L’éclaircie by Philippe Sollers (review)

SOLLERS, PHILIPPE. L’éclaircie. Paris: Gallimard, 2012. ISBN 978-2-07-013202-7. Pp. 236. 17,90 a. Subtitled a novel, this autobiographical reminiscence begins with an epiphany portraying a young boy under the cedar tree in the family’s garden. In this presumptuous Proustian link to time (l’éclaircie is the meteorological and social gap), the narrator’s childhood returns with his depiction of the photograph of himself under the cedar tree where his older sister Anne could always find him. This place recalls Baudelaire’s temple de la nature (in his Correspondances) and anchors the narrator’s tie with the sacred and his identification with ma sœur from the poet’s L’invitation au voyage. These themes especially find resonance in the painter Manet about whom the narrator is reading and who becomes his latest fascination from the visual world of painting. Both Manet and Picasso are retrieved for their art despite many negative aspersions cited from their contemporaries. Of course, we now know that Sollers is Philippe Joyaux (b. 1936) who is from Bordeaux and has over sixty books to his credit going back to Une curieuse solitude (1958). Pertinent to this story, the narrator is the editor of the journal L’Infini and published the study Casanova l’admirable (1998) and the novel Trésor d’amour (2011). As we have come to expect from Sollers, this narrative is a bully pulpit for editorial comments on the present culture of France ranging from the political scandal of L’Oréal’s heiress to the preference for the drug ecstasy among presentday imitators of Rimbaud. We still have echoes from the terrorizing cultural stances during the Tel Quel heyday of the 1970s as the narrator delivers harangues against iPads and films (“le rouleau compresseur du cinéma” [204]) that threaten the end of literature in paper format. Along the way the music of Handel is valorized as well as Picasso’s and Manet’s revolutionary paintings (e.g., Manet’s Olympia with its “terrorisme éclair” [60]). Sollers manages to intersperse his own elitist ideas about culture while maintaining the narrative thread of the writer studying painting to gain insight into his own writing. For example, the narrator writes about women in programs on the present-day television screen as if they were artistic subjects being painted on a canvas. The flirtation with sibling incest constitutes one of the threads linking the narrative’s fragments. The narrator’s present mistress, Lucie, resembles his nowdeceased sister Anne. Lucie is a wealthy native of Bordeaux and an accomplished pianist like Manet’s wife who would play Handel for the painter. The Baudelaire conundrum of explaining the poet’s use of ma sœur in L’invitation au voyage is always in the margins of this narrative. Baudelaire also returns throughout in his epistolary exchange with, and art criticism of, Manet. Since the narrator is obsessed with how women figure in the paintings and the lives of Manet and Picasso, there are repeated references to Baudelaire’s dislike of Manet’s painting of the poet’s mistress Jeanne Duval, as if the poet’s distaste were worthy of replication. Of course, the poet did publish many essays on artistic painting, and his judgment of Manet’s work might be suspect due to personal disagreements about how the poet’s mistress was painted. Narrative experiments abound. Irony has always been a favorite with Sollers as it is here with formulas from conversation such as tu parles. The writer also experiments with using tutoiement for the narrator speaking to himself as a child and vouvoiement speaking to his readers. He would have his writing be similar to the art of painting always in process, similar to the progressive verb form of the French language. Both the Chinese and the French languages are ideally suited, in his opinion, to say what painting does. Consequently Sollers Reviews 801 bequeaths the manuscripts of his opus to the University of Shanghai. There Chinese scholars will be able to appreciate anew his visually artistic literary style, wherever it may be. Trinity University (TX) Roland A. Champagne SPERLING, SACHA. Les cœurs en skaï mauve. Paris: Fayard, 2011...