L’oral dans Un Homme, ça ne pleure pas de Faïza Guène : de la transcription du parler à la représentation du locuteur

From the 1990s onwards, a sort of cultural revenge of the suburbs on the city centres has been observed, thanks to rap and slam, films such as La Haine, as well as a literary production by authors from colonial and immigrant backgrounds, known as ‘beur’ (Hargreaves 1991, Laronde 1993), then ‘de banlieue’ (Chaulet Achour 2005), ‘des cités’ (Horvath 2007) and ‘périphérique’ (Vitali 2011). While the banlieusard of the 1980s compressed his accent when crossing the ring road, the spread of the suburban language outside the neighbourhoods where it was born is now a fact, which nevertheless continues to come up against warnings issued by the defenders of the French language (Benzitoun 2021). Faïza Guène is a French writer of Algerian origin who bears witness to this phenomenon. The analysis of the characteristics of this oral code in her novel Un homme, ça ne pleure pas (2014) reveals the presence of the main linguistic and discursive features identified in the Corpus of MPF (Gadet 2017): rhythm, repetition, markers of intensity and continuity, a syntactic deficit alongside a rich terminological diversity, but above all the internalization of a symbolic hierarchy of languages. The characters in our corpus belong to the working classes of North African immigrants, they use oral language (Blanche-Benveniste 2010) and ordinary French (Gadet 1997) and stand in front of an otherness whose stigmatising discourse produces a linguistic and social discrimination (Blanchet 2016). Based on a discourse analysis approach, we observe how the novelist transcribes the oral language, together with the discourse that accompanies its representation and modulates its reception. In order to question the contribution of literature in this reconstruction of suburban speech, we argue that we are faced with a multidimensional representation in which, alongside the language, we discover its speaker.