Unlimited, Unseen and Unveiled: The Force of the Aorist in Pascal Quignard's Sur le jadis

Abstract

����� ��� —Jadis, si je me souviens bien […] Rimbaud, Une saison en enfer T HE FIVE VOLUMES THAT MAKE UP Pascal Quignard’s Dernier Royaume, published 2002-2005, are in some respects typical. They rehearse, elaborate, and modify themes and motifs long familiar from the author’s considerable œuvre. Irretrievable loss and transience; silence and the human voice; uterine existence and birth; rhetoric, reading, and musical resonance; horror, nakedness and the constitutive secret—all surge forth over the course of these books, formulated in Quignard’s usual kaleidoscopic and aphoristic style. As expected, deeply personal reflections and autobiographical details commingle with obscure allusions, provocative etymologies, and peculiar anecdotes drawn from the full range of the world’s nearly forgotten cultural legacies. The accumulated material is presented in verbal mosaics that closely reflect Quignard’s creative, wandering abandonment, his renunciation of mastery, his attentive submission to texts, history, and memory. For Quignard’s devoted readers, both the form and content of Dernier Royaume amount to a return to the same, a restitution of the similar, something at once new yet not without a haunting sense of deja lu. That is not to say, however, that Quignard’s pentalogy has simply succumbed to a flat, stylistic homogeneity, or that the work has fallen into a self-scripted routine. Although the terrain may be familiar, it is in no way comforting or reassuring. On the contrary, it affords the recognition of the disruptive power of the same. As Quignard has persistently demonstrated, the return to the same hardly offers respite, for the familiar is often the harbor for that which at any moment may surge forth with frightening force. Like Freud’s Heimliche, the familiar may be the secret (heimliche, geheime) container of das Unheimliche, the uncanny, l’inquietante etrangete. With Quignard, as in the Freudian model, the return to the same may always be