Maybe I’ll let you living surrounded by books, sheet music, and a modest wall-mounted piano, but the noisy northwest of Paris doesn’t guarantee the mineral calm of his home, located at the foot of the River Yonne, more than a hundred kilometers from Paris, that he himself has never seen. I missed the sunrise. Pascal Quignard (Verneuil-sur-Avre, 1948) pauses the interview to close the window and restore the silence of his family. mottled-a-terre in the capital of the SeineIn the shade of the plane trees in Buttes-Chaumont park.
Author of the dazzling diary cycle last Kingdom, related to sex and fear anyone every morning in the world He left Gallimard publishing house in 1994 and went into self-exile. this brings him closer to the “solitary union” of La Boétie, Mallarmé, or the Montaigne he admired.
Baroque soloist, specialist in Greco-Latin and Oriental corpus Polygraph will receive the Formentor Award on September 22 for the graceful shyness, straight back and lively blue eyes that characterize this passionate pianist.
Fifty years after the publication of his first texts, Quignard Opposition in Gallic letters, a multi-award winning, sensual and knowledgeable work erected from endless wonders. “From Mysteries,” he adds, with the malicious intent of a secret-keeper. He doesn’t trust the world, he doesn’t trust the language either. Perhaps the dedication of the musicians in his novels is his: to give up the note. Who knows if it will stop to be music page.
S. El Formentor cements your reputation as a cult writer, but you still like to stand out as a reader above all else.
R. A grateful reader. The beauty of the Formentor Award is that it encourages translation, that is, the travel of books. I speak only French, apart from Latin and Greek. Freud said: “You must know how to cross the border.” This award crosses borders in the search for new readers and it excites me beyond recognition. You know, society has never influenced me (laughs shyly).
Q. Is it better to study outside of society?
A. It is best to read quietly. To read is to receive. And reading invokes the passivity of my character. It is very difficult for me to digest the world, love, fear, death. The same thing happens to many animals.
I find it so hard to digest the world
Q. Do you like it? cats.
R. I admire the way they enjoy silence, their hostility towards people, the little pleasures that civilization allows them. I am like them. Of course I appreciate the comfort of civilization, but I yearn for its wild freedom, alien to positions and functions. I resign every time.
Question: In 1994, you broke up abruptly in Paris, like the reclusive musician Sainte Colombe who starred in Paris. every morning in the world.
I worked for R. Gallimard publishing house for twenty-five years. Not bad at all for someone like me. I doubt we were created to live in groups, although religions and ideologies suggest the opposite. We are born alone and we die alone. Moreover, we only dream. The grammarian Émile Benveniste, whom I knew from my childhood, used to say that there are first-person, second- and third-person singulars, but never the plural. “We” is not a person despite Marxism. This insight helped me find excuses to withdraw from public life.
Question: France, on the other hand, loves intellectuals soaking in the public waterhole. Afraid of being labeled as a conservative?
My colleagues on the R. Gallimard reading committee were always signing the manifestos. I don’t. I’ve never seen a crow, cat, or thrush sign a manifesto in the name of crows, cats, or thrushes.
Q. Don’t you vote too?
R. No. And if I do, he’s always been against it.
We are born alone and we die alone. Despite Marxism “We” are not one person
S. in wandering shadowsThe 2002 Goncourt winner writes: “To read is to be born.”
You see, the idea of moving repels me: especially moving your own self. But I believe that the experience of moving inevitably evokes the experience of birth, which is the biggest change in our lives. When you die you don’t know where you are going, whereas at birth we feel where we came from, the passivity of the womb… and where we are going: sun, light, others (Quignard with a theatrical expression), others! Opening a book may be another move, while reading is hoping to explore mental, sensory, or erotic possibilities that we are unaware of.
Q. Throughout your work, a gradual abandonment of the self is perceived. Is the self exaggerated?
R. I care more about works than creators, if that’s what you mean. Deep down you and I are a secret, a secret we will always ignore. When a person is born, he cannot say “I”. I was an anorexic baby, with no desire to live, probably because I felt my mother didn’t want me and I wanted to make her happy. When we are born, we think we are an extension of our mothers, we lack subjectivity. Loving forces us to give up ‘I’.
Question: This is linked to another mystery that fascinates you, the ambiguous etymology of the two words: literature and eros.
R. We all come from an erotic scene that makes us who we are and, paradoxically, what is missing is us. I think the initial mystery has to do with the mystery surrounding the origin of both words. (Quignard freezes this move for a long time). But I prefer to keep the mystery. It will certainly be more valuable than any answer. I don’t write to shed light on things.
The issue of reproduction is a matter of societies rather than individuals. Let’s not forget that a person dies without having children.
Q. And for what?
R. The epic of creation does not interest me much; In my case writing is an extension of reading. (Quignard points to a huge shelf full of notebooks). I’ve been keeping notes on every reading here since the sixties. I come from this shelf.
Q. You grew up in Le Havre (Normandy) in the middle of the post-war period.
R. I grew up in a city that mourned without knowing who died. I recently came across an image of the harbor devastated by American bombs in the press and was touched. However, after reading the title, I discovered that it was Mariupol (Ukraine). The terrible irony is that the ruins always come back. Cicero was obsessed with them, as was the painter Hubert Robert.
Q. Do you remember your first readings?
R. I learned to read with him memories of a donkeyby the way, a little book written by the Countess of Ségur. castle near my hometown. The truth is, that donkey who dreams of escaping and is content not to know how to speak really impressed me. I guess it will end badly.
It’s a terrible irony, the ruins always come back
Q. I feel like you don’t like happy endings.
R. The classic happy ending in stories involves having children. However, the issue of reproduction is a matter of societies rather than individuals. Let’s not forget that people die when they can’t have children. Great stories, classic tragedies, epics end badly. Christianity ends with crucifixion, and worse yet, when a mother abandons her son: Mary decides not to participate in the resurrection and sets out for Ephesus.
Q. It seems that your love for the piece is reinforced by: small reviews (1977-1980) struggles to give things a beginning and an end.
R. Fragment, small review, is the exact opposite of the thesis so popular in French schools, the absurd habit of associating two opposing theses with pure ideology. I prefer the baroque attitude, which does not want to solve anything and celebrates contrast, difference and rupture instead.
Q. Do you consider yourself a Baroque writer?
A. Absolutely. I advocate the intensity of the emotion, the sensory, whether it is successful or not is a separate discussion. I was an altar boy and later an organist, and from my childhood these masses have shown me that there is nothing more beautiful than this. Cry baroque.
Scary moments can lead to great beauty
Question: You are a musician and most of your novels take shape as a score.
R. Above all, our voice is heard. Hearing is excessive passivity before the eye, resembling something predatory. It is known that we hear the mother’s heartbeat in the amniotic fluid. As the encyclopedias say, we are not the hard-to-learn talking species. But we are a hearing species: birds, music, waves. Music continues to be more important to me than literature, although I love writing endlessly and always look for a genre of music in the silence of writing.
Q. You do not trust words.
R. I need words to organize the truth, to distinguish the smell of mint from the smell of thyme or peony. But once you have reviewed the discourse, it is more appropriate to delete it in order to return to the sensuality of things. That’s why I celebrate having lived, it takes thirty or forty times to know what is spring and what is winter to know a season.
Q. Your last novel, I like seareturns to his favorite region, music and love in the tumultuous European baroque. The terrible coexists with the sublime.
A. Scary moments can produce great beauty. This is an unpleasant but quite plausible paradox. Attila razes Rome at the same time that St. Augustine begins the dizzying text “The Confessions”; during the wars of religion the finest works of Western music are written; Sima Qian, BC. It describes how Taoism arose in the 1st century, when fratricidal strife tore China apart.
Q. Are you interested in the Spanish Baroque style?
R. My friend Jordi (Savall) discovered the wonders of Spanish culture for me. But I admit that I don’t understand everything (he modestly nods). I don’t understand Cervantes any more than I understand Rabelais.
I’ve always been very limited, like I can only love the serious
Q. Do you know why?
R. I’ve always been very limited, as if I could only love the serious.
Q. Your work is filled with virtuous musicians who refuse to publicize their creations.
R. I was fascinated by dedicating a life to a monumental work and not showing it to anyone. Robert Walser or Saint Simon, whose memoirs are in a suitcase, did not write for anyone, just as a flower grows nowhere.
Q. Who are you writing for?
R. I suspect that my books are not easy. When I started publishing, I was lucky to be well received by critics and readers. But if it were not so, I would have continued to write even if there was no one waiting for me on the other side.
Q. How long?
R. Forever, if the disease respects me.
P. Write while breathing.
A. This is a form of asceticism. But yes, breathing is creating a vacuum, clearing the rib cage, the soul. You write too. One of the functions of sleep is to digest the previous day. I must have some shortcomings because I always felt the need to summarize my experiences while writing. I start around three or four in the morning. I go to bed at baby time. It must be incomprehensible to a Spaniard (laughs).
Dawn is more beautiful than twilight
Q. Convince me.
R. The beauty of the dawn. Much more beautiful than twilight.
Q. What are you reading these days?
R. I’ve been subscribing to scientific journals lately, I don’t understand much, but that’s exactly what satisfies me. It is said that we live in an age without legends, it is not true. Science is our mythological catalogue, it’s really beautiful.
Question: Where does this enduring capacity to wonder come from?
R. Let’s say I like to keep my eyes open.