The Joy and Melancholy of Living Beings in Mon ancêtre Poisson

Abstract

Christine Montalbetti’s novel Mon ancêtre Poisson (2019) is teeming with descriptions of living things, perhaps not surprisingly given its subject, the life of her great-great-grandfather, the botanist Jules Poisson. In this essay, I argue that the focus on living beings becomes a way of fleshing out her account of this distant ancestor, whose life story she can only piece together from archival documents. As I demonstrate, the narrator, a version of Montalbetti, turns to shared experiences of the physical world as a way of imagining her great-great-grandfather, picturing them walking in the same garden and experiencing similar physiological sensations. The narrator draws attention to the corporeality of both herself and Jules, emphasizing their physicality and carefully positioning them as breathing bodies, part of a complex network of living beings. Ultimately, I show that, for the narrator, the world of living things is a source of both joy and melancholy. Her research into her great-great-grandfather becomes part of a larger process of reconciling the joy of engaging with the abundance of living and growing things around her with the sorrow of accepting the fundamental and inescapable fragility of living bodies, be they animal, plant, or human.

Keywords:

• Christine Montalbetti
• Mon ancêtre Poisson
• biography
• autobiography
• plants
• bodies
• Jardin des Plantes

Notes

1 For a discussion of Montalbetti’s choice to call her text a novel, see Warren Motte, “Christine Montalbetti’s Unreasonable Mission.”

2 On the inseparable link between bodies and writing and emotion, see also Marie-Anne Paveau and Pierre Zoberman’s introduction to the edited volume Corpographèses: Corps écrits, corps inscrits, where they affirm: “L’idée s’impose désormais que les productions dites de ‘l’intellect’ comme le texte littéraire ou le discours en général ne sont pas coupées de l’affect, du biologique et du corporel” (11).

3 This passage is particularly reminiscent of Bruno Latour’s refutation of the myth of the scientist as “le grand homme…seul dans son laboratoire, seul avec ses concepts, et il révolutionne la société à bout de bras, par la seule puissance de son esprit” (30). See also Paveau and Zoberman who write: “L’enjeu est donc très important, puisqu’il s’agit finalement de remettre en cause la coupure cartésienne, et d’une façon générale métaphysique, très fortement implantée en France dans les mentalités scientifiques, entre corps et esprit” (10).

4 See Walter Putnam, “The Colonial Zoo,” for more on zoos in France and, in particular, for their close links to colonialism.

5 See, for example, Marie-Hélène Parizeau, who explains: “Le déploiement des sciences au XVIIIe siècle et leur spécialisation au XIXe permett[aient] d’objectiver la nature en la décomposant en autant d’objets de connaissance et d’expériences mesurables” (28).

6 See also Motte, French Fiction Today, for more on the way Montalbetti engages the reader. He notes, for example: “We should enter into narrative, she suggests, in a way that makes us available to the experience it offers, bringing with us all of the baggage that makes us ourselves” (75).

7 Suzanne comes from the Hebrew word for lily, or, more commonly in modern Hebrew, rose (Tanet and Hordé 416).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Marla Epp

Marla Epp is Assistant Professor of French at MacEwan University in Canada. Her current research studies the continued and evolving ways in which contemporary French and Francophone literature and film incorporate historical elements into their narratives. Her work has appeared in journals such as The French Review, Green Humanities, Modern & Contemporary France, Neophilologus, and Women in French Studies.