L’atmosphère comme « régime d’écriture » chez Georges Simenon

Abstract

Frédéric François (1935-2020) defined reading as the lived experience of an imaginary world or an alien life. Among the psycholinguistic notions he proposed for the convergence of “mode of thought” and “course of life” in this experience was the concept of “atmosphere”. As for the writer Georges Simenon (1903-1989), he conceives “atmosphere” as the necessary starting point to guarantee the reader’s suspension of disbelief, not through characters, places and times, or reported actions and speeches, but through smells, noises, colours, lights and climates, all of which are generally considered to be insignificant in relation to the main twists of the plot. The present study aims to alert literary linguistics researchers to the key role of atmosphere in the narrative convention that facilitate the reader’s suspension of disbelief towards the content of the narrative, which, however realistic, must nevertheless be conceived as a kind of daydream.

Keywords

• predominantly narrative texts
• fiction texts
• non-fiction texts
• psycholinguistics of reading
• psycholinguistics of writing
• linguistics of literature