Event

A superbly translated coupling of Sollers’s Drame (1965) and Barthes’s contemporary commentary. In this early piece, Sollers, subsequently a bestselling author because of his smug Don Juan persona, discreetly keeps watch over his fictionalizing self as it moves from nonverbal impressions to verbalized thoughts. He wants to escape the limitations imposed by language (“a trap that works . . . when I think I am the most free”). Inevitably failing, he delivers an open narrative in which “I,” “he,” and “you” interact by association. Barthes’s approving essay, containing Sollers’s footnotes, translates this doomed narrative quest into critical discourse, thereby assuring readers that they have indeed understood Sollers.
Marilyn Gaddis Rose, Comparative Literature Dept., SUNY at Binghamton