Listening to music: Danièle Sallenave and Pascal Quignard

Abstract

Les Portes de Gubbio (1980) and Villa Amalia (2006) are two novels which highlight the phenomenology of music, an auditory experience that is both regressive and ecstatic. These two novels each contain a small treatise on the nature of this musical experience based on the resonating body. First, we will contrast Sallenave’s and Quignard’s phenomenologies of musical listening. Second,  building on various analyses by Claude Lévi- Strauss, Guy Rosolato, Marie-Louise Mallet and Jean-Luc Nancy, we will examine the emotions triggered by music as well as the drive to write that these emotions provoke. In conclusion, we will examine the articulation between melomania and melophobia in Performances de ténèbres (2017), an essay by Pascal Quignard.