The MRIs of Sollers’s Fictions

Since 1983, beginning with Femmes, Philippe Sollers has published nine novels of which the last, Passion fixe, appeared in March 2000 (I am not including the experimental novel Paradis in this group). Emerging from common characteristics in all these novels is a narrator persona with a consistent identity, an omnipresent first-person speaker, the focal point from which everything is seen and to which everything returns. All action centers on this narrator and main character; he is the perspective, the filter, the recorder of all events. Most often he is a writer of keen intelligence and a marginalized social critic–very much like the view Sollers has of himself as a writer.