lives are spectacular in all senses of the word: Situés sous le laser de la société du spectacle, ces êtres-là n'ont pu devenir que le roman de leur être; ils se sont transformés, fictionnés à vue d'oeil. La démonstration d'un tel roman, au rebours de tout plat naturalisme photographe du réel, montre que le réel a une infaillible vocation fictionnelle, imaginaire - et qu'il ne reste de nous et dans notre mémoire et dans celle des autres qu'un roman joueur ou tragique. Que vaut l'autre, la personne, sinon sa métamorphose en personnage?12

12. Jean-Luc Steinmetz, 'A propos de Femmes de Sollers', La Quinzaine Liner aire, 16 mars 1983, p.29.

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This fictional or mythical aura surrounding the lives of leading intellectual figures is implied by other writers, for example, in the title of one of the most interesting books on Lacan, Vies et légendes de Jacques Lacan by Catherine Clément. The problems that Fais (Lacan) encountered with one of his mistresses has since been taken up by another fictional account of the same period in Kristeva's Les Samouraïs. Accordingly the novel, in its subversion of the spectacle's artifice, becomes the unique scene in which these subjects can be treated. As it is expressed at one point in Femmes: 'Destinée invraisemblable des acteurs d'une époque. Comme s'ils étaient liés par le fil d'un roman en train de s'écrire. Un roman auquel personne ne croirait si c'était un roman' (p. 100). The encouraging factor common to these points on the portrayal of intellectuals in the age of the spectacle, is that one is brought back to specifically literary considerations, such as: "Are famous real individuals proper subjects for fictional treatment?", and "Why did Femmes provoke so much hostility as a roman à clef?". Concerning the first question, Sollers was much criticized for some of the novel's portrayals, which many took to be betrayals.13 Yet such a response highlights once again the disinclination of critics to see the continuity of Sollers's texts (in this case with the irreverence of Lois) which the current work has insisted on emphasizing. It also demonstrates a failure to consider in the broader context of the contemporary novel the significance of his using a roman à clef. The interest of the subject for the question of fictional representations in general can only be addressed adequately through a literary analysis, and not by moral or emotional outrage at the narrator's irreverence. Given that Lois had already taken names of individuals and disciplines in vain, without causing much of a scandal, why is it that in the case of Femmes the hostility was so much more violent? One explanation is that the phrases to which some could have taken offence took in the earlier novel the ambiguous form of wordplays, hence to condemn them outright would have left one open to charges of not having considered Freudian theories of the relationship between jokes or wordplay and the functioning of the unconscious. Another, more cynical, explanation is that Lois remained relatively unread; and most likely those who did read it were in the main those to whom it was addressed. For an intellectual to encounter a hostile tone in an avant-garde narrative which will reach only a narrow readership is quite different to finding one's raison d'être challenged in

the pages of a best seller!14 As for the second question, beyond this resistance to the names of writers and critics being changed and their roles interpreted in terms of fiction, lies a renewed threat that fiction poses to the authority of theory, for Sollers's irreverent challenge represents nothing less than literature's refusal to remain subservient to the latter. The narrator of Femmes can now laugh at the time not long gone when: 'c'était la lutte pour le pou voir entre les quelques noms qui abolissaient les noms... Intrigues, jalousies, vanité de tous les instants...' (p. 102). Those theories that sought to undermine the subject produced a new orthodoxy which comes under attack in Femmes for having provided the intellectual basis for a dissemination of nihilism. Suddenly, the resistance on the part of critical theorists to Sollers's fictionalizing ploys makes story-telling seem a subversive activity!:

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13. For examples of hostile reactions to Femmes see Dominique Fernandez, 'Des milliers de petits points', L'Express, 11 février 1983, p.25, and Maurice Nadeau, 'Une nouvelle conversion de Philippe Sollers', La Quinzaine Littéraire, 16 février 1983. 10-11.

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La vie mentale de Jane est pourtant un roman incessant. Les uns, les autres, ce qu'ils font, qui ils ont vu, ce qu'ils ont dit, comment ils étaient habillés, leurs voyages, leurs liaisons, tel dîner, telle confidence... Mais ça! pour elle, c'est la vie, ça ne doit pas être écrit. On doit écrire pour penser ou, à la rigueur, pour poétiser en profondeur. Pas de reflet qui pourrait faire apparaître que l'on vit comme un simple reflet. Elle est elle-même un personnage de roman, mais elle ne veut pas le savoir. Elle pressent là un danger, une possibilité catastrophique, l'horreur d'une vérité qu'il vaut mieux éviter (p. 160). By fictionalizing the intellectual Femmes undermines the latter's authority to write about fiction. The drawing together of considerations on the spectacle and famous individuals in a roman à clef is an interesting manoeuvre that brings about a renewal in the form of Sollers's fiction. It establishes a narrative scene that is distinct from the spectacle and free from subjection to theory; the reader thus encounters a text that is unusually immune to pre-

14. It is necessary to make a distinction between the overtly hostile portrayals of certain figures and that of Barthes for example which Sollers defended strongly: 'Alors que j'ai été particulièrement ému par sa disparition et que je suis certain d'en avoir brossé un portrait plutôt irréprochable. Je pense que Barthes m'a dit des choses gênantes ou désespérées qu'il n'avait dites à personne d'autre et qu'il a voulu me les dire à moi. Son homosexualité était un secret de polichinelle et j'ai pris la décision d'en parler sans fard, mais avec tendresse, parce que lorsqu'on aime bien quelqu'un, on ne doit pas accepter qu'il soit transformé en polichinelle' Sollers' (interview with Pierre Boncenne), Lire, 152 (mai 1988), 28 41 (p.36)

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conceived images. Given that such images are being discussed in terms of the contract that society seeks to impose through the spectacle, I will in the next section of this chapter examine the ways in which the narrator of Femmes develops a counter-contract that is vital for his narrative and its understanding of visual art. Thus the counter-contract will be seen to be supported by the counter-images offered in particular by painting. As was mentioned above, the relationship between Will and S. is essential to the novel and the counter-contract by means of which the narrative attempts to foil the control of the implicit contract of 'la société du spectacle'. Writing is vital to the inversion of this latter form of contract, as is symbolized in the fact that when one reorders the word 'contrat' one hears the word 'raconte'. I will begin the discussion of this theme by looking more closely at the narrator of Femmes. Will presents himself as a free spirit who, perhaps more than anything else, likes to spend or waste time as he pleases: Taime sentir le temps passer pour rien, n'importe où, dormir, dépenser le temps, me sentir le temps lui-même courant à sa perte...' (p.55). He likes also to appear to be innocent:

tor originates from that country gives his response a greater force than il it had come from a Frenchman:

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Ce qui me frappe d'abord, c'est mon absence de culpabilité. Toute ma vie, j'aurai plus ou moins essayé d'apprendre, comme on m'y invitait, à me sentir coupable... Je n'y arrive pas, je l'avoue... Je me sens innocent... (p.33). This absence of feelings of culpability is made easier for him via the fact that he lives abroad in France, although this innocence is not ignorance, but a necessarily shrewd affirmation of his independence. Will's status as an outsider is an essential factor in the narrative's desire to escape the forms of control exercised by society's contract. He represents a point beyond the limits of Parisian life, even though he does live in Paris for most of the novel's duration and understands it extremely well. The fact of Will not being French allows an outsider's perspective of the peculiarly Parisian setting of the novel. The use of an American narrator (French though he may at times appear!) is quite logical if one thinks back to Tel Quel?, eulogy of American culture in a special issue (71-73) in 1977. That particular celebration of America's cultural diversity brought one to conclude that notions such as intertextuality had led naturally enough to a celebration of hybridization, or to use a cliché, the melting pot. Predictably, however, given what we now know of Sollers and Tel Quel, one principal objective of such a eulogy of the USA was to provoke those who encourage what are considered to be flabby prejudices nurtured within France's borders, in this case that America is unequivocally bad. In Femmes, it is Flora who represents this hostility to all things American, and the fact that the narra-

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Elle est comme les progressistes du monde entier; comme tous ceux qui sont viscéralement et provincialement attachés aux grandes idées simples du XIXe siècle, incapables d'apprécier la nouvelle beauté de là-bas, sa démesure, son silence dans le maximum de bruit, sa souplesse, son énergie... (pp.172-3). Equally Will can communicate a sense of excitement that he shares with Sollers, for the inspiration with which New York can provide a writer: 'Ce qu'était l'Italie pour les individus à tempérament du XIXe, pour Stendhal, disons, et n'en parlons plus, New York devrait l'être pour un écrivain français d'aujourd'hui...' (p.448). The French writer in Femmes is simply called S., and he is married to a Polish woman called Sophie. Is S. meant to represent Sollers in the narrative? The most that one can say is that there are definitely some resemblances between S. and certain bio-graphical details that Sollers has allowed to be known about his own past. Thus S., like Sollers, had a childhood that was spent in south-western France during the Occupation (p.83) and he too is generally reputed by critics to take himself for other writers like Dante or Joyce (p. 160). Yet Femmes confirms the view reached in the introductory discussion of Sollers's bio-graphy, that one would be wise to be wary of detail presented by the writer to his public. For whilst one can certainly point out some similarities between S. and the Sollers we read about, one can see that Will also bears certain resemblances to Sollers. For example, Will is criticized for being '[un] clown' and '[un] retourneur de vestes' (p. 159), terms which have been associated with the name of Sollers. Similarly, again like Sollers, Will's wife is a psychoanalyst, and they have a son. This indeterminacy is motivated by the narrator's intention to frustrate the formation of an unproblematic image in the reader's mind that would identify either Will or S. with Sollers. The reader is discouraged by Will from the temptation he or she may feel to amalgamate these details into a composite figure: 'Ma famille, ne l'oublions pas, pas celle du signataire de ce livre... Aucun rapport, aucune comparaison surtout... Je le jure' (p.34). It is indeed true that there are factual differences between Sollers and Will, such as the fact the latter is thirty-five years old (p.418), which is more than ten years younger than Sollers when Femmes was published. If one does insist on amalgamating the figures of Sollers and Will, this difference in age is at last proof that writing fiction is a magical and rejuvenating exercise! The existence of S. in the novel produces several quite humorous moments when one recalls the reception given to Sollers's Paradis. On

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the strength of Will's friendship with S., he is forever being asked his opinion on the latter's previous novel, which in Femmes is called Comédie. This provides the narrator with the opportunity of gleefully reporting the general hostility that greeted Comédie (Paradis), as well as putting Will in an awkward position. For, being a faithful friend, Will tries to be positive about S.'s novel: 'j'approuve... Je suis héroïque... Je dis que c'est probablement un événement, mais difficile à apprécier, très difficile...' (pp.144-5). Elsewhere he avoids committing himself by claiming that he doesn't understand it: 'trop difficile pour moi' (p. 158), although privately he admits that it is 'collante, continue, biscornue' (p. 103), and elsewhere again Will becomes openly exasperated by the very mention of S.: 'II commence à me fatiguer, celui-là' (p. 166), 'je vais finir par me sentir obligé de lire son bouquin, après tout...' (p. 177). Hence the presence of a foreign (American) narrator allows S., the eventual signatory of the novel, to remain distinct from the narrative process, but it also allows for an apparently independent account of S. himself, as Will hears different opinions of his work and character. The notion of the counter-contract would seem to introduce an element of freedom for the narrator and his narrative; both Will and S. benefit from an indeterminacy where it is impossible to distinguish quite what aspects of the text originate with each. This indeterminacy concerning their characteristics should be seen as a symbol of the freedom they enjoy within the counter-contract to escape the pressure to conform to one's image and one's identity. In considering the positions of S. and Will, oneis led to make comparisons, not only with an earlier novel by Sollers called Drame in which, it may be recalled, the narrative developed out of an interaction between the two figures of 'je' and 'if, but also with a more ancient literary tradition whereby a manuscript is said to have fallen into a particular individual's hands he then doing what was necessary to have it published. Having established the general value to Femmes of the counter-con tract between Will and S. as a response to the social contract of the spectacle, we may now go on to see how this narrative technique is significant with regard to painting. Femmes is like previous novels by Sollers in that it engages in a dialogue with particular forms of visual art that have concerns which he considers to be analogous to those of his writing. As is also generally the case with Sollers's novels, these concerns recur in a slightly different form in different texts. Just as Will's allusions to S.'s Comédie produce one degree of interaction between himself and S., and at the same time introduce Sollers and his Paradis, so there is a similar device at play in Femmes that encourages the reader to reflect upon the various connotations of the name Will in other Sollersian contexts. These connotations form a bridge in die text between writing and painting. Firstly, Will is the Christian name of Shakespeare, which is

significant both in that the audio tape recording of Sollers reading an extract of Paradis was called 'La Seconde vie de Shakespeare' and in that Femmes contains a lengthy piece of commentary on Shakespeare (pp.4619). Secondly, Will is also the Christian name of the painter de Kooning on whom Sollers wrote a book dated 1988 and entitled De Kooning, vile. The link between Will the narrator and Will the painter is confirmed when at one point in Femmes (p. 164) the narrator directly refers to de Kooning, and Sollers has himself acknowledged that: 'Le titre de mon roman, Femmes est évidemment une référence directe à De Kooning'.15 So the title of Femmes can be related to a series of painted images bearing the same title and the narrator's name forms a link not only with that of the painter but also with the oral reading of Paradis, a text which despite its obvious formal differences should not, as was explained at the beginning of this chapter, be forgotten in a reading of Femmes. The interrelationship between narrative and painting is confirmed by an inversion of roles: if one pursues the points that Will is the Christian name of a painter and that S. is the initial of a writer's name, one is surprised to read that it is in fact S. who educates Will in the subject of painting. This comes at the beginning of the novel, when Will states his aversion for a literature where: 'les descriptions sont trop extérieures' with their 'scènes trop soumises à l'oeil, à l'idée de l'oeil, au stéréotype optique...' (p.29) of the spectacle. There follows an acknowledgement of S.'s influence on the narrator in this respect:

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Depuis que j'écris ce livre, d'ailleurs, tout en discutant avec S., je comprends mieux les peintres. Il me semble queje rentre dans leurs gestes, dans leurs évidences d'au-delà du miroir (p.29). This inversion confirms the interaction of writing and painting in the novel. It also adds another dimension to the more general inversion operating between S. and Will that has been seen to underwrite their counter-contract. One could say therefore that the painter de Kooning is both absent and present behind the names of S. and Will, just as these two are both present and absent behind the names of one another. In the consideration of art as a counter-image to the spectacle, the figure of de Kooning offers an interesting variation on the theme that has been present since, in Chapter One, it was seen that Poussin's 'deux regards' could be interpreted in ways significant for a reading of Sollers's texts. The title De Kooning, vite evokes one important aspect of the artist's method: 'Il faut aller plus vite que le principe d'incorporation qui vous tient à l'oeil' (p.29). By the quickness of his brush-strokes, com15. Philippe Sollers, De Kooning, vite (Paris, ll).XX). p 38,

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bined with a practice of painting certain strokes with his eyes closed, de Kooning creates an almost mystical experience which Sollers likens to Proust's 'vision fugitive' (p.29). 'D'avoir fermé les yeux plus et mieux que ne le pourra aucun sommeil, vous permet de les ouvrir au-delà des limites permises' (p.55). Once more, it is the experience which the exceptional artist can produce that forms the basis for Sollers's analogy between writing and the visual arts. In discussing two of de Kooning's paintings, 'Black Friday' (1948) and 'Painting' (1948), which are predominantly monochrome pictures of white markings on a black background, 'comme expérience du néant actif (p.22), Sollers could well have been referring to the inverted form of a text such as Paradis, with its apparently uniform pattern of thick black words on a page, or else to the black and white of the chessboard in Drame. The book De Kooning, vite resulted from Sollers's meeting with the artist in July 1977. It comprises two volumes, one of text and the other of reproductions of de Kooning's paintings and sculptures. In the course of this text, Sollers expresses not only a personal sympathy for de Kooning but also several factors which could be interpreted as promoting a dialogue with Femmes and its narrator. He begins by recalling de Kooning's isolated position with regard to both avant-garde and tradition. Keeping a distance from the A.A.A. (American Abstract Artists) group, he was also viewed with suspicion by the traditionalists and by the social realists. Rosenberg would seem to support Sollers on this point: For de Kooning the traditional has lost its power to command, and the new, no longer new, has become a commonplace. Both perspective and two-dimensionality are devices for the painter to use as he wishes; to regard either as an ideal of painting is nonsense.16 Although where Femmes is concerned I am concentrating on de Kooning, the novel does make several other references to art. Picasso and Matisse are like de Kooning praised by Sollers in De Kooning, vite for having recogized the essential importance of tradition and the past for any truly revolutionary form of expression: Ce n'est pas parce que les dimensions ont brusquement changé; que les flux de population se sont mêlés et intensifiés, que la question de base ne reste pas la même. Elle est un peu plus difficile à reposer, voilà tout. Obstacle technique. La technique vous rentre plus vite et plus énergiquement dans le corps, la tête, la photo s'anime, le cinéma parle, la publicité va bientôt bavarder sans arrêt. La 16. Willem de Kooning, p. 17.

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télévision ou l'ordinateur seront encore une autre épreuve, la même, toujours (p.21). For Will it becomes vital not to discard rashly the past under the influence of superficial change. Indeed, the subject matter of de Kooning's 'Woman' series (a title which Sollers borrows for his novel) cannot simply become outdated and rendered obsolete by new forms, as the avant-gardists claimed it had: But her very evanescence was a guarantee that as a subject she could never be exhausted, and that the attempt to seize her reality through the act of painting could be prolonged indefinitely.17 This same guarantee is given by Femmes in the repetition of numerous sexual encounters which are scattered across the text for no particular purpose. Their prolongation becomes an assertion of the characters' sexual identities outside the terms of the contract. The censorship imposed by the liberal establishment as it sought to silence de Kooning's exploration of sexual identity and representation in his series of 'Woman' paintings took the form of an attack on the artist's refusal, by producing figurative representations of women, to confine himself to abstract painting. As Sollers comments in De Kooning, vite: 'Quel bombardement! Quel brouillage! Quel déluge pour empêcher à tout prix de harponner la Woman!' (p. 19). As a resuit de Kooning was branded a reactionary and a misogynist, which branding Sollers interprets in the following way: 'on est toujours traité de misogyne quand on préfère les femmes aux femmes ou aux hommes qui se prennent pour elles, c'est curieux' (p.31). In De Kooning, vite particular interest is focused on the series of famous and controversial paintings called 'Woman'. Clearly this can be related to the fact that one of the main themes of Femmes is the confrontation of the sexes or, to be more specific, the concern that an oppressive, authoritarian and essentially puritanical strain of feminism is at work in society. Femmes thus represents Sollers's contribution to the controversy in feminist circles that split the movement, especially in France, between those who support an exclusive, authoritarian politics and those other feminists, like Julia Kristeva, who have opposed them.18 Having himself become disillusioned with the discourse of the Far Left, Sollers's narrative attacks its feminist wing with an especial zeal. At the

17. Willem de Kooning, p.31. 18. Toril Moi's Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Lhcorv (I ondon, ll>85) offers an interesting account of the various branches of French feminism.

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same time this repudiation puts the role of women at the centre of the novel's preoccupations, whether it be in the guise of an analysis of feminist movements, personal relationships or, most importantly for us, representations of women in art. The scandal surrounding de Kooning's 'Woman' paintings is clearly reflected in the experience of the narrator of Femmes, which fact adds a sexual dimension to the opposition between society's contract and the narrative counter-contract. Will identifies a 'contrat tacite' (p.234) operating in society, a contract which effects various forms of control. The novel confronts what it sees as an increasing conformity and regimentation of society that certain brands of politics and branches of science have imposed on us in the name of progress:

ing from her using sex as a weapon against men. Although the conflict has until now been presented as being between the two sexes, women are said to be as much the victims of the pressures to conform and to be a part of '[le] fard imagé du trottoir roulant du néant' (p.52), as are men. Experts who, by the authority of medical and scientific innovation, seek to transform patterns of social behaviour, succeed more often than not in producing neuroses. Sollers has elsewhere imagined a present-day equivalent of Chaplin's 'Modern Times', where a woman would replace the factory worker in the famous scene in which the latter is put through the machine:

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Il y a longtemps qu'il a disparu, le Nom, le Nom du Père, pour se perdre, être dépecé, dans les initiales et les matricules, les numéros de Sécurité sociale, le trictrac des ordinateurs... (p.60). The development of a feminist ideology, together with an ever-growing faith placed in gynaecology and in the control over processes concerning reproduction (abortion, contraception, artificial insemination), has for Will placed the lives of ordinary people under the control of experts operating a sort of social planning or generalized hospital that lasts from birth to death. It has also aggravated the conflict of interests between the sexes. The novel names movements such as FAM ('Le Front d'Autonomie Matricielle') and WOMANN ('World Organisation for Men Annihilation and for a New Natality') (p.46) whose policies are designed to control sexuality through a cultural conformism. The nature of this attack is reminiscent of Maurice Girodias's account of how a feminist from SCUM (The Society for Cutting Up Men') shot Andy Warhol.19 The problems created by such phenomena are especially evident in the narrator's experience with the most negative female character in the novel, Bernadette (and what he calls 'l'empire de la dette' (p.310) (Berna-dette)), for whom sex is at best a rape to be endured so that a sense of obligation is felt by the man whereupon an implicit contract is established: 'Il fallait que je la baise pour lui devoir quelque chose... C'est là, je crois, où, dans une lumière glaçante de fin du monde, le contrat radical m'est enfin apparu' (p.63). Her notion of the contract is as something which shames her opponent into a submission, a tactic that in another context the novel amusingly calls 'hontologique' (p.344). The narrator however refuses to conform to this form of contract and interprets Bernadette's anguished self-conscious attitude towards sex as result19. Maurice Girodias, L'affaire Kissinger (Paris, 1990), p.63.

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Pour son bien, pour sa liberté, pour son émancipation. On pourrait la suivre dans différents contextes, dans les cliniques, dans tout ça, quoi. Alors ce serait d'un comique éminemment effroyable.20 Will too finds evidence to support his views in the fact that women are not even happy with their lot: Elles sont inquiètes... Ca ne tourne pas comme prévu... Reflux, contrôle... Poulailler modèle... Pondeuses réglées... Séduction, fantaisie? Envolées! Désir? Chloroforme. Fatigue... Travail et fatigue... (p. 199). According to Will, both men and women suffer from the unrelieved monotony that social pressures tend to impose, and from a consequent reining in of desire, fantasy and excitement. Militant feminists are perceived to have an interest in promoting such monotony and disharmony between the sexes, and their politics is considered by opponents such as Will to perpetuate the repression and hypocrisy surrounding sex. Hence the originality of Femmes in this context lies in its not following the general view whereby feminism is opposed to, and the victim of, a maleoriented capitalist system. The desire to control and exploit the means of reproduction coexists perfectly well with the dominant capitalist system of economic production, to the extent that both are concerned with tangible gain (in the first case through a sexual contract, and in the second case, a commercial contract), in the pursuance of which no gratuity is admitted. The perceived dissatisfaction with sexual manifestations of society's contract is associated in a humorous way by Will with the more general theme of the spectacle and its forms. The subject of sperm banks produces one of the most amusing parts of the novel, as humour becomes a 20. Improvisations, p. 142.

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way of countering the sexual misery that conformism would produce. If sexual exchanges are to be subject to calculation and management (as they are for Bernadette), ought one not henceforth to demand a salary for each ejaculation? Sportsmen would have the most valued stock and this would add greatly to the value of sport as a spectacle: Les femmes vont se mettre à suivre attentivement les matches à la télévision... Elles feront leurs choix à la carte... Angoisse des maris... Stériles, par définition... La Grèce va enfin redevenir la grande République! Généticienne et Platonicienne! Du Gymnase au Banquet, du Banquet à la Seringue utérine! Commandez vos Idées en direct! (pp.544-5). With their polluted minds and their sick, weary bodies, writers would of course hardly offer the most valuable specimens. Their only chance would be to adapt their role and serve the new order by working in salaried teams to produce imaginary biographies for the teeming nameless bodies to flow from the sperm banks. There would however be other new horizons for the writer, in new literary prizes to be won with, for example, the Fémina being replaced by the Ovula (p.546)! Will jokingly considers an alternative form of contract that would enshrine the conditions of paternity (p. 115), yet the sexual form of counter-contract that is indeed to be found in the pages of Femmes is far more subtle than this, relating as it does sexuality with language, painting, and the spectacle. The narrator's understanding of his relationship with women is established for the reader early in the novel, via a contrast between two successive encounters, the first with Kate and the second with Cyd, language playing an important role in both. In the first case, Kate tries to talk Will into going away for the weekend, and the scene is set: the romantic location, the walk, the meal, the museums, the shopping: On se dirait tout, vraiment tout... L'affaire serait faite... Le mariage quoi. Finalement, ça en revient toujours là: qu'on s'installe, qu'on régularise, qu'on réglementarise, que ça ne fasse plus qu'une seule atmosphère partagée... (p. 17). Kate is quickly followed by Cyd who, by contrast, makes no attempt to achieve fusion through language. Instead of trying to confuse the issue of sexual difference, that difference is used by Cyd and Will to create a sort of ritual: 'Cyd m'ouvre la porte. Toujours nette, ponctuelle, discrète... Le jeu consiste à ne pas se parler, à faire directement l'amour...' (p.18). The only words to be exchanged are offered after they have made love:

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Une fois que la crise a eu lieu de façon physique... Le malentendu exorcisé... L'incommunicabilité mimée, déchargée... Elle a compris ça, elle accepte le rythme, je ne sais rien de sa vie ou presque... Voilà la liberté aujourd'hui... (p. 18). Femmes contains a series of sexual encounters between the narrator and various female characters, who generally do not know one another, and between whom in any case there is no narrative link. In one intervention Will states openly that interrelationships are to be consciously avoided because the building up of such a story together with the ensuing psychological interaction would constitute a web in which he would be trapped: 'Que les personnages se rencontrent... Que les personnagesfemmes se voient... Discutent... Donnent leur avis... Sur moi?' (p.333). By thus controlling the narrative the narrator maintains a certain gratuity or 'liberté inadmissible' (p.205) in the various encounters which is designed to frustrate any attempts to restrict him, and so to prevent an image of the social contract forming within the text. Although Will aims to exclude communication and, by extension the social contract, from the sexual moment, language is certainly not dismissed as an overt preoccupation for the narrative. The intricate web of discourse in the novel is not concerned to elaborate psychological motivation in the characters nor to paint in descriptive appearances, but to construct a narrative form where relationships are established primarily in verbal terms. It is interesting to note for example that there are no detailed descriptions of women's appearances in Femmes, which is paradoxical given the novel's association with de Kooning and his paintings called 'Woman'. Yet the paradox can be understood if one considers the female characters' presence in the novel in terms of the counter-image. The narrator's sexual encounters become the scene of a counter-contract with women whose status within the counter-image greatly contrasts with the stereotyped roles normally allotted them in the spectacle. The ideological control of sexuality and the liberating images promised by apparently progressive agencies in society are both looked on suspiciously by the narrator of Femmes. In developing a counter-contract with S., Will creates the basis of a series of counter-images that implicate sexuality and images of sexuality. De Kooning and his paintings are important as a point of reference because he represents an opposition to processed spectacular images of sexuality, like those the narrator of Femmes fears will be set up on the sports fields in the future. It is not difficult to see why de Kooning represents a valuable ally for the narrator of Femmes. Where Will makes his cause against the spectacle and feminists, de Kooning's battle was with the dogmatic exponents of abstract art. However different the ostensible subjects may he, the underlying confrontation remains the same. Interestingly enough, Rosen

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berg explains that the promotion of abstract art was seen by de Kooning to have a motive different from that commonly held and which Sollers himself accepted in the 1960s (see the discussion in Chapter Two on Rothko) namely that abstract art was a form of progress and a freeing of the artistic imagination. Whilst in some cases this was undoubtedly true, de Kooning understood that such progress could also conceal a more dangerous motive:

This brings one to the centre of the subject concerning representations of sexuality in the novel and in visual images. The tendency to repress such images, whether on moral or aesthetic grounds, is considered by Will to be wrong in principle. Moral or political prejudice is seen to have a blinding effect on people's judgment of art, of which the case ol' de Kooning is a poignant example. If, as has been suggested, the spectacle is the dominant form by which relationships are mediated in capitalist society and not merely a peripheral aspect of that society, representations of sex such as those by de Kooning should be considered a challenge to the spectacle and not a reaffirmation of it. This makes the analogy all the more contiguous between de Kooning as a painter attacked for the form and content of his art, and Will as a narrator concerned with the threat posed to freedom of expression in the novel. Will's enemies, be they feminists or agents of the spectacle, are seen as being particularly perfidious in that they attack or at least undermine sensibility and artistic expression and thereby indirectly promote the semi-literate languor of the self-satisfied, mediatized society. Sollers's description of the painted 'Woman' series demonstrates that he views them primarily as a comment on spectacular images:

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That subject matter had become an issue in modern art, de Kooning contended, was the result of an historical aberration: the opposition between form and subject was, in his opinion, conceived by the middle class who had lost touch with the meaning of human gesture [...] Though de Kooning shunned politics, he recognized in the impulse to purge painting of the actual matter of the artist's existence a tendency toward totalitarian discipline which tailors life to fit dogmatic ends.21 This community of interest between the middle-class consumer and the avant-garde artist finds a parallel in Femmes where it has been shown thai Will identifies a common enemy in the capitalist and the feminist whom he believes would both outlaw the non-conforming individual by exerting moral reprobation and repression. Will is not hostile to certain feminists simply because he fears any freeing of the roles women can play. On the contrary, he considers that at best the feminists are irrelevant and that at worst they would impose one more form of misery on women and men. As Sollers himself writes in the preface to a book by Maurice Girodias: Révolution sexuelle? Défaite de la censure? Sans doute, mais très transitoires, suivies presqu'immédiatement d'une contre-révolution et d'un déplacement répressif. Le sexe reste interdit sur la plus grande partie de la planète? Peut-être mais il est aussi devenu une industrie comme une autre: laideur, stereotypic, platitude abrutissante, volonté de réduction et d'oubli. Au point que la subversion, aujourd'hui, (c'était la conviction de Girodias) s'appellerait: mémoire, perfection, beauté - tout ce qui, dans l'ancien monde, représentait la résistance à la vérité sexuelle. Découverte: le puritanisme et l'exploitation violente de la sexualité en clichés sont une seule et même chose, l'esprit religieux et la technique de mécanisation des fantasmes peuvent faire très bon ménage.22

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Mais les "girlies" de De Kooning, elles, passent vite de haut en bas ou de droite à gauche, avec leurs têtes mutines de mort, leur sourire idiot carnassier, leur harnachement erotique gras montrant le trou du squelette. Elles sont bêtes et irréfutables comme l'idée même de société. Publiques, publicitaires, désacralisées et télévisées, elles partent de la consommation de leur bouche pour se voir rentrées-violées dans l'espace qu'elles appellent à perpétuer.23 De Kooning concentrates on the enticingly pouting and painted lips of models, images of which he cuts out from magazines: Ces bouches découpées tirées de la presse pressée, ces bouchesmarchandises valables pour tous les objets (avions, vêtements, voitures, actions, "réfléchissez", "salivez!"), De Kooning sait qu'elles résument l'apparent mystère des transactions, des appétits, des désirs.24 They too are there for no particular reason, since they are nothing but an incitement to buy, intended to provoke a desire for the product, any

21. Willem de Kooning, pp.23-4.

23. Théorie des exceptions, pp. 167-8.

22. Philippe Sollers, 'L'insoumis', L'Infini, 33 (printemps 1991), 11-14 (p. 12).

24. De Kooning, vile, p.32.

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product: 'Le sourire engageant, le sourire-contrat'.25 Here, once more, is the word contract, this time used in the most common sense to signify the contract of buying and selling on which capitalist society is run, and under which sex becomes just one more inducement to be a good consumer. One can now see the significance of the gratuitousness in the relationships between Will and the women in Femmes. These women, like those of de Kooning's paintings, are also there for no particular reason and could be seen as separately painted images like for example de Kooning's 'Woman', 'Woman 1', and 'Woman 2'. However, the vital difference is that in Femmes the gratuity is real (as opposed to the spectacle's calculating use of images of women) since pleasure and not the promotion of consumer products underlies their presence. The references to de Kooning concludes this interpretation of Femmes. Earlier in this chapter some mention was made of the discord that followed the disintegration of the avant-garde. Would it be too simplistic to suggest that more or less the same situation had occurred thirty years earlier, which development led de Kooning to adopt a position not unlike that promoted in Femmes?: 'By the end of the 1940s he was prepared to denounce the ideologies of the twentieth-century art movements, except insofar as they served to create stimuli to individual artists'.26 In both cases, an exploration of the diversity of human behaviour, its gestures and the meanings of those gestures, becomes a more vital objective for artistic or literary activity than the mere repeating of stale formalist moves dictated by the rationale of the avant-garde:

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In de Kooning's approach, painting as an objective historical continuum extending toward the future has ceased to exist. It is for each painter to bring painting to life again out of his own life and the shifting residue of art memories embedded in his (and the spectator's) sensibility. The artist juts out of art history and, in the last analysis, composes the format of his past and even his own culture.27 With this approach, the time of art reasserts itself over the time of theory, politics, and history. If one were to substitute the name Sollers for that of de Kooning, and literature for painting, Rosenberg's statement could apply just as well to Femmes.

25. De Kooning, vite, p.32. 26. Willem de Kooning, p. 14. 27. Willem de Kooning, p. 17.

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We have explored several ways in which the narrator of Femmes seeks to.avoid conforming with society and entering sexually and psychologically into its contract. To this end, the narrative creates the intricate structure of a counter-contract. A similar device is at work in Le coeur abso lu, although this time it takes on a very different form, becoming a more confident affirmation of artifice and pleasure. In the following section I will show how Sollers produces a narrative distant from the spectacle and society's contract, with a counter-contract established within the framework of a secret society. The paintings of Fragonard offer the narrative counter-images that are important in the building of such a framework. The secret society which was founded on 8 October 1984 lakes its name of 'Le coeur absolu' from a Persian poem of the same title that one of the founder members happened to be reading at the time (p.258). With its seven written Articles, the secret society is constituted around the values of pleasure and knowledge, and it forbids only boredom and discrimination of any sort. Based in Venice, it advertises aesthetic principles that relate significantly not only to literature, but also to painting and music, as with regard to Venice for example, the members are brought together with a memory 'd'une certaine couleur jaune, d'une certaine couleur violette' which is written into the first Article (p.53). There follow other aesthetic imperatives such as a taste for Manet and Picasso together with a love for Mozart's clarinet quintet which is to be the hymn of the society (p.54). All such works of art are to be reinterpreted in the context of the society. They combine with the narrative to create not a centrifugal force that holds the society together, but a multiplicity of reference points that develop from the original Articles: La chair n'est pas triste du tout, non, quelle idée, et tous les livres s'ouvrent pour être relus avec une franche insolence... La Divine Comédie, L'Odyssée, Racine, ce qu'on veut... Au radar du coeur absolu... (p.64). These Articles are the fundamental manifestation in this novel of what I am referring to as the narrative counter-contract. In the same year (1987) that he published Le coeur absolu, a book also appeared by Sollers on the painter Fragonard. Moreover this association of Fragonard with Le coeur absolu is reinforced by a footnote to Les surprises de Fragonard where Sollers states that the novel 'peut se lire comme une apologie constante de Fragonard' (p. 137, note 11), whilst elsewhere he describes the Fragonard book as having been constructed like a novel:

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Chapter Three Surprises de Fragonard? A chaque instant. Ce livre est construit comme un petit roman d'aventures, images, détails, récits. Les sujets, en général interprétés superficiellement comme "erotiques et galants", révèlent des arrière-plans inattendus, des audaces inouïes. C'est toute une société qui se dévoile dans ces coulisses.28

In elaborating an alternative scene within the scope of the countercontract, Les surprises de Fragonard complements the aesthetic attitude of Le" coeur absolu: 'Littérature, peinture, musique. Fragonard est, par excellence, le peintre qui est conscient de ce noeud où les corps trouvent leur respiration essentielle'.29 One could also mention in passing that by a coincidence fortunate for our study with its interest in contracts and counter-contracts, a painting by Fragonard (now lost) was called 'Le Contrat'.30 The visual art that Sollers introduces into his recent texts is often called upon to confront the puritanism that would repress and censor the most beautiful and unhypocritical artistic expressions of social, and therefore sexual, relationships. Thus in Les surprises de Fragonard he sees Fragonard's painting 'La Résistance inutile' (or 'La Surprise' as it is also known) as a treatment of the subject of the game in sexual relationships, in a context where the entire notion of game is too often considered morally offensive: Quoi qu'il en soit 'La Résistance' a été, une fois pour toutes, jetée comme un défi à la face de la pruderie universelle, elle offense à jamais le mufle puritain obscène fait de rigidité ou de misère grimaçante, hypocrite vertu ou tétanisation organique, répression ou bestialité par manque d'animalité. Ce couple-là est sauvé. Donc, il y en aura toujours d'autres (p. 122). Sollers does not merely use Fragonard's painting impressionistically, any more than he does de Kooning's work in Femmes. There are a number of specific points relating Les surprises de Fragonard to Le coeur absolu that demonstrate the ways in which Fragonard's paintings stimulate a fascinating interaction with fictional narrative. Firstly, at the thematic level, there is what Sollers calls 'La maîtrise érotisée de l'alphabet et de la lecture' (p.39) of a painting such as 'La Maîtresse d'école' where 28. Philippe Sollers, Les surprises de Fragonard (Paris, 1987), cover notes. 29. Les surprises de Fragonard, p.58. 30. See George Wildenstein, The Paintings of Fragonard (translated by C.W. Chilton and A.L. Kitson) (Phaidon, 1960), p.319.

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the pretty young mistress interrogates the little boy at the blackboard. Reading or writing is also the subject of interest in paintings like the famous 'Le Billet doux'. As well as drawing attention to the word as subject matter there are other, less obvious, links that Sollers seeks to establish between literature and his book on Fragonard's painting. For the reader familiar with Sollers's earlier work there is a hidden allusion in his use of a quotation from Rousseau's La Nouvelle Héloïse that also features as the epigraph to the novel Le parc. The quotation, a definition of the word 'park', resurfaces here in the context of Fragonard's 'La Fête à Rambouillet' where this park, like the one in the earlier novel, is described as being 'un composé de lieux très beaux et très pittoresques dont les aspects ont été choisis en différents pays, et dont tout paraît naturel excepté l'assemblage' (p.26). Such correlations are extended further in Sollers's discussion of 'La Fête à Rambouillet' by implicit allusions to other novels such as Nombres, where the use of Chinese pictographs is intended, one may recall, to introduce another logic into Western writing. The narrative of Fragonard's painting, where the boat's passengers enter the picture from the right could be said to offer yet one more instance of the interrelationship between painting and Sollers's literature, since: L'embarcation entre par la droite, en sens inverse de l'écriture et de la lecture, "à l'orientale", à la chinoise. C'est à un renversement du sens et des perspectives que vous êtes conviés (p.26). Both Les surprises de Fragonard and Le coeur absolu explore the linguistic roots of the name Fragonard in a similarly rich tone that is heavy in alliteration: Son nom, donc: on sait qu'il signait Frago, syllabes où il est impossible de ne pas entendre le ago latin qui signifie mettre en mouvement, se mouvoir, s'élancer, accomplir, poursuivre; mais aussi jouer une pièce ou tenir un rôle, passer la vie ou le temps selon un agenda réglé. C'est Y acte qui entre en scène en première personne. D'une façon qu'on peut juger agonistique, d'ailleurs, c'est aussi une lutte. Et qui fait du bruit (fragor) en fracturant, en fractionnant, en faisant craquer. Un bruit qui exhale une odeur suave (fragro) avec un fond de fraise encore audible en italien (mais l'Italie est toute proche de Grasse, ville de Fragonard et capitale des parfums, lesquels comportent parmi eux le nard indien, ou celui d'Italie, justement, nom vulgaire de la lavande apsic).31

31. Les surprises de Fragonard, p.92.

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Chapter Three "Frago." Fragrance de parfums, y compris le nard, ou encore fragore etfragola, en italien, déflagration et fraise... Le fringant et fragile frago, flagrant du lit, en fric-frac dans Y anti-frigo... Frago furioso...32

There are other references in Le coeur absolu to Fragonard. In one scene, the painter is evoked (although not by name) by the sight of an eighteenth-century harpsicord with little pictures such as that of a couple by a swing: Je rentre, j'enlève la housse du clavecin, je l'ouvre: un magnifique 1750 et des poussières, bleu-gris et jaune, avec de petites scènes de bergeries, un jardin, couple à balançoire, guirlandes de roses... (p.322). This inevitably brings to mind Fragonard's 'Les Hasards heureux de l'escarpolette'. That particular episode in turn leads the narrative into the recollection of a night spent at the Villa Fragonard where the narrator discovers the ground floor to be decorated in a style acceptable to the powerful new revolutionaries, while the first floor is kept in the splendour of the painter's own tastes: 'Il est venu se réfugier là, Fragonard, dans sa naissance aux parfums, après la liquidation de son temps, idylle avec le non-temps' (p.323). Yet other scenes in the novel are described in terms of Fragonard's paintings, such as when a sexual game in which the woman is dominant is described in the following terms: 'C'est le "Verrou" de Fragonard à l'envers...' (p.206). A similar reversal of roles also takes place in a passage where the narrator becomes a model who sits for a female artist: 'Nouvelle version inversée du peintre et de son modèle...' (p.140). It is undoubtedly to 'Le Début du modèle' that the most attention is paid in Le coeur absolu. The three figures in this painting are the male painter, the young female model, and the older woman presenting the model to him. The oval-shaped painting shows the painter viewing the model, the model looking out at the viewer of the painting, and the older woman looking at the painter. In the background stands a blank, rectangular canvas. From this Sollers draws a scene like that promoted in Femmes where there is a freedom that the absence of psychological overtones makes possible: L'ovale du tableau ne viendra jamais coïncider avec le rectangle de la toile dans le tableau, le trio des regards ne cessera pas, les yeux ne se rencontreront pas, chacun suit son idée, son roman, c'est 32. Le coeur absolu (Paris, 1987), pp.323-4.

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cela, l'harmonie: l'absence de rapports, ensemble.33 Le coeur absolu could be said to follow this pattern of 'Le Début du modèle' in that the novel has a male narrator and two leading ladies, Sigrid and Liv. The distinction between the external, oval framework and the rectangular blank canvas within the picture is pertinent as an image of the form their relationship takes. As members of the secret society, die narrator, Sigrid and Liv are not confined by the objective existence of an external (or social) framework, for within the scene of their interaction (i.e. the interior of the painting or the secret society) is another framework, that of the blank canvas. The latter is significant in that, being blank, it does not simply impose a scene that limits the role of one's imagination, rather it can be taken as a sign of art's counter-image that leaves one free to build up a possible picture. 'Le Début du modèle' is therefore a particularly felicitous counter-image for the relationships that those in the secret society of Le coeur absolu seek to create, since the painting does not ultimately define identities, roles, or relationships. As in the novels of the 1960s one is less interested in the text or image as a finished product than with finding a positive metaphor for the experience of producing, creating, and interpreting such forms. Sollers's interpretation of the relationship between the three figures in 'Le Début du modèle' provides a scene within which the question of identity and the counter-contract is posed in Le coeur absolu. It may be recalled that uncertainty over the identities of Will and S. operates as a symbol in Femmes of the freedom created by their counter-contract from the spectacle and society's contract. This indeterminacy is multiplied in subsequent novels. At one point Philippe Diamant, the narrator of Portrait du joueur, assumes without warning the name of Philippe Sollers (p.70). The name Diamant is also obviously linked with Sollers's real name Joyaux. Interviewed about the novel, Sollers answered a question on die narrator's identity in the following ambiguous way: 'C'est Philippe Sollers s'il était un personnage de roman'.34 The fact that Les folies françaises also has a narrator who uses the name of Philippe Sollers (p.32) would lead one to believe that the novels have the same narrator. However, Sollers has overtly stated that none of the novels have the same narrator, but rather that they are: 'identités rapprochées multiples. Perte d'identité partout, réponse: multiplication de proximités variables'.35 33. Les surprises de Fragonard, p.92. 34. 'Au peigne fin' (interview with André Rollin). Lire, I 13 (février 1985). 85 8 (p.87). 35. Carnet de nuit, p. 126.

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Elsewhere, he has expressed the same point in different terms: 'Je m'intéresse aux oscillations de l'identité à l'intérieur d'une même identité'.36 These last two quotations demonstrate that in fact Sollers perceives these oscillations as a response to the more general threat to identity that is posed by the spectacle, and not merely as a representation in fiction of the loss of identity. Given the impersonal and often stereotypical nature of the roles distributed within the social contract the narrative, like 'Le Début du modèle', subverts the concomitant anonymity to use it as the basis of the counter-contract. Beyond the use of names lies a broader complication that one encounters when one comes to consider the identities of narrators. This brings one close to the claim that underpins the bio-graphical preambles to each of the three chapters in this book, namely that the information relating to his own life provided by Sollers in novels and interviews can be nothing other than a distinctive form of fiction. The narrator of Les folies françaises has a biographer who is mentioned in certain scenes of the novel:

form by which the threat posed to his identity by the spectacle is confronted. Here illness can be seen in terms of the more general 'oscillations de l'identité à l'intérieur d'une même identité' by means of which the narra tor creates the terms of the secret society's counter-contract. The narrative of Le coeur absolu insists from the very beginning on the physical danger and uncertainty of existence; the narrator is subjected to this law through the theme of illness identified with him. On the first page of the novel one finds for example the word 'paralysé' (p. 13), and this is quick ly followed by others such as 'tremblais' (p. 14), 'fièvre' and 'douleur' (P-15). The fact that the theme is introduced so early on in the novel suggests that it is intended to be seen as a principal element, and that an awareness of one's vulnerability is a precondition for relating fully to the experiences that follow. Perhaps S.'s illness has a more general significance in that it makes him aware of what might otherwise remain an insidious presence:

Abuser son biographe, c'est drôle. Je le lance sur de vraies fausses pistes compliquées. Il y court. Il connaît par coeur toutes les théories dont je suis, paraît-il, l'illustration dégradée. Il est imbattable sur mes erreurs. Sa thèse est que je suis un tissu symptomatique d'erreurs. Il me comprend mieux que moi-même (p.41).

La grande misère, celle dont tout le monde a peur instinctivement, biologiquement... L'hôpital... La prison... L'asile... Ou le camp... Oui, le camp... Pas forcément visible... La sensation d'être assigné, encerclé, surplombé, surveillé... (p. 15).

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In Femmes there is another passage that ought to make one wary of the information offered on its narrator: 'Je ne dis jamais rien de ma vie aux autres, par principe. Par esthétique personnelle. Par superstition. Transpositions...' (p. 133). Then in Le coeur absolu the narrator again makes a very similar statement: 'Je la rassure, je ne révèle rien, à personne, par principe, de ma vie privée...', to which the woman replies '- Sauf au public...' (p. 118). A point so consistently expressed as is this one on the narrators' bio-graphies cannot be ignored. The use of 'transpositions' and 'sauf au public' reflects accurately our perception of the ambiguous status of information revealed by Sollers to the public. He does so not merely in order to inform them of his life but to question the reliability of the distinction between fact and fiction when mediated by the spectacle.37 The theme of the narrator's illness in Le coeur absolu offers another

36. 'Propos du joueur' (interview with Gilles Farcet), Filigrane, 1 (printemps/été 1988), 6-25 (p.23). 37. Frans De Haes makes other points relating to the question of identity in Sollers's novels in 'Philippos Adamamos, homo Sollers', L'Infini, 11 (été 1985), 98 104.

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The idea that the illness is somehow significant for the entire narrative finds support in the fact that the narrator suffers from something which, although never exactly defined, does resemble '[une] crise de coeur', which has an obvious parallel with the name of the secret society. The precise correlation between the threat of death and pleasure is implied at one point by an allusion to the Commendatore of Don Giovanni (p. 144). Sometimes the attack comes in the middle of the night, forcing S. to surface from sleep and dream: Une fois sur deux, vers trois heures du matin, le rideau se lève... Heureusement qu'il est baissé d'habitude, on ne pourrait plus respirer ni accomplir les gestes élémentaires.. La grande machine de mort est là, le visage découvert... (p.263). At the beginning of the first chapter, we saw in the discussion of Sollers's bio-graphy how a period of illness, primarily auricular, leads to a writing which insists on the importance of the voice and hearing, and that illness thereby becomes a metaphor for the capacity to create imaginative work. Le coeur absolu also makes a direct reference to the ear problems which provoked: 'Le nuage des voix dans la cité des douleurs...' (p.32). We saw too that in Le parc, illness exists as a theme that is directly implicated in creating the ambiguity inherent in the charac-

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ter's identity. In the novel now under discussion, the experience of illness offers a means by which the body can cross through a barrier defined by normal consciousness, on a route somewhat parallel to that taken towards the secret society: 'Pas une vague sensation de dualité, non, vraiment deux, consciemment, avec deux corps, l'accent de réalité oscillant de l'un à l'autre, tantôt ici, tantôt là-bas...' (p.279). For through these 'crises de coeur', conscious perception of first space and then time are called into question, as the following two quotations make clear:

The costume ball is another example of the way in which Fragonard's paintings inspire episodes in the narrative. The scene in 'Le Début du modèle' in which the roles and nature of relationships are uncertain and in which the three figures each follow their own line of thought, is used extensively as a model for Sollers's fictional narrative. By establishing a certain indeterminacy of narratorial identity or, in the case of the costume ball, anonymity, and by introducing a theme such as illness thai even threatens the narrator's existence, the narrative rejects the building up of identity that could form images in the reader's mind, images upon which the logic of the spectacle feeds. The narrative operates within the broad framework of the counter-contract that the secret society offers, by making an appeal to the joyous artifice of a painting by Fragonard in order to develop a counter-image in the text: 'il s'agit d'un décor, l'époque aime s'entourer de panneaux, introduire l'illusion et donc la vérité partout, mêler les volumes, multiplier les chances'. 38 Having explored some of the ways in which the paintings of Fragonard are in Le coeur absolu supportive of the narrative's view of identity within the counter-contract, one may now go on to consider another aspect of the novel that falls within the scope of the enquiry into narrative and the visual, namely the relationship of the secret society to the spectacle. The world of the spectacle is forever present in the background of the narrative:

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Le plus étrange, encore une fois, c'est l'intermittence du regard: trois secondes sur quatre, je suis carrément aveugle, l'espace ne semble se déployer que comme une parenthèse négative, une trace d'hallucination... (p.43). J'ai eu brusquement l'impression que le temps recommençait non pas à couler mais à battre, le temps d'avant, mais aussi un autre temps, plus précis, plus net... C'était comme si j'avais franchi un premier barrage, les crises étaient là et seront toujours là pour concentrer le temps, rien de plus... (p.44). So a knowledge of his fallibility combined with a stubbornness that makes him persist in his ways, is one way to define the attitude of this Don Giovanni of a narrator in Le coeur absolu. One short piece of dialogue sums up the resistance borne of his perception of life: - Vous savez ce qu'est le coeur en termes de blason? - Le milieu? -L'abîme (p. 188). The theme of illness engenders awareness in the reader of a still more unpleasant reality, most poignantly when the narrator is returning home from a costume ball with Sigrid. Owing to a sudden attack, he is brought down from the grandeur of a ball at Versailles to the dirt of the roadside: 'J'ai le poing gauche serré plein de terre, maintenant, je gratte les cailloux avec l'autre main, comme un chien... Aiguille de feu, du crâne aux talons...' (p. 102). Although the attack comes after the costume ball it is nevertheless an integral part of it. The narrator's loss of identity as he grovels in the dirt is another, painful dimension that complements the light-hearted acts of disguising as, dressed as Casanova, he accompanies Sigrid, dressed as Mozart, to the ball. The interest of the ball scene in terms of identity is made clear by the line where it is stated that: 'il n'y a plus de signes reconnaissables [...] C'est comme s'il n'y avait plus personne, et que cette absence était manifestée, désormais, par n'importe qui' (p.99).

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les journaux, la télévision, les soucis de ce qu'on va dire, penser, murmurer, laisser entendre, éviter de dire... Et l'Agence, les bureaux, les plateaux, les studios... Et les producteurs, les acteurs, les entremetteurs... Et les débutants et les débutantes, toute la demi-prostitution légèrement endiablée du métier... Et les critiques, les échotiers... Le grand radeau-miroir, sons et images... (p.77). By way of contrast, first impressions would lead one to believe that the secret society is the pure antithesis of the world of the spectacle: C'est comme si on avait fondé une société secrète... Pour nous seuls... Avec quelques correspondants ou correspondantes, de part et d'autre, qui ne soupçonnent pas nos activités... On parle d'eux et d'elles, de nos rencontres, on compare, on évalue, on prévoit, on juge... Je leur apporte mon matériel, et elles le leur... Hommes et femmes... Changements d'histoires, de temps, de lieux, de milieux... (p.53). 38. Les surprises de Fragonard, p.27.

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Meetings with characters like a cardinal and a countess (p.410) would seem to confirm that the secret society is far from the mediatic world of the spectacle, but there are in spite of this numerous links between the two worlds. If the secret society called 'Le coeur absolu' with its own Articles and codes is in many ways distinct from the rest of society, it retains nevertheless some relationship with the external world. These links inevitably have consequences for the conception of the novel and also, as has just been seen, for the identity of the narrator within it. As Debord writes, the spectacle produced by capitalism does not leave the nature of the world unchanged:

point at which one is reading gives the reader the impression of being in the presence of the writer at the moment of writing. This is, of course, a stylistic device that has been used by Sollers in different forms since the 1960s. Yet whereas in earlier novels such as Drame it is as we have seen generally employed to support the theory of the reader's participation in the production of textual meaning, it is now more prominent as a sign of the spectacle's immediacy that has been incorporated into the text. Other stylistic features of Femmes and Le coeur absolu, such as the rejection of long psychologically-oriented descriptions in favour of an abundance of ellipsis, would appear to support this view. These features reflect, for example, the unavoidable brevity of news items as presented in the media and the trend towards zapping, two instances of what Debord has in Commentaires sur la société du spectacle called 'un présent perpétuel':

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l'expérience pratique de l'accomplissement sans frein des volontés de la raison marchande aura montré vite et sans exceptions que le devenir-monde de la falsification était aussi un devenir-falsification du monde.39 A paradox evident in this discussion of the relationship between the social contract of the spectacle and the counter-contract of the secret society, is that a novel such as Le coeur absolu can be described as realist, but only if one recognizes that that reality is in fact highly illusory and artificial. The paradox is best understood therefore by following Debord's reasoning, or else by keeping in mind the attractive line uttered by the narrator of Portrait du joueur: 'Goût de la vérité par l'artifice? Tout un art' (p. 112). By exploring this art the narrator creates the freedom of the counter-contract and the novel rediscovers its sense of purpose: 'Mais personne ne peut croire, n'est-ce pas, que la vie peut devenir un roman permanent pour certains... Happy few...' (p. 180). I will now therefore go on to consider some of the other ways in which this scene of artifice is expressed, especially in Le coeur absolu, as a means for the narrative's counter-contract to confront the spectacle. Considerations relating to the spectacle do not remain simply at a thematic level in these novels, for they also have an influence on the structure of narrative. There are many instances where Sollers's narratives mimic the spectacle, as in Femmes when Will writes the following: 'Je tape en direct le dialogue qu'on vient d'avoir...' (p.537). This narrative equivalent of the televisual 'en direct' is also to be found in references in the text to the page that one is in the process of reading. Thus on page 452 of Femmes Kate asks the narrator how many pages of his novel he has written, to which he replies '- 452...'. Similarly, when Will meets S. near the end of the novel he makes an allusion to the novel being almost complete (p.561). The fact of his speaking about the story at the 39. Guy Debord, Commentaires sur la société du spectacle (Paris, 1988), p. 19.

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La construction d'un présent où la mode elle-même, de l'habillement aux chanteurs, s'est immobilisée, qui veut oublier le passé et qui ne donne plus l'impression de croire à un avenir, est obtenue par l'incessant passage circulaire de l'information, revenant à tout instant sur une liste très succincte des mêmes vétilles, annoncées passionnément comme d'importantes nouvelles; alors que ne passent que rarement, et par brèves saccades, les nouvelles véritablement importantes, sur ce qui change effectivement.40 It would be wrong however to conclude that such instances of the spectacle being incorporated into the text suggest that Sollers is in these novels offering a celebration of it. To remain with the example of ellipsis as an image of the spectacle's brevity in its treatment of information, it is true that Le coeur absolu eulogizes over what is called '[f] évidence du moment': 'c'est le moment qui compte, le pur moment...' (p. 162). Yet elsewhere the word moment is used in such a way as to imply a subversion of the spectacle's use of it. In Les surprises de Fragonard Sollers alludes to a libertine secret society that existed during the reign of Louis XV called 'la Société du Moment' (p.27). Given the interplay between this book and Le coeur absolu it is fair to assume that the narrator's secret society is inspired by one similar to 'la Société du Moment'. If this is so, the moment as celebrated in the narrative is that created through the framework of the counter-contract and not that of the spectacle. There remains however a fundamental qualitative difference between the two, as Bosquet recognizes in the following statement: 'Le moment présent est capital: le coeur absolu est celui qui donne et qui prend, sans 40. Commentaires sur la société du spectacle, p.21, p.23.

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les artifices de la justification'.41 This last phrase 'sans les artifices de la justification' points to an internal contradiction of the spectacle, in that although it promotes ephemera it nevertheless clings to a highly conventional notion of value. The sense of gratuity on which the spectacle is based is denied, for example both by the image-maker in Le coeur absolu who pretentiously speaks of his Creation, and by the journalist who, submerged in his role, believes in the importance, originality and neutrality of his intervention. One fundamental way in which the narrator's world of the secret society relates to that of the spectacle is through his employment on a television adaptation of Dante's Divina Commedia (p. 151). The adaptation is set in the twentieth century and in a highly mediatized context, which is in a sense appropriate to parts of Dante's text, since like the spectacle it is characterized by: 'Des voix, donc, des milliers et des milliers de voix, et l'apparition des images selon...' (p.31). This employment places the narrator under contract with the spectacle and introduces to the narrative a number of people from the sphere (to maintain our use of this Dantean term) of the media. Yet the relationship between the narrator and the spectacle is complicated still further by the fact that the adaptation also inspires a number of scenes that are played out within the confines of the secret society. It seems as if it is through a reappraisal of Dante that the narrator gains a perception of the contemporary world and his own existence in it, which allows him a freedom to pass among the multiplicity of spheres within the three broad categories of Le coeur absolu: the secret society, narratorial textuality, and the spectacle. One could extend the Dantean analogy by associating these three categories with those of his Divina Commedia: Paradise, Purgatory, and Hell which would reflect the strong degree of interrelationship between the secret society, the narrative, and the spectacle. If one follows through this analogy with Paradise, Purgatory and Hell, it would maintain writing as 'l'intermédiaire' that Sollers promoted in his book of the same title that was discussed in the first chapter. One should insist on the fact that his freedom is gained through writing, since it is by using the spectacle as the framework for his twentieth-century adaptation of Divina Commedia that the narrator paradoxically maintains a distance from the spectacle that the counter-contract of the secret society allows him to explore. The interrelationship between the secret society and the spectacle that is brought about by the reinterpretation of Dante, is supported in the text by the different uses of the word 'création'. Attention to the media's pretentious use of the word to signify its product comes at the end of a 4L Alain Bosquet, 'Sollers: confession et chirurgie', Le Figaro (Littéraire), 26 Janvier 1987, p.VIL

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portrait of one of those involved in the television adaptation: Son visage, entièrement façonné pour la communication rentable, pour le having-pushing permanent, est lui-même la contraction permanente de ces deux mots: chaleureux-stimulant... Ah, et puis aussi le mot "création"... (p. 153). The audacity of such characters even extends to their use of phrases like: 'il faut créer quelqu'un' (p.230), which mimics the word of God. The use of the word creation introduces another element of interaction between the narrative and the secret society against the spectacle. This concerns the different uses of the number seven in the novel. The number seven is especially important in that it builds a bridge between the narrative of Le coeur absolu and the libertine philosophy of the secret society which bears the same name. The novel is made up of seven chapters, and the society's written constitution, or counter-contract as I have called it, is also made up of seven rules. Yet the correspondence is not quite as direct as this as can be seen from the fact that, even if one recognizes the intended correlation of writing with libertinage, there is nevertheless a slight disjunction or time-lag between the two which is most obviously due to the fact that the formation of the society and the elaboration of its rules only take place at the beginning of the second chapter. So if each subsequent chapter could be seen as corresponding to an aspect or experience of the secret society, then when one arrives at the end of the novel, the range or potential of the society cannot be said to have been exhausted because one has only explored six of the seven rules or spheres of that society. This interpretation, that the end of the text is not the definitive end, would seem to be confirmed in the closing pages of the novel when one reads the following quotation from St Augustine: 'Or le septième jour est sans soir, il n'a pas de coucher parce que vous l'avez sanctifié pour qu'il se prolonge éternellement' (p. 422). The word sphere is used above intentionally in relation to the seven rules of the society's counter-contract. The slight dis-synchronization between the seven chapters and seven rules across which the narrator and his text move could well be envisaged as a sort of Dantean journey in which one sphere leads to another through an infinite procession of language. This would confirm Dante's Divina Commedia as a model of creation that is invoked by Le coeur absolu, one that inspires a spatial (nay spherical) dimension in the text. Of course the number seven also corresponds to the days both of the week and of Creation, adding a temporal dimension: On peut prendre ça par la Genèse, si vous voulez, car qu'est-ce que

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There is one further significance contained in the number seven. It has been seen to provide a correspondence between the narrative and the secret society. That the corresondence between the two is moreover mediated by overt references to another text should come as no surprise for anyone familiar with Sollers's novels, and this is underlined in Le coeur absolu by the existence of 'le carnet rouge' that recalls the orange exercise book of Le pare. The 'carnet' is a seven-volume record of the narrator's sexual experiences, written in a coded form. This text within a text brings about a displacement dirough writing of the sexual scene, detaching it from its original, specific context and making it serve as a pretext for further story-telling and love-making. Given that the records are coded, one cannot forget that the excitement they provoke in any particular narrative scene passes inevitably via the mouth of the narrator: sans moi, vous ne pourriez pas les lire. Ce sont des documents chiffrés, des partitions; il faut avoir le code, la clé. Abréviations, signes convenus, hiéroglyphes, sceaux, je vous épargne les questions techniques. Le mystère des pyramides, l'énigme des cathédrales, la porte dérobée du saint des saints, la combinaison du coffre, la formule de l'onguent magique... (p.67). What clearer eulogy could there be of narrative discourse than to locate it in a scene of gratuitous pleasure with the context of the secret society? Or as S. says: 'il y a sûrement une équivalence inconsciente et magique entre foutre et roman' (p.240). As a narrative within the narrative, the 'carnet' and the direct links it maintains with the rest of the novel through the number seven confirm a long-standing tenet of Sollers, namely that through its curious correlation of creative and subversive characteristics the novel can occupy a privileged position. Le coeur absolu offers a clear example of this correlation through the various uses of the word seven and the associated significance of the word creation, which help produce a complex relationship of the narrative with the secret society and the

42. 'Le roman comme conversation', Art Press, 110 (janvier 1987), 11-13 (p. 11).

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spectacle.43 The secret society plays with the codes of the rest of society, undermining their severity and authority, and subverting them through a mime of simulation for which the models provided by Fragonard's paintings are essential. Although the secret society is founded on convention and therefore artifice it is no less real than Ma société du spectacle'. Where on the one hand the reader discovers the role-play of the secret sociely, on lite other he or she recognizes the imposition of roles within the media market. Through two senses of the word society, two forms of artificiare thus brought face to face in the realm of writing. La fête à Venise Sollers's novel called La fête à Venise (1991) brings together several of his preoccupations of recent years, such as eighteenth-century culture and history and 'la société du spectacle' as he understands it. For the purposes of this book it is perhaps the ideal novel with which to end, since of all his fictions it is the one that deals most directly with art in its relationship to the spectacle, and in particular with the fascination surrounding the selling and stealing of famous works of art. The theft of paintings, such as Monet's 'Impression, soleil levant' seems to occur in reality ever more frequently; the myths concerning painters apparently develop in proportion to the vast prices their paintings reach at auction; and art becomes a commodity like any other, providing an investment and publicity for the new owners (although not necessarily good publicity as the Australian businessman Alan Bond, who bought one Van Gogh painting, discovered). These phenomena have all contributed to making art one of the most spectacular spheres of the capitalist market system, and this is the subject of La fête à Venise, whose narrator plays a peripheral role in one international gang involved in the illegal trafficking of art. The narrator, called Pierre Froissart, is a writer who occupies an ambiguous position between writing and painting. Taking his name from the fourteenth century chronicler Jean Froissart, he is part-witness to and

43. The narrator of Portrait du joueur makes a comment that could be considered significant in this context. 'Enfin, il sera beaucoup pardonné à Balzac pour sa Préface à La Comédie humaine. In extremis veritas. Et pour ceci: "La littérature roule sur sept situations; la musique exprime tout avec sept notes; la peinture n'a que sept couleurs; comme ces trois arts, l'amour se constitue peut-être de sept principes, nous en abandonnons la recherche au siècle suivant."' This quotation the narrator follows with the words: ("est fail' (p.254).

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part-actor in the events which the novel recounts. Froissart, who writes clandestinely, and whose name contains the word 'art', is the figure on the edge of a world that brings together art and literature in the marketplace, wherein art is just one product traded illegally through an international network: 'La nourriture, les armes, la drogue, l'art: zones financières massives' (p.28). Froissart maintains a relationship with a woman called Luz, after Hemingway's character in 'A Very Short Story' (p.78) and their relationship introduces a quite different mood to the narrative because Luz is in no way connected with the affairs of the gang. Although she spends time in Venice with the narrator, she proceeds with her own work oblivious of Froissart's activities. This contrast between the innocent pleasures of the narrator's life with Luz and the more serious background activities of illegal trading is one source of the novel's interest, as it brings about radical swings in mood from, for example, a passage on Artaud's horrific experiences, to an analysis of the workings of the art market, to a strangely peaceful description of the narrator's passage across Venice: Ce qui compte, là, tout de suite, c'est le corps à promener d'un bout à l'autre du grand rectangle liquide, le bleu dans la bouche et les yeux, les hirondelles plongeant à droite et à gauche, la pensée intermittente de Luz nue dans sa chambre, le plaisir d'être cachés ensemble, d'avoir pour le moment échappé à la surveillance (p.33). Yet Luz has a good deal more importance for La fête à Venise than simply providing a measure of emotional diversion from the serious business of the narrator. Her work is significant as a symbol that gives the reader an understanding of Froissart's ambiguous position as both a writer and a thief. The first clue to this is that in Luz, an American physicist whose work centres on black holes, we are presented with another female scientist to compare with those already discussed in the bio-graphical preamble to this chapter who attract both the writer of the 'Questionnaire Marcel Proust' and the narrator of Le coeur absolu. The name Luz means light in Spanish, which is appropriate given the fact that the novel is set in Venice, the city of light. The definition Luz provides of the black hole is as follows: 'corps condensé dont le champ gravitationnel est si intense qu'il empêche toute matière et tout rayonnement de s'échapper' (p.58), and to this extent the black hole represents a symbolic opposition to life in the blaze of the spectacle: Maintenant, si la matière noire existe, cela signifie que toutes les choses visibles ne sont pas si importantes. Place à 1'evanescent, à l'incertain, à l'intervalle, à l'écho, au décalage, à l'accent, à la perturbation minuscule, au reflet, au ricochet. Place aux milliards

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de milliards de milliards de particules qui remplissent ce monde trop léger. Ce qui brille n'est pas ce qui soutient. Ce qui s'observe n'est pas ce qui enveloppe. Tout le monde se raccroche à l'image au moment même où elle est mise en abîme, relativisée, explosée. Publicité sur fond d'évanouissement, galaxies d'écume. La mon peut se regarder indirectement, le soleil est un détail, la nuit nous donne une nouvelle énergie, vive la peinture en acte, loi, moi, bonjour (pp. 187-8). The black hole is offered as a sphere from which the light of man's world, and by association the light of the spectacle, are excluded. This consequently provides Froissart with the scene for his narrative of contestation, but it is Luz who makes explicit the bridge between her science and the narrative: Pour elle, un écrivain (Stendhal, Proust, Artaud, les autres) est une sorte de trou noir dans le cosmos humain, une sorte de trafiquant de l'antimatière, avalant tout, même la lumière, ne laissant rien échapper, ne renvoyant rien (p.36). Science is also presented as offering a symbolic attraction for the novel in a passage on the spacecraft Voyager IPs visit to Neptune (p.87). Voyager II creates instant science because the new discoveries made in the course of its visit continually prove our previous givens to have been fallacious. This principle is transferred to 'le roman instantané' (p.87), a novel that would be flexible enough to be in sympathy with the speed of change in science, and to maintain the narrative's correlation with the spectacle's inherent brevity that became evident in the discussion of Le coeur absolu. For Sollers, such a narrative form consists essentially of an absence of long, psychologically oriented detail, and a multitude of short, apparently unrelated scenes and analyses, that are in fact anything but arbitrarily chosen. From the outset La fête à Venise attempts to produce this sort of narrative with its airy description of Venice and with a juxtaposition of alternative beginnings which has the effect of loosening or breaking up the chain of events in the reader's mind. This is what Milan Kundera highlights in his reading of La fête à Venise: 'Ce qui emporte et transporte est, non pas l'action, la vie des personnages, mais le courant d'une perpétuelle réflexion. D'une réflexion sui generis: appelons-la réflexion accélérée'.44 This lightness or sense of acceleration in language has been one of the most important changes in Sollers's writing since Nombres. It 44. Milan Kundera, 'L'arche du bouffon' 1991, p.70.

Le Nouvel Observateur, 7 février

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was first evident in the wordplay of Lois, but also more recently in the style of his short novel called Les folies françaises. It has also been seen in earlier sections of this chapter to be a characteristic of Femmes and Le coeur absolu that allows them to respond to the spectacle-based contract of society. The notion of the counter-contract is less obviously inscribed in the narrative of La fête à Venise than it is in the secret society's Articles of Le coeur absolu, or even in the narratorial counter-contract between S. and Will of Femmes. It does nevertheless appear to exist in the later novel, but more clandestinely. It has been seen that Froissart is an undercover writer, that Luz knows nothing of his work in the gang, and that their presence together in Venice remains something of a secret. It has also been seen that her work as an astro-physicist provides a symbolic opposition to the light of the spectacle. Taken together these elements establish one level in the relationship of Froissart and his narrative to the spectacle. Expressed in terms of social contract and narrative countercontract, this level of the relationship would be constituted by an opposition between on the one hand the spectacle and the theft and trading of art and on the other hand the pairing of Luz the astro-physicist with Froissart the writer of a 'roman instantané'. As with Le coeur absolu however, there is a greater ambiguity to this relationship between the spectacle and the narrative than one would at first imagine. This ambiguity will become clearer through a detailed examination of the presence of the gang and the spectacle in the narrative of La fête à Venise. Taken as an allusion to the innocence of their pleasures, 'Player IF the name of one of the boats present when the Watteau painting illicitly changes hands in Venice, is one link between the world Froissart shares with Luz and the world of art theft. The word 'Player' recalls Portrait du joueur, and the importance of the ingenuous player in Sollers's last novels. Himself a sort of 'joueur', the narrator of La fête à Venise would seem an unlikely character to be involved in the dramatic and dangerous activities of international crime, but it is that implausibility which makes him so useful. As Geena says at the beginning of the novel:

violently in a hypothetical question and answer session with the sceptical reader later in the narrative, in which he boasts of some of the advantages of: 'Les nouveaux délinquants "innocents", comme on les appelle désormais' (p. 158). A closer examination of certain aspects of the gang and its work makes one less surprised to find Froissart in its midst. Although in part based on factual evidence the network in which the narrator operates is fantastic in a very literary way, an example of this quality being the employing by the criminal organization of psychoanalysts: 'A propos, que deviennent nos psychanalystes? - Ils réclament encore des fonds pour leurs congrès mondiaux, monsieur. - Donnez, donnez!', and conventional writers: '"Et nos écrivains boursiers? J'espère qu'ils écrivent des choses bien sages?"' (p.45). The point is obviously not to be taken literally; the implication is that psychoanalysts and conventional writers both provide normative products that help the system operate. Another fantastic detail which makes Froissart's involvement with the gang more credible is the degree of intellectualizing of the gang's motives undertaken especially through the character Richard. Richard is the would-be philosopher of the group: '- Mais c'est un devoir, comprendstu, de remettre les oeuvres d'art en circulation, en situation d'excitation intense. C'est leur nature, après tout' (p.63). Richard's theory is that art belongs outside the law, which creates an affinity between himself and the artist:

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Après tout, on a besoin de gens comme toi. Tu sais regarder, tu voyages, personne ne s'occupe de ton emploi du temps, tes bizarreries sont plus ou moins admises, tu sais être discret, écouter au troisième degré, rouage pour nous, terrain d'observation pour toi... (p. 17). Crime is of course often converted by fiction into a game, for example in murder mysteries and thrillers, and Froissart's involvement with the gang could be considered in terms of this convention. In case there remains any doubt as to Froissart's suitability for the job, he defends himself

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Nous, nous sommes les vengeurs des artistes, l'armée du génie humilié à travers les siècles, le commando des écrivains exilés ou bagnards, la brigade du jugement dernier, ici, tout de suite. Vous voulez un Van Gogh? Pour vivre? Eh bien, vous le paierez d'une inquiétude perpétuelle (p.64). It is an interesting theory to consider that at a time when art itself has lost its power to shock (or even to move, in many cases), the thieves are the only ones who can use art to provoke a strong reaction, and therefore do play a role analogous to that of the artist. Where once the artist shocked the middle class into buying art, now the thief shocks the collector with the threat of relieving him of it! Whatever the merits of Richard's case, he is surely right in pointing to the absurdity that the market has produced: Conflits internes, remplacements de personnel, jalousies mortelles et, au centie du match, un simple rectangle barbouillé un beau matin par un type plus subtil ou fou que les autres... (p.64). This absurdity is likened to a game, which fact recalls die discussion of a

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humorous passage in Femmes describing how women would within the context of the spectacle be encouraged to watch sport and select a suitable sperm donor. Richard's idea of there being an affinity between the thieves and the artists is supported in the novel by the fact that the former are given aliases based on the latter: Durer (Nicole Vuillaud), Andy (as in Warhol) (Richard Milstein), and Cézanne (Elodie). It has already been suggested that Froissart's position in the gang is ambiguous, and this is especially clear at one point in the novel that relates to a case not unlike 'L'Affaire Cansón'. This incident, which stimulated much publicity in the middle 1980s, involved an old woman called Suzanne de Cansón who was physically isolated and left to die, it was claimed, whilst being robbed of her valuable possessions by a scheming companion. A book on the events by Laura Fairson and Alauzen di Genova called L'affaire Cansón details a mixture of theft, forgery and sales, involving ministers, famous specialists, the Louvre and international auction houses. The affair is fictionalized in La fête à Venise in the following extract:

luxembourgeoise' (p.220). The narrative oí La fête à Venise makes a link between, on the one hand, theft and illegal dealing and, on the other hand, the highly spectacular legal sales of paintings, a link summed up humorously by the phrase 'vols aux ventes' (p.82). Illegal and legal trading are presented as being two related phenomena in the logic of capital and the spectacle: publicity produces spiralling prices which generate even more publicity, business participates because of the high returns in terms of investment and publicity, and thieves are attracied by the great financial rewards and the discretion of dishonest collectors:

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Entendez-vous, au bord de la forêt, les hurlements d'une vieille dame malade enfermée sans nourriture et sans soins dans l'aile gauche de son manoir? Ses appels déchirants au secours? On est simplement en train de lui capter son Murillo, son Titien, ses pastels de La Tour... Sa voix devient de plus en plus faible... Son corps décharné tombe au pied du lit... Déjà, la moitié de ses fauteuils est à Zurich, sa pendule Louis XV à Bâle... Elle n'a plus rien à signer contre une bouillie ou une piqûre calmante? Non? Alors, débranchée! A la suivante! On m'en signale une, là-bas, en Auvergne... (pp.34-5). The deliberate implication of the narrator at the end of the passage is another example of the sudden changes of mood in the novel. Here it is almost a schizophrenic progression, moving from a seemingly sympathetic elaboration of the woman's misery, to a detached 'A la suivante!' all expressed in an episode that represents the clearest example of what the narrator himself calls Tendiablement du marché d'art' (p.33). It is interesting to note that, for a novel which is clearly about painting, and where the names of painters are taken by thieves, there is not one living character who is a painter. However it is not the process of creating art, the inspiration and psychology of the painter, which is here explored, but what happens to a painting when it becomes an object for speculation in a market which is clearly less than free. The novelty of this spectacular aspect of the market is recognized by the authors of L'affaire Cansón: 'L'intrusion du spectaculaire est relativement récente sur un marché jusqu'alors aussi peu voyant et discret qu'une banque suisse ou

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L'industrie du faux s'organise, les vols sont monnaie courante |...| La Suisse ne sait plus jusqu'où numéroter les comptes, les télex crépitent, les fax écrivent la nuit, les ventes se succèdent en rafales, banquise en expansion, repérages, estimations, intoxications, raids, poker de volumes et d'époques. Le Japon immémorial et électronique se prosterne devant le sensuel Monet dans sa barque? Money! Une nouvelle rétrospective truquée, une réécriture insidieuse des catalogues, une exposition changeant quand il faut les perspectives, tout doit aider la modification des cours. Enterrer des tableaux dans les coffres-forts est devenu un passe-temps passionné mondial (p-34). There is no shortage of instances where art is primarily seen as product rather than creation or production: Cet autoportrait roux, mangé de mouches, est transformé par le yen en assurance tous risques (ce sont d'ailleurs de plus en plus les Assurances, comme par hasard, qui achètent les tableaux) (p.27). One only has to look at a weekly magazine such as Le Point to see that market values can often be deemed more interesting than the aesthetic value of art. 'Tout cela a un nom unique: combien? Le comment nous mène immédiatement au combien. Pourquoi? Pas de pourquoi. Pour qui? Pour Monsieur et Madame Combien' (p.205). The present location of Fragonard's painting 'La Fête à Saint-Cloud', which decorates a wall belonging to the Bank of France, is a powerful image of the fate of painting's fête.45 Yet it is not only the fate of classic paintings which is in the grip of money, but also the work of contemporary painters: Imagine-t-on, d'ailleurs, un peintre plantant aujourd'hui son chevalet en haut du World Trade Center pour étudier les nuances du 45. Les surprises de Fragonard, p.22.

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Chapter Three soleil couchant sur Wall Street? Warhol avait raison: peindre en série le sigle du dollar suffit (p.204).

Here we see a further justification of Sollers's and de Kooning's previous refusal to accept the simple distinctions between classic and modern in art, since the fate of avant-garde paintings in the market place makes a mockery of their claims to have revolutionized the conception of art. For in the operation of the market, does the avant-garde resist any more, does the so-called difficult abstract art object fare any better than the established masterpieces of the past? One could even go so far as to say that the avant-garde has furnished the art market with some of its greatest fetish objects, a fact that Warhol certainly understood. His habit of filming people as they came into the Factory is interpreted by La fête à Venise as a recognition that art was henceforth to be constituted by the spectacle: 'Vous qui entrez, sachez que vous n'êtes qu'un reflet' (p.61). The desire of those who speculate upon art in order to conceal it in vaults even reaches macabre proportions in a passage on the appropriation of the skulls of dead artists. Is not this fetishistic attitude towards the dead artist's body, with the skull being promoted over the meaning of the work of art, another form of the realist's stupidity that Lacan attributed to Poe's policemen? Autres trous noirs, les peintres... En pleines prunelles... Décollant la rétine, brûlant l'iris... Les puissants achètent ce qu'ils ne pourront jamais pénétrer, ou plutôt ce qui les enferme à jamais dans leur cécité (pp.38-9). If one takes Froissart's description of himself, as: 'le passant passionné passeur du passé' (p. 143), and his ambiguous position with regard to the gang, what do they suggest exactly about the relationship of the narrative to the spectacle? It has, in the discussion of previous novels in this chapter, been shown that the narrator and certain important characters do not adopt an unambiguous hostility to the spectacle, but rather assume a position within, or more precisely at a tangent to, the spectacle in order to subvert or disarm its impact by means of a narrative countercontract. The position of La fête à Venise is even more complex in that it seems impossible to maintain a consistent view of the contract and the counter-contract. Is one to make a distinction between on the one hand Froissart's employment with the gang and by association with the spectacle, and on the other hand his life with Luz and his role as a writer, as was suggested earlier in this discussion? Or is the work of the gang to be considered as Richard claims an opposition to the spectacle, and thus part of the narrative counter-contract? This uncertainty presents a further instance of the interrelationship between the narrative and the spectacle,

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because both these sets of distinctions can be supported. The livelihood of gangs is in part guaranteed by the myths and high monetary value of art which the spectacle perpetuates, but it is also true that the gang is on the side of the artist (and the narrator) in the sense that it represents a logical extension of the idea essential to poetic licence whereby art should remain outside the law. The only satisfactory conclusion appears to bethat the interrelationship whereby even the narrator and his countercontract become indirectly implicated in the spectacle offers a symbol of what Debord has defined as '[le] spectaculaire intégré'.46 It is no longer possible to treat the spectacle as a local issue or theme because it has invaded every aspect of reality. As if to support this conclusion, Froissart himself quotes (in an inverted form) on page 189 of La fête à Venise the passage from Debord's Commentaires that I referred to earlier in connection with Le coeur absolu: 'le devenir-falsification du monde est le devenir-monde de la falsification'.47 Our provisional distinction whereby the contract was represented by Froissart's role in the gang, and the counter-contract by his relationship with Luz, would appear to be unsustainable because the spectacle is present behind the transactions and thefts committed by the gang, and at the same time the gang's rationale also places it within the scope of the counter-contract. This is not to say that the narrative simply falls victim to the spectacle for the narrator attempts, through a preoccupation with language and painting, to bring about a subversion of the spectacle. Although the spectacle appears to invade the counter-contract it does not annul it, any more than does the purchaser of a work of art necessarily buy anything more than the object (to quote an earlier passage again: 'Les puissants achètent ce qu'ils ne pourront jamais pénétrer, ou plutôt ce qui les enferme ajamáis dans leur cécité'). The final section of this chapter will explore some of the ways in which counter-images are produced in La fête à Venise despite the threat posed to the counter-contract by the spectacle. The first symbol of resistance is provided by the choice of Venice as the setting for the novel. Venice has also become a prominent feature of Sollers's more recent fiction. As he writes in his Carnet de nuit: Je suis arrivé pour la première fois à Venise, après un long voyage en car venant de Florence, en octobre 1963. Je me revois laissant

46. Commentaires sur la société du spectacle, p. 18. 47. For other comments by Sollers on Debord and his work see Carnet de nuit, p. 13 and pp.27 9, and 'La guerre selon Guy Debord', L'Infini, 28 (hiver 1989 1990), 45 6.

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Chapter Three tomber mon sac, la nuit, devant Saint-Marc. J'y suis toujours (p.131).

At the end of Femmes, S. prepares to leave for Venice, and warns Will not to paint a depressing picture of it: '- Attention!... Pas d'erreur!... Pas de "mort à Venise", hein? Soyez joueur! En diable!' (p.511). Portrait du joueur also ends in Venice, with the narrator looking on himself in the following terms: DIAMANT DIT SOLLERS VENITIEN DE BORDEAUX (p.308). One can also mention Le coeur absolu, with its secret society established in Venice, and numerous appreciative descriptions of the place: 'Le soleil éclate de partout, maintenant, c'est la folie lumineuse, vaporisée, brassée...' (p. 160). The title oí La fête à Venise is clearly meant to contrast with the melancholia and sense of decline and decay given by Thomas Mann's Death in Venice. The popularity and influence of Mann's novella, reinforced by Visconti's film adaptation, have promoted a somewhat negative view of the city which has qualified the pleasure to be taken in its beauty. But for Sollers this is just one instance of the puritanical ideology of an economically dominant north imposing an image of despair and depression on a joyous south, perpetuating the image of Venice in decline. Artaud is quoted in the novel as the figure who best represents a general resistance to this attitude, in a passage about his recoiling from death: Ce qui fait que l'on meurt, c'est que depuis l'enfance on croit à la mort. On se voit entre quatre planches dans un cercueil, c'est cela qui nous fait mourir, mais si vous vous refusez à cette idée, vous ne mourrez jamais (p.30). Instead of death, Sollers offers a simple, seductive tone to open his novel that is more reminiscent of the Venice of Vivaldi, an opening in which a lightness of tone is counterpoised by the lapping of a weightier rhythm, an ebb and flow of light and dark from which despair and depression are absent: Comme toujours, ici, vers le dix juin, la cause est entendue, le ciel tourne, l'horizon a sa brume permanente et chaude, on entre dans le vrai théâtre des soirs. Il y a des orages, mais ils sont retenus, comprimés, cernés par la force. On marche et on dort autrement, les yeux sont d'autres yeux, la respiration s'enfonce, les bruits trouvent leur profondeur nette. Cette petite planète, par plaques, a

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son intérêt (p. 13). The positively joyous image of Venice supports Froissart's treatment in the narrative of life under the spectacle: Beaucoup d'affaires, beaucoup de misères. Plein d'images, peu de corps. Centaines de tableaux exécutés, rares surfaces profondes. Litres de sperme, milligrammes de lévitation. Il est étonnant quecette disproportion soit si peu étudiée en elle-même, comme si la représentation ou l'acte avait une valeur en soi. Stéréotypes productifs ou libérateurs, sensations censurées. Ce sont les mots qui manquent (p.25). Reflecting upon, and writing about, art becomes in itself a subversive act that would interfere with the painting's status as merchandise: Quoi? Vous prétendez perturber le marché en retrouvant le geste intérieur des peintres? Le système nerveux perdu? Les veinules de l'ancienne affaire? Les doigts, le globe, les déliés, les plis, la touffe insolente, les préparations rouges, blanches, les glacis, les frottis, les empâtements, le dessin direct au pinceau? Toiles, bois, cuivres? Comme ça, de chic, avec des phrases et des mots? Devant nous? Mais l'espace est depuis longtemps confisqué, cher monsieur, et le temps de même! Vous n'avez pas la carte, la grille, le code d'accès! Spectre assigné, comme tout le monde! Somnambulez! Dégagez! Vous allez retarder la vente! (p. 17). Seen in these terms, the narrator's involvement with the gang represents an anti-social, perverse, even diabolical homage to the original work of art in an age of spectacular reproduction. The invasion of art by the spectacle is analyzed by La fête à Venise as being a vain compensation for the inability of the spectacle to find time or place to support any degree of linguistic sophistication: On dira donc que la nôtre [période] ne ressemble à aucune autre dans la mesure où elle a mis hors la loi la conscience verbale développée. A sa place, la peinture est chargée de briller comme une transaction immobilière permanente (p.26). This notion provides the novel with its raison d'être as elucidator with regard to painting in opposition to the spectacle. The value of the relationship between the visual arts and literature is developed in La fêle à Venise through the figure of Watteau. Antoine Watteau and the world of pre-Revolutionary France may seem far re

Chapter Three

La fête à Venise

moved from the late twentieth century, but Froissart brings the two together at the centre of his narrative to the extent that one can see Watteau as a party to a narratorial counter-contract like de Kooning in Femmes and Fragonard in Le coeur absolu. Although he is not a character in the sense of himself appearing in the text, Watteau could nevertheless be said to be present in the narrative and to influence its direction. And in fact Sollers has referred to this painter before. Watteau is alluded to briefly in Le coeur absolu as S. describes the musical concert given by his friends as a 'balade à Cythère' (p. 197). Sollers had also previously written of his liking for Watteau:

The Watteau painting that brings Froissart to Venice is called 'La Fête à Venise', a painting whose existence is said to be unknown to the public. Froissart explains that it reappeared suddenly on the clandestine market at about the same time as 'La Surprise' was rediscovered, and that it has never been exhibited (p.89) and Froissart describes it as a 'redoublement' of the 'Fêtes vénitiennes' on view in Edinburgh. An important feature of the narrative is the way in which Froissart sets about rewriting the v painting:

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Vous dites qu'il est nostalgique, mélancolique? Toujours la propagande romantique! Quel contresens! Quelle culpabilité ressassée, quel ennui! Comme cette erreur d'interprétation en dit long sur la peur de jouir, véritable malédiction des temps dits modernes! 48 In La fête à Venise the painter plays a central role, and not only because of the transaction concerning one of his canvases. His painting provides the scene for a textual counter-image that tends to undermine the spectacle. It is not a coincidence that the narrator sets the scene for the transferring of the Watteau painting in Venice. One objective of Froissart's detailed summary of Watteau criticism (pp. 167-171) is to demonstrate how the painter has suffered from a similar affliction to Venice, namely that he has either been dismissed as decadent and outmoded or condescendingly domesticated by interpretations that insist on finding mere melancholia in the scenes portrayed. The image of Watteau as a depressive is proposed in the novel by the Proustian figure of Maître Norpois, whose spouting of psychoanalytic clichés is intended to prove that Cythera is in fact a burial ground! The role of Watteau in La fête à Venise contrasts with the image perpetuated by characters such as Norpois. The romantic encounter, the subject matter of numerous paintings by Watteau, is transferred to contemporary Paris as Froissart explains how it was at the Louvre in a gallery housing Watteau's work that he first met Luz: A l'année prochaine devant 'L'Indifférent', à toutes les années prochaines devant 'La Finette' [...] Watteau est l'agent le plus secret, le véritable agent W, comme on dit dans les services d'espionnage pour désigner celui ou celle qui est chargé d'entrer au coeur du dispositif adverse... (p.38). 48. Théorie des exceptions, p. 142.

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Je le préfère: de mêmes dimensions, il a quelque chose de plus aéré, de plus détendu, de plus jeté, de plus rouge. Watteau a accentué certains des repentirs qu'il a eus pour l'autre, par exemple en racourcissant les robes (il a dû peindre 'La Fête à Venise' juste après). Il a ajouté deux nouveaux personnages féminins: une deuxième femme-fontaine, explosive de sensualité, toujours sur le modèle du nu de 'Nymphe et Satyre' (aujourd'hui au Louvre) et une seconde danseuse retenue, jouant ainsi, comme il le fait souvent (et son époque avec lui) sur la contradiction d'un inanimé pierre ou marbre - plus habité et charnel que le corps vivant (p.89). Froissart is presenting to the reader a painting that he or she cannot possibly have seen, which is perhaps the most ingenious device for combining painting and discourse in an imaginary context that escapes the dominance of the image. This is literally a rewriting of painting, a changing of names that is an assertion of what art should be about, since it also undermines any preoccupation one may have with the painting as merchandise. Does not this description whet the reader's appetite for a glimpse of the painting? Surely that is the intention, for it makes us wonder about other paintings the existence of which we may be entirely ignorant, and which pass from hand to hand without ever being seen by the public. Further details of the invisible painting are sketched in through subsequent passages of the narrative: Curieusement 'La Fête à Venise', comme 'Fêtes vénitiennes', est plus proche de 'L'Amour au théâtre français': même danse centrale de fin d'après-midi, même jeu de pieds et de bras, même assemblée à la fois attentive et distraite (p.95). Dans les 'Fêtes vénitiennes' d'Edimbourg, il y a dix-huit personnages, dix-neuf si l'on compte la statue blonde vivante de femme nue en bord de cascade, le bras droit bien relevé pour qu'on ne voie qu'elle. Dans 'La Fête', donc: vingt et un. Conversation générale.

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Chapter Three en rebonds discrets, avec danse sur fond de musette de cour (p.138). Dans 'La Fête à Venise', le cercle est plus resserré, comme vu de plus près. Les roses et les verts dominent, sauf le départ d'escalier à la petite blonde en rouge, avec, toujours, le couteau transversal des nacres. A gauche (innovation par rapport au tableau d'Edimbourg), une dénivellation du sol, comme dans la 'Récréation italienne', donne l'impression que l'un des musiciens, un guitariste, est assis sur le sol peu profond d'un bassin, d'une petite piscine ou d'une fontaine à sec, patinoire d'été, glacée d'ombres (p. 139).

By elaborating upon these subtle differences between the two paintings, Froissart appears to tease the reader with details of 'La Fête à Venise' that one will never actually see. The only way to see the painting is through one's imagination. Froissart's rewriting is a cross-referencing between different pictures that confuses each one's status as an object: 'Ils finissent par rentrer les uns dans les autres' (p.234). Such cross-referencing is the clearest expression of Watteau's paintings where a lightness of mood seems to cross from one painting to another: 'Tout est un et différent pour qui sait danser les plaisirs du vide, jouer, jouir et s'éclipser dans l'instant' (p.234). It is this lightness that the narrative seeks to recreate by promoting both painting and narrative in opposition to the dull insipidity of the spectacle.

Conclusion

Conclusion

It has in Chapter Three been argued that Debord's notion of 'le spectacle intégral' enters the narrative of La fête à Venise and the counter-contract of its narrator. The spectacle makes spectres of us all as Froissart implies by the use of the pun: 'Société du spectral' (p.24). As spectres we have become images of individuals. We live in a society where for example an obsession with information has led to a glut of images and opinions, to the extent that the latter have less and less originality: 'Plus rien n'est vraiment dit ou entendu, mais tout se répète, s'écoute. Pas de pensée, mais pullulement de signaux, écume d'écume, réduction maniaque et raidie' (p.71). For the narrator of this novel it is a myth to believe that a greater level of awareness necessarily follows from a multiplication of the channels of information. Froissart describes 'la surinformation pour rien' (p.228) where the spectacle gives the misleading impression that valuable information is being imparted, which is often far from being the case. The inauthenticity that lies behind the image promoted by the spectacle is also present if one considers culture. We are told of the latest exhibition to attend as we are told of the latest soap powder to buy. As a consequence we troop dutifully in search of an enlightenment that remains for the most part elusive: les files d'attente devant les musées ressemblent à celles d'autrefois, devant les ambassades, pour obtenir un visa. Ils viennent pointer ou se faire homologuer devant la caméra invisible. Nous avons été voir les peintures, le Maître n'arrête pas de nous dire qu'elles sont très précieuses, il va être content. Certains d'entre nous ont même fait l'effort particulier d'acheter un livre que, d'ailleurs, ils ne liront jamais, faute de temps. Ouf, à table. Télévision (p.214). This is the context in which Sollers writes. The novelist is of course subject to the same treatment by the spectacle as any other figure. One could suggest the concrete example of a writer being given at best one or two minutes at the end of a news programme in which to set out his ideas, in a slot sandwiched between the summary of the day's activities on the financial markets and the advertisements leading into the following programme.

Conclusion

Conclusion

Yet by virtue of the fact that the spectacle encourages the development of stereotypes literature is endowed with a valuable role of resistance: 'Tout s'arrange, rien ne dérange, et au moindre dérangement le film pour l'extérieur est prévu. Savoir lire, simplement lire, vous mettra bientôt au rang des dieux' (p. 136). In La fête à Venise a possible function of literature is rediscovered as it is seen as being both a form of artifice treating reality but also as realist fiction treating the artifice of reality. Owing to the inauthenticity of the spectacle the novel finds itself in a unique position to treat and subvert that inauthenticity. Sollers understands the necessity of developing new forms of fiction to treat the subject of the spectacle. Whilst one must be wary of the influence of the spectacle one must nevertheless recognize that it has revolutionized life so profoundly that a new response is demanded of the novelist:

seen by the reader as an endorsement of society on the part of the narrator. As Sollers said in an interview:

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Il me semble que nous sommes très en retard par rapport au développement de la science et de ce qui surgit avec les nouvelles communications. Tous ces réseaux de télévision, la Bourse qui marche à cent à l'heure, les milliards d'informations, les satellites, les avions, tout ce mouvement de notre temps jusque dans sa folie, nous passons à travers en continuant à écrire lentement et avec une psychologie du XIXe siècle.1 Where characteristics of the spectacle, such as the televisual 'en direct', do appear to be incorporated into the narrative they do not merely represent the spectacle but communicate the urgency of the narrator's response. In La fête à Venise this sense of urgency is given by the idea of the novel being like a modern Noah's Ark for the safeguarding of literacy: 'Navette-Noé... Le Louvre va sauter: filmez-moi les dix oeuvres les plus importantes... La Bibliothèque va brûler, retenez l'essentiel en dix lignes' (p.261). A Noah's Ark is also mentioned in Le coeur absolu as a means of creating a refuge in the middle of a cultural void: '"Ce rassemblement, ces citations, ces collages: le roman comme encyclopédie et arche de Noé? Après vous le déluge?"' (p.228). This supports the idea that the novel's raison d'être now lies in its attempting to subvert the authority of the spectacle. As the narrator of Femmes states: 'Une lutte à mort est engagée entre la stereotypic intéressée et la perception réellement personnelle. Entre la répétition étalée mortelle et la sensation interne...' (pp. 79-80). Owing to their role in opposition to 'la société du spectacle' Sollers's narratives disregard representation, for to represent the spectacle could be 'Sollers' (interview), p.35.

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Il me semble que j'ai toujours poursuivi, spontanément et aveccalcul, un même objectif: un ensemble d'écrits essayant de donner, sous différents angles (Leparc, Drame, Nombres, Paradis...) l'idée d'un espace rigoureusement irreprésentable. C'est-à-dire de reprendre au théâtre sa structure même de représentation pour abolir toute représentation.2 In our discussion of Sollers's subversion of the spectacle and representation a number of figures have been called upon to highlight a fundamental distinction between image and counter-image. These figures include Freud (through his notions of the dream-image and 'mystic writing-pad'), Poussin, Dupin (the poet-detective who, because he thinks with the light extinguished, represents poetic insight as opposed to conventional blindness), Rothko, Fargier, de Kooning, Fragonard and Watteau. Whilst Freud's notion of the dream-image provides a useful analogy for the counter-images of Le parc, certain problems resulting from his thoughts on the relationship between analytic discourse and dreamimages, which he specifically likens to that existing between poetry and painting, have important consequences for the direction taken by our treatment of narrative and the counter-image. Freud's view of the dreamimage as unreliable is a product of his traditional conception of painting as a representation of a representation. Whereas Freud establishes a dichotomy between on the one hand analytic discourse and poetry and on the other dream-images and painting, one can offer an alternative dichotomy between on the one hand rational discourse and on the other literature and visual art. This dichotomy encourages the development in Chapter Two of a discussion relating non-representational art to the narratives of Drame and Nombres. The analogy is justified because of the way in which these two novels reject images of figuration and landscape. By drawing back from the elaboration of conventional images of identity and setting the narratives are deemed symbolically to challenge the spectacle. Thus the two essential elements in the building of an abstract textual counter-image are the undermining of identity (through for example the use of pronominal identities, and themes of violence, illness and silence) and the formation of a geometric framework. The relevance of abstract forms as a response to Freud's understanding of the dream-image is most apparent 2. Improvisations, p.38.

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Conclusion

in the horizontal and vertical axes of the library dream at the beginning of Drame. The radical arrangement of theatrical space, and the diagrams, described as deforming and invisible, that fall within the fourth side of Nombres are further evidence of geometric structures imposing themselves through the failing light of represented forms. The limit to the suitability of abstract art to inspire a counter-image in Sollers's narratives is reached with Nombres. In his book on de Kooning, Rosenberg recounts the artist's particular perception of abstract art whereby: abstraction becomes an ideal reality on the basis of which an aesthetic can be formulated in advance of the paintings themselves. The result is to make creation subservient to theory.3 One would have some justification for expressing a similar view of the climate that was produced after Nombres and 'La dissémination', in that it was characterized not only by a desire to promote an awareness of the process of writing, nor even to see writing being realized in the process of its reading, but also by writing that at times appeared to be formulated in advance by the constraints of theory. The limitations of abstract art are made explicit in the discussion of Femmes. The opposition of abstract artists to de Kooning's depictions of sexuality is analysed by Sollers in De Kooning, vite, an opposition that recalls Will's struggle to avoid being constrained by the society's contract. Where de Kooning confronted a community of interest between abstract artists and the middle class that was based on a loss of sensibility, Will faces a similar alliance between certain feminist factions and agents of the spectacle. The importance of de Kooning as a contributor of textual counter-images is underlined by Sollers's interpretation of the 'Woman' paintings as profoundly anti-spectacular. The formal differences between the work of the various painters are finally less important however than one's understanding of their possible value to the narrative. Fragonard's work is for example incorporated into the text of Le coeur absolu for its buoyancy so that, for all the obvious differences between Fragonard and de Kooning, the effect on the reader of the two painters is similar in that they are both in a sense action painters painting for the moment: 'Frago presto, frago furioso...'.4 Our notion of the counter-image that relates figures such as Fragonard to the narratives of certain novels seems at one point to be reflected in the

3. Willem de Kooning, p.24, p.28. 4. Les surprises de Fragonard, p.43.

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words of the narrator of Les folies françaises: Je te peins, je te peins, la peinture est un roman, troisième monde au-delà de la réalité et de son miroir, plus présente que ne le sera jamais la conscience de la réalité redoublée d'un miroir. C'est notre folie visible et lisible (p. 117). The role that Sollers attributes to the novel, variously as an explosive device against and a refuge from the spectacle, makes it extremely important. Both he and his narrators have become ever more vociferous in their support of the novel. In one of his recent articles 'Nouvelle inquisition, nouvelle censure' Sollers attacks the promoters of Political Correctness who condemn writers such as Genet, Céline and Miller for their lifestyles or attitudes, and who appear above all to want to prohibit any consequential discussion of their books.5 The narrator of La fête à Venise expresses a similar point of view: 'Dévaluer le roman, le châtrer au maximum, qu'il soit considéré comme inférieur ou bien qu'il ne raconte que des superficies... Le contrôle du pouvoir est là...' (p.162). The notion of bio-graphy offers Sollers and his novels some protection from the sort of reductive attitude that he considers to have been adopted against writers like Genet. The complexity of the relationship between bio-graphy and fiction renders problematic the simple equation on which such moral and Correct judgments seem to be made. Bio-graphy is therefore, along with themes such as violence and illness, to be interpreted as a refusal on the part of Sollers to present conventional images of figuration, which refusal is for example demonstrated by the indeterminacy governing the relationships between Sollers and the various narrators in the novels discussed in Chapter Three. Sollers's bio-graphy has consciously been elaborated in a fictional context and he has drawn attention to the fact that identity is founded in language: 'J'ai tiré mon nom des dictionnaires et il s'y retrouve'.6 One can only hope to come to an understanding of the significance of these points in the course of a detailed literary study. It has thus been the purpose of this book to demonstrate that through the jocularity of his fictional identity Sollers continues to provide us with very real motivation for taking literature seriously in the age of the spectacle.

5. Philippe Sollers, 'Nouvelle inquisition, nouvelle censure', L'Infini, 36 (hiver 1991), 3-8. 6. Carnet de nuit, p.47.