L'homme aux trois lettres: dernier royaume XI par Pascal Quignard

Abstract

Reviewed by: L'homme aux trois lettres: dernier royaume XI par Pascal Quignard Eilene Hoft-March Quignard, Pascal. L'homme aux trois lettres: dernier royaume XI. Grasset, 2020. ISBN 978-2-246-82487-9. Pp. 192. This volume is the eleventh in Quignard's opus, Le dernier royaume, a themed series of meditations. In thirty-eight short and varied reflections, this book attempts to capture the experience of reading literature. The overall effect is one of a beautiful tracery of history and myth, almost all classical or medieval, the most recent example being Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights. Quignard's adamant disregard for anything more modern underscores his contention that reading opens the infiniteness of our human past. Other unconventional associations with—or dissociations from—reading spill out chemin faisant. Quignard retells the legend of St. Augustin observing St. Ambrose reading silently and turned inward to his own thoughts, an apparent anomaly of his era, and one that so impressed Augustin that he converted to Christianity. "Requoy" with its added connotations of withdrawn, meditative searching recurs in the author's examples (e.g., the angel Gabriel's [Jibril's] command to the prophet Mohammed to read). Secrecy also figures importantly in Quignard's conception of reading. The "man of three letters" refers to a Roman epithet for a thief, "fur" being Latin for one who steals, both "fur"-tively and silently. Connotations of criminality do not cling to this reader-thief. Rather, the latter, in a readerly state, remains unobtrusively outside of human conventions, laws, and institutions. The author revels in the expansion of human existence and the concomitant if temporary loss of consciousness of self that reading promotes. Liberatory reading is at the heart of the [End Page 260] author's writing: "[É]crire assure une prise entre deux mondes possibles (entre le premier monde et le dernier royaume)" (92). If these are possible communications with and of other experiences and worlds, Quignard refuses the chestnut that literature is communication with readers. He sternly dissociates spoken language from writing. As illustration: the only "dialogue" he re-stages in L'homme is a lopsided one between Petrarch and Cicero, dead some 1,300 years at the time he was so passionately addressed by the Renaissance poet. Petrarch's interrogation could be likened to the book's example of mushroom hunting, the absorbed free association of the sights secreted in the soil and the odors spanning all the natural, autumnal decompositions. This same "odeur de jadis" is the reader's recompense. One last meditation stood out for this reader: the story of Louis XI's defense of the (then) new technology of the printing press, especially the king's defense against allegations of witchcraft and the better-founded fears of insubordination to political regimes and religious hierarchies. Louis XI was an inveterate, solitary, nocturnal reader who, perhaps, paved the way for the incorrigibly independent habits of the rest of us readers. L'homme aux trois lettres understands literature as liberations from time, from the body, from spoken language, and from servitude. A welcome read for 2021. Eilene Hoft-March Lawrence University (WI) Copyright © 2021 American Association of Teachers of French