Philippe Sollers is a controversial figure in French letters today. Editor of the left-wing journal Tel Quel, a periodical which has published some of the most daring critical and philosophical as well as speculation (and polemics), Sollers is a prolific novelist and critic. He is also a protean figure capable of quick volte faces. His creative life began when at the age of 21 he published his first novel Une Curieuse solitude, an initiation narrative deriving largely from what he himself calls the classical French tradition but one which owes as much to Georges Bataille as it does to Marcel Proust. Though this book has been dis avowed by its author, it bears witness to his precocious verbal gifts and his re markable ability as a storyteller. The middle-class boy's premier amour with an unpredictable Spanish servant is somewhat more than the conventional tale in this genre. Appropriately, it is the only novel by Sollers that has been translated into English (A Strange Solitude, 1959). Sollers' later consists of a series of highly structured but plodess verbal tours de force, attempts to develop the lyrico-epic style which he described in this interview and which is best illustrated by the passage from H published in this issue of The Iowa Review. A continuing series of permutations of language as a medium for semi-narrative forms and carefully integrated political state ments, these novels have led to, rather than derived from, an appreciation of writer-heroes like Joyce, Pound, Mallarm?. Sollers' fiction has also tended to justify his position as leader (along with the novelist-critic Jean Ricardou and the brilliant and playful experimentalist Maurice Roche) of the post-New Novel ists, a tendency loosely called the New-New Novel. The confusion generated by this tag has led Sollers to suggest that this movement be rebaptized The Wake in a punning play on Joyce's tide. It is perhaps important, since these writers and others like them are receiving an increasing amount of critical attention here and in France, that we not con fuse them with the original New Novelists, most of whom might be called ob jectivist anti-novelists, whose work derives more or less directly from the central novelistic traditions they deliberately modify. The group represented by Sollers and centering around Tel Quel is more directiy inspired by novelists and poets of the fringe, writers tending to violate the very ground rules of narration as well as the canons of taste and thereby discovering new uses for language. Among their heroes are the prose poet Lautr?amont (Isidore Ducasse, 1846 1870), whose sadic visions inspired the early Surrealists; the playwright Antonin Artaud (1896-1948), who insisted on the role of theatre as a ritual implicating the audience in representations of its own impulses; and the recendy rediscovered novelist-poet-essayist Georges Bataille (1897-1962), who preached the accep tance of the negative urges as essential to communal health, writing moving books based on paradox and hyperbole. Bataille's novel Le Bleu du ciel is a mas