The Excremental Poetics of Daniel Pennac’s Journal D’un Corps

Abstract

The French literary landscape, from its earliest stages, is littered with faecal matter. Medieval fabliaux such as Audigier give us a coprophilic knight, the eponymous Audigier, who falls in love with women in proportion to how soiled their bottoms are; Rabelais’s Gargantua, as part of his princely education, methodically works his way through all manner of torchecul — satin, sage, fennel, hay, a cat, a hat, a rug — before settling on a gosling as the best; the Marquis de Sade’s Cent vingt journées de Sodome is well known for its coprophagy.