‘Am I a Bear or a Hedgehog?’ Language and Silence in the Works of C.S. Lewis

Abstract

Whereas Wittgenstein claims that language can only say that which can be said and, since language constructs only a world of simple objects, GOD is, as the OTHER, probably the ultimate challenge to language - the OTHER of whom one can neither speak nor write. One of the tasks of literature, however, is to write the unwriteable and to say the unsayable. Language can only impinge on the realm of silence by means of metaphor and myth. For C.S.Lewis myth is metaphor writ large.