This thesis investigates the particular conception of time developed by Pascal Quignard in his series Dernier Royaume and his novel Les escaliers de Chambord. We argue that this conception of time, which Quignard refers to as Le Jadis, operates through an anachronistic method based on a semiotic apparatus of waste, or rejects. The argument is presented in three different chapters. The first chapter uses the work of Jacques Rancière and Georges Didi-Huberman to show the way in which the concept of anachronism embraces a temporality that blurs the lines between past, present, and future and creates openings to summon and redeem forgotten relics of the past. The second chapter analyzes this open relation to time in Dernier Royaume and Les escaliers de Chambord. In these works, Quignard's notion of Le Jadis seeks specifically to awaken a vertiginously distant conception of past that is incomplete, non-linear, and perpetually becoming. The last chapter analyzes the manner in which Le Jadis can reappear as an active force through the mediation of waste, which constitutes a specific class of signs. The work of Quignard is one of montage and remontage--fragment by fragment, scrap by scrap--of the pieces of memory, which he strives to reopen and release from the linear entrapment of chronological time to which they have been relegated.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:pdx.edu/oai:pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu:open_access_etds-4047 |
| Date | 06 July 2016 |
| Creators | Lussier, Etienne |
| Publisher | PDXScholar |
| Source Sets | Portland State University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | Dissertations and Theses |
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