Listening to Silence in Pascal Quignard's Vie secrète

Contre la représentation univoque du rapport au silence comme simple absence de bruit (qui n'en est que l'aspect élémentaire), il faut tenter d'en comprendre la nature complexe.10 At first, silence is a way of imposing order on potentially endless chatter, and the narrator indicates having recourse to a "taciturnité systématique" in order to replace meaningless conversation between him and Némie with something authentic, which is to be had in silence (71). [...]the process of establishing silence is correlated to the process of cultivating authentic human relationships. 11 This is not to say that Quignard rejects all possibility of communication through language or that he reverts to quietism. Hearing musical works in silence allows one to make the overly familiar unfamiliar once more, to really hear the music. [...]the narrator imagines silent concerts of familiar classical works: If perceivers are actually able to recognize that a text can compose itself, they participate in the composition of the work, which is the simultaneous creation and perception of the work, a nearly impossible scenario to conceive and yet one that is the logical end of a process whereby writer and perceiver become indistinct from each other and from the act of creation. Since we are now on the borders of the logically impossible, and thus of the ineffable, it is here that Quignard's own work must tend toward silence, and it is significant that, in an autobiographical piece, Quignard chose to sum up his approach to writing by quoting a critic who asserts, "La puissance du style de Quignard, qui est grande, dérive de son désir sincère, taraudant, on dirait presque douloureux, d'ouïr l'inaudible, de savoir ce qui s'est tu ou crié avant la naissance, de s'abolir dans une sorte d'aphasie contemplative et areligieuse. "18 Truly solitary creation is possible in principle, but a completely solitary reading experience is not, since reading always implies entering into dialogue with words written by another. [...]we arrive at yet another potential point of connection between an amorous relationship and a relationship with a book, both of which are experienced at their most intense level in silence, and both of which imply an erotic charge which leads to a creative act.