The question of time occupies a central place in the sequel to “The Last Kingdom”.
Verses of poetry that blossom between the blocks of prose, memories that are intrusive, narrated historical facts (with a marked preference for the 17th century), pages of almost cryptic essays… happy hour, Twelfth volume of his “Last Kingdom” series, disturbing because of its disjointed appearance, but also because of the difficulty and ambiguity of the text (at times)“The dead interval is man’s only abode”) and the immensity of a knowledge that seems intimidating. To best navigate between these pages, we must see Pascal Quignard as an author of memory who mobilizes it in all its intimacy and intellectuality and makes his writings complex and referential. And the question of time, the central theme of the book, takes part in this formal experiment that the author articulates around memory.
The porosity of genres in his work is understood through the desire to reproduce the movement of thought; To achieve this, it relies on the association of ideas, thus leading to heterogeneity (evidenced by the sequence of the memory of the last moments of Emmanuelle Bernheim with a sharp and subjective criticism of the month of November, the month of the dead). This return movement is a characteristic element of the writer, linked to his vision of memory: this circularity, like an undertow, is a quality that he gives to time Happy hourby rejecting the linearity usually attributed to it.
Water is a key element of his work, Happy hour is no exception. When Quignard goes through his memories with Emmanuèle Bernheim, a seascape almost always appears on the pages; and his memories become paintings, no doubt inspired by the vignettes from the Duke of Berry’s Book of Hours, which he read in his grandmother’s house when he was younger: “She actually slipped into the sea. She passionately entered the icy and always slightly windy waters of the crowded and vast Atlantic. As if water were air.”
This theme of water, the sea, touches the author deeper than it seems: because when he writes that «[le] The past always returns in the form of strange waves that are never the same., it is also his writing gesture that he talks about. In the text, the sea and the water are an image of memory, of “pure surf”, which intersperses each page with themes (death), historical figures (La Rochefoucauld) and details of memories (figs and grapes) that come and go again , which hardly remain in the reader’s memory longer than the foam in the sand and, through this endless recurrence of motifs, lead him into the vast and inscrutable memory of Quignard.
