On knows what pleasure Fabrice Luchini takes in quoting great authors. He is also currently playing at the Théâtre des Mathurins, where he is reciting texts by La Fontaine. But he is also a man who has his own rhetoric, extremely singular, so much so that he often provokes extreme reactions: either he fascinates, or he ulcerates. And when we listen to him speak, we understand why.
“It was not La Fontaine who translated the incredible wisdom of this slave called Aesop. But La Fontaine did an incredible thing: he translated this richness and made it into the most amazing language. I don’t even know where it comes from, it’s so fluid!”
What is striking in this extract, as in all the others, is Fabrice Luchini’s prosody. Prosody is the word for the musicality of our voice when we speak. And with Luchini, all the parameters of his prosody are modulated to the extreme. The volume, which goes from “forte” to “pianissimo”. The rhythm, which alternates fast sequences and other slower ones. And above all, the intonations of his voice, which constantly vary to accompany the enunciative breaks, when he passes from his own words to the words of La Fontaine, then to the commentary on the words of La Fontaine.
Fabrice Luchini plays “La Fontaine et le confinement” in Paris: “It’s amazing that an author is so incredibly identified. I think he’s the genius of adaptation!” #le79inter @LuchiniOfficial @LeaSalame pic.twitter.com/IBNrHue6l5
– France Inter (@franceinter) February 2, 2022
It’s unquestionably virtuosic, but it’s also excessively marked, which explains why we can love it or hate it.
Beyond the prosody, the choice of words is also very specific with Fabrice Luchini. For example, when he talks about hunting: “What is extraordinary is that a hunter who goes out at 7 a.m., you give him 400 rabbits, 300 deer… But he takes the rifle, he wants to get out of himself, find entertainment, he doesn’t want the rabbit! But why does he piss off the rabbit?”
Two remarkable things: on the one hand, the enunciative ruptures, of which we have already spoken. Fabrice Luchini keeps changing register, language level, even subject. And moreover, a constant recourse to hyperbole, that is to say the figure of exaggeration: “400 rabbits, 300 deer”which is “extraordinary”… Everything is always amplified to the maximum.
The effect produced by these two processes, ruptures as hyperboles, is the same: it participates in constantly capturing our attention, while also being able to exhaust our energy. We find this duality. Still on France Inter, Fabrice Luchini once again demonstrated his talent as a storyteller, about our cell phone addiction: “Can you imagine that we look at the cell phone 300 to 400 times a day? Why? Why? to fuck you, a bicycle that spit on your face, you try to make a vague path… And you realize that when they stop at a red light, the first gesture of all bicycles, to all motorbikes: mobile! Because between the red light from two minutes ago and this red light there, someone may have called? But no one is going to call you! will call you!”
This long narrative description is so detailed and lively that you end up having the impression of having the scene before your eyes. This is called a hypotyposis: a vivid description, and it is indeed the tool of great storytellers.
What makes all these processes particularly interesting with Luchini is that he does not try to convince us of anything. This is what allows us to grasp the difference between rhetoric and eloquence. Rhetoric is indeed the art of convincing. But it is not certain that Luchini seeks to convince us. He shares his point of view on the world, of course, but without any real desire to change it. What he practices is therefore more eloquence: not the art of convincing, but that of capturing our attention, of charming us with his words, and of arousing emotions.
Remember, words aren’t just for influence. They can also, quite simply, strive for beauty.