H

Fiction. Art. Translated from the French by Veronika Stankovianska and David Vichnar. Philippe Sollers groundbreaking 1973 novel H was inspired by the May 1968 Paris student/worker uprising and in its own right performs a revolt against much thats been (and still is) taken for granted in the belles lettres. Described as a music that is inscribed in language becoming the object of its own reasoning (Julia Kristeva) and as an unpunctuated wall of words an extremely active [...] mass of language (David Hayman) H does away with plot character and settingand on the typographical level with punctuation capitalisation or paragraph breaksin order to attempt what Sollers himself called an external polylogue. The text performs an infinite fragmentation of subjectivity into a polyphony of ventriloquized voices where words turn round and come back producing a material fullness of pleasures and everything is organized into a splendid series of irrelevancies (Roland Barthes). It is this fulness of H this suffocation it produces that might be with Barthes termed its beauty. Accommodating a vast range of tonalities attitudes modes and ideologies H makes a case in point of how a literary work should function according to Sollers: A work exists by itself only potentially and its actualization (or production) depends on its readings and on the moments at which these readings actively take place. H is the first English- language translation of this influential experimental text.