Philology and Music in the Work of Pascal Quignard

The persistent association of philology and music in the work of Pascal Quignard is mediated through various modalities of silence. Throughout Quignard’s novels, essays and treatises, musical sensibility and philological obsession work to silence the all-too-loud, abstracting processes of communication, representation, narration, or discourse. Upon sketching out the general terms and definitions that Quignard employs across his writing career, the essay turns to two especially illustrative examples: Quignard’s reading of Lucretius and his reflections on Plato’s discussion of misology. Misology, denoting a deep mistrust of words, ends up serving as a synonym for philology itself; it is a hatred of words—that is, a hatred of the way words are subsumed into logical discourse—that presents itself as the only true love of words, a love that respects a word’s resistance to any system, a philology that attends to a word’s relation to silence and thereby to the music of singularity. This article is available in Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature: http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol33/iss1/9 Philology and Music in the Work of Pascal Quignard John T. Hamilton Harvard University Chaque livre est un morceau de silence et pourtant chaque livre a une intonation propre. Every book is a scrap of silence and yet every book has its own intonation. Pascal Quignard The writings of Pascal Quignard (b. 1948, Verneuil-sur-Avre) tend to return insistently toward two distinct areas, toward two well-defined and recognizable zones: music and classical philology. Although these two domains by no means exhaustively account for the rich variety and stunning complexity of Quignard’s work, it is fair to say that an intense concern for music and a scientific (or quasi-scientific) attention to the texts of classical antiquity together comprise a thematic nexus that, despite its dual orientation, may help to unify an oeuvre that is, at least in terms of genre, rather heterogeneous, covering everything from essay to novel, fable to treatise. One might with justification go so far as to speak of a compulsion, either decreed by an imagined fate or decided by the accidents of birth. Accordingly, to account for this bifocal trajectory, this twinned passion, the writer has repeatedly alluded to his upbringing in a family that boasted both philologists and musicians. In a brief autobiographical note, he claims: “My parents taught classical languages and literature ... My father belonged to a family of organists who worked for three centuries in Bavaria, Wurttemberg, Alsace, Anjou, Versailles and the United States” (Marchietti 191).1 1 Hamilton: Philology and Music in the Work of Pascal Quignard Published by New Prairie Press 142 ST&TCL, Volume 33, No. 1 (Winter 2009) Apparently, at least in the author’s own self-representation, music and philology are the writer’s patrimony, a double heritage, forming a creative identity that oscillates between the attractions of word and sound, tonalities and lexica, between a fascination with the silence of the page and an enthrallment to the sonorities of performance. The centrality of music and Greco-Latin literature, with a decided emphasis on Roman antiquity, is evident even in the most cursory look at Quignard’s publications. It constitutes a nearly obsessive focus for the writer and, for the reader, a provocative collocation that beckons examination. To be sure, music and philology are treated in ways that are more emotional than intellectual, less academic than personal. Nonetheless, Quignard does not relate to music or to institutional philology entirely as an outsider. In addition to his proficiency on the cello, piano and organ, he has worked since 1988 as advisor for the Centre de Musique Baroque and, from 1992 to 1994, as chairman of the Festival d’Opera Baroque at Versailles, which he founded with Francois Mitterand. As for philology, having studied philosophy at Nanterre with Paul Ricoeur and Emmanuel Levinas, he went on to teach medieval literature at the Universite de Vincennes and later a seminar on the ancient Roman novel at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes. At the Bibliotheque Nationale he applied textual criticism to establish texts by Maurice Sceve, Dom Deschamps and the sixteenth-century scholar of Syriac and Aramaic, Guy Le Fevre de La Boderie. He regularly published articles on classical philological topics —on Heraclitus, Aeschylus, Aristotle, and others—including a critical edition and translation of Lycophon’s Alexandra. In 1976, with the appearance of Le Lecteur ‘The Reader,’ a work clearly stemming from his position as reader for Gallimard, he embarked on a writing career devoted to more original and creative reflections, including a number of novels and the digressive essays collected in two volumes of Petits Traites ‘Short Treatises,’ first published in 1984. His engagement with philological matters was transposed into a piece of historical fiction, Les Tablettes de buis d’Apronenia Avitia ‘The boxwood tablets of Apronenia Avitia’ (1984), which purports to be based on notes inscribed by a woman of late Roman nobility on the eve of Christianity’s rise and the Empire’s decline. In Albucius (1990), Quignard turned to an earlier but 2 Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature, Vol. 33, Iss. 1 [2009], Art. 9 http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol33/iss1/9 DOI: 10.4148/2334-4415.1696