A stylistic link: François Rabelais and Léon Bloy
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.33910/2686-830X-2025-7-2-93-98Keywords:
Léon Bloy, François Rabelais, french literature, style study, lexicologyAbstract
The writer Léon Bloy (1846–1917) saw himself as an heir to François Rabelais. In The Desperate Man, the author even declared that the style of Marchenoir (his literary double) was related to Rabelais. This article sets out to examine the significance of this assertion. To do so, it recalls the sources of inspiration of the two authors, specifies their syncretic approach to language and characterizes it, noting the influences of ancient Greek, Latin, Italian and the regional languages of France. The article also reveals the writing processes shared by the two men of letters, particularly in the creation of neologisms. It then draws up the outline of a dictionary shared by the two writers, based on the following works: Gargantua, Pantagruel, The Desperate Man and The Poor Woman. The existence of this shared vocabulary testifies to a shared madness for words, which contributed to the creation of a world-language. This world-language is inspired by all fields of human activity, by virtue of a quest for meaning that affects style and gives it a “monstrous” dimension, resulting in a veritable rhetoric of hypertrophy. A rhetoric of hypertrophy, at once the foundation and the mainspring of the poetic enterprise, which is what makes François Rabelais and Léon Bloy so special, while at the same time bringing them together.
References
SOURCES
Bloy, L. (2010) Le Désespéré [The desperate man]. Paris: Flammarion Publ., p. 182. (In French)
Bloy, L. (1980) La Femme Pauvre [The woman who was poor]. Paris: Folio Publ.; Gallimard Publ., 436 p. (In French)
Rabelais, F. (1973) Pantagruel. Paris: Folio Publ.; Gallimard Publ., 439 p. (In French)
Rabelais, F. (2007) Gargantua. Paris: Gallimard Publ., 673 p. (In French)
REFERENCES
Barthes, R. (1993) Le Bruissement de la langue [The rustle of language]. Paris: Seuil Publ., 448 p. (In French)
Guyot, G. (2003) Latin et latinité dans l’oeuvre de Léon Bloy [Latin and Latinity in the work of Léon Bloy]. Paris: Honoré Champion Publ., 546 p. (In French)
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