L’écriture des interventions narratoriales dans Melyador*

Abstract

The narrative voice of Jean Froissart’s romance Melyador is characterized by its omnipresence and by the originality and the delicacy of its manifestations. In order to ascertain how Froissart handles this repertoire reputedly limited by tradition, the object of this study is to examine his interventions on the microstructural level, taking into account the various functions they perform in the text. It appears that the formulas and the syntactic forms employed originate from the verse romance, from the epic poem, from the narrative but also the historiographic prose. Is thus exposed a tension between the writing and the oral modes that could be defined as orality founded on solemn writing. Despite some borrowings from tradition, the writing of narratorial interventions is not set. Concerned about variety and lexical as well as syntactic research, the author combined ancient formulas, at times of prosodic function, with less stereotypical, not to say openly personal, expressions. It emerges that the narrator is deeply involved in his story, nearly present physically and engaged in a constant dialogue with the audience, on a conversational mode that is lively, elegant and not devoid of humour.