Our objective is to propose a cultural poetics of literary language by attempting to define, from an ethnocritical point of view, a “genetic narratology” (Hamon 1972). Logogenesis proceeds from the hypothesis that “figurative” language appearing in fixed contexts such as proverbs and sayings (“a wolf in sheep’s clothing”) contains both latent semantic motifs and symbolic worlds based on cultural (anthropological) rules. In other words, culture is contained in language. This article analyses from this point of view the poetic productivity of common as well as invented idiomatic expressions found in a tale written by G. Sand, a short story by Maupassant, a novel by Zola and a poem by Mallarmé. The article suggests a typology of the polyphonic phenomena involved in the engendering of narrative texts. It also takes into account the participation of the reader in this dialogic activation of the imaginative reservoir of ordinary language.