The Frenchman Pascal Quignard (Verneuil-sur-Avre, 1948) is perhaps – well, actually, it hurts to say – the strangest writer who has ever won the Formentor prize, which he collected last night at a solemn event in the Canfranc Estación hotel, in the ancient and imposing railway station of the Pyrenean town. A baroque musician – he played viola da gamba and violin, now limits himself to piano due to arthritis – he earned his living by giving concerts, conducting festivals and acting as a reader and editor at Gallimard, where he also wrote biographies of musicians. .., but in 1994 he abandoned what he considers “a superior art” (music) to devote himself to the minor art of literature, in which he has erected, as if denying himself, an enormous work of more than seventy titles that include novels, short stories, essays, diaries…
“Literature is not addressed to anyone, it is a wild thing, and every creator must isolate himself from the group, from the critics, from the editors”, he said yesterday in Canfranc under the watchful eye of Antoine Gallimard.
Quignard wakes up every day at 3 or 4 in the morning to write and, later, sees the sunrise. “Life outside the pages does not exist – he assures -. I’m not able to take holidays, but basically I work very little, a few hours, my day ends at 10 in the morning”. But, at the same time, he is possessed: “It’s incredible how demanding the work can be, they can’t imagine it, it suddenly wakes you up in the morning. The person who writes is looking for a metamorphosis, he is not even addressing himself, he is a prisoner”. So that the journalists could understand, he used a simile: “In autumn, in forests like these, we see the deer, which in their struggles get tangled with each other, the leaves, the trees, the streams… Nature is a wonderful thing, a huge spectacle that has no target audience, is not addressed to anyone. I write because I need to, not because I think it should be published, it’s like the so-called ‘brut art’ of psychiatric inmates. Our interior is very disoriented, the impulse that animates us is the same that stimulates the plants, the stars, the sky and the weather. Nothing has any meaning or orientation and we storytellers must not seek it at any cost, we must not cheat”.
In a brief biographical review, he recalls that he had “difficulties with language and food” – a euphemism to refer to his episodes of autistic mutism and anorexia – and that “words are still mysterious to me, I can’t never resist looking for their etymology, as if they had a nature inside”.
Cult and minority author, the closest he has come to literary fame is his short novel All the Mornings of the World (1991), based on the life of the musician Sainte-Colombe, brought to the cinema with Gérard Depardieu as protagonist and music by Jordi Savall, with whom “we still organize concerts every year”.
Both his fiction and his essays deal with eroticism. In this sense, he observes that lately “there has been a female liberation, but at the same time a wave of puritanism and censorship that saddens me. Freud’s rich idea that love and sex have no object has been lost along the way.”
On artificial intelligence, he opines that “instruments – like the arts – appear and disappear without any progress, although I admit that the mobile phone has one: it allows you to suppress sound. It has always been like this: in the Renaissance the lute suddenly disappeared, and the viola de gamba disappeared during the French Revolution, we never quite know why”.
An admirer of the Spanish mysticism of Saint John of the Cross and the works of the composer Frederic Mompou, some constants in his books are the cultured, artistic and mythological references of the past, symbolic reading, passion or sophisticated narrators. Among his works, titles such as The Salon of Wurtemberg (2011) or, the latest, El amor el mar (Galaxia Gutenberg), set in the 17th century in a France devastated by wars and epidemics where music stands out, stand out in refuge of the sublime, and with real characters such as his beloved Sainte-Colombe or Purcell, among others.
