Philippe Sollers's 'Portraits de femmes' Examines War Between Sexes Through Painting

In his book 'Portraits de femmes' (Flammarion), Philippe Sollers proposes a method to create 'pauses, intervals, clearings' within the 'fatal and immemorial' war between sexes. Drawing on Clausewitz and Sun Tzu, he argues that knowledge of the art of war is a useful propaedeutic for writing. Sollers's method is that of painters: making portraits of women, as did Titian, Watteau, Tiepolo, Fragonard, Manet, Picasso. His models are fictional names from his novels—Luz, France, Dora, Clara, Reine, Lucie—but all existed and offered their persons to help illuminate the 'dark continent' of women. The book traces how a man becomes a man, and that man a writer, through encounters with women: his mother, sisters, aunts, a 30-year-old maid from the Spanish Basque country named Eugenia (the character from his first novel 'Une curieuse solitude'), prostitutes, Dominique (a 45-year-old writer he calls 'the most beautiful woman in the world'), and Julia (his wife, a Bulgarian intellectual who joined the Tel Quel adventure). Sollers dedicates pages to Dominique's final days at Hôtel-Dieu hospital. The book is framed as resistance to the 'soft terror' of modern democracies that homogenize genders and language, evoking Mallarmé's 'On a touché au vers' and predicting future readers in Patagonia, China, or the stars.