La confession dans l’œuvre de Georges Bernanos

Confession is a topical motif in the novels of Georges Bernanos. In Sous le soleil de Satan (1926) it is thematized throughout the novel and reaches its climax in the epilogue with the discovery of Donissan's corpse in the confessional, while in Journal d'un curé de campagne (1936) it invests the very form of writing through the fiction of the diary written day after day by the priest of Ambricourt. Scene par excellence of enunciation, confession results in a poetics of ambiguity, because confession appears as the space of scandal, of the unsaid, of the impossible to say, of the prosaic and the supernatural.