The Frenchman Pascal Quignard (Verneuil-sur-Avre, 1948) is, perhaps – well, actually, that is saying a lot – the strangest writer to have ever won the Formentor prize, which he collected last night at a solemn ceremony at the Canfranc Estación hotel, in the old and imposing railway stop of the Pyrenean town. A baroque musician – he played the viola da gamba and the violin, now he limits himself to the piano due to osteoarthritis – he made a living giving concerts, directing 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 higher art” (music) to devote himself to the lesser art of literature, in which he has built, as if denying himself, an enormous work of more than 70 titles that include novels, stories, essays, diaries…
“Literature is not addressed to anyone,” he said yesterday in Canfranc, “it is something wild, and every creator must isolate himself from the group, from the critics, from the editors.”
Quignard wakes up every day at 3 or 4 in the morning to write and, later, watches the sunrise. “Life outside the pages does not exist,” he says. I am not capable of taking vacations, 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, you can’t imagine, it suddenly wakes you up at dawn. “He who writes seeks a metamorphosis, he does not even address himself, he is a prisoner.” So that we journalists could understand it, he used a simile: “In autumn, in forests like these, we see the deer, which in their fights get tangled with each other, the leaves, the trees, the streams… Nature is something wonderful, a huge show 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 art brut of inmates in psychiatric hospitals. Our interior is very disoriented, the drive that animates us is the same that stimulates the plants, the stars, the sky and time. Nothing has a meaning or orientation and we narrators should not look for it at any price, we should not cheat.”
In a brief biographical review, he recalls that he had “difficulties regarding language and eating” – a euphemism to refer to his episodes of autistic mutism and anorexia – and that “words remain mysterious to me, I can never resist searching for them.” its etymology.
Cult and minority author, the closest thing he has known to literary fame is his short novel Every Morning in the World (1991), based on the life of the musician Sainte-Colombe, made into a film with Gérard Depardieu as the 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.”
Regarding AI, he believes that “instruments – as well as the arts – appear and disappear without any progress, although I admit that the mobile phone has one: it allows you to suppress the sound. This is how it has always been: in the Renaissance, the lute suddenly disappeared, and the viola da gamba disappeared during the French Revolution, we never know why.”
Admirer of the Spanish mysticism of Saint John of the Cross and the composer Frederic Mompou, some constants of his works are the cultured, artistic and mythological references of the past, symbolic reading, passion or sophisticated narrators. Among his works, titles such as The Wurtemberg Room (2011) or, his latest, Love the Sea (Galaxia Gutenberg), stand out, set in the 17th century, in a France devastated by wars and epidemics where music stands as a refuge. of the sublime, and with real characters like his beloved Sainte-Colombe or Purcell, among others.
