Spotlight on … Philippe Sollers H (1973)

‘At the most elementary level, language behaves like gears and teeth locking and moving forward. A word has meaning, the reader decodes the word’s meaning, and then reads the next word. Other elements like punctuation, capitalization, paragraph breaks, and quotation marks further assist the reader in how the text will be interpreted. H by Philippe Sollers has none of these prompts.

‘In standard reading practice, words become sentences, sentences become paragraphs, and ink on the page becomes narrative. It is such a common practice, we think nothing of it when reading the daily newspaper, a bestseller, or a website. H throws this relationship into flux. The text flows, the words flooding the page, with no period or paragraph break in sight. Written in 1973, Sollers wrote this avant-garde text in the middle of a personal ideological crisis. The former Maoist and founder of Tel Quel abandoned his Leftist ideology and converted to Catholicism. This crisis took place after he witnessed the violent excesses of Mao’s Chinese Cultural Revolution.

‘The challenge for the reader is parsing this ideological conversion story amid the word-flood that fills page after page. H reads like an amalgamation of Molly Bloom’s soliloquy from Ulysses, Lucky’s nonsensical monologue from Waiting for Godot, and the disintegration of identity from the last pages of The Unnameable. Sollers thrusts the reader into a strange linguistic borderland, straddling sense and nonsense.

‘During this literary engagement, the reader and the author toggle between collaboration and antagonism. In the non-blurb blurb on the back cover, Sollers explains that ‘Beyond the automatism, a calculation is at play, keeping watch, criticising, departing at once from all the points of history. This calculation is uttered by masses in the discontinuous unity of its sections. It adjusts, strikes, whispers, shouts, marks, deletes, tallies, signals the moving absence which is nevertheless addressed, talked to, with all the background language.He goes on, saying, “That’s it, then, relax, it’s clear. Stay with the meaning, it’s simple. They are two, here, in the night. Tempo.” The two being author and reader.

Part of the joy and the challenge presented by H is finding one’s groove with the text. The “discontinuous unity” will at first confront the reader, attacking her sensibilities in the vain attempt to discover a linear narrative or intellectual through-line. But as more and more words get consumed by the reader, a relaxation sets in. A kind of numbness or hypnosis pacifies the reader. Then, as if by some alchemical reaction, sentences and phrases start appearing. These phantom sentences begin to create fragments of narrative.

‘But even these nebulous narrative fragments appear and disappear with a frustrating randomness. The text will build into an extended set-piece and the, just as suddenly, evaporate in a mishmash of random words or nonsense terms.

‘The ephemeral narratives take on different forms, different tonal registers. Everything from high- to low-culture is evoked. A confessional narrative as Sollers struggles with the empty promises of Maoism. This might become a more formal meditation, a historical genealogy of the Left since Karl Marx, only to turn into a nonsensical dadaist inventory of words. The inventory might mutate into a long pornographic tableau, penetrations and vulgarity. And so on. For 172 pages.

‘Regular notions of reading practice become moot when confronting a text like this. I myself began reading it, had other reviewing duties, and then returned to the text after a long absence. It felt like dipping into a lake after a long winter. At first it was strange and alienating, then I got back into the groove of things. Because of the text’s avant-garde nature, I didn’t need to remember characters or plot. The verbal static began to take on new forms.

‘Sollers also created a text that avoid a uniform interpretation. Because there are no paragraph breaks or punctuation, any reader can separate where a sentence or phrase begins or ends. As with Finnegans Wake or The Cantos, despite any authorial premeditation in execution, a certain amount of ambiguity develops. The way I read H will differ than how another person reads H. Equus Press kept academic machinery to a minimum, only italicizing words that were in English in the original French version. Sollers drops in Chinese, German, Italian, Latin, and other languages. Citations explaining these foreign phrases would slow down the reader and impose an interpretive framework. I just went with the flow, letting the sight and sounds of those foreign tongues echo off the unending textual flood. If you really want to know what these words mean, there’s always Google Translate. For me, it didn’t seem necessary.’ — The Driftless Review

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Further

Philippe Sollers Site
PS @ Wikipedia
#philippesollers hashtag on Instagram
Philippe Sollers : “It’s called strategy, my dear friend”
Philippe Sollers’ “Nombres:” Structure and Sources
PHILIPPE SOLLERS: interview and photography by OLIVIER ZAHM
The Novels of Philippe Sollers: Narrative and the Visual
‘What is the Meaning of the Avant-garde’s Death?’
DVD: ‘Jean-Luc Godard / Philippe Sollers: The Conversation’
‘The Body Comes Out of the Voice’
‘Loving Kristeva: a Memoir’, by Phillipe Sollers
David Platzer on Philippe Sollers
Philippe Sollers @ goodreads
Nodality or Plot Displaced: The Dynamics of Sollers’s H
Polysemantic Brush Strokes of Garden Green under Gray Clouds of Synchronicity

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Extras

Philippe Sollers – Interview (1988)

Julia Kristeva & Philippe Sollers – Du mariage considéré comme un des beaux-arts

Philippe Sollers : Enfance et jeunesse d’un écrivain français

Philippe Sollers “Le Nouveau”

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Interview

David Hayman: Can you summarize the developments that led up to the sort of fiction now called the New-New Novel?
Philippe Sollers: The last 50 years produced three important literary movements in France beginning with the Surrealist period between 1920 and 1930. Then Existentialism dominated the post-WW II period, and during the decade of thesixties, we had the so-called Nouveau roman. These three movements werevery differendy constituted. We could say that Surrealism popularized, explicated, and publicized the big break (coupure) which occurred at the end of the 19th century with Mallarme and Lautreamont. I believe that the essential elements of the crisis we are still living through derive from those experiments on language in literature. Surrealism simply took note of the remarkable literary events of that period. The Surrealists discovered and publicized Lautr?amont, who would not have been read and perhaps not even published without Breton and Aragon in 1920. It was they who copied down the poems at the Bibliotheque Nationale. So you see they performed a belated exhumation under rather strange circumstances. Almost 50 years after Lautreamont wrote Les Chants de Maldoror the Surrealists made their discovery and extrapolated their theory using what they thought they understood of psychoanalysis, of language, of automatic writing, etc. There you have one of the areas of inquiry (problematiques).

Sartre’s work derives in a sense from Surrealism. He became famous during a time of upheaval, the Second World War. Recognizing the irrationalistic limits of Surrealism, he tried to relocate the problem of literature within a conceptual field which is, in my view, more consistent with 19th-century Naturalism. He turned against the Surrealists’ irrationalistic inflation while espousing a more realistic or naturalistic conception which he called the literature of engagement (litterature engage) or evidential literature (la litt?rature du t?moignage). His movement was regressive after Surrealism but, more importandy, it lacked or rather overlooked what are for us extremely decisive experiments, those carried out under th? inspiration of Surrealism by people like Artaud and Bataille. Clearly, if we consider the problematics developed by Sartre at that moment, we see that he wanted to bypass Mallarme, to avoid in-depth interpretations of poetic language, and above all to limit the possible influence of Artaud or Bataille. Or at any rate, he failed to recognize how fundamental their experiments were. I believe that it was a rather hollow, empty moment, but we can justify it in the light of the disruption caused by the Second World War, and above all by the already perceptible displacement of the European cultural scene toward the United States . . . toward a decentralization of world history, an unfocusing. (I should of course have spoken of the other movements of the twenties, Futurism, Dada, etc. But this is just a schematic overview.)

But then, during the fifties and sixties (we might speak half-seriously of a Hegelian thesis, antithesis, and synthesis), with the New Novel, there is an apparent return to literary experimentation, to the problem of language in literature. To my mind, this is a rather feeble and didactic phenomenon, a movement which harks back to but fails to take into account the experiments of Mallarme and Lautreamont and above all the decisive and fundamental linguistic experiments of Joyce. The Nouveau roman came to rather academic conclusions about the most noteworthy experiments with language in the 19th and 20th centuries. Take, for example, the case of Joyce. Within the French context, a context still xenophobic and nationalistic, the major movements almost completely overlooked Joyce. Breton, you know, condemns Joyce, saying that in the end he returns to the arbitrary, but really he had no right to say that.

DH: You know Joyce had similarly unkind things to say about the Surrealists …
PS: Yes, of course the feeling was mutual. But what counts is that the appearance of a phenomenon as important as Joyce collides in France with two other phenomena. First, there was that critical censor, the NRF,* with its neoclassical and bourgeois conception of literature: Gide, Valery, etc. . . . Proust! I am alluding to a conception or rather to a syntax, to a way of writing sentences, making them unfold, a conception anchored in French classical rhetoric. So, there was no chance of really understanding Joyce’s contribution in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. But there was also what we could call the Surrealist refusal, the failure to understand that Joyce goes beyond the problematics of automatic writing, of the marvelous or of the simple occult, that is, beyond the domain of Surrealism. And we can see that Existentialism could hardly have been aware of the great new continent opened by Joyce since it harked directly back to 19th-century Naturalism. The space-time, the Einsteinian side of Joyce, was not perceived by Sartre in its modernity, as a seismic shudder within language itself. The same goes, I think, for the Nouveau roman. Even if there is a sort of modernity within the problematics of language, we can’t think of the Nouveau roman (excluding Beckett, who is himself a post-Joycean) as truly aware of Joyce’s contribution.

DH: Let’s talk about the problems of the novel to which you referred earlier.
PS: It seems to me that for a century now language has been undergoing a revolution. For one thing, we are increasingly aware that there can no longer be purely national languages. The isolation of different languages and of different nations each with its language is being severely tested. We see a sort of intercultural movement of which I think a writer like Joyce is the deepest sort of exemplar. He grasped the situation radically, understanding that we were entering a new world of which he tried to write the gospel, at once ironic and serious. Which means he understood that the definition of the human subject through his language and in history was entering an unprecedented phase of transmutation. We would save a good deal of futile talk if we were to accept Joyce’s project as fundamental; for I think Joyce understood that we were beginning to reshape the relations between man and language and history. That’s the central issue. People still perceive the problem of literature in 19th-century terms.

Repeatedly, we’ve seen literary errors committed, great errors, occasionally tragic ones (like . . . Socialist Realism). Such errors are a function of metaphysical suppositions dating from the last century. They’re still fixed by ideology despite the progress made by the sciences, despite historical growth, despite the shocks experienced by our species, even, I’d say (and this is the strangest fact), despite the revolutions that have occurred within the other arts. Traditionally, we stick to archaic literary ideologies even while painting and music are in full cataclysmic bloom. All of this suggests that what happens in the spoken language, a language made up of words, syllables, phonemes, etc., is something very dangerous. That’s why it is so carefully regulated, changes are so brutally suppressed. As opposed to what happens simply visually or audibly, that which is charged with significance in language is watched over, subjected to limitations . . .

DH: Perhaps we can return once more to history, to contemporary history and particularly the history of the Tel Quel group and of novelists who do not belong to the group but who nevertheless are doing something similar to what you are doing.
PS: People talk only about the literary aspects of Tel Quel, though Tel Quel, as you know, has a number of other sides. It’s a sort of dialectical machine. According to its subtide, it treats literature, philosophy, science, politics. There is a whole dynamic history to be written some day, not now, since we are still in process. The point is that these several aspects interrelate. The originality of the review, like that of certain others which have the same concerns, lies in the awareness that we must put literature within a general context of development, a context at once historical, political and philosophical. Further, we must locate literary practice at the very center of these several disciplines, these several realities. At the end of the 20th century we are abandoning the idea that literature has to be written by “maudit,” an individual set apart and seemingly enclosed by his creative concerns, one who can see the outside only through certain very narrow apertures. I am perhaps a bit naive, but I feel we must not encourage the belief in the outcast creator, in the necessary tragedy of literary creation. It is precisely in this area that we must leave Romanticism behind.

To get back to literature, I think there have been a great many things of rather unequal value done in the past five or six years, but these works constitute a creative study whose prime concern is to X-ray our culture as it has existed these 2,000 years. Clearly, what we have is an attempt to achieve in literature an enormous anamnesis. There you have the project that was already preoccupying Joyce. That is, we are abandoning the rather cramped vision of those who preached Naturalism, psychological fiction, description of a limited social milieu within a given historical period. Of course, this sort of writing is still being done. It still sells, if you will. But in fact it is dead. The publications of the Tel Quel group attempt to approximate a language which could be prodigiously retroactive, one which would have the analytic capacity to penetrate the history of humanity viewed as a sort of great myth. I think this project prolongs and subsumes that of Mallarme, Joyce, etc. It is an attempt to unify history through the unnumbered strata of civilizations, cultures and languages

DH: But you aren’t trying to fix or fossilize them.
PS: Quite the contrary, we’re trying to analyze them, that is, in a sense to dissolve them, to dissolve the frontiers, the compartments,

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Book

Philippe Sollers H
Equus Press

‘Philippe Sollers’ groundbreaking 1973 novel, H, was inspired by the May 1968 Paris student/worker uprising, and, in its own right, performs a revolt against much that’s been (and still is) taken for granted in the belles lettres.

‘Described as “a music that is inscribed in language, becoming the object of its own reasoning” (Julia Kristeva) and as an “unpunctuated wall of words, an extremely active […] mass of language” (David Hayman), H does away with plot, character and setting–and, on the typographical level, with punctuation, capitalisation, or paragraph breaks–in order to attempt what Sollers himself called “an external polylogue.”

‘The text performs an infinite fragmentation of subjectivity into a plethora of ventriloquized voices where “words turn round and come back, producing a material fullness of pleasures” and “everything is organized into a splendid series of irrelevancies” (Roland Barthes). It is this fulness of H, this “suffocation” it produces, that might be, with Barthes, termed its “beauty.”

‘Accommodating a vast range of tonalities, attitudes, modes, and ideologies, H makes a case in point of how a literary work should function according to Sollers: “A work exists by itself only potentially, and its actualization (or production) depends on its readings and on the moments at which these readings actively take place.”’ — Equus Press

Excerpt

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p.s. Hey. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Yes, once you settle on the right take to use, you, or I should say I, basically forget about the more individually exciting one. It just goes into storage. Strange, but yeah. You just think about the film as a whole basically. I guess you can tell love that I’d like Donner Party, and merci, but it’s hard to choose. Love explaining to me why Michael Douglas deserved the Cannes Film Festival’s Lifetime Achievement award, G. ** A, Hi. No, I’ve never been especially interested in Madonna’s music. I was kind of interested for a while in seeing what lengths she would go to next to stay notorious. Yes, ‘Suzume’ is playing here, and I definitely want to see it. Sure, a Welcome post, yes. Just send me the appropriate stuff when the time becomes right. I actually find Letterboxd reviews pretty useful, at least for blog post making. Zac and I are around and here for the near-duration, so just let us know when and how you want to arrange things. We should know better what the post costs are going to be in a week or so. Thanks! ** Jack Skelley, Jackpan! Great news about Kim’s award, and about your convo with her obviously. Hook me/us up when … Uh, I think the soonest I’ll get back to LA is Halloween. I’ll be in the editing room until then, pretty sure. Re: missing FOKAPALOOZA, drat. I hope it goes without saying that I’d be chuffed to do a ‘welcome to the world post’ for FOKA if you want. Speaking of, I just got my copy in the mail yesterday! Love like a bristling pinecone, me. ** Misanthrope, Me too, obvs. Cool. I seem to have had pretty good luck with dentists, and with car mechanics too, actually. Must be my million dollar smile. ** David Ehrenstein, I’m with you on the scale model excellence, but not on the movie itself. ** Bill, The DbT guy makes them individually by hand, which doesn’t help punters like us, but semi-explains the cost, I guess. Oh, I so wish I knew what the story is on the Addams Family Dark Ride-ette. I looked and looked when I found those pix, and I found zip about it. I’ve read something by Matthew Cheney, but I can’t remember what. Huh. ** _Black_Acrylic, I think you’re right! ** M., Greetings, M. Hm, no, I don’t think I ever think about being that small. I’m quite tall, so maybe that’s why? Not that I think about even bigger either. When I was a little kid I had a recurring nightmare about a sentient apartment building that had legs and was walking around looking for people to crush including me, but I was normal sized in the dream. Close though, maybe? ** Nick., Hey, Nick.! Belated very happy birthday to you, sir! Glad you had a blast. Everything has felt kind of unreal to me since I stopped shooting our film, which is weird because this is real and that kind of wasn’t. I’m good. A guy I’ve been friends with for quite a while revealed to me the other day that he’s FtM trans, and I’d had no idea that’s the case. That was unexpected, and cool. I never met Keith Haring, so, sadly, no stories. I think I saw him in the distance at an art gallery opening once, but that’s it. I did meet and have a strange encounter with Jean-Michel Basquiat once, but that’s not the same thing. Enjoy the chain. Sorry I can’t embellish it, but it probably is pretty self-embellished. Good to see you. ** Darbz, Hey, hey! Bored with a stomach ache, hugs. Sync! No real incentive for going to Japan other than just wanting to go there. I wouldn’t say Tokyo is pretty, really, well, in parts it is, but it’s pretty wild looking and acting. Definitely go there when you get the chance. Definitely. I’m happy the weird rehab place is doable and maybe even a pleasure sort of. You sound good. I don’t know if my grandmother was an imperfect taxidermist or if this just happens in taxidermy in general, but all of the taxidermy animals she gave our family eventually rotted away. Every single one. So, no, they no longer exist sadly. Oh, I was super excited when she gave them to us. Like I may have said, I was really into making Haunted Houses in our basement, and they were the big stars of it. She was really nice. I honestly think she’s probably why I decided to become an artist. Hm, I don’t think I have any strong opinion about stuffed animals. I’m cool with them. I don’t know, I’ve never thought about it. I don’t think I had any when I was a kid, just taxidermy animals. I want to have something in which I can hide my secret stash and carry around with me. I’m going to give that some thought. Big up today! ** Cody Goodnight, Hi, Cody. I’m pretty alright today so far. I’ll avoid ‘EfT’ like the plague, thank you. Actually, you picked my favorite Efteling ride: Droomvlucht. It’s amazing. One of the best rides anywhere ever. Are you acquiring a tan the old fashioned way, or are you lying prone under artificial light? One time when I was in high school I wanted to be tan for my first day back at school after summer vacation, and I sat under a tanning light to tan myself, but I didn’t know what I was doing, and I put the light too close to my face, and the next day at school my face starting blowing up like a balloon and blistering, and I had to be taken to a hospital. So don’t do that. Day of days to you! ** Okay. Philippe Sollers died last week, and I was reminded of how great his early novels are, including the one I’m spotlighting today. Have a gander. See you tomorrow.