Il s'agit de réfléchir sur ce que disent les larmes, comme forme d'expression dans toutes sortes de contexte et dans les arts. Les organisatrices de ce colloque souhaitent une ouverture des perspectives culturelles et anthropologiques. C'est pourquoi les points de vue sur l'histoire de la représentation des larmes ou sur leur distribution genrée sont également attendus.

Argument

"What are words? A tear will say more", as Franz Schubert wrote in his "praise of tears". While it is customary to consider that tears, like laughter, are a properly human expression, their meanings and stakes depend on the part attributed to affectivity or intellect, particularly between the Cynic and Stoic approaches. This is why Baltasar Gracián, in El Discreto, invites us to look beyond the apparent dichotomy of two recurring topical models of laught and tears: "we must not always laugh with Heraclitus or always weep with Democritus".

Unlike laughter, which is impalpable, tears are concrete. What's more, they have the transparency of water and the shape of pearls. Picasso chose to depict eyes in the shape of tears. Because flowing tears speak a language that is interpreted differently depending on the era and societal codes. In any case, Roland Barthes invites us to question the original power of tears when he writes that they are "the liquid medium of cordial expansion, which we know to be nothing other than the true generative force". What secret does this visible sign reveal? Is it a sign of strength or weakness, or simply an expression of passions and compassions? In short, what part does the body, mind and culture play in weeping? For tears, as Jean Loup Charvet writes, are charged with "an eloquence in which the eyes become the mouth", conveying forms of discourse that range from pain, rage and joy to resilience and resistance.

The paradox of the tears, which reveals both intimacy and social conventions, and social conventions, deserves to be examined, whatever the period or approach considered. The physiological and psychoanalytical dimensions of tear fluid cannot be ignored. Jacques Lacan maintains that "when the body is supposed to think secretly, it has secretions". Before Freud's approach to the pulsions of the body, Empedocles (Vth century BC) believed that blood was transformed into tears when the soul's passions were disturbed. Later, Hippocratic and cerebro-centric theories claimed that tears were linked to the brain, either as cerebral production or as a mood. The eighteenth century, with the introduction of sensibility, rethought crying and thepoetics of tears. The nineteenth century, for its part, divided masculine and feminine emotions to the point of opposing tears and virility, leading to a "pool of tears" in Lewis Caroll's young Alice.

Nevertheless, while tears are often associated with the feminine, many epic heroes - Ulysses, Achilles, the Cid... - shed copious tears. We also can remember the pain of a fallen king, such as Boabdil losing Granada; the grief of a father, Pleberio, faced with his daughter's suicide, in La Celestina; or King Richard II's injunction, "Make dust our paper and with raining eyes, write sorrow on the bosom of the earth"-, the "wet way" evoked by the cousin of Stendhal's eponymous protagonist Lucien Leuwen, or the ban on weeping in John Donne's poem "A Valediction: of Weeping", Goethe's Sufferings of Young Werther or the despair of love highlighted in Rainer Fassbinder's Die bitteren Tränen der Petra von Kant (The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant).

In the twentieth century, anthropologists studied the origins and functions of piacular rites, which have a significant presence in various cultures and religions. The mourners, the tears of Christ and of the saints, are referred to in all types of representations. Mary Magdalene and Jeremiah, between sin and grace, weep, thus speaking to Christians. Moreover, tears form a vertical link between heaven and earth, while at the same time expressing physical and moral pain,  individual or collective suffering, and thus playing a part in the symbolism of the four elements. Nor should we forget the changeable nature of tears, which can become blood.

Being a language and metalanguage of the body and the mind, between visible and invisible, tears, by nature non-verbal and cathartic, conventional or manipulative, are undoubtedly the source of a rich phraseology:  "pleurer à chaudes larmes", "pleurer de rire", "pleurer d'un œil", "les larmes de crocodiles" or "lágrimas de cocodrilo", "llorar a lágrima viva", "las lágrimas de san Lorenzo", "to cry crocodile tears", "to be bored to tears", "blood, sweat and tears", "in floods of tears"; eJemanden zu Tränen rühren, den Tränen nahe, bittere Tränen weinen, etwas unter Tränen gestehen, ihm/ihr kommen die Tränen”.

We can also consider the development of tearful models in literature and iconography, expressed by genres such as planctus, elegy, epitaph and tragedy, by the rhetoric and by textual and gestural topoi. These include the various intertextual echoes from the valley of tears (Lacrymarum valle) in the Bible to the diverse representations of the mater dolorosa. The structuring of these models, between the appreciation and depreciation of tears, in various European and American countries from Antiquity to the present day, will be explored.

This transdisciplinary conference invites us to reflect, either synchronically or diachronically, using linguistic, literary, iconographic, cinematographic, musicological, anthropological or psychoanalytical approaches, on the perceptions and representations of tears, focusing in particular on the following themes:

• The sex of tears
• Tear code(s) and model(s)
• Tears as an individual or collective weapon
• Tears in the history of sensitivity
• Laughter and tears
• Tears and blood
• The language(s) of tears
• Tears and staging
• Writing and rewriting tears

Submission guidelines

Proposals for papers (between 5 and 10 lines), accompanied by a title and a short biobibliographical presentation (including institutional affiliation and contact details), should be sent to cecile.bertin@unilim.fr, florence.dumora@univ-lemans.fr and Christine.orobitg@univ-amu.fr

by 15 March 2024 at the latest.

An answer will be given by May 2024.

Conference: 14-15 November 2024 at Le Mans Université (France)

A €30 registration fee will be charged to cover meals.

Organising committee

• Cécile Bertin-Elisabeth (EHIC, Université de Limoges)
• Florence Dumora (3LAM, Le Mans université)
• Christine Orobitg (TELEMMe Aix Marseille Université)

Scientific commitee

• Damien Boquet, (History) Aix Marseille Université, TELEMMe
• Carmen Cortes Zaborras (French Literature) Málaga University, Spain
• Anne Coudreuse (French Literature), Université Paris 13, University Pléiade
• Christophe Couderc (Hispanic Studies), Nanterre Université 
• Dominique Berthet (Arts and aesthetics), Université des Antilles, CRILLASH
• Cécile Iglesias (Hispanic Studies), Université de Bourgogne, TIL
• Nicolas Darbon (Musicology), Université d’Aix-Marseille, CRILLASH
• Nathalie Leprince (Literature and philosophy) Le Mans Université, 3LAM
• Encarnación Medina Arjona (French Literature) Jaén University (Spain)
• Corinne Mencé-Caster (Linguistics, Middle Ages), Sorbonne-Université, RELIR
• Nathalie Martinière (English Studies) Limoges Université, EHIC
• Sandrine Persyn (German Studies) Le Mans Université, 3LAM
• Odile Richard (French Literature), Limoges Université, EHIC
• Laetitia Tabard (Literature), Le Mans Université, 3LAM

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