Du subversif à l’empathie grâce au fragnol de Pas pleurer (L. Salvayre) et à son « imaginaire hétérolingue »

The fragnol of Lydie Salvayre’s novel Pas pleurer (2014) has the particularity of making heard the voice and memories of the narrator’s mother, Montse, who lived through the Spanish Civil War as a teenager and went into exile in France in the early 1940s. In this study, we analyse the “heterolingual imaginary” (Myriam Suchet) of this other language, in the very normative context of the French language, which asserts its “foreign” identity at the same time as its subversiveness, which arouses the (solidarity) empathy of readers. By studying the affective representations of the environment and the relationships that Montse expresses in fragnol, this “mixed and trans-Pyrenean language” (Salvayre), we can also establish a sketch of the imaginary at work, which is that of the Spanish woman exiled in France. The fragnol then appears as the linguistic and literary reflection of the subversion of Spanish republican ideas, and of the human values they integrate.

Keywords: French-language literatures, Spanish exile, libertarians, intersectionality, alterities