Legal Terms and Legal Situations in the Reasonings on “Men-Women” in the Novel “In Search of Lost Time”

The current article deals with stylistic functioning of the legal terms and related to law situations in Marcel Proust’s theoretical reasonings on “men-women”. In these reasonings, Marcel Proust resorts to the terms of the criminal law, criminal trial, to those of the financial law as well as to the figurative descriptions from the life of some representatives of legal professions, namely of an advocate or a notary. The methods used in the paper are those of semantical, lexical, syntactical and linguostylistic types of analysis. We have studied nine of such contexts selected from the first part of the fourth volume of the novel, numbering about thirty pages. The relations between two persons of the same sex, in accordance with the dominant views in Marcel Proust’s time, are often represented as a crime, so the vocabulary prevailing in these contexts is related to the criminal law and criminal trial. Drawing a parallel with a financial law situation, namely with the budget planning process, embodied in a medical metaphor, according to which a certain amount of liquid inside the human being has got to come out sometime, allows to represent men-women’s feelings as an objective reality in quantitative terms. In these fragments, legal terms are also often combined with different cultural allusions, for example to the ancient Greek myth of Pygmalion and Galatea, to one of the stories of the “Golden Legend” Christian collection, comparison of the men-women’s life with that of the poet as well as with the tragic destiny of Oscar Wilde; different kinds of arts are also mentioned, such as music schools, competing with each other not only due to their different views on music, but because of their opposite political views; here also belong judicial rhetoric and eloquence. Men-women’s societies are compared with different societies of art amateurs, as well as with some objectively existing social communities, for instance those of people suffering from a malady. Therefore, Marcel Proust, through the wide range of artistic expression means, shows that men-women’s predisposition is an objective inclination, given to them by the nature; they are guilty of nothing, they suffer from the society’s unfair attitude towards them just like an innocent person suffers because of a trial error.

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