The Invisible Punctuation of Sollers's Paradis

mais est-ce qu'on peut mettre le tout en vrac en jet continu personne ne pourra naviguer là-dedans c'est sûr la ponctuation est nécessaire la ponctuation vieux c'est la métaphysique elle-même en personne y compris les blancs les scansions

(H, 14)

With typical ironic self-parody, Philippe Sollers describes the revolutionary prose of his Paradis as "that thing without punctuation": "mais vous savez bien que c'est impossible à lire une fois de plus votre truc là sans ponctuation sans raison" (Paradis 2: 114), in which he channels the disquieted and obviously disapproving reader.¹ One such would be the typical book reviewer for a newspaper: "l'un d'eux raconte peut-être en dix lignes la parution de paradis 2 vous savez ce truc sans ponctuation milliers de grains noirs serrés illisible absolument illisible on n'a jamais vu ça sur la liste des best-sellers n'est-ce pas non" (2: 130). Always attentive to his reception among readers, Sollers captures their tone precisely. Upon publication of the first volume of Paradis in 1981, a book lacking capital letters, paragraphs, and punctuation and printed in small, dark italic type, the absence of punctuation was invariably mentioned by professional critics and ordinary readers alike. But Sollers has repeatedly claimed that Paradis is actually overpunctuated; only visible punctuation is absent. When I interviewed him in November 1999, for instance, he compared his writing to the ancient tradition of Greek oral poetry: "tout peut être, tout doit être, selon la virtuosité du chanteur. En réalité c'est très ponctué. Mais les signes de ponctuation ne conviennent pas. C'est très ponctué" (Mortimer, Interview of Sollers). The perceptive Philippe Forest has also observed that Paradis is radically and profoundly punctuated, even overpunctuated, and he notes that without ordinary punctuation to determine meaning, we read rhythmically, giving the text a scansion instead of a form (Philippe Sollers 203). With ordinary punctuation, capital letters, and paragraph breaks and other possible divisions (chapters, sections, blank lines) lacking, what serves for invisible punctuation in this remarkable text? And why does Sollers seek its seditious effects?

Paradis suffered widespread incomprehension and provoked unrestrained scorn. Roland Barthes's 1978 Sollers écrivain opens with an imaginary dialogue in which an antagonist criticizes Paradis as it had been appearing, without explanation, serialized in the opening pages of every issue of Tel Quel since 1974. To the antagonist's objection that the text is illegible, Barthes the protagonist replies: "Paradis est lisible (et drôle, et percutant, et riche, et remuant des tas de choses dans toutes les directions—ce qui est le propre de la littérature), si vous rétablissez en vous-même, dans votre oeil ou votre souffle, la ponctuation" (OEuvres complètes 3: 929). Barthes thus rises to Sollers's defense by turning our attention to the reader's ability to set the punctuation either visually or vocally; the word "rétablissez" implies that punctuation inheres in the text; it suffices to find it. What Barthes does not mean, I believe, is that it is simply an ordinary text with the punctuation marks removed; something else is going on, as Barthes writes in a concatenation of mixed metaphors: "La ponctuation, parfois, c'est comme un métronome bloqué; défaites le corset, le sens explose" (3: 929). Undoing the corset in the case of Paradis does not mean removing all punctuation at the last stage of the publication process, as Apollinaire did from Alcools, but making a conscious decision to let the metronome work on its own. Then the language itself contains the beat, and visible punctuation is unnecessary. The audio and video versions of the Paradis project, in which Sollers can be heard or seen reading his text at TGV speeds, illustrate the presence of punctuation or overpunctuation in the voice and the use of rhythm. Sollers recorded the entire text of Paradis on audiotape, for an eleven-hour marathon. Collaborating with videographer Jean-Paul Fargier, he read into a video camera the first fifty-one...