Pour un réalisme acoustique : Un de Baumugnes de Jean Giono

Abstract

Un de Baumugnes by Jean Giono (1929) is the second volume of the “Pan trilogy”. This novel presents and even defends a “realistic” poetics in line with the research of other French and francophone writers in the 1920s and the 1930s. Both the construction of the text and its practice of language are consistent with the critical discourses that the author disseminates during the same period: all of them contribute to set up an “acoustic realism” which is the great novelty of the interwar period. Finally, this article proposes a reading of the central scene of the novel by taking into account Roland Barthes’ theories on the “reality effect”: the music (which is the object of the novel) and the musicality of the literary language that evokes it, marked by features of orality, make it possible to recall reality through “the direct collusion of a referent and a signifier”.

Keywords

• Giono (Jean)
• realism
• music
• reality effect
• orality
• interwar French literature