Rehearsing the promise: narratives and interlocutors, or what literature promises

Ensayar la promesa: narraciones e interlocutores o lo que la literatura promete

Abstract

I analyse in this paper the narrative-interlocutor unit through two of Carmen Martín Gaite’s most representative essays: La búsqueda de interlocutor y otras búsquedas (1973) and El cuento de nunca acabar. Apuntes sobre la narración, el amor y la mentira (1983). Through the theoretical reflections of both texts on narration, the interlocutor and the different voices that make up the stories, Gaite proposes a truth of writing through which she envelops literature in theory and vindicates a few certainties to which she clings as a writer, and which constitute a relatively safe horizon: that of what literature promises. She does this by asserting a fundamental vitalism while insisting that these essays are just that: attempts, a reflection in process, in formation. In other words, she moves away from a fixed and stable theoretical dogmatism to defend the fragmentary and the fragile as constitutive aspects of truth.