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The Answer to Lord Chandos
Imposible liberarse de la invasión de la lengua, esa materia laboriosamente aprehendida desde la infancia. Imposible comulgar con las cosas, porque las cosas no son sino las palabras con las que aprendimos a designarlas, cuando todavía no tenían un nombre. Se comulga con la lengua que nombra las cosas. Y solo con la lengua escrita, objetivada como un silencio nuevo, se alcanza a entrever, como un adiós o un éxtasis, el resplandor de lo que ya hemos visto.
Un Francis Bacon escrito por Pascal Quignard reivindica en una carta imaginaria la escritura, y no el silencio al que se entregó Lord Chandos al no poder decir cada cosa-en-sí. La escritura como contemplación estremecida y coalescencia. Bendita llave ensangrentada de la escritura, que abre la puerta más allá del abismo y de la muerte, como la llave de un cuento de Charles Perrault. Llave que no se seca jamás
Pascal Quignard borda su carta desde la fisura entre el deseo y lo real, herida que se reabre, desgarramiento. El hilo con el que borda une a dos exiliados del mundo, Emily Brontë y Georg Händel, dos confinados por propia voluntad. Retirados para revivir, para recuperar el asombro primordial con la escritura como tercera mano. No nos han sido dadas dos manos sino tres. Y es la tercera la que palpa la noche, del otro lado de la desesperación y la impotencia. Del otro lado no hay silencio. Hay sustancia sonora y animal, gritos y lágrimas de recién nacido.
Un Francis Bacon escrito por Pascal Quignard reivindica en una carta imaginaria la escritura, y no el silencio al que se entregó Lord Chandos al no poder decir cada cosa-en-sí. La escritura como contemplación estremecida y coalescencia. Bendita llave ensangrentada de la escritura, que abre la puerta más allá del abismo y de la muerte, como la llave de un cuento de Charles Perrault. Llave que no se seca jamás
Pascal Quignard borda su carta desde la fisura entre el deseo y lo real, herida que se reabre, desgarramiento. El hilo con el que borda une a dos exiliados del mundo, Emily Brontë y Georg Händel, dos confinados por propia voluntad. Retirados para revivir, para recuperar el asombro primordial con la escritura como tercera mano. No nos han sido dadas dos manos sino tres. Y es la tercera la que palpa la noche, del otro lado de la desesperación y la impotencia. Del otro lado no hay silencio. Hay sustancia sonora y animal, gritos y lágrimas de recién nacido.
- GenresFrance
49 pages, Paperback
Published May 21, 2024
About the author
Pascal Quignard
158 books317 followersRomancier, poète et essayiste, Pascal Quignard est né en 1948. Après des études de philosophie, il entre aux Éditions Gallimard où il occupe les fonctions successives de lecteur, membre du comité de lecture et secrétaire général pour le développement éditorial. Il enseigne ensuite à l’Université de Vincennes et à l’École Pratique des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. Il a fondé le festival d’opéra et de théâtre baroque de Versailles, qu’il dirige de 1990 à 1994. Par la suite, il démissionne de toutes ses fonctions pour se consacrer à son travail d’écrivain. L’essentiel de son oeuvre est disponible aux Éditions Gallimard, en collection blanche et en Folio.
===
Pascal Quignard is a French writer born in Verneuil-sur-Avre, Eure. In 2002 his novel Les Ombres errantes won the Prix Goncourt, France's top literary prize. Terrasse à Rome (Terrasse in Rome), received the French Academy prize in 2000, and Carus was awarded the "Prix des Critiques" in 1980.
One of Quignard's most famous works is the eighty-four "Little Treatises", first published in 1991 by Maeght. His most popular book is probably Tous les matins du monde (All the Mornings in the World), about 17th-century viola de gamba player Marin Marais and his teacher, Sainte-Colombe, which was adapted for the screen in 1991, by director Alain Corneau. Quignard wrote the screenplay of the film, in collaboration with Corneau. Tous les matins du monde, starring Jean-Pierre Marielle, Gérard Depardieu and son Guillaume Depardieu, was a tremendous success in France and sold 2 million tickets in the first year, and was subsequently distributed in 31 countries. The soundtrack was certified platinum (500,000 copies) and made musician Jordi Savall an international star.
The film was released in 1992 in the US.
Quignard has also translated works from the Latin (Albucius, Porcius Latro), Chinese (Kong-souen Long), and Greek (Lycophron) languages.
===
Pascal Quignard is a French writer born in Verneuil-sur-Avre, Eure. In 2002 his novel Les Ombres errantes won the Prix Goncourt, France's top literary prize. Terrasse à Rome (Terrasse in Rome), received the French Academy prize in 2000, and Carus was awarded the "Prix des Critiques" in 1980.
One of Quignard's most famous works is the eighty-four "Little Treatises", first published in 1991 by Maeght. His most popular book is probably Tous les matins du monde (All the Mornings in the World), about 17th-century viola de gamba player Marin Marais and his teacher, Sainte-Colombe, which was adapted for the screen in 1991, by director Alain Corneau. Quignard wrote the screenplay of the film, in collaboration with Corneau. Tous les matins du monde, starring Jean-Pierre Marielle, Gérard Depardieu and son Guillaume Depardieu, was a tremendous success in France and sold 2 million tickets in the first year, and was subsequently distributed in 31 countries. The soundtrack was certified platinum (500,000 copies) and made musician Jordi Savall an international star.
The film was released in 1992 in the US.
Quignard has also translated works from the Latin (Albucius, Porcius Latro), Chinese (Kong-souen Long), and Greek (Lycophron) languages.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
May 23, 2025
You need not pick apart the soul in a spirit of autopsy when it is simply a breath borrowed from the air that birth sets free.
I’m torn: unsure whether this was a galvanizing experience or a wayward parlor game for the literary type? I’ll go with a hybrid as the liminal is all the rage. This is a layered treat which compels the reader to consider Hofmannsthal and the late renaissance dancing on the head of a pin. However cumbersome it might prove, having prerequisites is always an amusing order and in the case the fictitious Letter penned by Lord Chandos which is plea that reality is excessive, and one must remain silent, see The Lord Chandos Letter and Other Writings for the lavish lamentation.
The introduction by Jean-Luc Nancy is especially bold. He finds a conversation in the artifice. The utility of language is debated, and we are all the richer for the "exchange" or whatever one deigns it. I like how the tone of each piece lends to mental inventory, a shorthand to establish links and proximity. This culminates naturally in an etymology of the word coalescence. . . and a wicked correlation with the legend of Bluebeard.
I’m torn: unsure whether this was a galvanizing experience or a wayward parlor game for the literary type? I’ll go with a hybrid as the liminal is all the rage. This is a layered treat which compels the reader to consider Hofmannsthal and the late renaissance dancing on the head of a pin. However cumbersome it might prove, having prerequisites is always an amusing order and in the case the fictitious Letter penned by Lord Chandos which is plea that reality is excessive, and one must remain silent, see The Lord Chandos Letter and Other Writings for the lavish lamentation.
The introduction by Jean-Luc Nancy is especially bold. He finds a conversation in the artifice. The utility of language is debated, and we are all the richer for the "exchange" or whatever one deigns it. I like how the tone of each piece lends to mental inventory, a shorthand to establish links and proximity. This culminates naturally in an etymology of the word coalescence. . . and a wicked correlation with the legend of Bluebeard.
Read
April 4, 2025A Very Late Romantic Book on Silence
This little book needs a reference key and a summary. After that, some critical observations.
A chronology
1626 Francis Bacon, author of the Essays, Novum Organum, and New Atlantis, dies.
1902 Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874-1929) wries "A Letter" written by the fictional Lord Chandos to Francis Bacon, dated August 22, 1603.
2020 Pascal Quignard writes The Answer to Lord Chandos. This little essay, only fifty small pages, is said to be the work of forty years. It contains four parts. The third is "Bacon to Chandos," supposedly written by Francis Bacon on April 23, 1605.
2021 April: Jean-Luc Nancy writes "Literature versus Literature," a preface to Quignard's book.
2023 Nancy dies.
2024 Wakefield Press publishes an English translation.
The form of the book
To read this, you need to read Hofmannsthal's letter first. It's online. One of many commentaries about it is here.
Quignard's little booklet is actually complex. The first part, five pages long, is "Emily in the Shadow of the St. Gudula Bell Tower," about Emily Brontë's desire to be left alone. (It incorporates an even shorter story, about Sakyamuni leaving his family and starting his life of meditation and teaching.)
The second part is "George Handel in Hanover Square," about Handel's rooms and his private life. The first person pronoun appears, and a moment later we're not in the 18th c. (with Handel) or the 19th (with Emily Brontë) but in Quignard's present—but then the first person disappears and the inventory of Handel's rooms continues, up to a mention of one of Handel's harpsichords, which "dates back to the Chandos who was Lord Bacon's friend." The final paragraphs, one page long, are about Hofmannsthal's "terrible nervous breakdown that began in the month of November 1899, and his Lord Chandos letter, "which became my Handel."
The third part is Bacon's answer to Chandos. There's a stylistic lapse here that I can't explain: Hofmannsthal is eloquent and often persuasive in his ventriloquizing of an early 17th century writer. Quignard is fairly persuasive in his evocation of 19th century prose when he describes Emily Brontë, and of the 18th century ambience of Handel's rooms. But in this third and central part he almost entirely abandons style in favor of content. In the last five pages he writes as a French poststructuralist, informed not only by Freud but also Lacan, and full of images that suggest Bachelard, Deleuze, Benveniste, and a number of others. I don't know how to read this, or even if it should be read.
The fourth part is a series of aphorisms attributed to La Rochefoucauld on sexual experience as "the key that never dries interpolated with alchemical images of birth and sexuality, and a summary of Bluebeard's Castle.
Critical thoughts
Philosophically, Quignard's answer to Hofmannsthal appears very straightforward: where Hofmannsthal claimed language and reason fails, Quignard defends it everywhere. And yet the two texts are curiously close. Hofmannsthal's fin-de-siècle and early modernist mistrust of language is colored with late romantic imagery, and full of the ecstatic re-enchantment of everyday life that can be found in contemporaneous sources from Rilke to Trakl and even Joyce's "The Dead." Weirdly, Quignard draws on the same stock of images—is that an effect of trying to stay in the 17th century?—even though he insists that the "silences" of numinous experiences are actually full of words, made by words. His central argument is that "the states prior to language" (birth, the night, epiphanies of ordinary life, silences in sex) "are not silent states." Silence "is what the language we have learned invents as its opposite."
In his preface, Nancy poses the two letters as a conversation within literature, separated by a century but belonging to a longer history in which literature talks to itself, within itself, about reality. The two authors' senses of silence (Hofmannsthal: the abyss into which language sinks; Quignard: the effect of language thinking about its absence) "have a certain tonniuity," and perhaps the deepest source of that correspondence is that both writers avoid "sacred language as much as the conceptual subsumption of language."
Nancy's pages are insightful, as always, but also too easy, because they bypass the strange structure of Quignard's little book, the way the author suddenly emerges, as if he's been holding his breath underwater, and then sinks down again, and the way he asks us to move between several nearly unrelated episodes, chained only by references to solitary rooms and harpsichords.
In particular, there's an odd contrast between the vociferous, even harsh, arguments in the answer to Chandos (as Nancy notes, it's the answer, not an answer), and the narrators of the other three sections, who are adrift in history like Kluge, Sebald, or Bonnefoy. Silence and night are places where spoken language ceases and the inner richness both authors love can flourish, but why should those be connected to a feeling of being unmoored from history?
That's my principal question, and my main complaint is that these are, in the end, both late romantic texts. Hofmannsthal's is a product of its time: he was responding to "the wear and tear of a certain grandiloquence and literary profusion of the 19th century" as Nancy puts it. Quignard is much closer to us: he swims in poststructural waters, and his defense of language uses some of Kristeva's, or even Bataille's, ferocious sensualism. So why does it all have to sound so nostalgic, so pale, so sweetly lost? He makes me want piss into a wall socket. (Or just go back and read Bacon.)
This little book needs a reference key and a summary. After that, some critical observations.
A chronology
1626 Francis Bacon, author of the Essays, Novum Organum, and New Atlantis, dies.
1902 Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874-1929) wries "A Letter" written by the fictional Lord Chandos to Francis Bacon, dated August 22, 1603.
2020 Pascal Quignard writes The Answer to Lord Chandos. This little essay, only fifty small pages, is said to be the work of forty years. It contains four parts. The third is "Bacon to Chandos," supposedly written by Francis Bacon on April 23, 1605.
2021 April: Jean-Luc Nancy writes "Literature versus Literature," a preface to Quignard's book.
2023 Nancy dies.
2024 Wakefield Press publishes an English translation.
The form of the book
To read this, you need to read Hofmannsthal's letter first. It's online. One of many commentaries about it is here.
Quignard's little booklet is actually complex. The first part, five pages long, is "Emily in the Shadow of the St. Gudula Bell Tower," about Emily Brontë's desire to be left alone. (It incorporates an even shorter story, about Sakyamuni leaving his family and starting his life of meditation and teaching.)
The second part is "George Handel in Hanover Square," about Handel's rooms and his private life. The first person pronoun appears, and a moment later we're not in the 18th c. (with Handel) or the 19th (with Emily Brontë) but in Quignard's present—but then the first person disappears and the inventory of Handel's rooms continues, up to a mention of one of Handel's harpsichords, which "dates back to the Chandos who was Lord Bacon's friend." The final paragraphs, one page long, are about Hofmannsthal's "terrible nervous breakdown that began in the month of November 1899, and his Lord Chandos letter, "which became my Handel."
The third part is Bacon's answer to Chandos. There's a stylistic lapse here that I can't explain: Hofmannsthal is eloquent and often persuasive in his ventriloquizing of an early 17th century writer. Quignard is fairly persuasive in his evocation of 19th century prose when he describes Emily Brontë, and of the 18th century ambience of Handel's rooms. But in this third and central part he almost entirely abandons style in favor of content. In the last five pages he writes as a French poststructuralist, informed not only by Freud but also Lacan, and full of images that suggest Bachelard, Deleuze, Benveniste, and a number of others. I don't know how to read this, or even if it should be read.
The fourth part is a series of aphorisms attributed to La Rochefoucauld on sexual experience as "the key that never dries interpolated with alchemical images of birth and sexuality, and a summary of Bluebeard's Castle.
Critical thoughts
Philosophically, Quignard's answer to Hofmannsthal appears very straightforward: where Hofmannsthal claimed language and reason fails, Quignard defends it everywhere. And yet the two texts are curiously close. Hofmannsthal's fin-de-siècle and early modernist mistrust of language is colored with late romantic imagery, and full of the ecstatic re-enchantment of everyday life that can be found in contemporaneous sources from Rilke to Trakl and even Joyce's "The Dead." Weirdly, Quignard draws on the same stock of images—is that an effect of trying to stay in the 17th century?—even though he insists that the "silences" of numinous experiences are actually full of words, made by words. His central argument is that "the states prior to language" (birth, the night, epiphanies of ordinary life, silences in sex) "are not silent states." Silence "is what the language we have learned invents as its opposite."
In his preface, Nancy poses the two letters as a conversation within literature, separated by a century but belonging to a longer history in which literature talks to itself, within itself, about reality. The two authors' senses of silence (Hofmannsthal: the abyss into which language sinks; Quignard: the effect of language thinking about its absence) "have a certain tonniuity," and perhaps the deepest source of that correspondence is that both writers avoid "sacred language as much as the conceptual subsumption of language."
Nancy's pages are insightful, as always, but also too easy, because they bypass the strange structure of Quignard's little book, the way the author suddenly emerges, as if he's been holding his breath underwater, and then sinks down again, and the way he asks us to move between several nearly unrelated episodes, chained only by references to solitary rooms and harpsichords.
In particular, there's an odd contrast between the vociferous, even harsh, arguments in the answer to Chandos (as Nancy notes, it's the answer, not an answer), and the narrators of the other three sections, who are adrift in history like Kluge, Sebald, or Bonnefoy. Silence and night are places where spoken language ceases and the inner richness both authors love can flourish, but why should those be connected to a feeling of being unmoored from history?
That's my principal question, and my main complaint is that these are, in the end, both late romantic texts. Hofmannsthal's is a product of its time: he was responding to "the wear and tear of a certain grandiloquence and literary profusion of the 19th century" as Nancy puts it. Quignard is much closer to us: he swims in poststructural waters, and his defense of language uses some of Kristeva's, or even Bataille's, ferocious sensualism. So why does it all have to sound so nostalgic, so pale, so sweetly lost? He makes me want piss into a wall socket. (Or just go back and read Bacon.)
January 17, 2026
4 stars
This slight volume as a response to Hugo von Hofmannsthal's influential 1902 short story "Letter from Lord Chandos to Lord Bacon" is a moving defense of the vital importance of language and poetry that arises from decades of Quinard's personal contemplation of the original. Lord Chandos of Hofmannsthal's story is a fictional young poet who writes to his friend Francis Bacon to confess that he has lost all faith in literature and intends to withdraw from the world. Reading the original story before reading this treatise will enhance the experience.
A longer review can be found here: https://roughghosts.com/2026/01/16/yo...
This slight volume as a response to Hugo von Hofmannsthal's influential 1902 short story "Letter from Lord Chandos to Lord Bacon" is a moving defense of the vital importance of language and poetry that arises from decades of Quinard's personal contemplation of the original. Lord Chandos of Hofmannsthal's story is a fictional young poet who writes to his friend Francis Bacon to confess that he has lost all faith in literature and intends to withdraw from the world. Reading the original story before reading this treatise will enhance the experience.
A longer review can be found here: https://roughghosts.com/2026/01/16/yo...
April 11, 2025
Gorgeous and inexplicable. As it is a cry against silence, I find it rather funny that I just kind find the words to describe this little volume
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews