Papers on French Seventeenth Century Literature
pfscl
0343-0758
2941-086X
Narr Verlag Tübingen
121
2008
3569
Wendy Ayres-Bennett: Sociolinguistic Variation in Seventeenth-Century France: Methodology and Case Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. xi + 267 p
121
2008
Anne E. Duggan
pfscl35690749
PFSCL XXXV, 69 (2008) W e n d y Ayr e s - B e nn e tt : Sociolinguistic Variation in Seventeenth- Century France: Methodology and Case Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. xi + 267p. From the perspective of literary studies, Wendy Ayres-Bennett’s book appears quite technical, with its heavy focus on methodological issues specifically related to sociolinguistics. Her overall purpose is to reconstruct nonstandard usage and the spoken language of seventeenth-century France in order to account for linguistic variation according to socioeconomic status, register and style, and gender. In each chapter, Ayres-Bennett draws from metalinguistic texts such as Jean Nicot’s Thresor de la langue françoise, Antoine Furetière’s Dictionnaire universel, and Richelet’s Dictionnaire françois and plays them against literary texts, popular pamphlets, and correspondence. She also makes great use of FRANTEXT. Out of this moving back and forth between metalinguistic texts (what is said about language) and literary and non-literary texts (actual linguistic practices), Ayres-Bennett tries to sift out general features of linguistic variation characteristic of different moments in the seventeenth century. Much space in each chapter is devoted to the methodologies that do not work and why, and to the problematics of trying to draw out spoken language from written texts. While Chapter 1 lays out the parameters and sources of the study, Chapter 2 revolves around extracting from written sources some sense of the actual French spoken in the seventeenth century. The first part of the chapter focuses on the relation between certain types of texts to spoken discourse. For instance, to what degree does letter writing or written conversations approximate real speech? When it comes to books on conversations, another complication arises: to what degree did the written text reflect speech and to what degree did it produce new speech, since written conversations were held up as models for spoken language? Ayres-Bennett also considers seventeenth-century perceptions of the relation between written and spoken language. For instance, Claude Favre de Vaugelas believed writing should mirror speech, and that the spoken word preceded the written. Scipion Dupleix, however, did not believe writing should reflect speech, and demonstrated the anteriority of the written word over the spoken by making reference to practices of preachers and lawyers. It might have been interesting to situate this part of the chapter in terms of later debates on language, notably Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Essai sur l’origine des langues. In the second part of the chapter, Ayres-Bennett problematizes the sources she will use to account for linguistic variation with respect to pronoun usage, verb morphology, and interrogation. One of her sources is the PFSCL XXXV, 69 (2008) 750 journal of Héroard, doctor of the young Louis XIII. Using the journal of the dauphin’s reported speech presents the problem of age: is linguistic variation due to the youth of the dauphin or to other factors? In order to balance out factors, Ayres-Bennett compares the dauphin’s reported speech to similar examples in Creole and Quebecois French since many aspects of seventeenth-century French remain inscribed in these offshoots of hexagonal French. Chapter 3 centers on variation due to socioeconomic status on the one hand, and register, style, and genre, on the other. Ayres-Bennett immediately suggests there may be a correspondence between class and register, which is explored in more depth over the course of the chapter. Drawing from metalinguistic texts, she tries to tease out distinctions between “popular” and “familiar” French. While these two domains can get confused in the works of some authors, it appears that most metalinguistic commentators do uphold the correspondence between low genres such as burlesque, considered a style bas, with lowerclass linguistic variation. However, the problem arises that most references to lowerclass speech in metalinguistic texts come from works by authors like Paul Scarron, Molière, and Charles Sorel. These authors represent lowerclass speech for the purposes of comic effect, for which they must depend on certain caricatures for their audiences to recognize lowerclass speech in their texts. As Ayres-Bennett repeatedly remarks, the reproduction of lowerclass speech in literary texts is based primarily on lexical and phonetic variation but very little on syntactic variation, which must have been a feature of lowerclass speech. Staples of lowerclass speech in burlesque texts included the use of proverbs, words issuing from patois, archaic terms, and morphological features like “je pensons.” Because the reproduction of lowerclass speech in burlesque texts is based on exaggeration and caricature, Ayres-Bennett turns to private texts like the livres de raison and to texts in patois and mazarinades, all of which present their own problems with respect to gleaning spoken French from texts. The livres de raison were journals written by merchants and heads of households in which they took inventory of daily transactions and business. As a source of spoken French, these texts are problematic due to their use of formulaic language, and their scope is limited, since they are texts written by educated professionals. Texts in patois and mazarinades present similar problems as burlesque texts. Ayres-Bennett suggests that burlesque texts in fact influenced the language and style of the mazarinades, for one finds similar features in both types of texts. Moreover, one must take into account the question of audience: the likely audience for texts in patois and maza- Comptes rendus 751 rinades were not members of the lower class, whose speech was parodied in these texts. In her chapter on women’s language, Ayres-Bennett runs into many of the same issues she encountered when approaching variation according to class. After situating debates on women and language within the period (i.e., women as good and as bad examples of good usage), Ayres-Bennett asks whether or not a woman’s language - a “precious” language - actually existed in seventeenth-century France. In the same way that lowerclass language as represented in written texts is a mix of fact and fiction, so it is the case with precious language. Writers like the Abbé de Pure and Antoine de Somaize reproduced precious language for the purposes of parody and caricature. Indeed, Ayres-Bennett did find features discussed by de Pure and Somaize in works by Scudéry, but these two writers clearly exaggerated precious traits for the sake of comic effect. Moreover, as Ayres-Bennett discovers, many expressions characteristic of precious language according to de Pure and Somaize in fact can be found in texts written by male authors. This chapter falls more into my area of expertise, and while I found many of Ayres-Bennett’s observations interesting, some of the discussion is rehashing conclusions reached by literary scholars such as Ian Maclean (whose seminal book Women Triumphant is not cited), Joan DeJean (who is not cited in the bibliography), and Linda Timmermans. This rehashing, however, might be necessary for an audience of sociolinguists, but for seventeenth-century scholars, the sociocultural contextualization can seem simplified and redundant. The strengths of the chapter reside more in the problematizing of the possibility of delimiting a “woman’s” language or a “precious” language, and her conclusions are necessarily very conservative. In her final chapter, Ayres-Bennett looks at variation in time over the course of the seventeenth century. As one might expect, she uncovers a tendency for retrenchment. In her assessment of metalinguistic texts, out of 300 observations on usage, 137 concern words and expressions that have disappeared or are going out of usage, whereas only 63 observations report on new words and expressions. Ayres-Bennett emphasizes that this period of “standardization” and elimination of variation nevertheless is one of constant change, to which metalinguistic commentators were slow to respond. As Ayres-Bennett remarks over and over again, it is very difficult to extract spoken language and non-standard variations from written texts because of questions regarding audience, the socioeconomic and gendered position of the writer, and the objectives of the text (i.e., parody and caricature). The best we can do is to get a sense of how non-standard variation was represented in written texts. Written texts give limited insight into non-standard variation not only because of stylistic and audience consider- PFSCL XXXV, 69 (2008) 752 ations, but also because of their focus on lexical and phonetic variation, providing few examples of syntactical variation. Moreover, the parodying and use of stereotype - not to mention the prejudices of individual authors - in the depiction of non-standard usage make the sorting out of fact from fiction even more difficult. It is for this reason that Ayres-Bennett’s resulting reconstructions, though generally convincing, seem meager to me, and necessarily so. While it may be impossible to get a sense of seventeenthcentury spoken French and linguistic variation, Ayres-Bennett’s study does provide important insights into how we might approach the representation of spoken French and linguistic variation in written texts, and in this regard her book can be of very practical use to scholars and students of seventeenth-century literature. Anne E. Duggan C hri s tia n B e lin (dir.) : La méditation au XVII e siècle : rhétorique, art, spiritualité. Sous la direction de Christian Belin. Paris : Champion, 2006. 275 p. Christian Belin qui a publié en 2002 une étude magistrale sur La Conversation intérieure avait organisé en 2000 avec Bénédicte Louvat-Molozay et Pierre Pasquier un colloque sur le même thème dont il présente maintenant les actes. Ce volume complète de manière heureuse ses recherches en les élargissant à des domaines qui n’entraient pas dans sa perspective originaire comme par exemple la musique (Anne Piéjus, La musique française du XVII e siècle face à la question de la méditation, 211-234 et Maya Suemi Lemos, La musique et la méditation : l’exemple des vanités, 235-256) ou qui la dépassaient dans d’autres genres littéraires, le théâtre surtout (Georges Forestier, Présence et lieux de la méditation dans la tragédie des XVI e et XVII e siècles, 157-180) ou le roman (Nathalie Grande, Le roman : un genre spirituel ? , 181-194). Sa monographie se terminait par un commentaire du tableau Le Songe de saint Joseph de Georges de la Tour (ibid., 414-417), tandis que ces actes contiennent une contribution d’Anne Le Pas de Sécheval « Peinture et méditation, la méditation dans le tableau, le tableau-méditation : à la recherche d’un concept d’analyse » (181-194). Le colloque de Rome de 2002 sur l’esthétique baroque a débuté par une réflexion de Marc Fumaroli sur « Retorica sacra, retorica divina : les souches-mères de l’art dit Baroque » où le concept de « retorica divina » vise le même argument que Le Pas de Sécheval. Selon Fumaroli, saint Augustin « a posé dans son De Trinitate le principe qui a décidé du statut des arts et des lettres dans la tradition occidentale » (Estetica Barocca a cura di Sebastian Schütze, Rome 2004, p.
