Like the Playful Clones in the Forest: An Experiment in Reading Marie Darrieussecq’s Notre vie dans les forêts as an Instance of AI

Abstract

Marie Darrieussecq’s Notre vie dans les forêts (2017) is a science-fiction novel about cloning. Alternatively, it could be described as a notebook composed by a fugitive clone named Viviane writing before her imminent death in the tunnels constructed beneath a forest on the ghostly fringes of an unnamed city. Viviane has unplugged from this socially engineered illusion by following one of her former patients and a member of a fugitive group of scavengers and hackers who free their anesthetized clones. But, the fugitives comically struggle to prepare their clones—who just want to play—for the egalitarian, just, and liberatory future in which they hope. In this paper, I first provide a close reading of the narrative of Darrieussecq’s novel, focusing on how it teaches us to read it subjunctively and contingently. I then argue that the clones’ playfulness expresses an energy source resistant to exploitation. I conclude with a hypothesis: the book itself could be understood as an instance of artificial intelligence that resists exploitation because it teaches us to read subjunctively, contingently, and playfully.

Keywords:

• Darrieussecq
• science fiction
• play
• cloning
• AI
• reading

Acknowledgment

This paper was written with the aid of a Carolina Postdoctoral Program for Faculty Diversity fellowship at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I would like to thank my colleagues in the Department of Romance Studies, whose energizing comments about an early version of this paper have been invaluable. I would also like to thank the conference organizers and participants of the 39th Annual 20th and 21st Century French and Francophone Studies Colloquium at the University of Pittsburgh, where I presented a later version of this paper in March 2022. The generous feedback I received at the colloquium has been equally invaluable.

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Notes on contributors

Sean Singh Matharoo

Sean Singh Matharoo is Assistant Professor & Jacques Hardré Fellow of French and Francophone Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he is writing The Damned of the Anthropocene: Performatively Modeling Energy Aesthetics for a New Structuralism.