Le monologue épistolaire, poétique de l’inachèvement dans Confiteor

Abstract

“I deemed this novel definitively unfinished on 27 January, 2011”: thus begins the postface of Catalan novelist Jaume Cabré’s Confessions (Jo confesso, 2011). Beyond the totality of the published work, the phrase evokes the infinity of possibility, and hints at the æsthetic and ethical matter of the novel. Despite the narrator Adrià’s painstaking quest for exhaustivity, completion and the last word in the long letter he writes to his beloved, the fictional universe denies him all of the above: in the end which Cabré deals him (not death, but Alzheimer’s disease), in the form of the epistolary monologue whose fate necessarily leaves his hands, and in the uncertainty which surrounds the interpretation of the novel’s end. This unfinished quality is revealed as valuable. It highlights life’s real continuity amid the artificiality of literary endings; it is dialogic, as highlighted by the letter-form, revealing the novel to be open to constant reinvention; finally, it is ethical, standing in opposition to the final solutions whose drive for ends and completions are the heart of darkness and the portrait of evil in the novel.

Keywords

• Cabré
• confessions
• letter-novel
• epistolary monologue