MARC FUMAROLI
AND
PHILIPPE SOLLERS
69
later. The potentially creative individual is increasingly discouraged from
taking part in these upheavals, these adventures with language. You can see
it in the incredible loss of our ability to read.
That is the reason why I would like to join the general notion of
litera–
ture
with that of reading. I return to Claudel: "The purpose of literature
is to teach us to read." You see how useful this definition could be in get–
ting us out of such pointless debates as: What can literature do? What
should it do? Which ideology should it serve? Ideologies eventually
become totalitarian, as our century gives incomparable proof. .. .
LE
DEBAT:
You have in common your interest in the classics. This has
been Marc Fumaroli's calling, and he has devoted himself to the life of an
historian. Following his baroque period, Philippe Sollers's calling, as crit–
ic for
Le
Monde,
has been to devote himself first and foremost to the
classics. And yet, at the same time, you approach the classics very differ–
ently. Marc Fumaroli proceeds from an historical asceticism and attempts
to recapture their original meaning, while Philippe Sollers is more con–
cerned with bringing these same works in proximity to us. Would you
agree with this description?
MF:
Our divergences seem to me not only self-evident but necessary. I
have never attempted, nor even wished, to fashion myself as a writer, much
less a novelist. What I write belongs to another literary genre, but it is lit–
erature all the same. My genre, which has its own classics, is the erudite
knowledge of literary tradition, particularly the French. It's a sort of liter–
ary asceticism very different from the writer's. It has a completely different
relation to memory, the imagination, and style. It requires a certain self–
forgetting to resuscitate, from a rather rigorous point of view, seemingly
lost moments in the literary tradition and the forgotten meaning and sig–
nificance of works from the recent or distant past. I have occasionally had
the pleasure of seeing that writers, novelists, and poets could find the kind
of sojourns that I've published useful or enriching. There is, in fact, some–
thing profoundly romantic in this literary erudition. It has some affinity
with the writer's possibly even more romantic and improbable work. But
a writer of your sort is also an egotist. He wants to be one with his style,
and he brings everything he perceives to his work: the classics, his learn–
ing, his personal life, current events. It is another family of literature. "My
Father's mansion has many rooms." ...
LE
DEBAT:
Philippe Sollers, twenty years ago, would you have used the
same language?
ps:
I'm often seen as a repentant terrorist: "So, you've discovered Bossuet,
Voltaire, etc." But of course, I am discovering them much less than is sup-
