Quignard's Answer to Lord Chandos — What Festers
There seems mostly, maybe always and only, what is accumulated, what is read, and then, what remains. What remains being what is returned to amidst evermore accumulation. Digging up some of what I return to: Büchner’s Lenz, “the divine suffering in his features speaks to them distinctly, and they grow afraid, for it has gotten dark,” and two lines of Mandelstam, “The proper tears dimmed the proper eyes, // the right bells rang through the autumn.” Going back through these pages while the garden continues sprouting fresh acquisition one comes to notice that there is something else entirely, something not returned to on the page, but always present. While turning over accumulation steel doesn’t quite strike stone, but encounters something more fragile, it touches something buried and festering. What festers emerges voluminous as the whole of your periphery, and painted dark as your eyes bare to the ceiling at night. What festers is always active in what remains, in what is read, and accumulated; always something still blistering beneath the scar of past experience, still painted red beneath the bandage of the present at hand. Should the spade lift the ulcerate mass above ground and offer it to a passerby, held there, aching on the shovel’s blade, it is shared. To make this offering, to prepare the naked flinching nerves as alms; to share what shrinks you away from the one walking on; to witness and latch on to what is withering, not to save it, but to feel its pulse. Here, held above ground and lifted from the root of what one might believe is why one does this are the works that fester, works which include the writing of Pascal Quignard. An oeuvre that now contains The Answer to Lord Chandos, out from Wakefield press and translated into English by Stephanie Boulard and Timothy Lavenz.
I hoped to write a longer review, and one closer to the release of the book, though here we are. Still, the want to spread word of this volume remains, and the effort to produce shorter pieces here amidst work on now more concrete (to me) longer projects is always in the back of my mind. When something like Chandos is published in translation; being written since 1978, published in Quignard’s French in 2020, marking just over forty years of work on a slim fifty pages, there is something to be shared, and all the better that the work warrants its sharing.
Much remains from Quignard, much scrawled down to assure its taking root, a taste; “Matter; neither sound nor sign; more than breath, more than voice” and “All rights revert to the ancient limit: the limit of each person's shadow on the ground. Everything acquired is war.” Though this remains what festers most from his work is what I have failed to find again, the image of being lost in the forest, blind, hearing the hoofbeats of a stag sound as the muffled voice into the womb where one once laid. There is much in Quignard’s The Hatred of Music adjacent to this scene, but nothing that quite fulfills the image itself; and still, it is this that causes the most turning, the most distress, and the most fruitful thought relative to Quignard’s work as a whole. In this Quignard’s Hatred of Music has become for me what Hugo Von Hofmannsthal’s Lord Chandos Letter became for Quignard; that is, something to respond to, and if not pointedly, then still something one is always in response to. Quignard describes this notion in The Answer to Lord Chandos, “He published, in 1902, his Lord Chandos—which became my Handel.” This comes at the end of the second chapter, a recalling of George Handel’s living in Hanover Square, and more, a recalling that Handel, so planted in London, remained still German; “He always said eine Geisskanne for the watering can, ein Nussbaum for the walnut tree.”
So what of Lord Chandos becoming Quignard’s Handel?
That those German words Handel maintained and the Rembrandt of the Rhine that hung on his wall were not only remains from Handel’s past, but what he dared to lift into the light, not in some effort of pronounced vulnerability, but in a sober self-offering to his own life, an offer that concedes to our not choosing what so persistently festers. Wrapped tightly around Quignard, around something leaking and sanguine, a bandage, for forty years, spotted red with Lord Chandos, in the same manner that ein Nussbaum remained always on Handel’s tongue.
In The Lord Chandos Letter, Von Hofmannsthal writes, “the abstract words which the tongue must enlist as a matter of course in order to bring out an opinion disintegrated in my mouth like rotten mushrooms.” Here is Chandos’ illness, that the fullness of things in themselves cannot be fully enough contained by the words which must describe them, that language in its utility to mean something has become fraught with too much difficulty, and that the only language which remains for him is one “in which mute things speak.” In The Answer to Lord Chandos, to disagree; Quignard, as put by Jean-Luc Nancy in his forward, leads a “vehement and uncompromising charge against” this concession to silence. This charge, the titular answer, comprises the third chapter of the book, following both the Handel section, and a first chapter recalling Emily Brontë’s short stint in Brussels: “Freedom…is not a state. It is an irrepressible drive for emancipation that carries us away the moment we leave the maternal womb…Freedom is the preservation of that original personal isolation.”
The promised epistolizing reads as a creed, and coming after the dramatization of two historical lives, it fashions Quignard’s own writing as something to be taken up by one willing to find themselves within it, in the same manner that Quignard finds Lord Chandos becoming his Handel. Finding oneself in this manner within Quignard’s creed is not meant as a mirror of grinning intellectual curiosities. Instead, the manner is of finding that how one comes to identify with a work is not a matter of sliding scales of likeness, but is something set in the stone of our living in the world. Identification, in this instance, does not affirm likeness with the subject, but brings the reader to themselves by means of introducing nothing short of life itself; it is only meant to represent in the most absolute way, that is, not to personify but to be created, and in turn and equal measure, to set fire in the kiln.
In defining the silence which Lord Chandos has come to favor Quignard writes, “regression to the aphonia of the primary world is a chimera”, he goes on, that there is only “a shifting sand full of dead language [that] stretches out — and not an auroral silence.” I will allow Quignard to further his own definition,
“Understand this point well: that other world is not silence. It is so much richer than silence. It is far more substantial than the void. It is much more primordial than birth itself and stands upstream of it. Silence is only the opposite of speech once acquired. Silence is what the language we have learned invents as its opposite so that language will emerge. You were looking for aphasic states in the sense of states prior to language. But the states prior to language are not silent states. Consider the waves! In truth, we are dealing with a sort of tidal bore at the bottom of life.”
The book ends with a chapter detailing Charles Perrault’s Bluebeard, the very final pages retelling the story’s staining of its forbidden room’s key, “Then she began to see the floor covered in blood and, mirrored in the blood, the bodies of several dead women, and she thought she too was going to die, and the key dropped from her hand.” Here is a moment, not the drama of noticing that the key is stained, but the impetus of its reddening. The impetus being the moment one encounters death; the encounter, down where she does not belong, announces a fear which will never cease to rear its head — the key’s clank, the splash of iron, a hushed gasp of hot air, the smallest of vibrations shake the smallest of bones and spread their crawling numbness to the head’s whole en route to Quignard’s instruction, “It is its cry that the soul must restore, not its silence.”
In the end the chimera of aphonia is set suddenly beside the fabled illustration of the cry, the aphoniatic then reeks desperate, how manageable that Lord Chandos desires a void, desires not to clamber down the stairs into a room not meant to be seen, but necessarily witnessed. The reality, then, is much less manageable, but must be had. The mass of the sea sways heavy, and churned as fully then as it does now, something sounds, there is a festering, and Quignard writes, “There is nothing that dies completely. Not a single wound that does not, over time, reinjure itself, and worsen.” He provides a brief note on Bluebeard’s beginnings — on the dawn of conception, the flickering sense of form, on one’s own eine Geisskanne and ein Nussbaum, on the world before you were there as a stage for what you have come to lack, that your lament, your cry, was there for you to hear so now you might listen — “his twin brother, François Perrault, had died in 1628….Charles Perrault published his Tales of Times Past on Rue Saint Jacques, in 1697.”