Le lecteur comme copiste et naufragé. Une lecture presque romanesque des “Petits traités”
Abstract
The reader of Pascal Quignard’s work is, we might say, robbed of the faculty of interpretation and reduced to the state of copyist, which is in fact the state that Pascal Quignard also attributes to the author, since it goes hand in hand with a certain desire for all-inclusiveness. This encyclopaedic aspect is boundless and embarks the reader on a sort of odyssey which leads to another figure the writer also associates with the reader, that of the shipwreck victim. Therefore, the act of reading is not related to the notions of invention or originality, although the question of origin repeatedly crops up. The act of reading is seen in its most trivial, sensorial and material form, as a gesture and posture of abandonment. In Petits traités, the “romantic” perspective is connected with the author’s fondness for the sordidissima.