Gaius Albucius Silus and Pascal Quignard

John T. Quinn (Hope College)

Throughout his distinguished literary career, Pascal Quignard has been intensely engaged with the ancient world, even if this engagement has often escaped the notice of classicists.  Quignard seems especially drawn to the margins of the world we love -- literally on the fringes in the Herodotean Scythia evoked in the prose poem Sarx (1997), but also on the intellectual fringes of antiquity, as witnessed by his translation of Lycophron's Alexandra (1971) and in his championing of Fronto against the philosophical strain of the Western literary tradition (Rhétorique Spéculative, 1995). The same proclivity is evident in 1990's Albucius, a meditative recreation of the life and world of the declaimer Gaius Albucius Silus, otherwise mostly known through the writings of the Elder Seneca. 

This paper examines how Quignard selected and arranged the material found in Seneca, to create an Albucius whose rhetoric and life mirror each other.  In so doing, Quignard was faithful to Seneca's own beliefs in the power of declamation; indeed, the author Quignard himself starts to become the model of a Senecan declaimer who, with inventio and pointed language, assumes the role of a character in an almost more-outlandish-than-life scenario.

Select Bibliography

Olivier Chazoud, "'Le Dêsir d'être Homère':  Quginard, Albucius e la question du tiers" (in Poirier et al., 2002)

Jean-Louis Pautrot, "Pascal Quignard et la penseé mythique" (French Review, 2003)