Les Confessions: ‘Ivresse, délires, folies’

Abstract

THE LANGUAGE OF TRUTH is present everywhere in the Confessions. The first sentence of the preamble introduces a theme that will recur with many variations throughout: ‘Voici le seul portrait d’homme peint exactement d’après nature et dans toute sa vérité, qui existe et qui probablement existera jamais’ (3). Within the text, every comment on the aims and method of the work lays claim to exactness, completeness, frankness; every embarrassing admission calls forth a reminder that such admissions demonstrate the author’s good faith. That being so, fiction may seem a perverse starting-point for a commentary on the Confessions. However, although notions of truth dominate all the author’s remarks on the work itself, quite a different vocabulary of ‘fictions’, ‘chimères’ and ‘rêveries’ emerges side by side with the language of truth in the account of his life. Rousseau is ‘l’Ami de la Vérité’2 and has taken the motto Vitam impendere vero, but he is also ‘le berger extravagant’ (427), much of whose life is spent in a dream world of his own imagining. As, for example, in Book 9: Que/is-jeen cette occasion? Déja monLecteur l’a deviné, pour peuqu’il m’ait suivijusqu’ici. L’impossibilitéd’atteindre aux êtree réels mejetta dans Ie pays des chiméree, et nevoyant rien d’existant quiJut digne demon délire, je le nourris dans un monde idéal quemonimagination créairice eut bientot peuplé d’êtres selon mon eæur. (427) KeywordsSexual IntercourseBeautiful WomanIntense ResponseMoral EntityMaternal FigureThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.