Le corps, l'esprit et le langage dans l'Histoire comique de Francion de Charles Sorel

This dissertation examines the portrayal of characters who use language in unusual and therefore ridiculous ways in seventeenth-century French comedy. It takes Charles Sorel’s Histoire comique de Francion (1623-1633) as an example of the genre and seeks to explain why, in the decades surrounding the creation of the French Academy (1635), the body is the focal point for ridiculing characters who attempt to take control of the French language: what, if anything, does this type of ridicule reaveal about the nature of language and the ability to take control of it? The argument begins with a consideration of “naked” or “bare language,” a term coined by Hélène Merlin-Kajman – after Giorgio Agamben’s “bare life” – to refer to the first language that a child acquires from his nurse. It then discusses how both Sorel, in La Science universelle (1634-1668), his multi-volume work on natural philosophy, and the grammarian Claude Favre de Vaugelas (an original member of the Academy), in his Remarques sur la langue françoyse (1647), look for ways of refashioning “bare language” other than rhetorical ornament. For Vaugelas, such refashioning involves following the spontaneous norm established by usage, which he identifies as the “sovereign” of our tongues; for Sorel, it involves applying “la logique parlante,” or a mental logic not routinely found in discourse or in the spontaneous norm. The reader is led to believe that Francion, the novel’s title character, applies such logic well, while other characters such as the poet Musidore and the pedant Hortensius do not. Francion, gifted at seduction, is presented as being in a position to rewrite the rules of the French language successfully (and therefore in a supposedly unridiculous way) by controlling his interlocuters on a bodily level, thereby making them sensitive to the usages that they hear, similar to a nursling. Language, we see, is learned and produced in a context that is more bodily and grotesque than rational and self-conscious. In that sense, language is ultimately open to influence and impossible for anyone in particular to control. Appropriately, the novel never presents any proof that Francion succeeds in his endeavor, suggesting that he, like the others, is doomed to fail in his efforts to replace usage as the “sovereign” of the French language.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical referencesby Maren Danie