Centre by Philippe Sollers (review)

Considering that this novel of 112 pages consists of twenty-six laconic, titled chapters (from two to four pages each) written in the present tense, one would wonder about a traditional cohesive and developing plot which would validate the descriptor roman on the front cover, and which the rebellious Sollers insists on being there. After having perused this intriguing work this reviewer would rather consider it to be a lengthy philosophical discourse or testament dealing with a variety of topics such as psychoanalysis, history, literature, and poetry in order to better understand and analyze our present society in its state of hysteria. The title refers to the Pascalian concept of an infinite sphere where the center is everywhere or nowhere if one is to consider a sphere where the circumference is everywhere. The central character besides the author/narrator is his fictional lover, Nora, who is a "psychanalyste, très marquée par les figures de Freud et de Lacan" (11) as is Sollers's perception of psychoanalysis. The focus of the novel is psychoanalysis itself and a personalized view of our epoch through which Sollers digresses on various topics of stimulating interests, such as "Négation,""Progrès,""Sherlock Freud,""Inceste,""Bizzareries 1" where Sollers offers interesting outlooks on the practice of circumcision, and "Bizzareries 2" in which the author discusses Shakespeare and The Merchant of Venice. In "Crimes" the philosopher offers the following honest but harsh commentary: "Qui tue un être humain tue l'humanité tout entière. À voir ce qu'elle est devenue, c'est parfois tentant" (82)."Big-Bang" offers a defense for psychoanalysis which seeks to unmask hysteria "de la nature humaine la plus profonde. On pourrait en tirer un roman génial invendable: Voyage au bout de l'ennui" (89). In the final accusatory chapter entitled "Mutation" the eighty-one-year-old Parisian intellectual seems to be ready to leave this world. And yet, "l'eau coule toujours sous les ponts, les arbres fleurissent, et, comme d'habitude, ma complicité est totale avec les oiseaux. Apocalypse? Non, mutation et transmutation" (112). In the final sentences Sollers leaves the circle only to rejoin the center. "Et là, d'un coup, le monde se déploie" (112). Is the author informing us that death might not be an existential finality? That perhaps a new and divergent metaphysical existence might be awaiting and that there might be the possibility of a continuous intellectual literary afterlife? Each stoic chapter challenges the reader, and in their own individual manner these intertextual chapters seem to evoke those brilliant marginal authors who had lived on the crest of a divergent lucidity and who are so admired by Sollers: Voltaire, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Lautréamont, Céline, et al. It is their concept of reality with which Sellers deeply identifies, and the fact that hysteria is still a dominant trait of the human adventure, and is mushrooming.