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Natures mourantes

Introduction

Claire Cazajous-Augé

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1In Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Jane Bennett challenges the traditional opposition between inert and animate matter. She shows that even things with no apparent subjectivity or intentionality such as debris, daily life objects or edibles are composed of “vibrant matter” and act as “quasi-agents” (viii) which actively participate in the perpetual transformation of nature. She points out that death does not prevent human and nonhuman bodies from contributing to the vibrancy of the world: “This vital materiality congeals into bodies, bodies that seek to persevere or prolong their run.” (118) The corpses of animals and dead plants are not inert; indeed, they host other species (insects, fish, birds of prey, etc.) that feed from them and destroy them simultaneously, and they are often turned into food or commodities (humans eat the flesh of animals, use their fur, hides and bones for clothing and agriculture). In other words, they take part in the energetic flux of the world and illustrate the infinite capacity for recreation of natura naturans (Spinoza).

2Art and literature can help us bring an end to the ontological separations—inert matter v. organic life, human v. nonhuman world—our modern tradition and mode of thinking are based on. Indeed, artists, writers and poets have often disclosed the energetic vitality inherent in all things and their complex and dynamic networks of relations. For example, David Abram suggests that Van Gogh’s still lifes are not mere depictions of inert and inanimate things, but networks of vibrant elements that influence and transform one another:

Even in his so-called still-lifes there is nothing inert or inanimate. The artist’s pipe, a plate, two onions, and a box of matches—each being radiates into the world around it, and each is affected (even infected) by the others, as an empty bottle, transparent as an eye, gathers the room into itself. (51)

3Artists, writers and poets who choose to depict the dead or dying bodies of animals through dynamic and animated descriptions may help us forgo the idea that humans are distinct from the rest of the world. They show that “[e]ach thing, each being, is in steady intercourse with the entities and elements around it, negotiating its passage and exerting its participation in the ongoing emergence of what is” (Abram 51). They can also allow us to perceive and experience nature’s creativity and its endless capacity to generate new forms, which, at the age of the Anthropocene and the Sixth Mass extinction, has become vital. They suggest that we should put an end to the idea that we are surrounded by an environment that we are separated from and acknowledge that we interact with other natural entities, even beyond death. As Tim Ingold puts it, we should not look at “the relations between organisms and their external environments but [at] the relations along their several enmeshed ways of life.” (103) However, far from suggesting that the death of nonhuman individual and species is less tragic and disastrous because nature is endowed with a virtually infinite power of re-creation and regeneration, the vivid descriptions of animals and plants which died or are dying because of human activity and actions—industrial farming, pollution, deforestation, etc.—remind us of our responsibility in the deaths of countless nonhuman beings and help us picture the sometimes invisible yet vital multispecies events that we are part of.

4The present issue proposes to continue a discussion initiated in one of the Cultures Anglo-Saxonnes (E.A.801) interdisciplinary research group focusing on the notion of the commonplace1 and in a 2021 symposium2. The seven essays and the two dialogues aim at rethinking the genre of still life, or “nature morte,” by focusing on the representation of dead and dying nonhuman bodies in anglophone art and literature. The expression “natures mourantes,” whose English closest yet imperfect equivalent could be “dying still lifes,” may offer a new understanding of the ontological, scientific and linguistic categories we are used to and may encourage us to rethink the role of artists, particularly in the context of the ecological crisis. Similarly, in Pour en finir avec la nature morte, art historian Laurence Bertrand-Dorléac argues that we ought to change the name “natures mortes,” or “still lifes,” as she considers that the French and the English expressions fail to properly define artworks that belong to this artistic—and we could add, literary3—genre. She explains that the two names insist on the inanimate dimension of the elements depicted, whereas the paintings and photographs which represent man-made and natural objects assembled on a specific order rather illustrate the dynamic relationships which exist between them and the viewers. She thus proposes to use the term “choses,” or “things,” and to name each painting by the animal, plant, food, object, etc. that it represents.4 Indeed, she explains that naming things contributes to acknowledging their existences and the dynamic roles they play in our societies, our everyday lives and our imagination.

  • 5 In this view, some of the rotting bodies described in this issue could belong to what Stephane-Hich (...)

5The gerundive used in “natures mourantes” and “dying still lifes” first expresses that we are witnessing the Sixth Mass extinction and that we are at a tipping point for the future of civilization. Even if some of the essays do not directly mention the Anthropocene, they all show the responsibility of humans in the deaths of animals, plants, and entire ecosystems. Then, the gerundive alludes to the vitality of natura naturans and its ceaseless transformative power, suggesting that death is a process rather than an event. Finally, it intimates that art and literature are endowed with the ability to present the ceaseless flux of nature occurring between species and beyond death through innovative and always changing forms. The nonhuman dead bodies described in the following essays all hold a strong evocative power which persists after death; indeed, their images haunt the characters, the narrators and the viewers, stir their imagination and raise their environmental consciousness. Dying still lifes then invite us to create more ethical forms of praxis towards the other-than-human world and to acknowledge our proximity with plants and other animals5 thanks to artistic and poetic experiences.

6The texts and artworks analyzed in the essays of the first section highlight the responsibility of humans in hurting or killing animals by confronting readers and viewers with the disturbing and shocking agony and death of nonhuman animals. In her contribution, Isabelle Keller-Privat studies the different and haunting forms of dying still lifes which pervade Lawrence Durrell’s writing (Alexandria Quartet and Avignon Quintet) and the manners in which they encourage readers to enter new modes of perception and relation with the world. The image of an executed camel and the motif of the female prey particularly shed light on the numerous endangered subjects hiding in the recesses of the visible world and textual mimesis: “The network of embedded still lifes not only functions as the hidden pattern in the carpet: it prompts us to question our relation to the world through the focus of the weak and vulnerable subject.” David Lombard’s essay investigates the role of the sublime in Steven Rinella’s hunting memoirs, and more particularly in the description of animals Rinella hunted and killed. Lombard argues that even if Rinella’s hunting stories contribute to reinforcing human and male dominance over the nonhuman world, they also testify to the author’s growing ecological concern. Indeed, it is by contemplating the bodies of his victims and their remainders (hides, skulls), which are described as sublime still lifes, that the hunter is led to question his relationship with the nonhuman world: “In other words, the killing and death of the animal, which becomes a ‘still life’ itself, are productive of transformative meaning for Rinella, which encourages him to ponder over and promote a destructive yet respectful relationship with non-human animals.” Vincent Lecomte’s essay explores the motif of the dying animal in the works of three contemporary artists and the manners in which they attempt to make the invisible—our society’s violence towards animals—visible. Diane Michener’s photographs thus expose the severed heads of animals immediately after they have been killed in slaughterhouses. Damien Hirst’s formaldehyde animals also present the inevitable death of animals in our consumerist society to the viewers but his sculptures may also, paradoxically enough, be seen as a form of celebration of the act of killing. Vincent Lecomte concludes his essay by presenting how Costa Rican artist Guillermo Vargas chose an even more provocative approach: he attached a feral dog in a museum and let it starve in front of the spectators, thus confronting them with the humans’ unjust treatment of animals. In an essay dedicated to Jim Crace’s Being Dead, Marie Cazaban-Mazerolles chooses to focus on the descriptions of the corpses of a man and a woman—the two main protagonists of the novel—which underline that humans experience the same process of decomposition that animals go through. In Crace’s dying still lifes of human cadavers, the boundaries between human and nonhuman bodies cannot be distinguished, thus blurring the Western and modern distinction between life and death and between the human and the nonhuman worlds. Marie Cazaban-Mazerolles argues that, far from suggesting a “metaphysical humiliation,” the rotting human corpses amount to a “horizontal ecological transcendence” and invite us to rethink our funerary rites and position in the natural world.

7The essays of the second section reevaluate the motif of literary still lifes by adopting an ecological perspective. Mathilde La Cassagnère’s contribution examines three poems by Ted Hughes which, just like the essays from the first section, force readers to look at dying beasts in the eye. However, she argues, Hughes reinvisions the motif of still lifes by shifting perspectives: “Ted Hughes reverses the dynamics of this scopophilia (or visual violence) by putting the human eye—therefore the reader’s eye—under the beast’s petrifying gaze.” Poet and readers are “absorbed” into the animal’s gaze. Such an experience gives way to complex multispecies entanglements and to the salutary promise of regeneration during the “pivotal era of the Anthropocene.” Studying these three poems in light of the shamanic rituals that fascinated the poet also allows Mathilde La Cassagnère to present death as an intermediary state and to reconsider the ontological divide modern societies are based on. In their essays, Frédérique Spill and Antoine Traisnel both address the role of plants in the human and the nonhuman worlds. Frédérique Spill examines Ron Rash’s novella “In the Valley” which depicts the decimation of entire forests and the numerous species they shelter in the Appalachian Mountains. She argues that the text partakes of the genre of the “poetry of extinction” as it illustrates the devastating and irreversible loss of nonhuman lives caused by human activity in an elegiac tone. By setting his story in the 1930s, Frédérique Spill remarks, Rash intimates that this mass extinction is not a new phenomenon and that animal and vegetal species have been dying because of humans for decades, if not centuries. In “Thoreau’s Garden Politics,” an essay which was initially published in 2021 (Dispersion. Thoreau and Vegetal Thought), Antoine Traisnel investigates Thoreau’s relations with plants in Walden in line with 20th and 21st century plant theory. He explains that Thoreau’s interest for vegetal life made him a precursor, contradicting contemporary thinkers who deplore that the agency of plants has been ignored until very recently. Evoking Thoreau’s denunciation of the lack of guilt with which humans kill plants, Antoine Traisnel addresses Thoreau’s “pragmatic politics of planting” and expands on the necessity to take into consideration the lives of vegetal entities during the environmental crisis.

8In the third and last section, Aaron Moe first proposes an original dialectical dialogue which explores how part of the vibrant, pulsing, and overwhelming energy of still life emerges from glimpsing the object’s existence in the context of Deep Time. The dialogue poises itself in the tension between ode and elegy, between the sense of grief and outrage concerning the slow persistent strangling of the planet, and yet the awe at the frenzied surge of life surrounding decay. Living in this tension may yield insights as to how we might live better and more creatively on this shared planet. Finally, David Vann’s interview offers new perspectives on the question of the representation of the dead bodies of animal and human beings. By resorting to a fragmented syntax and terrifying yet beautiful scenes in which humans and animals are killed, Vann questions and sometimes transcends the tragic events of his life, the systemic violence of the American society and the ecological crisis that has permanently modified the landscapes of his childhood.

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Bibliography

Abram, David. Becoming Animal. An Earthly Cosmology. New York: Random House, 2010.

Afeissa, David-Hicham. Esthétique de la charogne. Bellevaux : Dehors, 2018.

Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010.

Bertrand Dorléac, Laurence. Pour en finir avec la nature morte. Paris : Gallimard, 2020.

Cazajous-Augé, Claire. À la trace. La poéthique animalière des nouvelles de Rick Bass. Lyon : ENS Éditions, 2021.

Hamon, Philippe. Rencontres sur tables et choses qui traînent. De la nature morte en littérature. Genève : Droz, 2019.

Ingold, Tim. Lines. A Brief History. New York: Routledge, 2007.

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Notes

1 https://cas.univ-tlse2.fr/axe-2-common-places

2 https://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/16599

3 In Rencontres sur tables et choses qui traînent. De la nature morte en littérature, Philippe Hamon extends the artistic genre of still life to literary works.

4 Laurence Bertrand-Dorléac was the curator of an exhibition dedicated to still-lifes entitled “Things. A History of Still Life,” which was held in Le Louvre from October 2022 to January 2023. https://www.louvre.fr/en/what-s-on/exhibitions/things

5 In this view, some of the rotting bodies described in this issue could belong to what Stephane-Hicham Afeissa defines as an “aesthetics of the carrion” which attempts to show that human and nonhuman corpses experience the same process of putrefaction and decomposition.

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References

Electronic reference

Claire Cazajous-Augé, “Introduction”Miranda [Online], 27 | 2023, Online since 21 March 2023, connection on 23 January 2026. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/miranda/51441; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/miranda.51441

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