{"title":"The Joy and Melancholy of Living Beings in Mon ancêtre Poisson","authors":"Marla Epp","doi":"10.1080/00397709.2022.2149069","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Christine Montalbetti’s novel Mon ancêtre Poisson (2019) is teeming with descriptions of living things, perhaps not surprisingly given its subject, the life of her great-great-grandfather, the botanist Jules Poisson. In this essay, I argue that the focus on living beings becomes a way of fleshing out her account of this distant ancestor, whose life story she can only piece together from archival documents. As I demonstrate, the narrator, a version of Montalbetti, turns to shared experiences of the physical world as a way of imagining her great-great-grandfather, picturing them walking in the same garden and experiencing similar physiological sensations. The narrator draws attention to the corporeality of both herself and Jules, emphasizing their physicality and carefully positioning them as breathing bodies, part of a complex network of living beings. Ultimately, I show that, for the narrator, the world of living things is a source of both joy and melancholy. Her research into her great-great-grandfather becomes part of a larger process of reconciling the joy of engaging with the abundance of living and growing things around her with the sorrow of accepting the fundamental and inescapable fragility of living bodies, be they animal, plant, or human.","PeriodicalId":45184,"journal":{"name":"SYMPOSIUM-A QUARTERLY JOURNAL IN MODERN LITERATURES","volume":"76 1","pages":"212 - 224"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3000,"publicationDate":"2022-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"SYMPOSIUM-A QUARTERLY JOURNAL IN MODERN LITERATURES","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00397709.2022.2149069","RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"LITERATURE","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Abstract Christine Montalbetti’s novel Mon ancêtre Poisson (2019) is teeming with descriptions of living things, perhaps not surprisingly given its subject, the life of her great-great-grandfather, the botanist Jules Poisson. In this essay, I argue that the focus on living beings becomes a way of fleshing out her account of this distant ancestor, whose life story she can only piece together from archival documents. As I demonstrate, the narrator, a version of Montalbetti, turns to shared experiences of the physical world as a way of imagining her great-great-grandfather, picturing them walking in the same garden and experiencing similar physiological sensations. The narrator draws attention to the corporeality of both herself and Jules, emphasizing their physicality and carefully positioning them as breathing bodies, part of a complex network of living beings. Ultimately, I show that, for the narrator, the world of living things is a source of both joy and melancholy. Her research into her great-great-grandfather becomes part of a larger process of reconciling the joy of engaging with the abundance of living and growing things around her with the sorrow of accepting the fundamental and inescapable fragility of living bodies, be they animal, plant, or human.
期刊介绍:
Symposium is a quarterly journal of criticism in modern literatures originating in languages other than English. Recent issues include peer-reviewed essays on works by Jorge Luis Borges, Bertolt Brecht, Mikhail Bulgakov, Miguel de Cervantes, Denis Diderot, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Paloma Díaz-Mas, Assia Djebar, Umberto Eco, Franz Kafka, Francis Ponge, and Leonardo Sciascia. Scholars of literature will find research on authors, themes, periods, genres, works, and theory, often through comparative studies. Although primarily in English, some issues include discussions of works in the original language.