Marriage as a Fine Art

I will not duck this intensity. My response is simply that if this cohabitation of our two foreignnesses—Sollers’s and mine—continues to defy time, it’s because it writes itself in different registers and with a mutual resonance. Since I situate our “joint pact” in the logic of “writing itself,” I might have declined the invitation I received to present the “childhood and youth of a French writer, Philippe Sollers.” I accepted, partly because the Bernardins monastery space places writing at the horizon of the Incarnation, and I regard the incommensurable intimacy of the experience of writing as precisely that, an incarnation—worlds away from the “celebrity” culture exhibited in what are currently known as “talking points.” But I am here above all because I feel very strongly that the themes of this encounter—childhood, youth, writing, Frenchness—are far from being transparent, let alone natural, topics. Instead they grow ever more unfathomable and even shocking amid the banality of mind that threatens us and is, in my view, the radical ailment of the day.

“A French writer,” indeed “the most French of French writers”: that’s how Philippe Sollers appeared to the student I was when we met, soon after my arrival in this country from my native Bulgaria. And this impression has been confirmed and deepened all through the evolution of his work, from The Park, Laws, H, and Paradise to The Taste War, A Divine Life, Watteau in Venice, A True Novel, and Perfect Discourse.¹ The truth is, he who was once dubbed “Diderot’s nephew”²—the same Sollers—is “incorrigibly French” in the broadest sense, derived from the eighteenth century and that signally French way of thinking in novels. When I say “novel” it’s the French kind I think of, as full of talking as of romancing, teeming with monologues and dialogues in the tradition of Voltaire and Stendhal, in which curiosity along with a cheerful, encyclopedic vivacity infect the reader with a taste for Rabelais, Molière, and Watteau, for Manet, Fragonard, Cézanne, and Picasso, for Artaud and Van Gogh, Mozart and Nietzsche, Freud and Joyce, Courbet and Céline. A novel as French as the port of Bordeaux—that bord de l’eau, water’s edge, evoking Venice while opening toward England, where the first French Parlement voted for the emancipation of the Jews…Not that this should make us overlook the yellow stars that reappeared there under the Nazi occupation.

It’s understood that, with Sollers, “French” is to be taken in the sense in which “national identity”—as constructed by great literature, and, more than any other, by great French literature—serves as the most effective of antidepressants. Why? Because in the experience of literature, the experience of a necessarily sensitive language and an inevitably historic narrative, French history has fashioned an equivalent to the sacred that is unique in the world. All peoples have literatures, but only in France does literature rival the sacred on the level of experience, because it has successfully shown that identity (personal, sexual, and also national) is not a cult so much as an interrogation, a perpetual querying that is forever, precisely, being written.

Against those who uphold national identity as a bulwark against the “others,” migrants in particular; against those who refuse to acknowledge the importance of identity because they lack the courage to see it through to the other side reflectively, the French writer that is Philippe Sollers wages his “taste war” in a country which is that of the French language as it took shape throughout the history of this people, and particularly through the diversity of French writers.

I’ve actually been told, on the other side of the Atlantic, that Sollers is too French.³ It is bad form these days to use the adjective French, because apparently it sounds nationalistic. Some people might define themselves at most as “Francophone,” which has a more cosmopolitan ring, despite the postcolonial, victimized undertone, but, too bad, it’ll do for highlighting the inherent culpability of being French. There’s nothing of the sort in Philippe Sollers, the author of French Follies.⁴

Nothing of the sort in you. The child and adolescent from Bordeaux—a place you fondly revisit in your novels and essays—is always sublimating, from inside and out, recollection both recent and ancient. And also this current France, the land whose verbal musicality and physical fiber you embody, the better to laugh and cry over it. You proceed, of course, in the company of the most illustrious sons of Bordeaux, from Montaigne, La Boétie, and Montesquieu down to Mauriac, including a galaxy of special favorites: Pascal, Saint-Simon, Sade, Lautréamont, Rimbaud, André Breton, Georges Bataille, Paul Morand, Sartre, and not forgetting women like Mme de Sévigné or even Beauvoir…

That style of Frenchness, no solemn cult but a matter of questions, tastes, thoughts, and shouts of laughter, is the one you practice, and it’s the one I fell for, as our audience will have guessed. This French vision, this French writing—in the sense in which writing is a destiny and a project—are just what is lacking, surely, from the contemporary social contract in its hunt for an elusive refoundation. What if the foundation being sought were to consist of this very taste for imbibing, by embodying it, political and literary memory, literary and political memory? What if this were the great means of engineering its rebirth, its ceaseless reincarnation in the reinvention of its vital force?

In times as dire as these, opting to wage a war of taste against and within national identity, through the memory of the nation’s tongue, literature, and political history, may seem outrageous, and in fact it is. How is it even possible? When I read your work, I seem to hear you telling us: The reason it’s possible is because I’ve kept my childhood and youth alive inside me. Unless it’s because you conduct your writing like a relentless war of taste against each and every identity, posture, pose, value, dogma, platitude, absolute, and the rest, so that your readers don’t register your foreignness as an anguished wail from some totalitarian catastrophe, nor as a confession of personal distress, nor indeed as a protest against social or racial exclusion—all these themes being the toast of the publishing market. No, your particular foreignness, irksome singularity that dictates your recasting of the French language, comes through to us as the outsiderhood of perpetual infancy and youth. But what infancy? What youth? The childish state you make us read and fathom is—unsurprisingly—nothing like the divine innocence of the Infant Jesus, nor does it have the inborn purity of Rousseau’s children. Closer to the Freudian image, the figure of the child in your books transmits the fullness of sensation, sorrow, pleasure, or sickness with a classical clarity overlapping with the hallucinatory and the poetic; this stretches from the flavors of Bordeaux to the secrets of your characters, portrayed as feeling concepts, rather like the men and women of that southwest France in which Hölderlin glimpsed the perpetuation of the Greek miracle.⁵ Could the infant Sollers be a lab researcher who prefigures the avid curiosity of the pseudonymous writer? A sort of Odysseus, whom Homer describes as polytropos, “the man of twists and turns”;⁶ in Latin sollers, sollertis—the wily, the adroit, the elusive one?

As for the adolescent, he helps me to better understand the teens who come to my consulting room. The teenage Sollers is a believer—fittingly for this venue, the Bernardins. Embarked as he is on a quest for his political, amorous, and psychic ideals, and unshakably convinced of the existence of Heaven, he can’t be anything except at war.

The teenage Sollers is a believer in revolt who can’t stop reinventing his own Heaven. Adam and Eve were adolescents, as were Dante and Beatrice; we are all adolescents when we’re in love.⁷

As an admirer of Baudelaire, you could well have said, echoing the author of the Flowers of Evil: “Genius is but childhood clearly expressed”⁸ or, more simply, as Lamartine put it: “Yes, to you I return, cradle of my childhood.”⁹ But you don’t say that, because you don’t “return” to that cradle, properly speaking (“Genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recovered at will”:¹⁰ Baudelaire again—it goes for Rimbaud as reread by Bataille, but it doesn’t apply to you). Nor do you evince the voluptuous desolation of Marcel Proust in his remembrance of things past. Let alone the “suffering” of Bernanos, who, “once childhood was behind him,” struggled “for a long time” to reach “at the far end of night…a different dawn.”¹¹ On the contrary, you go through childhood without ever leaving it, like the Daoist sage who claimed to be the only one feeding from the mother.¹² Because you lift childhood and youth into the present moment, right here, today.

You relive them in writing, here and now. How do you do that? The answer couldn’t be plainer, it’s like the purloined letter in Poe’s story. The theme is so ubiquitous in your novels that people would rather censor it; it never occurs to them that the ease with which childhood and adolescence are sustained in your rewriting of identities, especially French identity, could be due to that. The “purloined letter” is the bond with women and with mothers, intimate and rebellious at once, cultivated by the narrator of your novel Women.¹³ The constant curiosity that moves you arises from your curiosity toward the opposite sex, and that’s the one that radiates to infinity across Being and History. Insatiable curiosity, for where “the great seriousness at last begins, the true question mark is at last set down” (as Nietzsche has it).¹⁴ That question mark crystallizes in your laugh, so serious that it sounds anxious, unless this is a respectful revolt or perhaps an incredulous one. And since nobody is quite as guarded as the person who seems to give himself away to everyone, your media-savvy mask—on top of that laugh—shields the invisible solitude of a heart as uncompromising as it is gleeful. Leading the narrator of A Divine Life to behave precisely like an alter ego of Nietzsche.¹⁵

One of the high points in this interrogation of the greatly serious occurred in our real lives, for a change: when you read from Meister Eckhart over your father’s grave, in the cemetery of Bordeaux. That event cast surprising light on your own interrogation, the way you unpick the son’s relationship to the father by means of writing: a crucial question, which Antoine Guggenheim has forcefully articulated from the standpoint of a theologian who reads your work.