The Poetics of P. Quignard’s Tale ‘Triomphe du temps’

Abstract

This article analyzes the poetics of the tale Triumph of Time (Triomphe du temps, 2006) by modern French writer Pascal Quignard. He tends to hybridize genres, to search for new forms of expression and reconstruct traditions, like many writers at the turn of the 20th–21st centuries. The tale Triumph of Time has features of a hybrid genre, it combines the features of an essay and a parable and differs from a literary tale typical for the modern literary process. The genre of this tale is experimental for the writer. It was written for a theatrical performance of actress Marie Vialle. The tale does not contain the author’s assessment of the epoch, the characters are archetypical (husband, wife, child, etc.), the time of events is not accurately determined, the space is metaphysical, the philosophical subtext and the author’s intention become the main thing. The key theme of the text is death; the images of water and a boat are associated with it. The child, who Quignard compares with an old man, becomes a link between the living world and the dead world. In the third and fourth tales, the living world turns into Limbo, a borderline space where the dead are wandering. The author builds an internal dialogue between the past and the present, the personal and the universal, consciousness and the unconscious through the form of a verbal tale. Various motifs can be distinguished in the text: mythological, biblical, folklore, philosophical. Such features as autobiographicity, allegoricality, ambiguity, symbolization, and generalization give reason to believe that the tale Triumph of Time is a variant of the genre, a philosophical essay with elements of a parable.