Young, he was already “old”, an admirer of Mauriac, who published his first text before his majority. Old, wasn’t he still “young”, wanting to remain the troublemaker of letters despite his white hair? Everyone knew Sollers without necessarily having read him, as he had been present on the public scene. He loved nothing so much as talking about himself in front of a microphone, a camera, while complaining that people were more interested in his media and social character than in his work. What he leaves behind is that of half a century of writing, as rich and protean as the history of the last forty years. It has dozens of books. Philippe Sollers died at the age of 86.
Philippe Joyaux was born on November 28, 1936 in Talence, near Bordeaux. His family runs a kitchen equipment business. “ Prejudice always wants to find a man behind an author ; in my case, you will have to get used to the contrary, “said Sollers to avoid pouring out his childhood, which remained relatively unknown. He grew up in a family of the Bordeaux bourgeoisie (like Jacques Rivière or Jean de La Ville de Mirmont). He sees a lot of doctors – the heavy smoker we have always known started out as a severe asthmatic. Puberty took him out of this fragile state of health, which the Algerian war and his call to the flags made him regret. In 1962, languishing in a military hospital in Belfort, Philippe Sollers went on a hunger strike to escape his mobilization. André Malraux, alerted, releases the writer with flawless medical records and has him reformed for “acute schizoid ground”.
At 19, when he hadn’t written anything yet, Philippe Joyaux met François Mauriac in Malagar and asked him to do his portrait for a local newspaper. A few months later, when he published his first text, Le Défi, the old writer, thrilled, greeted his compatriot. “The author of the Challenge is called Philippe Sollers. I would have been the first to write that name.
Philippe Joyaux hastens to publish a first novel, Une curieuse solitude. He is 22 years old. His short majority would not have allowed him to sign a book on the sex education of a 15-year-old boy. He therefore took a pseudonym, taken from the Latin dictionary, “ Sollers”, of which he gave various definitions: “All in art” or “ cunning”, “ skillful”, “ sagacious”. With this book, Philippe Sollers becomes the darling of French letters, dubbed by the Catholic Mauriac as well as by the Communist Aragon. Between these three, the literary filiation with Barrès. Didn’t Mauriac confide in him: “You are family without knowing it”.
The same wrote in a December 1957 Notepad: “Philippe offers this singular character in a beginner of letters not to think of it as a career. Francis Ponge is one of his great men. Philippe is in no hurry to write in the newspapers, nor to stir on the surface. The work alone imposes itself on him. He doesn’t believe in recipes and if he has read everything that counts among the immediate elders, one could not be less docile to fashion. At the forefront, yes, but not at all costs”.
However, barely born, the writer is already marked by ambivalence. Mauriac may say, as soon as this first novel of classical inspiration appeared, its author very quickly changed course. Sollers founded Tel Quel at Seuil with Jean-Edern Hallier. This review, which, according to him prepared the movement of 68, is passionate about the structuralists, Lacan, Barthes, Foucault, Althusser. But also aims to reassess the extreme and marginal works of Sade, Bataille, Lautréamont, Artaud, Joyce, Céline, etc.
The fierce Jean-Paul Aron will in Les Modernes (1984) tell the pitiless story of this evolution: “Six months later he rushes to conquer the Parisian cultural space, denying his past by an acute perception of the circumstances, cynical, n ‘having faith only in her interest, insensitive to values, dispensed with feelings and dressed in fashions, always ready to thank her for others by sacrificing without pity the simpletons who accompany her’.
The writer chooses experimentation. He is close to the New Roman, by Alain Robbe-Grillet and publishes half a dozen novels which are hermetic puzzles for the reader, especially when they are devoid of punctuation. Drama, Numbers, Laws, Logics, H… They confuse the public, but delight Saint-Germain-des-Prés. In 1961, the writer was awarded the Prix Médicis for Le Parc.
He became the traveling companion of all the intellectual and literary trends of his time. New Roman, structuralism, communism, Sollers is a brilliant and elusive ludion. In addition to the PCF, with which he flirted for a short time, he became infatuated in the 1970s with China and Mao, in whom he believed he had found a spiritual guide. In 1974, he took his wife, the psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva, and Roland Barthes to China. Back in France, he bears witness to “the real anti-bourgeois revolution”, while Kristeva writes in Des femmes: “Mao liberated women. Their bewilderment, largely explainable by a profound ignorance of the country, earned them the wrath of the great sinologist Simon Leys who thundered: “The danger today is less to despair Billancourt than to despair Tel Quel; and this last eventuality is perhaps less frightening than it seems at first sight, because after all when this brave phalanx will have lost its Mao – always further to the East – it will still have Kim Il Sung. .
Sollers will have the honesty later to admit his blindness and above all to bow to Leys’ authority on this subject: “Let’s just say it: Leys was right, he continues to be right, he is an analyst and a writer of the highest order, his books and articles are a mountain of precise truths”.
In the 1980s, Philip the Maoist became a papist: the election of John Paul II, the prophetic dimension of the robust Poles in the face of the Soviet empire intrigued and fascinated him. The world is changing, Sollers too. In 1982, he left Le Seuil, where he had been directing Tel Quel for twenty-two years, for the respectable house of Gallimard, where he founded the magazine L’Infini. He publishes Femmes, one of his best novels, filled with portraits of the intellectual figures he has known, admired, loved. He was offered an office in rue Sébastien-Bottin and a place on the reading committee.
He is now a publisher and publishes his flatterers, Marcellin Pleynet, Jean Ricardou, but, still eclectic, authors like Frédéric Berthet (Daimler is leaving), Nabe, Duteurtre, Marc Pautrel, Alexandre Duval Stalla. The Prix Goncourt 2000 awarded to Ingrid Caven by Jean-Jacques Schuhl comes out of her stable.
This arrival at Gallimard and this return to the altogether classic novel are taken by some to be a calculated shift in a well-oiled career plan. Isn’t Sollers a conspirator, a seducer, a gambler? In Femmes, he stages the sexual exploits of a Catholic don Juan, worshiper of the Bible and of John Paul II. With Portrait of the player, La Fête à Venise, Sollers, without changing his haircut, takes on the face of the provocative gossip. He stuffs his novels with faked self-portraits and false confidences that never fail to delight or irritate. Whether he writes on Vivant Denon, Sade, Casanova – this libertine has always given his preference to the 18th century -, Philippe Sollers makes it a point of honor to disconcert, to do the splits, to affirm everything and its opposite, sometimes in a tone peremptory.
He is above all a tireless, passionate reader, a critic who proceeds by trial and error, flashes, intuitions. This seductive profusion, echoes of which will be found in his critical studies of The War of Taste, seduces some and annoys others. The demanding Jean-Paul Aron, always him, will not want to be fooled: “Relentless in the study, he leads to anything. There is something autodidact in this zealous as in many young clerks who, failing to impose limits on their appetite for knowledge, are forced to instruct themselves, getting confused in the references”.
Sollers appears like this: half-closed eyes, greedy mouth, pulling on his cigarette holder as if to seek inspiration, pretending to pity our society which wallows in lack of culture and inanity, but never sulking his pleasure when he appears on a television set to play one of his numbers, unexpected, full of charm and paradoxes.
All his life, Philippe Sollers wanted to remain unclassifiable, untamed, gifted with undeniable brilliance. The publication of his correspondence with Dominique Rolin (his great hidden love) showed another, more moving side of him: the gifted and ambitious young man was a sincere lover and a madman for literature. Hiding his truth and his intimate sufferings, he was born for another century. Less exposed, less solicited by the world and its chimeras, he would have been more profound, sparing himself from being forced to become the paragon of intellectual fashions and the commentator of fleeting news, he who seemed to delight only in in the company of Joyce, Lautréamont and Mozart.
