Valère Novarina, un démiurge du langage

For those who are already familiar with the creative resources which Valère Novarina is capable of, the following paper can only give the merest glimpse of his “neological passion”. It is a far cry from terminological neology, which is purely referential, or from all forms of instrumentalized language, since the playwright goes to the very limits of the irrational and the incongruous to reach an original language, if not an “Ur” language. The inheritance of Rabelais is quite clear, as Novarina himself indicates in his writing.
This paper is divided into two parts. It seemed logical to start by analysing the language that Novarina uses to describe his aesthetic convictions, since the writer attaches great importance to his idea of language, in particular the language of the theatre (Lettre aux acteurs, Le drame dans la langue française, Devant la parole). In the second part, we present a typology which accounts for the whole range of his lexical creativity, which goes from the most conventional forms (derivation, compounding, etc.) to other forms of creativity –patronymic, flexional or those which we shall conservatively call ex nihilo.