Lafont, Robert
▶ Watch on YouTubeCoverage note: full (about fifty minutes; YouTube auto-captions in English, translated from French, with many garbled terms such as praxematics and place names; the interviewer's questions are mostly short)
Core ideas
Career and literary history. Lafont describes his path: a classics student under Lucien Tesnière (Latin) and the Hellenist Louis Roussel, then Resistance service in a Liberation prefect's office, teaching in secondary schools (including a pioneering Occitan curriculum), a 1967 thesis on the Occitan sentence, and a chair at Montpellier titled "Romance linguistics, Occitan language and literature" (taking over the Revue des langues romanes). In literary history he first wrote Mistral ou l'illusion, which angered Mistral's "mummifying" disciples, then worked on the Occitan Baroque poets of Henri IV's time (Renaissance du Sud, Gallimard) and the troubadours. On the medieval epic he argues that the Song of Roland is not France's national poem: it is a Norman poem, it has an Occitan source (Roncesvalles is in Occitan toponymy), and it duplicates a Song of Saint Foy of Conques, which he thinks was danced around the church and measured to its ambulatory; the whole is linked to Pierre d'Andouque, a monk of Conques and bishop of Roda and Pamplona, and to the interests of the pilgrim route to Santiago. He also places the origin of the Grail in Aragon. His method is a "philology in motion": re-reading the texts and walking them.
Sociolinguistics and praxematics. "Diglossia is the contact of languages of unequal status." Lafont and his Montpellier students studied diglossic functioning, how a speaker manages two languages (a despised "patois" and the master language), borrowing from psychoanalysis (Lacan) and treating the speaker as an unstable, unhappy diglossic subject; he says he and his collaborators came a year before Weinreich. Against Saussure, his linguistics is a linguistics of speech and fieldwork (the connotation of "aïe/ouille"). Gustave Guillaume's psychomechanics and chronogenesis (the image of time in the mind) attracted him, but his heretical thesis added "topogenesis": the image of time develops from that of space. From there he built praxematics: "language is a praxis". Man invented praxemes (practical tools to communicate, as he shaped stones), and the Indo-European root of two consonants (per: expulsion plus friction of passing through) is motivated, following Benveniste; his latest book on Arabic argues that the Semitic root is biliteral, not triliteral, with guttural sounds as the first human sounds.
Writing and politics. Raised by Occitan-speaking grandparents, he began writing in Occitan after reading Mistral; he published about fifty titles in Occitan and fifty scholarly titles in French: La Vida de Joan Larsinhac (first contemporary Occitan novel, about the Resistance), poems (Dire, set to music), a verse translation of a third of the Odyssey, the thousand-page novel La Fèsta (European history from 1940 to the Larzac gathering of 1973), and Voltairean novellas (Les Vies d'Athanas, a novel of a dying man, and Le Chercheur de Dieu). Politically on the left, a member of Mitterrand's Convention des institutions républicaines, author of La Révolution régionaliste (Gallimard, 1967), involved in the Larzac and Decazeville struggles, he wrote Le Coq et l'Oc about his disappointment with Mitterrand's presidency.
Excerpts
“« Diglossia is the contact of languages of unequal status. »”
“« the Song of Roland is not France's national poem »”
“« language is a praxis »”