Ce "lac inconnu où vivent ces expressions sans rapport avec la pensée et qui par cela même la révèlent": le rôle du registre linguistique dans la « Recherche du Temps Perdu » : l'Affaire Dreyfus,

This "lac inconnu où vivent ces expressions sans rapport avec la pensée et qui par cela même la révèlent": the role of linguistic register in the Recherche du Temps Perdu. The cases of Bloch and of the Duc de Guermantes, forthcoming. EduCatt, Milano 2010 [I registri linguistici come strategia comunicativa come struttura letteraria, Atti del Convegno della Società Universitaria di Studi di Lingua e Letteratura Francese, tenutosi all Università Statale e Cattolica di Milano nei giorni 6-8 novembre 2008] Many are the works on the language of proustian characters and the unavoidable critical text by Gérard Genette, Proust et le langage indirect, has by now shown that the emergence of the characters deepest psychological dimension is necessarily expressed through an often swerving language: mistakes, omissions, shifts in meaning, and often an unexpected register. Indeed one of the ways, among others, in which A la recherche du Temps Perdu may be interpreted is like a gigantic representation of language: by means of the dynamics between the various languages that face each other in the narration (languages of the characters, language of the narrator, the metalanguage, rhetorical creations), the forever imprecise image of the human soul is brought to life amid a constant vibration. In this living flesh , which is language for Proust, it is possible to identify different levels of analysis: linguistic, social, psychological, esthetic. In different ways, it is the problem of register at each level. Attention will be focused especially on the language of two characters, the duke of Guermantes and Bloch, who seemed to be the most representative of the tangle of relations expressed through the discourse. Very seldom register is felt by Proust as a mere social mark (even when it would be the easiest thing to expect, as in the cases of the liftboy, the character of Aimé and his famous letter to his family, Françoise, her daughter); on the contrary, it is revealing of what Proust calls a place of language , which veut qu'on s' exprime comme les gens de sa classe mentale et non de sa caste d' origine (Côté de Guermantes, II partie).