L’expression des pensées du personnage au Moyen Âge français: continuité, innovation ou dégradation par rapport aux textes de l’Antiquité?

Abstract

This contribution will focus, initially, on the different discursive strategies in the expression of character’s thoughts in the
various genres and literary forms of the 12th and 13th century’s French medieval literature. In particular, we will examine the
different types of reported discourse and the characteristics of the character’s interior monologue, i.e. his exteriorisation and/or
interiorisation, with regard to its enunciation (spoken, or in loud voice, versus silent soliloquy). Secondly, these characteristics of the French medieval interior monologue will be compared to those of the same verbal structure in some works of Georgian and Armenian literature from the Middle Ages, as well as to those of texts from Greco-Roman Antiquity.
The analysis will show that, while in the French works (just as in the Homeric work) we remain uncertain on whether we confront
words or thoughts when there is no explicit indication, cotextual or contextual, that the monologue is spoken aloud or in a low
voice, in the case of Georgian and Armenian works we can state with certainty that there are several episodes in which a character’s
unspoken thoughts are represented in the form of a monologue in direct speech. This conclusion will allow us to hypothesise the
important role, in this particular case, of the presence of a more advanced written tradition.