Category Archives: 20th Century French Prose

Colons

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Reading the entire works of ancient authors, attuning our ears to their way of thinking and speaking, we are given entry into worlds which, but for these writers and their works, would have been lost forever; we are made to leave the prison-house of ourselves and are touched by the world.

—Gabriel Josipovici, (Vibrant Spaces, from The Singer on the Shore)

It is not the sentences alone that trace out for us the forms of the ancient soul. Between the sentences – and I have in mind those very ancient books that were originally recited . . . Often in St. Luke’s Gospel, meeting with the colons that interrupt it before each of the almost canticle-like passages with which it is strewn, I have heard the silence of the worshipper who had just ceased reading it out loud in order to intone the verses following it like a psalm that reminded him of the more ancient psalms in the Bible.

—Proust, (Journées de lecture, translated as On Reading by John Sturrock)

A Baroque Reader

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In an interview that eludes my current search, Pascal Quignard once proclaimed, “I am a Baroque artist. I seek intensity of emotion by any means necessary. I am not a classicist, I do not seek perfection. Baroque artists seek intensity, not beauty. If we can make people cry, we are happy.”

This reflection frequently occupies my thoughts and serves as a guiding principle when approaching Quignard’s works. I have long believed that within the writings of any serious author lies a manual on how to read their work. Quignard’s prose is reminiscent of painting—fluid, unstable, occupying a space between philosophical discourse and fiction.

Many of the writings I admire share this expressive Baroque quality. In the introduction to The Burglar, Brigid Brophy writes, “Baroque is an open, sometimes explosive embrace of contradictions—intellectual and of feeling. Ambiguity and fun are its raw material merely. Its essence is the ambivalence, in full, deep psychoanalytic import, of emotions. It is a pair of giant curly brackets that clip together things irreconcilable.” This sentiment perfectly captures the profound sense of astonishment central to the Baroque.

In Passions of the Soul, Descartes explores the initial moment of astonishment and how it gives way to other emotions, stating, “Upon encountering an object that surprises us, something we consider new or vastly different from our previous knowledge, we are filled with marvel and astonishment. Since this can occur before we possess any knowledge about the object’s suitability or unsuitability, I believe that admiration is the first of all passions. Moreover, it has no contrary; if the object lacks surprise, we remain unmoved and regard it without passion.”

It is precisely what I seek in prose and poetry—an encounter with the unfamiliar, the unknown, engaging with questions of memory, existence, and the nature of consciousness. While this may align me with the modernist camp, I consider my preferred reading experience to be Baroque, a style uniquely suited to an era where humanity reels from the collapse of old certainties and desperately yearns for re-enchantment and astonishment.

Sunday Notes (Blanchot, Quignard, Acquisitions)

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“The aim here is simply to test out to what extent it is possible to follow a text and at the same time to lose track of it, to be simultaneously the person it understands and the person who understands it, the person who, within a world, speaks of that world as though he or she were outside it; all in all, to take advantage of the strangeness of a dual work and an author split into two — into absolute lucidity and impenetrable darkness, into a consciousness that knows all and yet knows not where it is going — in order to feign the illusion of a commentary solely preoccupied with accounting for all and yet entirely aware of being able to explain nothing.”

Maurice Blanchot’s L’Expérience de Lautréamont

Something is compelling about the way French writers approach philosophy, as though it is woven into a literary work waiting to shape the questions that will arise in the mind of an attentive reader. Writers like Quignard, Duras, Ernaux, and Char approach philosophy and literature simultaneously. There are many others, not all French, particularly those writing what we would consider modernist literature.

Leslie Hill uses the Blanchot quote above as the epigram to his Blanchot: Extreme Contemporary. I have been fascinated this weekend by the opening essay in Blanchot’s Faux Pas. I suspect my French isn’t remotely sufficient for Blanchot, so I am reading Charlotte Mandell’s translation. Steve has been studying Blanchot’s work attentively for years, but I’ve found the writing slippery and uncertain on previous attempts. The introductory essay, From Anguish to Language, captivated me with a sense that a door was opening to a new world of thought, or perhaps a reminder of a very ancient one.

For several weeks I have been obsessed with Pascal Quignard’s writing, both his novels and his—what should I call them—perhaps treatises that form his Lost Kingdom series. He is a French writer that ignores the constraints of too-familiar forms of an impoverished medium and sees philosophy and literature as inseparably intertwined. His writing is a wild, unharmonious exploration of ideas that drew me back to Blanchot’s poetics of silence against the violence of language. Quignard is the writer that seems most to have accepted Beckett’s 1961 challenge to find a form that accomodates the mess.

A few additions to my library this week: Jen Craig’s Wall and her older work, Since the Accident, Musil’s Literature and Politics (translated by Genese Grill) and Han Kang’s Greek Lessons (translated by Deborah Smith and Emily Yan Won).

Philippe Jacottet: ‘Come Again, Destroyer’

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Come near again, Destroyer,
That I may look upon your face and it give me counsel
in shattering
But it is I who approach and I believe I see him before me
Behind the mask scented with carnival violets
Isn’t it urgent to know him before he breaks my bones?
But he takes the question out of my mouth,
he disarms me, scattering me like almond flower petals
and the more I search, the more he misleads me,
the more I want to defy him, the larger he grows and
escapes me.
I’ve already given up earthly concerns to contemplate
only him
when he attacks beauty, when he demolished the city walls.
In him I saw the source of day,
and in him I must learnt to recognise
the one who poisons the water.
I must contain in one invisible reality
Both source and ashes, lips and a dead rat’s carcase.
I was too quick to praise him for what daylight he spreads,
his revenge is to seem unspeakable in this clarity,
refusing me peace at so low a price,
regaining vigour in this exquisite guise.

Sunday Notes

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In 100 Days, Gabriel Josipovici, approaching his eightieth year, writes of trying to resist his innate sense of immortality, to be able to approach the inevitability of death with equanimity. It is, I suppose, the only way to contemplate the fact of death, our conspiracy to keep it unconscious a first and necessary line of defence.

Today, prompted by reading Karl One Knausgaard’s The Morning Star, I consulted the tables of life expectancy in England. Unless I get seriously ill or die in an accident I will experience roughly twenty-five more birthdays. Time enough maybe for another couple of thousand books though I do sometimes wonder what I miss when huddled in a fortress of literature. The Morning Star is infuriating and compelling in equal part. It ends with an extraordinary essay that gave me a sense that I should read the whole book again after carefully rereading the essay. I looked up some reviews and learnt that it may have been added as an afterthought and that The Morning Star is the first of a series.

In his novel, Knausgaard refers to a three-volume treatise on death, The Realm of the Dead: A World History, by Olav O. Aukrust. If it exists, it is not translated into English. It is a sufficiently compelling area of study for me to turn to online sources to order Philippe Aries’ The Hour of Our Death, recommended by Daniel, Thomas Laquer’s well-reviewed The Work of the Dead, and successfully look for my unread copy of Robert Pogue Harrison’s Dominion of the Dead (thanks, Steve).

This week I bought Bruce Kirmmse’s new translation of Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling and his earlier translation of The Lily of the Field and the Bird of the Air, both also prompted by The Morning Star. In London I also picked up a copy of Vladimir Sorokin’s Day of the Oprichnik, Carolyn Forché’s In the Lateness of the World (primarily for the poem Museum of Stones, but there are several others of interest), Peter Handke’s newly translated essay collection: Quiet Places, and a second-hand copy of William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying.