This article analyses the way in which the language practices that are represented and enacted in and by the and by the Novel of Silence constantly subvert usage and cast doubt on the capacity of words to produce direct knowledge of the perceptible world, thereby of words to produce direct knowledge of the perceptible world, thereby questioning the of language in the Middle Ages. The first step is to consider the situations of communication represented in the novel and communication situations represented in the novel and to examine how, in the diegesis, the mismatch between signs and signs and things have an operative value. The ignorance that characterises the characters who are not. The ignorance that characterises the characters who are not privy to this convention allows transvestism to operate. The challenge is then to to show how the reader-receiver, thanks to a language that is itself 'transvestite', gains access to a hidden, complex, sometimes multiple truth complex, sometimes multiple truth, thus giving the idea that this truth, which concerns beings as well as things, cannot be as well as things, cannot be delivered from the start...