Strategies of secrecy in Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly's novel "Un prêtre marié"

Abstract

If on one hand Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly’s novel, Un prêtre marié (1865), is characterized by the plurality of interpretative paths, on the other hand it finds in the secret the figure which structures the story both from a thematic and enunciative point of view. The dialectic between truth and lie, concealment and confession, transforms the secret into the spider’s web in which all the characters are trapped.
The famous series of paintings by René Magritte, entitled Le prêtre marié, visually translates the specificity of the novel preserving its secret symbolized by the mask. The secret, conceived more as a web than a veil, finally opens the novel to the suggestions of the intertextual plots, creating that infinite text theorized by Roland Barthes.