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 that’s 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 setting-and, on the typographical level, with punctuation, capitalisation, or paragraph breaks-in order to attempt what Sollers himself called an external polylogue.

The text performs an infinite fragmentation of subjectivity into a plethora 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 (translated by Veronika Stankovianska & David Vichnar) will become the first English-language translation of this influential experimental text.