Voix d’eau : Pascal Quignard et la «voix perdue» des lais bretons

Abstract

The links that Pascal Quignard’s work maintains with medieval literature are both discrete and numerous, in a writing that is shaped throughout by the confrontation with multiple aesthetic and literary universes. Developed by the contemporary writer, the concept of “past”, in the Lacanian sense, nevertheless focuses attention on the memory that resonates in particular with the lost Middle Ages of fairy tales and the medieval conception of literary memory. The present article proposes to underscore this resonance by comparing and contrasting two narratives based on a largely similar plotline: Quignard’s “The Lost Voice” and the anonymous lai Tydorel. This comparative reading offers a mirror reflection of the inaccessibility of the source, represented in both texts by aquatic places/characters. In the time before language, this fantasized origin is, in the two texts, at the heart of a poetics of detour that aims to emphasize, through literary language, the most troubled waters of the amorous encounter.