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Abstract

In Alain Robbe-Grillet's La Jalousie and Marcel Proust's Sodome et Gomorrhe, semantic duality of "jealousy" makes it both a realistic objective architectural element (the shutter in the window) and an abstract subjective element (the feeling of jealousy). Architectural jealousy constitutes a metaphor of romantic jealousy, which is a formalization of jealous love in the text. The romantic environment makes jealous love appear a part of "natural" reality. Some techniques are used to colorize the decor according to an "interior universe." Fragmentation of space and the delineation of text into borders contribute to illustrate the paradoxical jealous space in which one can see the object of one's jealousy, but where one always meets only oneself. The closing of the text into borders allows displacement by way of analogy, description and understatement, processes that force the reader to explore the allegorical narrative and the jealous space, a textual space. In a metaphorical place, the distortion of the narrative instance's point of view brings on analogical displacement. In La Jalousie, the traces revealing the presence of the narrator in the narrative can be observed. The motifs reflect his own image, in a jealous space. The narrator of La Recherche displaces the object of his jealousy who is not Albertine but the text itself. The text is the jealous object. The characters, as per Bakhtin's theories, try to escape the dictatorial point of view of the jealous narrator; they hide in folds of text where there exist blind spots, shades and reflections. They use the romantic fallacy to represent to the narrator the image he wishes to see. The socio-semiotic paradigm illustrates the narrator's masculine voice, which only suggests the recipient of jealousy, the "she" object. Romanticism renders dictatorial jealousy obscure; it then appears as jealous love. Jealousy constitute a metaphor of the untold in the narrative.