Abstract EN:

This is a historical, descriptive and typological study of unfinished french novels from the middle ages to the twentieth century, through a corpus of examples and an analysis limited to the unfinished or incomplete narratives of stendhal and giono (566 indexed titles in all). Noting the absence of a unambiguous concept of'unfinishdness', various criteria are adressed by which unfinished novels might be identified within the broader class of incomplete narratives, which are particularly numerous in the 17th and 18 centuries, inviting a study of how authors dealt with the problem of arbitrary nature of endings. The study goes on to analyse forms of unfinishedness, and their impact, in the work of stendhal and giono, and concludes in appraising such infinished and incomplete works in the light of the expectations set up by the narrative tradition. Research into different types of incompleteness suggests a distinction between (a) unfinished novels in the primary sense ; (b) fragmentary works ; (c) inconclusive cycles and romances ; (d) closed infinitely-expanding works ; (e) traces of the creative act (sketches, notes, outlines of planned works). Historically, the process leads to normalisation : with the inconclusive novels of the 17th and 18th centuries, and the open-ended narratives of the 20th, the lack of an ending ceases to be an exceptional feature, although their frequency does not challenge the paradigm of the concordant ending as a characteristic of the narrative tradition according to kermode and ricoeur. Morever, a study of the fate of unfinished works (posthumous continuations, reconstructive editions, critical readings offering explanations for the unfinished state of the work) shows that the ideal of completeness and coherence continues to shape contemporary expectations of fiction, even though the teleological conception of narrative in no way exhausts the variety of realisations of the novel as a genre.