The Hatred of Music

TRANSLATORS’ AFTERWORD

In 1994, Pascal Quignard, who had just begun to enjoy considerable popular success as a novelist after having previously published numerous quite esoteric essays and fragmentary texts, abruptly decided to renounce all of his professional activities: he stepped down as secretary general of literature at the illustrious Gallimard publishing house; he canceled the annual International Festival of Baroque Opera and Theater at Versailles that he had founded only four years earlier under the aegis of François Mitterrand; he completely distanced himself from the Concert des nations, which he had directed with Jordi Savall since 1990. He would no longer decide which authors to publish; he would no longer choose which songs to play, which forgotten masterpieces to unearth. He would do nothing but write. The Hatred of Music, published two years later, is a book that resulted from this rupture, but the title must not be misinterpreted. Quignard hints at the genealogy of the project in the following succinct formulation: “The expression Hatred of Music is meant to convey to what point music can become an object of hatred to someone who once adored it beyond measure.”¹ The ten treatises that make up the book do not add up to an outright rejection of music. Instead, through an impressive wealth of references, the author presents an indictment of its inherent dangers that is all the more relevant given the fact that never before in history has music enjoyed such a ubiquitous presence in daily life. “Suddenly infinitely amplified by the invention of electricity and the multiplication of its technology,” he writes, “it has become incessant, aggressing night and day, in the commercial streets of city centers, in shopping centers, in arcades, in department stores, in bookstores, in lobbies of foreign banks where one goes to withdraw money, even in swimming pools, even at the beach, in private apartments, in restaurants, in taxis, in the metro, in airports.”² Yet the omnipresence of music might not have troubled our existence to the extent that it does had it not also been for its latent powers of mesmerization and domestication. Music, so Quignard argues, unconsciously binds us to the social group, makes us dependent upon it, and thus embodies the same forces of which he had just sought to make himself independent. It represents the greatest threat to the successful continuation of his new anachoretic existence, dedicated exclusively to the solitude of writing.

In a text contemporaneous with The Hatred of Music, Quignard situates his work in a tradition he labels speculative rhetoric. “I call speculative rhetoric,” Quignard writes in the opening of this text, “the scholarly antiphilosophical tradition that traverses all of Western history since the invention of philosophy.”³ To state things somewhat too simply, this tradition attempts neither to resolve language’s violent oppositions into any sort of ideal, as speculative idealism had sought to do, nor to go toward things themselves, through the phenomenological process known as epoché, but declares rather that before the ideal can be speculated, before things themselves exist, they are already caught up in a linguistic mesh. Every statement that seeks to go beyond language is itself principally nothing but language. Instead of trying to undo the bonds of logos—archaically meaning “gathering, collection”—instead of analyzing, or “unloosening,” in the manner of philosophers, speculative rhetoric seeks to play with these bonds, to shift them around, and even to create new ones. Rhetoric, for Quignard, is not primarily a stylistic or argumentative art. It is rather the exploration of our inherent linguistic condition. “Language is in itself the investigation.”⁴ This does not mean, however, that Quignard’s interest lies in language alone. Time and again in his writings he returns to what might be called paralinguistic states, in which the mouth opens to produce nothing but silence, or to emit sounds with no immediately apparent meaning or whose meaning has been replaced by rapture. Music is one of these states.

If an author’s work is by definition hopelessly entangled in language, one might be justified in wondering whether a translation into another language is worthwhile, or even possible. If language itself is the investigation, how does one transpose this investigation from one language to another, in this specific case from French to English? The question becomes perhaps even more troubling when one considers the fact that it is rather debatable whether The Hatred of Music is indeed a work written entirely in French. “French does not derive from Latin,” Quignard writes in “Languages and Death,” and then affirms: “It simply is Latin.”⁵ This appears to be true in particular when it comes to the way he himself makes use of his native tongue. Even if one leaves aside the frequent occasions when classical citations are given in the original, one is often tempted to say that Quignard’s prose is as much Latin, or even Greek, as it is French, as if these languages were lurking just beneath the linguistic surface. In the same essay he suggests that, through erosion and degradation, a living language might become incapable of properly serving our needs. It might consequently little by little lead us “to the use of the dead languages from which it came in order to express what it no longer feels.”⁶ Thus the death of a language does not lead to its decay. On the contrary, death can reinvigorate it and allow it to reacquire a certain sharpness and purity of expression that our everyday parlance lacks.

Quignard’s own use of dead languages is not limited to quotations and untranslatable philosophical terms: at times it permeates every aspect of his writing, from his frequent use of paleologisms to a more or less perceptible syntactic distortion. Elucidating the precise nature of this relationship would be a task for classicists, which we unfortunately are not. Suffice it to say that Quignard’s speculative rhetoric constantly strives to make language an endeavor of disorientation. For language itself, any language, is always already a metaphora—a word that, as Quignard likes to remind us, is today to be found on the sides of moving vans in Greece — a translation, literally a transference from one place to another: from the pure sounds produced by the vocal cords, or the mere marks traced in the dirt or on paper, to their interpretation as signs of something else.

Language — not least of all French, “this language more weighed down than others by the history that carries it”⁷—is also always a translation of itself and of its former selves, making it impossible to speak without repeating what has already been said. Quignard’s nostalgia for the lost expressivity of dead languages could be read as the most fundamental condition of translation, which is to say the awareness of another language whose absence defines our own. What he evokes is a life in translation that was already well known in ancient Rome, where Latin was never the only language, but merely the language of daily life, as opposed to Greek, which to the Romans was already half-dead. Similarly, in Quignard’s essays, the past always insists on its presence. His texts are an endless conversation with voices that have long since been silenced, voices that nevertheless still echo, not only in his own work but in literature as a whole. Montaigne, the Nestor of the French essay — whose work is similarly interspersed with classical citations and for whom Latin was anything but a dead language — insists that, as writers, “we do nothing but comment upon one another.” Quignard gives voice to a more violent and perhaps frustrated version of this sentiment when he speaks of the “hatred of what is original.”⁸ There is nothing to be gained from trying to be original, he notes: intimacy and sincerity of thought can be achieved only by reinterpreting and commenting upon previous texts, just as dead languages alone can express feelings that have been buried deep beneath the communicative sediments of our native tongue.

Quignard’s various techniques of disorientation — linguistic and otherwise — give his prose a sort of refined coarseness, out of tune with the present, which we have tried to retain in English. He denounces what he sees as a narcissistic and anxious tendency in modernity, which compels the author to break with all precedent in an act of constant reinvention that disregards the strength that literature has been able to draw from millennia of “memories, shadows, behaviors, legends, transgressions, masks.”⁹ And yet it would be inaccurate to simply describe his style as classicizing or antimodern; more than anything it comes across as atemporal, an immersion in a present past. This dive into the waters of the history of thought, of languages, is vertiginous, and not only for the author. Quignard writes of readers: “Those who read run the risk of losing the little control they have of themselves. They let themselves become totally subjugated as they read, almost to the point of losing their identity, at the risk of disappearing. They lend their soul and body.”¹⁰ The Song of the Sirens is as much a literary experience as it is a musical one. The reader, entranced like the mythical Butes of the Argo, abandons his ship and crew for the half-bird/half-maidens. “Butes, alone, jumped,” Quignard writes in a book dedicated to the figure.¹¹ To Orpheus’s song, which maintains the social bond amid Jason’s sailors, Butes prefers the ambiguous isolation of a more original music, that of the womb. We once found ourselves in complete isolation, in our mother’s belly, in which we heard her muffled voice sing. This was before we knew music, before we knew language, before we could tell the difference between the two. We, alone, were fascinated by her vocal presence. Music enthralls. This is Quignard’s stern warning in The Hatred of Music. But readers beware, for the warning comes in the guise of literature, a less pernicious form of expression to be sure, but nevertheless one capable of pulling us down into its depths like a maelstrom as soon as we jump ship.