ABSTRACT

Several twentieth-century philosophers have defined these quandaries as essentially linguistic. From Wittgenstein and Heidegger to Jacques Derrida, European thinkers have questioned what language refers to, ontologically, and thus what ultimate meaning underlies, indeed justifies, speaking and thus writing. Tales of group cruelty are mainstays of childhood novels. Des Forets, however, surpasses the sociology of the boarding school by giving a mystical intensity to the boy's muteness. Even more than symbolizing the modern writer doomed to silence, this gripping schoolboy scene represents our separation from our own deepest selves because of the facility with which we willingly flee from potentially self-revelatory moments and take refuge in the distracting lures of language. After publishing these troubling stories involving childhood and the painful memories thereof, des Forets stopped writing for about a dozen years; he turned instead to painting. Yet the solemn final poem of the sequence characteristically inverts the poet's apparent last word.