In Search Of The Origin

Pascal Quignard, laureate of several grand prizes for literature in France, is one of the brightest contemporary French writers. He has published about sixty books of which three has been adapted into movies, and one into a play. His works are characterized by the short phrases and a wide range of fields. As a writer, Quignard is also well known as a musician. He has presided the International Festival of Baroque Music and Play, and was one of the persons in charge of the National Concert from1990to1993.Until now, the French academic world have applied lots of researches on his works which, because of the erudition of the writer, are diversified in the direction, and among which we see the writing style, etymology, linguistics, music, mythology, philosophy, psychoanalysis and traditional oriental culture, etc.. As regards the form of these researches, it varies from journal articles to collected works, from Master’s and doctoral thesis to monographs, from interviews to Academic conferences. Besides, several critics think that Quignard is worth the Nobel Prize in Literature. While in China, we have translated only six of his books and the serious researches are just at the beginning. However, there are too many things to explore in this writer’s works.Despite of an appearance of pell-mell, almost all the researches go towards the word origin. And Quignard says several times that he hopes to be read in1640. In his works, this year is often used as the time when the story takes place. It’s not to return to the past that he is so fascinated by1640, but to search a point through the lost time. This point is exactly the origin. Quignard also says that it’s for the origin that he writes. All of these constitute the basis of this paper of which the purpose is to study as the most accurately and synthetically as possible the motivation to write of Quignard.The body of the paper is divided into three chapters, plus an introduction and a conclusion. The study is based on the analysis of the quignardien texts and the application of interdisciplinary knowledge.The first chapter interprets the meaning of1640which is not just a historical year but includes two meanings. The first one is the original meaning, the past, which is explained successively in the individual and collective aspects. The former studies the source of Quignard’s creation by his individual experience, and the latter analyzes the reason of the passion for1640in the historical angle. The second one is the extended meaning of which the keyword is the once which is identified by being compared with the past. Then, four mythes are analyzed to foreshadow especially the third chapter.In the second chapter, the work to define the origin is accomplished by two steps by passing from the restricted meaning to the broader meaning. Firstly, everyone has his own origin, the fetal state of which we don’t remember anything, but it is undeniably that this is the beginning of life when we’ve already had the perception of the outside world. Secondly, to all of us, we have a common origin where the humankind has the same habits as those of the animal, and where he is the homo before sapiens. Besides, the quignardien heaven is interpreted in detail.The last chapter is devoted to the study of the main methods that the writer uses to find the origin. There are three, including the loss of the parole, the loss of the sight and the hearing which will not be lost, in an order that the method is better and better to approach the origin. The first and the third ones are described more concretely, as they concern the literature and the music which are the two arts that Quiganrd loves the most, and at the end of this chapter, a comparison between them explains why the writer chose the literature as the primary means of creation, instead of music which is closer to the origin.On the basis of these studies, the research indicates that the origin is the motivation to write of Quignard, and the writer creates everything that he can to attend the point that is never attainable. It seems that this is a work destined to failure, but it is worth it, because this is a manifestation of the man’s free will, his constant spirit and his thirst for the knowledge of the place where he comes from.