Mutisme et point aveugle : la néantisation de la voix de l’enfant dans « Chickamauga » d’Ambrose Bierce (1889) et Chickamauga de Robert Enrico (1962)

Abstract

Ambrose Bierce’s “Chickamauga” is a chilling tale in which a six-year-old deaf mute child fails to reproduce his father’s warlike achievements. Throughout the story, the child ignores reality as he plays at war on the eponymous civil war battlefield. But the tale’s horrendous conclusion turns him into an orphan barely able to utter a series of inarticulate cries. These final sounds testify to his regression towards animality more than his accession to any constructive language. In his filmic adaptation, Robert Enrico conveys a similar message, but the French director insists more on the macabre poetry of the child’s adventures than on the gory accounts given by the American author. Nevertheless, the absence of any redeeming epiphany at the end of both fictions entails some radical pessimism in which neither the child’s voice, nor his gaze, can save Man from the existential absurd.