Nature, a Love Story: Marie Nimier’s éco-critique in La Plage

Abstract

Marie Nimier’s recent fiction highlights the importance of natural ecology in the fictional protagonist’s search for self and for reparations with the past. In La Plage (2016), the juxtaposition of the Anthropocene’s disastrous destruction of nature with the emotional catastrophes of a heroine known to the reader simply as “l’inconnue” provides the background for a story of healing and redemption. Among the many aspects of the text that metaphorize its subject—the search for a new language, the return to a metaphorical Garden of Eden of childhood, reassemblages of relationships in the past and present—, is that of the protagonist’s emergence as a “terrestrial” in Bruno Latour’s sense of the word, that is, as part of a network of actors engaged in saving the planet. Through a process of deterritorialization on the “plage,” equated with the “page,” she discovers a renewed, hopeful language and a belief in love. A story of re-writing, re-living, and re-building one’s memories in and with nature leads to a regeneration of the human belief in a future for the planet.

Keywords:

• Network of actors
• eco-criticism
• writing nature
• triangulation
• deterritorialization

Notes

1 Photo-Photo, Paris, Gallimard, 2010; Le Palais des orties, Paris, Gallimard, 2010.

2 For further information about the Anthropocene, see James Jaehoon Lee and Joshua Beckelheimer, “Anthropocene and Empire: Discourse Networks of the Human Record,” PMLA 135: 1 (2020), pp. 110–129.

3 Bruno Latour, Huit conférences sur le Nouveau Régime climatique, Paris, La Découverte, 2015.

4 James Lovelock, Gaia: a new look at life on earth, Oxford UP, 2000.

5 Primate visions: gender, race and nature in the world of modern science, Routledge, 1989.

6 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Mille Plateaux, Paris, Éditions de Minuit, 1980.

7 In a conversation with the author at a conference in Chicago in November 2019, where I discussed my ideas for this study, she pointed to this quote as the transformative moment in the novel where the protagonist awakens to the possibility of nature as a love story.

8 The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. Third Edition, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1992.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Carol J. Murphy

Carol Murphy is Professor Emerita of French at the University of Florida and author of book-length studies of Julien Gracq and Marguerite Duras. She has also co-edited two volumes of Sites: Contemporary French and Francophone Studies and translated Jean Paulhan’s essay, Fautrier l’enragé. Her recent essays include studies of Duras, Nimier, Houellebecq, and Nothomb.