Le Parc

by Philippe Sollers

Une histoire dont on ne sait si elle est d'amour ou de mort; trois personnages en fuite; les échos . d'une guerre en Orient; une méditation avant la fin... Quelle est cette femme interdite, discrète? Qui est ce jeune homme dont la vie est en danger ? Qui raconte, seul dans une chambre, cette confession au bord de l'abîme?

Pas de grands mots ni d'événements spectaculaires. Tout se passe avec précision, de façon étouffée, feutrée. Et si la tragédie était là : dans le fait qu'il n'arrive jamais rien, que le vide ?

Genres: Fiction, France, Literature, French Literature

154 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1961

About the author

Philippe Sollers (born Philippe Joyaux) is a French writer and critic. In 1960 he founded the avant garde journal Tel Quel (along with the writer and art critic Marcelin Pleynet), published by Seuil, which ran until 1982. In 1982 Sollers then created the journal L'Infini published by Denoel which was later published under the same title by Gallimard for whom Sollers also directs the series.

Sollers was at the heart of the intense period of intellectual unrest in the Paris of the 1960s and 1970s. Among others, he was a friend of Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser and Roland Barthes. These three characters are described in his novel, Femmes (1983) alongside a number of other figures of the French intellectual movement before and after May 1968. From A Strange Solitude, The Park and Event, through "Logiques", Lois and Paradis, down to Watteau in Venice, Une vie divine and "La Guerre du goût", the writings of Sollers have often provided contestation, provocation and challenging.

In his book Writer Sollers, Roland Barthes discusses the work of Phillippe Sollers and the meaning of language.

Sollers married Julia Kristeva in 1967.

Reviews

[Nate D · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fragmentary instances of the act of writing, direct from a writing writer. This distinguishes itself from Robbe-Grillet and other nouveaux roman pioneers mainly in that there's no attempt to create a sense of intrigue to draw the reader in. Given that such intrigue was often transparently a device, this is perhaps more honest and direct in carrying through its self-reflexive-poetic purpose, but not overly involving for the same reason. Later sections do take on greater greater individual weight, as well as point towards the shadow outline of something more unified, but shadows remain shadows, and they never really become filled in with more than transient images.

[Lee Foust · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is another in the series of books that had a profound influence on me and my writing when I was a young college student. Read it in Nanos Valeoritis' "Nouveau Roman" course at San Francisco State University. The detachment of the narrator/s, the meta-narrative, the text that interrogates itself as it constructs something, itself? anything but a narrative! This was all so new to me in 1983 and eye-opening as to the possibilities of literature beyond what had already become the modernist cliche. I haven't read it since--I should probably do so and see how I feel 30 years of Post-modernist literature later--I've been carting it from apartment to apartment, fron San Francisco to New York to Florence, like a holy relic, all these years.

----

Not much more to say after this reread except to note how really difficult it is to remember much of anything concrete from this novel, even after having read it many times over the years. More than any other novel I can think of it's made up of impressions that almost immediately become feelings rather than any sort of memorable sensory information, as in what we usually call a memory. I find this just remarkable, especially since, with its incredibly vague cast of characters, he and I (who are maybe or maybe just sometimes the same?) and her, it's pretty much all descriptions of the apartment, the balcony, various rooms, the port town, the park, of course, various street corners. The novel that defines ambiguity and I suppose poetic prose. it leaves one with such a strong feeling, but one that evaporates like smoke when you try to define or hold on to it. Often it's said this is a novel about its own composition--and certainly that is one of the things it constantly returns to. Still, I might argue it's actually about what it doesn't say, what it can't say, the record of its having never actually having been written at all, the impossibility that it could even be written.

[Jonathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful

[Sean · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sollers has been likened unfairly by some critics as a second-rate Robbe-Grillet; though clearly an indebted purveyor of the 'nouveau roman', he is no mere imitator. Where Robbe-Grillet presents his narrative as a succession of collapsing Matroska-like frames that efface boundaries between real and simulacral, Sollers instead offers a fluid, ever-shifting index of dreams grafted on one another, a sort of oneiric drama-space playing out in the mind of the narrator as he commits it to pen.

[Aäron Willem]

Hier kan ik geen sterren aan geven. Een vreemd boek dat bij momenten prachtig poëtisch is, maar dat op het eerste zicht ook compleet onbegrijpelijk is. Ik hou daar wel van, maar hier kreeg het soms iets banaal. Benieuw om ander werk van hem te lezen, jammer genoeg moeilijk te vinden in het Nederlands.

[Nico · Rating 5 out of 5]

In which Sollers, taking from the corpses of the Nouveau Roman and Joyce, develops a new logic of prose that is guided by an impressionistic flux of knotted time that flows through intervals organised by the paragraph; and yet, even the paragraphs are organised by sentences, as Sollers fluidly shifts time and perspective from one sentence to the next, one word by the other. Sollers describes this idea of the sentence as a “succession of sentences which, in this book, seem more and more to take the place of any story and lead an independent life, being able, if necessary, to cut off any particular moment from its living context” (64). The sentence is no longer necessarily guided as a function of progressing the overall structure of the narrative; rather, each sentence exists as a sufficient thing in itself, it leads an “independent life” that captures the impressions of the narrator as he writes and remembers and represents. Everything here flows in a Heraclitean flux; nothing is guaranteed as the word is made into something plastic and fluid, the sense is guided by sound and is evocative of the fleeting flexibility of the misguided misty memory that remembers what it doesn’t remember. The narrative doesn’t really progress as much as it stutters across different points of memory in which the narrator, who also seems to be writing the current text, switches between someone who is I and He, a She and a He, and what takes place is a mix between lived experience, film, dream, and writing. Really, the fluidity is the most beautiful part of the text: nothing is grounded at all as the shifting times and characters could be the creations of the narrator as much as they could be something possibly real. There’s a section wherein the narrator describes this logic of a new prose based upon the Derridean notion of differance: it exists at the moment before an order of oppositional logic is imposed: “To impose, without admitting it, a contradiction, transformed into a new principle of identity by some unknown, impalpable logic… Outside and inside, night and day; or rather, as in the ossuary, outside and night, inside and day: neither one nor the other; but both at once” (85). It is this both at once through the new principle of identity that generates the sort of structure that Le Parc follows: nothing is grounded in a fixed, stable identity; everything becomes the folds of something constantly shifting through the multiplication of language in the writing of the present text in the exercise book; it is through this that the narrator is trying to generate what Sollers will eventually call a “limit-text;” a kind of text that will, in a sense, go beyond language to some Outside that is a kind of nothingness. This would indicate Sollers’ later interest in Taoism and ancient Chinese poetry; he says something to that effect in an interview.

Or, you could say, this kinda thing Sollers does is as French as it gets—as if Proust was a Barthesian-Maoist semiotician(?)

[Dina Rahajaharison · Rating 2 out of 5]

"A son insu, sa présence contrôlée, son attente, expriment la volonté de disparaître, l'attirance d'une chute dominée qui provoque et augmente la profondeur de la chute : prévoir, en définitive, c'est donner des armes contre soi."

[PATRICE PRIVAT · Rating 2 out of 5]

Canular iconoclaste réussi, la punkitude avec 20 ans d'avance; il faut le prendre comme la première toile blanche de peintre, un livre qui ne veut rien dire, un similacre limite nihiliste, comme du William Burroughs, quel foutage de gueule, ensuite il est repassé aux choses sérieuses. La Modification de Butor c'est un film de John Ford à côté; quel crachat à l'establishment littéraire et aux critiques ! Un pastiche géniale de la fausse littérature cérébrale. J'aimerais lire les thèses écrites là dessus, ça doit être pathétique et tordant. Du miel pour universitaires ratés qui se croient profonds, Sollers ne respectait rien, il nous manque.

[Xavier Roelens · Rating 4 out of 5]

Een uitdagend boek dat lastig is om te lezen, maar dat ik graag nog eens zou willen lezen, omdat ik het gevoel heb dat ik er nog veel van kan leren. Een ode aan het menselijke perspectief, aan het verlangen naar eeuwigheid in het besef van de kortstondigheid van de ontmoetingen.

[Dave Bouw]

In Nederlandse vertaling van Kiki Coumans