"Y ahora voy a contarte despacio todo": La dimension confesional en las cartas de Elena Fortun a Ines Field (1948-1951)

During her exile in Buenos Aires (1939-1949), Elena Fortun met Ines Field, an Argentine professor who would be fundamental in her life. The publication of the letters that Fortun sent to her friend between 1948 and 1951 (2020) revealed outstanding aspects of this relationship and the deep imprint of Field's spirituality on the writer. This work explores that corpus from a confessional angle. It is based on the contributions of Noel Valis in Sacred Realism (2010) and Maria Zambrano in La confesion: genero literario (1943). If Valis has analyzed how the confessional scheme intervenes in the Spanish novels of modernity and what is the scope of a painful self-examination associated with guilt, Zambrano understood the solitude as the great motor that drives one to give an account of oneself through the words that, in search of an interior unity that did not exist before, constitute us as subjects. This essay is located at the crossroads of both proposals to address the mechanisms that, in this correspondence, allow us to discover the act of confessional conscience and its implications for a damaged and fragmented intimacy. It also examines the importance of the receiving instance, always imagined, and the interest of the epistolary space for internal inquiry and identity construction. Likewise, it attends to the intertextual links that the letters reveal from the reading perspective -the Imitatio Christi (1441), attributed to Thomas a Kempis, and the Ejercicios espirituales (1548), by Ignacio de Loyola- and the creative perspective -El cuaderno de Celia (1947)-.