10 The Tragic Voice of Pascal Quignard

Les philologues ne sont jamais raisonnables.

(Quignard, Petits Traités)

Philologists have long been accustomed to interruptions. Queries, suspicions, and doubts, based on erudition or vague intuition or a combination of both, significantly decelerate the pace of reading, suspending the text’s discursive drive, imposing a fermata that closes off the text’s flow, if only for a brief moment. Time is given for examination or specification, for judging correctness or testing variants, for considering errors or corruptions, for spotting anachronisms, lacunae, or other inconsistencies. Whereas most readers are content with following plots, attending to arguments, or indulging in descriptive observations, the philologist stumbles on the words themselves. Here, method intervenes, turning language itself into a problem. It raises issues, creates difficulties, and thereby hinders complacent, undisturbed reading. It gets stuck on minutiae, lost in details, and thus threatens to obscure the larger picture. It imperils the order of things, thwarting efforts to subordinate a text to a domineering idea or ideology. As Lorenzo Valla and those in his scholarly wake discovered, philology discomforts those authorities bent on promulgating a clear message and preserving their power over doctrinal interpretation. Always ready to break in and overturn dogma, the philologist takes pride in sparking controversies and making everything somehow troublesome and less simple, adducing material that is otherwise lost on the ordinary and well-ordered reader.

It is arguably the love of language, which philology names, that causes the philologist to pause with each word, to relish its particular form, caressing its verbal contours, its morphemic properties, interrogating it to the point where the communicative pulse of the text in which the word occurs comes nearly to a full halt. The one who cherishes or even venerates words hesitates to let them go, to let them be absorbed at once into indisputable ideational content. As a mode of reading, this particular kind of philia—the philia for logos—holds each term back before it departs into imparted meaning, jealously questioning where the word has been, its present whereabouts, and its intended destination. In treating words with loving care before they serve as transparent vehicles of sense, philology breaks off the interpretative process and at times may derail it altogether, for it is loath to let words get away too easily.

Philology upsets smooth reading, even though it aims to provide an ultimately smooth text, even though it freezes the passage with an eye to have it carry on. This is because each word potentially addresses the philologist as a discrete utterance, as a request or even a plea, like a voice that cries out before being sacrificed to the logic of the sentence. And, while a philological interrogation necessarily proceeds by taking the entire passage into consideration, by the sheer act of pausing to question the word, the philologist appears to attend to this intrusive voice before it is silenced—that is to say, before it is perfectly worked into the discourse at hand. If one insists on an opposition between voice and signifier, then reading to track the sense of a text requires great efforts of devocalization, of compelling the voice to evanesce into signification, of transforming the mere fact of phonation into a sign.¹ In contrast, philological care tarries with the word that has been charged to dissolve into meaning, listening to it in its solitary cell, administering the last rites, striving to stay the execution of the vox moritura, however desperately, however provisionally. And, when the time arrives to move on, to let the words resume their discursive purpose, the philologist humbly stands to the side, willing to assume his or her traditionally ancillary role, a mute witness to the sacrifice of the beloved voice.

In disrupting the text’s continuity so as to listen to the word as a discontinuous voice, philology could be said to approximate a musical sensibility. Friedrich Nietzsche, the aspiring musician cum theorist of tragedy cum antichristian, famously takes pause to give pausing its due:

Philology is namely that venerable art [jene ehrwürdige Kunst], which begs of its votaries [Verehrer] one thing above all: to go aside, to take time, to become still, to become slow—it is a goldsmith’s art and connoisseurship of the word which has nothing but delicate, cautious [vorsichtige] work to do and achieves nothing if it does not achieve it lento. But for precisely this reason it is more necessary than ever today, by precisely this means does it attract and enchant us most strongly, in the midst of an age of ‘work’, that is to say, of hurry, of indecent and perspiring hastiness [Eilfertigkeit], which wants to ‘get everything done’ [fertig werden] at once, including every old or new book:—this art does not so easily get anything done, it teaches to read well, that is to say, to read slowly, deeply, looking cautiously before and aft [rück- und vorsichtig], with hidden agendas [Hintergedanken], with doors left open, with delicate eyes and fingers…²

Regarding philology as an ‘art’ and not as a science or discipline allows Nietzsche to redefine its practitioners as devotees prepared to perform the duties expected of them. ‘With delicate eyes and fingers,’ they attend to the service of words rather than enlist words into the hurried service of communicative meaning. On the basis of productivity, their slowness might be regarded as sluggishness, yet from the perspective of Nietzsche’s philology it is clearly a ‘good’: ‘it teaches to read well [gut lesen].’ Proceeding with careful caution—Vorsicht—philologists assume the Epimethean and Promethean roles of peering backward and forward—rück- und vorsichtig—which render any completion of sense provisional, expressing ‘hidden agendas’ (Hintergedanken) that penetrate into the substance of the words that lie ‘behind the thoughts’—hinter den Gedanken—delving into the substrate of meaning that leaves all work unfinished, incomplete, unfertig. ‘In the midst of an age of “work”’, Nietzsche the philologist proposes a method of idleness, a désœuvrement that actively unworks the compulsion to ‘get everything done’ and close up shop. He does so by leaving doors ajar and keeping his ears open. A critic of the times that are frantically fuelled by instrumental reason, he resets the tempo to lento in order to rein in the industrial and industrious horsepower that rushes to some definitive goal.

Nietzsche’s self-styled philological positions, which persistently inform his moral philosophical escapades, were clearly born, like his idea of tragedy, ‘out of the spirit of music’.³ In an early autobiographical sketch, written while he was still a student in Leipzig, the decision to take up classical philology is explicitly based on a resolution to stifle hopes of becoming a composer:

From my ninth year I was drawn most strongly to music; in those fortunate circumstances in which one does not yet recognize the limits of one’s talents and considers everything that one loves to be attainable, I had written down countless compositions and acquired a more than dilettantish knowledge of music theory. Only in the last period of my life at Pforta, in correctly understanding myself, did I give up all my artistic plans; and from that point on Philology entered into the gap that consequently opened up.⁴

While granting some post-adolescent exaggeration, the passage reveals a quality that persists across Nietzsche’s written work. Here, the silencing of music has left a ‘gap’ or perhaps a gaping wound that only the study of words could patch. It would be, of course, only a partial healing, one that would never entirely remedy what would never cease from festering. The interruption of music, which yields place to classical philology, should be taken as an extended fermata that resounds long after the final chord has been struck.

It is not at all difficult to see how the realm of music continues to exert an intoxicating fascination for the pastor’s orphan, particularly after his adoption into Richard Wagner’s home, attempting to correct what the philologist comes to characterize as his profession’s deafness. Again, musical sensitivity consists in having an ear for the ‘break’:

That one must not be in doubt about the rhythmically decisive syllables, that one experiences the break with any excessively severe symmetry as deliberate and attractive, that one lends a subtle and patient ear to every staccato and every rubato, that one figures out the meaning in the sequence of vowels and diphthongs and how delicately and richly they can be coloured and change colours as they follow each other—who among book-reading Germans has enough good will to acknowledge such duties and demands and to listen to that much art and purpose in language? In the end, one simply does not ‘have the ear for that’.⁵

Throughout his philosophical career, Nietzsche applies his ‘third ear’ to those verbal breaks in the history of values, to the ‘detached notes’ and ‘robbed time’—‘every staccato and every rubato’—that punctuate and puncture dogmatic systems. It is indeed this musical sensitivity that transforms Nietzsche’s idiosyncratic approach to philology into an art of interruption, always ready to give pause, always willing to hearken to the voice behind the words, to the ‘vowels and diphthongs’ that do not signify in the strict sense but are for this very reason all the more meaningful. Adhering to this pre-semantic yet meaningful phenomenon, Nietzsche is glad to rehearse the polyptoton of his fathers’ Redeemer—qui habet aures audiendi audiat!—‘He that hath ears to hear, let him hear!’⁶

The case of tragedy remains exemplary for Nietzsche, insofar as it proves to be a testing ground for the ear. For, in Nietzsche’s well-known view, tragedy stages the conflict between the voice and the word, maintaining the difficult tension between Dionysian music and Apollonian form, between choral song and individualized dialogue, before it is silenced by Platonism, before it is suppressed beneath the demands of a resolving pax philosophica. Again, Nietzsche refers to an aspect of persistent, resonant idleness: ‘the ecstasy of the Dionysiac state, in which the usual barriers and limits of existence are destroyed, contains, for as long as it lasts, a lethargic element in which all personal experiences from the past are submerged.’⁷ In other words, Apollonian form, which will eventually give rise to logical schematism, sets the terms that the raving god would break. As Nicole Loraux stresses, Nietzsche’s account of the birth of tragedy reveals the ‘mourning voice’ that resounds as something interminable, something repetitive and non-appeasable, a shrill tone that thereby ‘diverts, rejects, or threatens…the obligations and prohibitions constituting the ideology of the city-state.’⁸ For Loraux, whereas civic discourse tends to limit grief, channelling or sublimating lamentation into the persuasive arguments of the funeral oration, tragedy allows the wailing to continue to be heard. It recalls what the state works to forget. Concerned precisely for this voice, ever alert to the sufferings of Dionysus, Nietzsche raises philology’s resistance to a musical pitch. His work with words unworks the work of mourning, so that the mourning itself never fades off entirely. As an art of breaking free from the precipitous drive of discourse, philology sides with the breaks that tragedy consistently registers. When others gather their things and head for the exit, satisfied with the feeling that everything has been understood, that all the terms have fallen into place, Nietzsche stays put in the theatre, unwilling—like every slow reader—to move on.

There are few writers today who more diligently adhere to this Nietzschean ideal, to the twinned vocation of philology and music, than Pascal Quignard (b. 1948, Verneuil-sur-Avre). With Quignard, as in the case of Nietzsche, philological and musical domains provide a dual orientation that produces the elliptical orbit of an œuvre otherwise difficult to classify. To be sure, Quignard’s prolific output, like that of his Saxon predecessor, is exceptionally heterogeneous, an intriguing hybrid of genres and styles that would include the novel and the fable, the philosophical essay and the scholarly treatise, aphoristic pronouncements and autobiographical reflections. Although the range of topics and themes covered by his books defiantly resists thematic unity, a deep passion for music tugged by the gravitational pull of texts from Greco-Roman antiquity is discernible across the nearly fifty titles he has published to date.

Neither a professional musician nor an academic, Quignard is nonetheless not simply an amateur. A highly trained cellist, pianist, and organist, he has had opportunities to hold seminars on the ancient novel and medieval literature at the Université de Vincennes and the École Pratique des Hautes Études. Working closely with manuscripts at the Bibliothèque nationale, he engaged in methodical textual criticism to establish texts by Maurice Scève, Dom Deschamps, and the sixteenth-century scholar of Syriac and Aramaic, Guy Le Fèvre de La Boderie. In addition to publishing articles on Heraclitus, Aeschylus, Aristotle, and others, he produced a critical edition and translation of Lycophon’s Alexandra. Two volumes of his Petits Traités appeared in 1984, featuring radically digressive essays on a diverse range of philological matters, which complement his venture in historical fiction of the same year, Les Tablettes de buis d’Apronenia Avitia, set on the eve of the Empire’s fall and purportedly based on quotidian observations by a learned woman of Roman nobility. With his novel Albucius (1990), Quignard turns to the fragile Republic of the first century bc, reflecting on the lascivious Controversiae of Caius Albucius Silus, which yield a number of key terms that constellate into a densely woven essayistic novel. Meanwhile, since 1988 he has served on the advisory board for the Centre de Musique Baroque and, in 1992, with the support of François Mitterrand, he founded and chaired the Festival d’Opéra Baroque at Versailles. Needless to say, explicitly musical material often comes to be incorporated into the literary work. Sententious comments on audition and the voice illuminate discussions of Latin rhetoric and oratory in Rhétorique spéculative (1997). Impassioned remarks on the performance and reception of seventeenth-century music are collated with a revaluation of the ancient sophists. Two important collections of treatises, La Leçon de musique (1987) and La Haine de la musique (1996), attempt to systematize an overarching phenomenology of musical experience, which is further developed in novels of roughly the same period, for example Le Salon de Wurtemberg (1986) and Tous les matins du monde (1991), as well as the later novel on musical silence, Vie secrète (1998). Most recently, in the five volumes of Dernier Royaume, which began to appear in 2002, Quignard continues to commingle meditations on music with recognizably philological concerns, each motivating the other by way of a sustained and fruitful tension.

Quignard repeatedly ascribes his musico-philological inclination to the accidents of his birth. He fondly alludes to his parents, who both taught classical languages and literature, as well as his father’s family, who for centuries worked as organists across Europe and the United States.⁹ Philology and music would appear, then, to be Quignard’s patrimony, a double heritage that navigates his literary ventures between language and sound, between meaning and articulation, between the word and the voice. All the same, questions remain. Is it justified to include Quignard among the ranks of philologists? Does his work contribute in any relevant or rigorous way to this well-established discipline? Or does he simply exploit scholarly resources to enhance his own creative inclinations? How, in fact, should we distinguish literary art from a science of words? And would such a distinction be helpful or even valid? What if Nietzsche was correct? What if philology is neither a discipline nor a science but rather ‘a venerable art’?

With Quignard, music and philology are perfectly complementary insofar as both pursuits are based on an ear for the break. Among his many childhood recollections, the writer singles out dinners with his maternal grandfather, Charles Bruneau, the historical linguist who co-authored the magisterial Histoire de la langue française, published in 1905.

At my grandfather’s house, not a meal went by that he did not get up to leaf through [fouiller] Bloch and Wartburg, Godefroy, Littré, Chantraine, Ernout-Meillet, in order to assure himself of the etymology of such or such a word that he just employed…My mother, his eldest daughter, was made from exactly the same strange wood of the Ardennes, precise to the point of obsession, stubborn [têtu].¹⁰

This account not only identifies the source of Quignard’s later obsession with the etymological latencies of verbal language, but also calls attention to that key aspect, noted above, of philology as the technique of interrupting consumption. Rising from the table to reach for the lexica and etymological dictionaries, breaking off the conversation to dispute semantics, charting a word’s derivation—all bring the continuous flow of communication to a decisive halt. Words are wrested free from their context. In his novel Albucius, Quignard again refers to his maternal grandfather in particularly telling terms: ‘My grandfather listened only to the form of what was being said. Human language never had any sense.’¹¹ Rather than employ language as a transparent vehicle of sense, these arresting acts problematize each word, turning every term into a hindrance or an obstacle, an object thrown onto the path of rational discourse. Quignard’s dual concern for music and philology expresses this distrust in the viability of a language that all too readily consumes words in the service of broader signification.

In particular, Quignard’s stubbornness slows down the process of devocalization, hoping to hold on to the voice before it passes into its signifying function. A telling illustration is given in his own theory of the birth of tragedy, which bears many Nietzschean traits, insofar as it hinges on notions of listening, the break, and the voice’s ultimate sacrifice. Accordingly, Quignard proposes what might be described as a non-Aristotelian account of tragedy, one that refuses to subordinate the song to the plot. However, in an altogether provocative move, Quignard evades the Poetics by looking elsewhere in Aristotle’s work, marshalling the Philosopher’s anthropological musings from the opening of the seventh book of the Historia animalium:

φέρειν δὲ σπέρμα πρῶτον ἄρχεται τὸ ἄρρεν, ὡς ἐπὶ τὸ πολὺ, ἐν τοῖς ἔτεσι τοῖς δὶς ἑπτὰ τετελεσμένοις · ἅμα δἑ καὶ τρίχωσις τῆς ἥβης ἄρχεται. καθάπερ καὶ τὰ φυτὰ μέλλοντα σπέρμα φέρειν ἀνθεῖν, πρῶτον Ἀλκμαίων φησὶν ὁ Κροτωνιἀτης. Περὶ δὲ τὸν αὐτὸν χρόνον τοῦτον ἥ τε φωνὴ μεταβάλλειν ἄρχεται ἐπὶ τὸ τραχύτερον καὶ ἀνωμαλέστερον, οὔτ᾽ ἔτι ὀξεῖα οὖσα, οὔτε πω βαρεῖα, οὔτε πᾶσα ὁμαλὴ, ἀλλ᾽ ὁμοία φαινομένη ταῖς παρανενεθπρισμέναις καὶ τραχείας χορδαῖς · ὅ καλοῦσι τραγίζειν.

(The male begins to bear seed, in most cases, when he reaches the age of twice seven years; and at the same time hair begins to appear upon the pubes, just as plants about to blossom bear seed, as Alcmaeon of Croton was first to remark. About the same time, the voice begins to alter, getting harsher and more uneven, neither shrill as formerly nor deep as afterward, nor yet of any even tone, but rather like an instrument whose strings are frayed and out of tune; and it is called the bleat of the billy-goat.)¹²

Here, it is the final verb, tragizein, that intrudes upon the narrative and causes the writer and reader to falter. Two definitions of the verb, together with a parenthetical explication, are provided: ‘puer comme un bouc et muer de voix (chanter comme un bouc ou comme celui qui en rappelle l’odeur)’—‘to stink like a goat and to break the voice (to sing like a goat or like someone who recalls its odour).’¹³ Aristotle’s description of male pubescence and its vocal effects is therefore summoned to reveal something fundamental at work in the conception of Greek tragedy, for Quignard explicitly aligns the verb tragizein with the definition of tragōidia as ‘goat-song’. Quignard will keep his notion of tragedy in close relation to the odoriferous goat, to the animal that, according to Aristotle, may have a ‘voice’ (phōnē) without possessing, like humans, logos. For Quignard, the tragedy heard in tragizein is the fatal disappearance of the child’s voice, of the voice that connects the self to prepubescent childhood. Thus, Quignard regards the ancient dramatic art in general anthropological terms as the sacrifice of the child, of one’s former self. In sum, tragedy is the record of a lost voice.

The passage from the Historia animalium is cited in La Leçon de musique, in an essay entitled ‘A young Macedonian debarks at the port of Piraeus’, which is loosely framed around the life of Aristotle. Quignard’s Leçon is composed of three distinct parts, each consisting of strikingly terse aphorisms, which readily recall Nietzsche’s late style. Moreover, just as Nietzsche’s genealogical method insisted on relating philosophies to the philosophers’ lives, all three of Quignard’s essays are structured by biographical details: the first based on the life of the French composer and violist Marin Marais (1656–1728) and the last on ancient Chinese legends surrounding the figure of the musician Tch’eng Lien. The theme of music’s role in diverse experiences of change, loss, and mourning constitutes the guiding thread that connects the poetic reflections and etymological associations that course through each section. Quignard thus puts into play a network of motifs, which ultimately formulate a sweeping theory of the voice, one that, although grounded in historical and cultural specificity, nonetheless transcends these particular coordinates so as to speak to the human condition in general.

The central piece on Aristotle opens in 366 bce with a brief description of the philosopher as an 18-year-old, as he arrives in Athens to attend Plato’s Academy. An oblique reference is made to Paul-Bernard Grenet, who, in his biography of the renowned Stagirite included in his Histoire de la philosophie ancienne (1960), affirms that when Aristotle first spoke to Plato the younger man’s voice was ‘low and hoarse’ (basse et rauque).¹⁴ It is thereby suggested that Aristotle undertakes his studies after having suffered the break in his voice. In Quignard’s reading, the pursuit of philosophy follows upon the loss of a prior voice and the acquisition of one that is new, adult, or productive. Philosophy is subsequent to tragedy.

By relating tragedy directly to the child’s voice and its loss, Quignard appears to elaborate a key Nietzschean idea. At the conclusion of The Gay Science, the final aphorism (§342) introduces the figure of Zarathustra in a passage that is repeated almost perfectly verbatim at the head of Nietzsche’s next book, Also sprach Zarathustra. The aphorism is entitled ‘Incipit tragoedia’, as if Zarathustra’s gospel should function as a demonstration of a voice otherwise lost in conventional philosophy.¹⁵ With his own ‘incipit philosophia’, Quignard gestures back precisely to that loss denoted by the word tragedy, a gesture that illustrates what he elsewhere designates as a decidedly ‘antiphilosophical’ tradition.¹⁶

As Quignard’s essay continues, the breaking of the voice, understood as marking a young man’s initiation into adulthood, is made discernible in many aspects related to the ancient festival, which served as the original context for tragic performance:

It was at the very beginning of spring. The tragōidia is the goat song. The entire village, during the grand procession, sang. The reed-flutes accompanied the song. Some large simulacra of the erect male sex were carried forth. Back then Aeschylus or Sophocles led the chorus. On the first day the bull was sacrificed. Before the competition (that which is choral, that which is danced, that which is theatrical were not yet dissociated), the suckling pig was sacrificed upon the altar. What one called dances were the procession of wine jars, the parade of armor. They danced, which is to say: they stamped their feet. Finally the trumpets sounded.¹⁷

With these straightforward, concise declarations Quignard creates a scene of spring awakening, replete with ritual sacrifice, the collective celebration of virility, and the musical accompaniment of the ‘reed-flutes’ or auloi. The description recalls Aristotle’s comparison of pubescence with blossoming, as well as likening the young man’s voice to an instrument producing uneven tones. Etymological clues further propel Quignard’s meditation. For example, the sound of the auloi is soon described as ‘the great quavering’—‘le grand chevrotement’—a word that instantly recalls the bleating of the she-goat (chèvre).¹⁸ In conjuring the Great Dionysia as the origin of tragic performance, Quignard insists on keeping the goat (tragos) in direct view.

With quick strokes, Quignard relates the eventual emergence of the tragic spectacle, wherein the audience is detached from the masked performers, while showing how the primal ritualistic context persisted across the centuries. In this regard, his intention differs little from many classicists before him who attempted to spell out tragedy’s provenance in archaic ritual. What distinguishes Quignard’s approach is a pronounced (and highly selective, if not altogether tendentious) attendance to etymological undertones and networks, to what otherwise remains latent in the cultural vocabulary. Throughout, he characterizes this attentiveness as a particularly musical sensitivity. Other scholars have noted how Quignard engages a quasi-musical approach to accumulate etymologically driven motifs. Claude Coste, for example, refers to the writer’s ‘search for the original music in words’ and the ‘obsessive presence of music’ in his books.¹⁹ Similarly, Gilles Dupuis describes ‘the harmonic secrets of Quignard’s style, the small notes that sound out in the void’.²⁰ As already suggested, this kind of investigation, this kind of exploration into the resonant vestiges of the lexicon, is undertaken by means of breaking with the narrative conveyed, by listening to the voice silenced in the word.

For Quignard, then, Attic tragedy is a historically situated musical performance that rehearses a universal, anthropological drama concerning the human subject’s relation to language and the voice, a relation that is essentially one of loss or sacrifice. That is to say, tragedy signifies what must be forfeited in order that signification may take place. Cultural gains—everything that is beneficial and useful to life—are purchased with a loss of the useless.

To designate these transformative losses, Quignard consistently employs the polyvalent term mue. Derived from the Latin mutare, la mue may denote not only the breaking of the pubescent male’s voice, but also the sloughing of a snake’s outer skin, the moulting of a bird’s feathers, or the shedding of hair. In addition to these usages, la mue evokes the notion of silencing represented by the adjective muet—from the Latin mutus, originally designating creatures that can only pronounce mu. Accordingly, the voice muted in meaning points to a trace of animal, non-verbal life in human being. What Quignard hears in la mue is the phonation that has evanesced into the semantic sign. In addition, the visual rhyme with musique and the association with the mysteries and the mustoi remain in play throughout.

On an anthropological level, the first loss or mue is birth itself, insofar as the infant is torn from the auditory, self-contained realm of fetal existence.²¹ Earlier in La Leçon de musique, Quignard makes frequent reference to embryology, which claims that the ears are the first organs to develop in the womb: ‘The human ear is pre-terrestrial and pre-atmospheric. Even before breath, before the cry which it gives forth [déclenche], two ears bathe for two or three seasons in the amniotic sac, in the womb’s resonator.’²² Situated in an airless space (‘préatmosphérique’) and removed from the ground for encountering others (‘préterrestre’), the womb resounds without engaging with any exteriority, without breaking the circuit of the burgeoning self, which, at this point, is not divorced from its nourishing envelope. Quignard stresses the musicality of this pre-natal site, which he elsewhere describes as ‘the maternal sonata’.²³ Birth into the world’s atmosphere, where the voice can be borne off away from the self, marks the end of this primal concert. It is an entrance into time itself.

The second mue occurs with the acquisition of verbal language, whereby the infant’s phonation is transformed into a system of conventional signs. This loss is closely analogous to what Jacques Lacan has identified as ‘the second death’, as an inscription into the structures and strictures of the so-called Symbolic register. According to Lacan, when the voice is redirected along the guidelines of signification, the pure pleasure in sound—useless jouissance—is rejected or at least rendered dispensable or unnecessary, emphatically insignificant. Quignard, who has occasionally expressed his indebtedness to Lacan, would no doubt corroborate the psychoanalyst’s assessment:

The coming into operation of the symbolic function in its most radical, absolute usage ends up abolishing the action of the individual so completely that by the same token it eliminates his tragic relation to the world…At the heart of the flow of events, the functioning of reason, the subject from the first move finds himself to be no more than a pawn, forced inside this system, and excluded from any truly dramatic, and consequently tragic, participation in the realization of truth.²⁴

In Lacan’s view, the subject of the signifier is hardly a master of the words he or she employs but rather nearly an automaton, limited by an external system. The subject is the one subjected and thereby eliminated from a ‘tragic relation to the world’, from a ‘tragic participation in the realization of truth’. Quignard rehearses a similar argument, yet he would postpone the ‘tragedy’—the point at which the subject emerges—to the pubescent stage, when the mue closes the subject off from the child’s life.

For it is the third loss, the mue de voix, that exclusively concerns male adolescents, that Quignard identifies as ‘the tragedy’ on the basis of Aristotle’s use of tragizein. Whereas birth robs the infant of gapless affect and language acquisition destroys the inarticulate purity of immediate phonation, the breaking of the voice separates the young man from his past: a threshold experience, coloured by the odour of puberty and leading to the imposition of sexual difference.

A child loses his voice, this is a male event. This voice—its identity, the very expression of his identity, the voice which linked this body to the mother tongue, the voice which linked this mouth, these ears, these sonorous memories to the mother’s voice, which did not appear to recognize a break [mue]—this voice is forever broken. It is lost forever.²⁵

In the section devoted to tragedy, Quignard characterizes this ‘event’ specifically as a ‘sacrifice’: ‘During the mue of the boys, in ancient Greece, it is the bleating of the goat that betrays the defining sacrifice of the species.’²⁶ The break is therefore heard as a symptom of differentiation and discrimination—of the ‘sacrifice définitoire’.

Is this, then, all that we can expect from the philologist’s attentiveness: an acknowledgement of loss, a consignment to silence? Or does something positive emerge from the evanescence of these voices?

The three privative ‘events’ eradicate some aspect of auditory experience—the uterine, the infantile, and the prepubescent. The link to the directly preceding period is for ever silenced. Yet, although the past is dispatched to the stillness of the no longer or the never again, it does not cease to resonate. Indeed, for Quignard, it resounds precisely as silence. In Quignard’s view, cultural activity and especially musical performance, including tragedy, are modes of reparation, attempts to address the series of alterations and deprivations that occur in the course of human life.²⁷ Quignard’s brand of philological reading, which engages in ceaseless interruptions, is motivated by an insistence on listening. ‘To obey the voice unto death. To listen all the way to the destination of its fate. To listen to the voice until the voice goes silent.’²⁸ Reading in this sense has little to do with receiving information and instead adheres to the evanescent voice. Creative writing proceeds according to the same desire: ‘To write is to hear the lost voice…It is to search for language in the language lost.’²⁹ Accordingly, La Leçon de musique aspires to be ‘a work of music hailing a lost voice or devising a voice that has become impossible’.³⁰ The centre point of art is the irretrievable.

Quignard’s philology may be highly unconventional and perhaps even unrecognizable as philology in the general sense of the term, yet his understanding of Greek tragedy, tied to his notion of the ‘tragedy’ of the lost voice, is not altogether remote from more straightforward exercises in philological practice. Walter Burkert, for example, also interrupts his reading of Attic tragedy by attending to the word tragōidia, which he finds troublesome. Why, Burkert asks, is ‘tragedy called τραγῳδία—a word which seems to impose the animal on the development of high human civilization, the primitive and grotesque on sublime literary creations’.³¹ Just as Quignard conjures an archaic scene of spring ritual and sacrifice, Burkert feels compelled to return ‘to the religious basis of tragedy and indeed to Greek cult in general’.³² He methodically adduces the various attempts to understand the word’s denotation, as meaning a ‘song of goats’, where dancers dressed as goats (Welcker, Wilamowitz), as referring to the goat that was the original prize in the tragedy competition (Reisch), and as commemorating a goat sacrifice at the height of the festival (Nilsson).³³ Like Quignard, he eventually posits ‘sacrifice’ as the crucial event that motivated tragic performance, alluding to Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, Sophocles’ Trachiniae, Euripides’ Medea as illustrative examples of plays that hinge on sacrificial victims. Yet, whereas Burkert regards Attic tragedy as an artistic sublimation of this ritualized violence, Quignard hears a document in loss. The human relationship to animal existence is not a problem to be resolved but rather an anthropological fact to be respected.

Quignard’s thesis on the birth of tragedy corresponds in many ways with well-known theories grounded in French Structuralism, particularly the insistence, central to the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss, that culture is continuous with or an extension of nature. His assessment, therefore, shares much with the analyses formulated by Jean-Pierre Vernant, Marcel Detienne, and others. Moreover, in construing the tragic break of the adolescent’s voice as the establishment of sexual difference, Quignard implicitly alludes to René Girard’s theory of originary violence and non-differentiation, which is subsequently quelled by the imposition of culture based on a scapegoat’s sacrifice.³⁴ However, where structuralism has generally opposed conventional ‘philological’ readings, Quignard redefines philology in such a way that it can contribute to and enhance typical structuralist interpretations. Much of this redefinition involves a profound interest in the archaic, which instigates a philology that renounces its traditionally ancillary role in the service of philosophical understanding. Here, Quignard’s explicitly ‘antiphilosophical’ intent is closely allied to Nietzsche’s critique of Euripides and Socrates.³⁵ Tellingly, Nicole Loraux’s own reading of Nietzsche’s text leads her to describe tragedy as ‘antipolitical’, alluding to the way tragic performance is at odds with civic discourse.³⁶

What is specifically philological about Quignard’s approach is that he demonstrates fundamental continuities between nature and culture by way of interruption—that is, by bringing communicative, significant, rational language to a halt in order to hear the voice silenced by the word, by tearing through the veil of culture that covers over loss in order to expose the loss itself. This kind of disruption, in Quignard’s view, lies at the core of tragic performance. In a reading of Euripides’ Bacchae, he is particularly explicit:

Dionysus, the god of the tragic sacrifice of the goat, the god who maddens the spectators with his animal masks, the god who causes spinning in dance and delirium in wine, is the god who interrupts language. He short-circuits all sublimation. He refuses the mediation of conflicts. He tears off every piece of clothing to the original nudity.³⁷

Defined emphatically as the ‘god who interrupts language’, Dionysus oversees the break that is fully staged in Euripides’ drama. ‘Omophagia: the mother devours her son raw and thus makes him return, by means of blood, back into the body of her who expelled him. This is the bloody ecstasy that founds human societies.’³⁸ Although clearly discontent with civilization, Quignard’s reading of the Bacchae significantly qualifies uterine existence, which he previously described with some perverse nostalgia as ‘the maternal sonata’. Retrospectively, the breaks that humanity suffers may be felt to deprive us of some past pleasure, but we should be relieved that the irretrievable remains so. The loss of the voice preserves us in time and saves our lives from violent dissolution, until the final break, the ultimate mue, which is death itself.

Aristotle dies. But it is the realist, the zoologist who dies. Meticulously [minutieusement] he abandons the day, the odor, the voice, himself. Even the broken voice [la voix muée], he leaves behind. The broken voice breaks [mue] into something less hoarse and less unequal. The last cloak he leaves behind is life.³⁹

In the end, Quignard’s idiosyncratic philology, his auditory attention to the minutiae of language broken off from language, is nothing other than the tragedy of tragedy.