In the world of letters, 1966 was a period of interregnum for poetry. Gaëtan Picon ran the Mercure de France until his death in the summer of 1965. The magazine L'Éphémère took over. While Mercure de France lasted three centuries, L'Éphémère lasted just a few years. In September 1966, André Breton died, marking the end of a reign. Three commanders of poetry dominated the landscape: Saint-John Perse, Char and Michaux. Ponge, who was enjoying a second youth, thanks in particular to Sollers, followed them very closely; he was undoubtedly the most active and the most in touch with what was being done (he read Barthes).
The arrival of pocket poetry was a major innovation, which some saw as sacrilegious. The situationists attacked this new consumer object and were just as harsh on the other arts, denouncing the "establishment of an advertising differentiation between products identical in nullity (Perec or Robbe-Grillet; Godard or Lelouch)".
1966 was also the time of the divorce between the New Novel and Tel Quel, which had until then been close friends and accomplices, of the split between Sollers and Robbe-Grillet, and of the rise of Duras in all genres and media. Barthes chose Sollers over Robbe-Grillet, and insisted on the historic nature of the new novel, which had been surpassed by Tel Quel. In his first Tel Quel article, "La littérature, aujourd'hui" (1961), Barthes denied that the label "nouveau roman" covered anything other than a myth, and still associated Robbe-Grillet with "immediately contemporary literature". In his second Tel Quel article, Barthes still associated Robbe-Grillet and Sollers with the same literary cause. Meanwhile, Tel Quel had published a long article by Genette, "Sur Robbe-Grillet" (1962), collected in Figures in 1966, which was still favorable. But by 1966, the days of Tel Quel 's complicity with the New Novel were over: the rupture was signified by a brief hostile note by Sollers on Robbe-Grillet's theoretical work, Pour un nouveau roman (1964). In line with the reservations already expressed by Barthes, Sollers denounced as incoherent and regressive the shift from "objective realism" to "subjective realism" in Robbe-Grillet's work (from chosism to humanism, as Barthes put it). Sollers defended modern novelists' challenge to the bourgeois, psychological novel, but criticized the symmetrical "realist" error of giving unacceptable privilege to the external world, following a naive conception of reality that failed to grasp the way things appear. In other words, under the guise of objectivism - praised in the past by Barthes - Robbe-Grillet's philosophical weakness led him back to psychologism. First he defended an object theory, then the blocking of meanings, and finally he returned to the idea of absolute subjectivity, of mental realism.
