Louis-René des Forêts
Louis-René des Forêts was a French writer born in Paris on January 28, 1918, into a family with a military background. Initially groomed for a career in military service or diplomacy, he chose to pursue his passions for music and writing instead. His first novel, "Les Mendiants," published in 1943, explores the themes of existentialism and moral ambiguity through fragmented narration. Following this, his second novel, "Le Bavard" (1946), further delves into the complexities of language and reality, questioning the reliability of narrative itself.
Des Forêts worked for nearly two decades at the prestigious Gallimard publishing house, and in 1967, he published his only book of poetry, "Les Megeres de la mer," which contemplates memory and identity. After a significant hiatus from writing, he shifted his focus to the visual arts before resuming literary work in the mid-1980s with "Ostinato," an autobiographical project that reflects on memory through a fragmented style reminiscent of Joyce and Woolf. This work, published in full in 1997, received acclaim for its lyrical quality and innovative structure, particularly for its poignant reflections on personal loss. Des Forêts passed away on December 30, 2000, leaving behind a notable legacy in the realm of postwar French experimental literature. His writings critically examined the limitations of language in conveying experience and memory.
On this Page
Subject Terms
Louis-René des Forêts
Fiction Writer and Poet
- Born: January 28, 1918
- Birthplace: Paris, France
- Died: December 30, 2000
- Place of death: Paris, France
Biography
Louis-René des Forêts was born in Paris on January 28, 1918, into a privileged family distinguished by two generations of naval officers. He was educated at a Catholic boarding school in Paris and groomed for a career in military service or diplomacy. Des Forêts, however, could not muster the commitment for such ambition, preferring music and writing.
Shortly before World War II, des Forêts began working on what would become his first novel, although because of his military service it would not be published until 1943. That novel, Les Mendiants, a dark story of smugglers, was a Faulknerian experiment in fragmented narration centered on the existential theme of a universe devoid of reliable moral authority.
His second, far more experimental work,Le Bavard (1946), explored des Forêts’s growing interest in the relationship between language and reality, specifically the inability of words to capture experience or even reconstitute a reliable secondhand frame of reference. The narrator ultimately deconstructs his own story and leaves significant questions over whether any of the storyline is intended to be “real.”
Beginning in the mid-1940’s, des Forêts, after struggling with a third novel he ultimately abandoned, worked in publishing, In 1953, he joined the prestigious Gallimard House and worked there for eighteen years as manuscript evaluator. In 1967, des Forêts published his only poem, the dense Les Megeres de la mer, in which a man contemplates his past, and, in the process, the relationship between memory and language, and how identity is itself an unreliable construct of words. For more than a decade after its publication, des Forêts turned his attention to the visual and plastic arts, abandoning language entirely for painting and cinema.
In the mid-1980’s, des Forêts began publishing extracts of an extended autobiographical experiment that he called Ostinato, a musical term that indicates the repetition of a phrase throughout a longer work, a suggestion of persistence despite the appearance of progress—an apt metaphor for memory itself. The entire work would not be published until 1997. Told in third person and in present tense, it proved a daunting work of imagistic evocation of memory that recalled the stylistic intensities of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. Des Forêts renders moments of spiritual insight back to his schooldays in fragments that resist cohering into convenient narrative but rather foreground the role of language and its ability to summon the past. Particularly poignant are the passages that recall the accidental death in 1965 of his fourteen-year- old daughter, Elisabeth. The work was widely hailed for its rich lyricism and its audacious experimental construction.
Des Forêts died in Paris on December 30, 2000. Over the course of more than fifty years, although his output was slender, his influence on the postwar French experimental novel was significant. In dense, often pessimistic writings, des Forêts questioned the sufficiency of language and its problematic role in memory and identity itself.