Ecospirituality: Vegetal Ghosts in Antoine Volodine’s Le Nom des singes (1994)

Abstract

Antoine Volodine’s idiosyncratic “post-exotic” fiction has been remarked for its singular cyclical temporality and its post-apocalyptical aesthetics. In this essay, I explore the ecocritical implications of Volodine’s nonlinear time—as it disrupts the underlying assumption of progress, and its inherently binary organization of life, that sustain our current ecological crisis. Drawing from Frédéric Neyrat’s “spectral ecopolitics” and Anna L. Tsing’s tracking of the matsutake in The Mushroom at the End of the World (2015), I follow the spectral and nonhuman beings that populate the novel Le Nom des singes (1994) and interfere with its narrative enterprise. The characters of the story appear as ghost-like figures whose constant re-telling of lists and lives (or stories) leads, voluntarily or not, to the production of worlds—or, rather, (spectral) glimpses of worlds. The taxonomic work of naming lists of indigenous flora and fauna engaged by the human characters conjures uncertain and unfamiliar beings that slightly escape our grasp and, in turn, swarm and attempt to take over the narrative space—at once blurring and, in the process, contributing to the work of narration.

Keywords:

• Volodine
• ecocriticism
• ecospirituality
• spectral
• plants
• opacity

Notes

1 While not devoid of its own systems of meaning now, “post-exoticism” is originally a ruse by Volodine to avoid literary categorization. He expands upon these literary genres in Le Post-exotisme en dix leçons, leçons onze (Paris, Gallimard, 1998).

2 Or “nirvana,” a deliverance from the cycle of life-death-rebirth that translates as “extinction” (of the human desire).

3 The bardo is a fixture of Volodine’s fictions, whether explicit, notably in Bardo or not bardo (Paris, Seuil, 2004), Dondog (Paris, Seuil, 2002), and Le Post-exotisme, or suggested, as in Le Port intérieur (Paris, Les Éditions de Minuit, 1996).

4 Paris, Seuil.

5 An active reader will also find themselves engaging in taxonomic work as they attempt to research each of the names and determinate their origin or “veracity.”

6 Paris, Gallimard.

7 This essay is part of a larger work of reading the nonhuman in contemporary French literature that positions itself within the critical framework that Glissant’s “poetics of the relation” provides.

8 On sabotage and avoidance as narrative strategies, see Volodine, Le Post-exotisme en dix leçons, leçon onze, p. 39.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sophie Brunau-Zaragoza

Sophie Brunau-Zaragoza is a Ph.D. student in the Department of French Studies at Brown University. Her dissertation project explores the intersections of ecocritical imaginations in Contemporary French Literature and on the ecoactivist occupied zone “zad.” She has previously published on Marie Darrieussecq.