Portes musicales et seuil du langage chez Pascal Quignard

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article discusses some aspects of the relation between literature and music, with Pascal Quignard's book La Haine de la musique as the object of examination. Quignard is known as someone who not just writes about music, but also attempts to incorporate musical elements into his distinctive style of writing. I examine different approaches of the dialectical movement between enunciation and the enunciated. My argument aims at documenting the influence of what the author names “l'espèce du son” on some aspects of the book: the status of some musical elements hidden in the origin of literary forms, subjective manifestations related to dialectic tension between sense and non-sense in the literary field and the incidence of musical forms upon it, and aesthetical and synesthetic manifestations of musical pleasure/displeasure (la jouissance musicale) and its incidence on literary forms. A short interlude is included, too, in which Quignard's Medea is also analyzed, as well as some critical contributions on the subject, from French structuralism and post-structuralism, namely Barthes’ and Lacan's works.