Exploring Francophone ecocriticism: studying a Quebec novel by means of animal-becoming

Abstract

This article is exploring how biology and philosophy can bring new ways of thinking critically about literature. Is this approach a productive one, or even a feasible one? In order to explore this research problem, I will base my theoretical framework on the devenir-animal (Deleuze et Guattari, 1980) a philosophical concept that I freely translated as becoming animal. This concept exposes simultaneously a desire of transformation and its process. To bring about this project, I investigated the work of the Quebecer Robert Lalonde entitled Le monde sur le flanc de la truite: notes sur l'art de voir, de lire et d'écrire (The world on the side of the trout: notes on the art of seeing, reading and writing). Structured around the four seasons, this narrative proposes a dialogue between some passages of his favourite writers and the devenir (becoming) inspired by a life in the country side. In a Canadian forest, its day-to-day life happens between nature and lecture. Isolated, this Métis writer showcases the animal's presence and he becomes a matchmaker between heterogeneous elements such as Canadians fauna and writers, a blend that takes root in his Mohawk origins. A multiplicity of universes intersect in Robert Lalonde's work and a large majority of them erase the frontiers between human and animal. Actually, the author explores many forms of non-human lives in order to adapt their perceptions (intensity, potential, speed, capacity, etc.) in other surroundings where some elements change. In this way, the analysis of Robert Lalonde's book through the lenses of becoming animal's theory helps to think the heterogeneous relation that takes place between environment and language. Therefore, the idea of natural habitat isn't limited to the animal world: it's also open to the language, the translation and the cultural transfers.