Le Lecteur et la question écologique dans Le Club des miracles relatifs de Nancy Huston

Abstract

This article examines the ways in which Nancy Huston’s novel Le Club des miracles relatifs establishes its relationship to its reader, focusing especially on the protagonist’s stilted monologues addressed to a supposed auditor and perhaps also, indirectly, to the reader. While the text is a fiction, it invites its readers to take note of the effects of the tar sands on the environment and to think critically about the place of humans in the ecosystem. It does so by involving the reader in the narration process, most notably by indirect interpellation. However, the text also distances its readers, thereby affording them the space to reflect on the environmental issues raised. This is done using a strategy of “linguistic defamiliarization,” for example by inventing words which unnerve the readers while giving them access to the protagonist’s mind.

Keywords:

• Littérature
• relationnelle
• écriture adressée
• lecteur
• écologie
• Nancy Huston

Notes

1 Dominique Viart, Comment nommer la littérature contemporaine, Fabula, 2019, https://www.fabula.org/atelier.php?Comment_nommer_la_litterature_contemporaine. Accessed 24 Apr. 2021.

2 Dans son interview en 2019 titrée Dans les yeux de Nancy Huston, elle ajoute, “il y a quelque chose de profondément humain dans la phrase et dans le récit. Si on a un récit complètement chaotique ou une phrase complètement explosée, c’est aussi une agression peut être superflue du lecteur” (Théâtre National La Colline).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Fanny Leveau

Fanny Leveau is a Ph.D. candidate at the department of French Studies at Western University. Her research focuses on contemporary French literature. She is studying how relations between humans and their ecological as well as technological environments are portrayed in novels published in the past five years. Her approach includes literary theory and analysis, ecocritism and posthumanism.

Karin Schwerdtner

Karin Schwerdtner is Associate Professor at Western University (Canada) where she teaches in the Department of French Studies. Her research focuses on contemporary literature, but she is also interested in epistolary writing and the literary interview. Her book of author interviews, Le (Beau) risque d’écrire appeared in January 2018 (Éditions Nota bene) and her volume with Isabelle Keller-Privat, La Lettre trace du voyage à l’époque moderne et contemporaine, was published by the Presses Universitaires de Paris Nanterre in 2019.