Poet and literary critic
Hilary Anne Clark has commented on the formal difficulties that
Paradis presents to readers: Philippe Sollers'
Paradis contains a ... major block to comprehension in that it lacks any form of visual punctuation to guide the reader in making sense, in reconstituting its units of meaning. Each page of
Paradis is a solid, unbroken mass of words, whose visual density is further emphasized by the use of a very black, italicized typescript. Lacking the visual landmarks provided by conventional punctuation practice, the reader can neither encompass the entire work, nor often decide where one unit of sense takes up from a preceding unit or gives way to a succeeding one. Clark goes on to cite
Paradis as an example of an encyclopedic tendency in literature, comparing it to Joyce's
Finnegans Wake and Pound's
Cantos: The dominance of the encyclopaedic gesture in
Finnegans Wake,
Paradis and the
Cantos allows us to account for the characteristic length, obscurity and "bookishness" of these works; they absorb the traits and tensions of essay, Menippean satire and epic while yet exceeding these traits in their fictional translation of the encyclopaedic paradoxes noted above. This translation manifests itself in each work as a characteristic parodic hesitation before the authority of totalizing predecessors; it manifests itself in the texts' fascination with images of a paradisiacal completion and timelessness, a tendency that is undercut by a repetitive, digressive or fragmented form which asserts the inevitability of time and incompletion. Further, the
Wake,
Paradis and the
Cantos, in their overt and extensive intertextual activity, emphasize the textual boundaries of encyclopaedic knowledge. Nonetheless, in their foregrounding and valorization of speech rhythms, the works also repeat the challenge that the encyclopaedia brings to its own limited nature as written book. Critics Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester note that in
Paradis, "Sollers achieved a
tour de force of modernist poetics whose clear precedents are Joyce and Faulkner. The powerful narrative voice that emerges in these works foregrounds song, chant, psalmody, and real rhythms that point toward their sources in sacred texts and Dantean
epos." Roland Champagne, in his monograph on Philippe Sollers, writes that The humor of
Paradis is found in its game of messages embedded in apparently unrelated sequences of spoken text. The messages are inserted by the omniscient voice of the poet/writer for the reader to decipher. These are encoded signals that the poet/writer offers as guides through the text. The poet/writer is basically saying that he is the only one who can find the way through this maze of contemporary culture's language. French literary critic
Roland Barthes grouped
Paradis with three other books by Sollers,
Drame,
H, and
Lois, and described these four as books that have to be referred to as novels because there is no other term to designate them. But they do not tell stories, describe a particular society or present identifiable characters. They are texts of which language itself is the subject, language which is wholly free from the duty to describe. The world which these texts presents is not one which the reader could either identify as her own or see clearly as different from it. In the past, in Barthes' view it was the author's duty to describe such a world which held language unjustifiably captive. One of the reasons he writes with such enthusiasm about Sollers is the way in which texts such as
Paradis and
Lois show what happens when this duty is removed. ==
Paradis in translation==