Figure of the French literary scene and of Tout-Paris for more than half a century, the writer Philippe Sollers died at the age of 86, we learned this Saturday from his publisher Gallimard, confirming information from Figaro.
Author of more than 80 novels, essays and monographs, director of magazines and long accustomed to television sets, Philippe Sollers had achieved notoriety with his novel “Women” in 1983.
Very early
Sollers was not his real name. Born Jewels, into a family of industrialists, he chose the pseudonym of Sollers when writing his first book. “I was underage when I published my first novel. The family was not joking, wanted me to get involved too, but in business… Threatened to have the book banned… Province!…” he explains in Release.
Very early, he published his first novel, A curious loneliness, hailed by Aragon. “The destiny of writing is before him, like an admirable meadow”, writes the poet in the French Letters. Three years later, in 1961, his second novel, The park receives the Prix Médicis.
A promising young writer, Philippe Sollers founded, with Jean-Edern Hallier, the literary review “Tel Quel” in the spring of 1960. The review intended to highlight all avant-garde forms, including literary ones. It defends the New Novel and authors like Francis Ponge or the future Nobel Prize winner Claude Simon. She lends her columns to writers like Michel Butor, Nathalie Sarraute or Alain Robbe-Grillet, before opening up to semiology and defending Roland Barthes. “Tel Quel” will also publish Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida.
Fascination for China
In the early 1970s, the journal took up the cause of Chinese Maoism. In 1974, a delegation composed in particular of Philippe Sollers and Roland Barthes went to China at the invitation of the authorities. This blindness vis-à-vis the Chinese authoritarian regime will earn the writer the sarcasm of the sinologist Simon Leys.
Philippe Sollers will deny having ever been a “Maoist” but, in the book of interviews with Josyane Savigneau, he affirmed: “I persist in saying (…) that this terrible revolution has made China the first world power from now on”. Sign of his fascination for China, all his books contain references to this country.
Two women in his life
After Mao’s death in 1976, the magazine changed course and took up the cause of the United States. In 1982, he founded a new magazine, L’Infini. He also left Editions du Seuil for Gallimard, where he became a member of the reading committee and director of the collection. As such, he refused the novel by Amélie Nothomb Assassin’s Hygienefinally published by Albin Michel.
It is with his novel Women (1983) that Philippe Sollers achieved notoriety. Critics denounce the “pornography” they detect in this text. “It’s my best book. My unsurpassable paradise,” retorts this connoisseur of Casanova (to whom he has dedicated a biography), author of a dictionary in love with Venice. Married since 1967 to the psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva, with whom he had a son David, he devoted a “mad love” to the Belgian writer Dominique Rolin, 23 years his senior.
Their correspondence over half a century was published in 2017 and 2018. He had revealed his double love life to him in 2013 in “Portraits of women”. To his detractors, he was “futile”, “worldly”, “boring” and proud. To the question, “If you were to die tomorrow, what would be left of you?” “, he replied:” a box of books “, adding:” We will wonder how we could let ourselves be taken in the image of such a media-savvy and casual Sollers when he is a hard worker. »