Philippe Sollers, un vrai roman - [excerpt]

translated by Thelma Sowley

Sollers has a superego, a superego of the last generation, Lacanian: it’s a superego that says yes. Sollers would not have refused the Nobel or the Goncourt, you can be sure. His superego says “Jouis!,” and Sollers obeys—and how! The will for jouissance pushed to this degree, an Id of such strength, quickly becomes sheer slavery, doesn’t it? I remark that the jouissance of all the great compulsive Fuckers, the great Author-Fuckers included, is never governed, in fact, by anything but an All for the jouissance of the Other. Sollers and women, that is to say, the whores, and the cooks, and the cantatrices, and the young and unripe, and also the ripe, and even, in passing, a few transvestites to give spice to the whole - “I hope you pay attention to your health?” Mitterrand, who had ears in every nookand cranny, asks him out of the blue - this is not so far, after all, from Montherlant, frenetic to gather the “crowns” of little boys. Which gives to the one as to the other, a muted resentment that sometimes overflows in direction of the tyrannical object that asks for too much: catamites too stupid and clinging for the first; for the other, women too maternal and overly faithful loonies, two unscrewable categories (Sollers defined this folly as “stupidity at its ultimate height”). On that score, Sollers plays Costals coming to grips with Andrée Hacquebaut. No one reads Les Jeunes filles anymore, and it seems a shame, because Montherlant is comical in it and often very true, so repetitive and tiring he is in his hatred of the “feminine”. So, just the opposite of Sollers.

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