Perhaps I will let you live among books, sheet music, and a modest wall piano, but the lively northwest of Paris cannot guarantee the mineral calm of a home near the Yonne River, over a hundred kilometers from Paris, a place he has never seen. He misses the sunrise. Pascal Quignard, born in Verneuil-sur-Avre in 1948, pauses the interview to close the window and restore the quiet of his family. The capital of the Seine hides in the shade of plane trees in the Buttes-Chaumont park.
He is the author of a dazzling diary cycle called the Last Kingdom, a work steeped in questions of sex and fear that greets the morning with urgency. He left the Gallimard publishing house in 1994 and chose self-exile, drawing closer to the solitary ethos of La Boetie, Mallarmé, and Montaigne, figures he admired.
He moves as a baroque soloist, a scholar of Greco Roman and Oriental corpora. The Polygraph will award him the Formentor Prize on September 22 for the refined restraint, straight posture, and bright blue eyes that mark this ardent pianist.
Fifty years after the appearance of his earliest writings, Quignard stands as a counterweight to Gallic letters in a lifetime of multi award recognition. He speaks of many wonders, a sentimentality and knowledge that persist. He writes of mysteries with the slyness of a secret keeper. He distrusts the world and resists the limits of language. Perhaps the musicians who populate his fiction are committed to letting the note go free, to stop being music on a page.
The Formentor Prize confirms his stature as a cult writer, yet he continues to emphasize his role as a reader first and foremost.
The prize has a generosity that welcomes translation, a journey for books that travels across borders. He speaks French fluently, with knowledge of Latin and Greek, and he recalls Freud’s injunction to cross borders. The award, he says, travels to discover new readers and excites him beyond measure. Society has never shaped him, he jokes with a shy laugh.
Question: Is it better to study outside of society?
Answer: Quiet reading is best. Reading is reception. Reading invites a certain passivity in his character. Digesting the world, love, fear, and death proves profoundly difficult for many creatures, including humans.
I find it hard to digest the world
Question: Do you like cats?
He admires their enjoyment of silence, their wary stance toward people, and the small pleasures civilization allows. He resembles them in part, appreciating the comforts of civilization while yearning for its wild freedom, a freedom untouched by roles and duties. He jokes about his own moment of resignation.
Question: In 1994 you broke away from Paris, much like the reclusive Sainte Colombe who stars in a world of music.
He spent a quarter of a century at Gallimard and reflects that perhaps people were not meant to live in crowds. He believes a person is born alone and dies alone, and that humans dream. The linguist Émile Benveniste, whom he knew since childhood, argued that there are first, second, and third person singulars but never a plural. The concept of we does not belong to any single person, a thought that helped him withdraw from public life.
Question: France loves intellectuals who bathe in the public square. Is there fear of being labeled conservative?
Colleagues on the Gallimard reading committee often sign manifests; he does not. He has never seen a crow, a cat, or a thrush sign a manifesto on behalf of their species.
Question: Do you vote?
His stance is simple. He does not vote, and if he ever did, it would be against it.
We are born alone and die alone, despite claims of a collective identity
The 2002 Goncourt winner writes that to read is to be born. He dislikes the idea of moving, especially moving the self. Yet he believes that the act of moving is a birth, the greatest transformation we experience. At birth we sense where we come from, the womb’s passive pull, and where we are headed toward: light, others, and the world of ideas opened by reading. Reading can be a new move, an invitation to explore mental, sensory, or erotic possibilities that lie beyond conscious awareness.
Question: Across your work there appears a gradual shedding of the self. Is the self exaggerated?
He values works over creators. Deep down, he agrees with the idea that people are secrets best left unspoken. At birth, one cannot say I. He recalls being an anorexic baby who longed for maternal affection and believes love compels us to yield the sense of self.
Question: The words literature and eros share a mysterious origin. Is that part of your fascination?
He suggests we all come from an erotic scene that shapes who we are, and what is missing is still part of us. The origin of both words remains a mystery, a question he prefers to keep unsolved because it is more valuable than any answer. He does not write to illuminate every question.
Reproduction as a social matter rather than a personal fate
Question: Why talk about reproduction?
For him, creation is not the epic of birth, but an extension of reading. He keeps notebooks on every reading since the sixties, a vast shelf of notes he tends to. He speaks of growing up in a city that mourned losses without knowing who died. He recalls discovering an image of a harbor devastated by bombardment in the press, only to realize it was Mariupol in Ukraine. The ruins, he says, always return. Cicero and the painter Hubert Robert shared this obsession with decay.
Question: Do you remember your earliest readings?
He learned to read with a small book about a donkey by the Countess of Segur, a story about a patient creature dreaming of escape. He believes that donkey will meet a sorry fate, but it is the memory itself that matters.
The ruins always return, a terrible irony
Question: Do you dislike happy endings?
The classic ending often involves offspring. But reproduction is a social matter rather than a personal one. People die when they cannot have children. Great stories, timeless tragedies, epics often end in sorrow. Christianity concludes with crucifixion, and Mary withdraws from the resurrection and moves to Ephesus.
Question: You have a fondness for small, fragmentary reviews from 1977 to 1980 that resist neat beginnings and endings.
He sides with the baroque mindset that celebrates contrast, difference, and rupture rather than closure. He identifies as a Baroque writer, praising the intensity of emotion and sensory experience, whether or not it succeeds.
Great moments can grow from fear and awe
Question: Your novels often take shape like scores. Do you see the voice as the primary instrument?
He argues that hearing is a powerful force, perhaps the strongest sense before sight. The mother’s heartbeat in the womb remains a primal memory. He believes humans are a listening species: birds, music, waves. Music remains more important than literature, though writing is a constant lure. He loves the idea of a genre within the quiet of writing.
Question: Words, do you trust them?
Words organize truth, he concedes, helping distinguish mint from thyme or peony. Yet after aligning the discourse, he sometimes chooses to erase it to return to the sensual world of things. Living, he says, requires time to discern the seasons. To know spring and winter, one must experience many cycles.
Question: Your latest novel returns to music and love within the tumult of European baroque. The terrible and the sublime coexist.
He believes scary moments can yield beauty, a provocative paradox. Attila’s assault on Rome sits alongside St. Augustine’s confessional texts, and during the wars of religion, some of Western music’s finest works emerge. He notes the crosscurrents of Taoism in early Chinese history, during times of fratricidal conflict.
Question: Are you drawn to the Spanish baroque style?
A friend introduced him to the wonders of Spanish culture, a gift for which he remains grateful. He admits he does not understand everything, not even Cervantes as well as Rabelais.
Enduring seriousness has always drawn him
Question: Why is there a constant pull toward the serious in your work?
He has always felt drawn to weighty themes, perhaps because seriousness carries a depth he cannot ignore. He respects artists who devote themselves to monumental works without seeking public attention, a sentiment that echoes Robert Walser and Saint-Simon, whose writings feel tucked away, yet speak volumes.
Question: Who is the audience for your work?
He believes his books are not easy. When he began publishing, critics and readers responded warmly, yet he would have kept writing even without an audience awaiting him. He would continue forever if health allowed it. He treats writing as a breath, a continuous act of creation. He describes starting work in the early hours of the morning and going to bed at what others would call baby time. He jokes that this routine might puzzle Spaniards.
Dawn has a quality that surpasses twilight
Question: Convince me.
He finds the dawn more beautiful than twilight. He has been reading scientific journals lately, not fully understanding every detail, yet enjoying the process. He believes legends still travel alongside science and that science itself carries a mythic force.
Question: Where does this lasting sense of wonder come from?
He prefers to keep his eyes open, letting the world reveal itself in unexpected ways.