Pacific Index

Event by Philippe Sollers

“Ultimately he seems to be there only to change, to forget (the afternoon before him is lost in a close, black sky) as if every time he were what recalls the edge, the fissure, the fall.”

   It seems, when reading Event by Philippe Sollers, one is at the ultimate frontier of words right before they become visible and audible. That they’re viewing the conception of a book intensely dreaming of itself with a patience bordering on infinity, all while it refers to itself with both passive and overly rich reflection. A book in which every situation, including the most violent, would allow itself to be caught into the labyrinths it constructs of itself. The reader, in Sollers’ short novel, is privy to every wave of meditation possible in the act of writing, in the obsession caused by a creative work—including, and ultimately chiefly, the abject, intricate feelings of chaos one who allows their consciousness to become disturbed through writing will ultimately come to find. Upon opening the book, passing the epigraph: “Thought is the blood that bathes the heart,” scraping a few pages deep, one finds themself enmeshed between words, overtaken and ravaged by sentences that swirl around your brain, deceive then disturb you, and lead you to the conclusion that this book is not for the faint of heart. 

   Event, and the rest of the early writing of Sollers (before he adopted his smug Don Juan/Louis-Ferdinand Celine persona and began to intellectualize his infidelities most emphasized in his novel Women) belongs to a pantheon of works that cause trances in the reader. The nut graph of this book would be: “A man seeks desperately for something, sometimes getting farther away, and sometimes getting closer to his goal by the forces that create this game”; comparable to most narratives leading back to Homer’s Odyssey. 

   This man, the only verifiable character in the novel, through both his narration and the omniscient narrator who follows him, a search is apparent. It later becomes evident that when sitting with the book, the search is for the book itself, as the hero walks through the city in a daze and writes love letters in his head to a female visage, who is perhaps an embodiment of whatever his artistic fervor is leading him to, or perhaps even the book he is writing. The struggle of writing that our hero faces, or rather the struggle to force himself to write, though seemingly petty, pedantic and incredibly unexciting, creates an interesting dilemma, thus embellished in Roland Barthes essay Event, Poem, Novel: “When an artist struggles with material, canvas, wood, sound, words, although that struggle produces, along the way, valuable imitations on which we can endlessly reflect, it is nevertheless that struggle and that struggle alone that is in the last instance being told; in it is the artist’s first and last word. And such a struggle “abysmally” reproduces all the struggles in the world…” 

   Event, through the narrator’s broodings, ruminations, and daydreams, creates a cosmos that is devoted entirely to the possibilities of the created novel.