Zoopoetics such as it has developed in France over the past ten years under the auspices of Anne Simon , seeks “specifically to highlight the stylistic, linguistic, narrative and rhythmic means by which writers restore the diversity of animal behaviors and world s, as well as the complexity, historical and otherwise, of human -animal interactions” (Simon 2015, 217). 1 As Simon reminds us, the term, which Jacques Derrida was one of the first to use in reference to Kafka (cf. Derrida 2008, 6), refers to the Greek notion of ζῷον [zōon], which designates the living being, the animate (Simon 2015, 219), deriving ultimately from the verb ζάω [záō] evoking the idea of living, of breathing, of being among the living, or in its transitive use, “to make life ,” or “to give life .” Zoopoetics furthermore refers to the notion of ποίησις [poíēsis], which defines creation, the action of doing according to a certain knowledge, and the notion of “poetics ,” understood in its broadest sense as a method that questions the properties of literary discourse. “Zoopoetics ” is, thus, the study of those living beings that move and breathe, examining the way in which creative language constructs textual animals. How does human literary language embody beasts of flesh and blood? How has this strong connection between φύσις [phúsis] and λόγος [lógos] been established? 2 How have the lives of animals been disseminated or transcribed in human language ? That is to say, how have the ways in which animals shape their Umwelt en, their expressive behavior , their rhythms, their voices, emotions, forms, ornaments, and styles, been captured in poetic language ? “Zoopoetics ,” Simon writes, “links the inventive, or even foundational power of creative language and the primordial expressivity of the living—the poiein of the zōon” (2017, 83). While speech (λόγος) has served to sanction the anthropological difference (i.e., the ontological superiority of man and the existential poverty of animals), it is through poetic language that writers have sought to (re)establish the connection between man and the rest of the creation.
In order to understand this complex form of poetic knowledge, which reveals multiple ways of figuring animal lives, and to change the way we look at animals in literary texts and in the world at large, zoopoetics draws on other disciplines that have deepened their reflection on animals and the living world (e.g., ethology , zoology , zoosemiotics , phenomenology , history, ethics, anthropology , and ecology). In short, zoopoetics integrates interdisciplinary perspectives that, because they change the way we look at animals, also allow us to reevaluate literary norms and uncover new corpora in the history of literature , bringing to light a wealth of unknown and marginal works that have been overlooked. I am thinking in particular of the corpus of rural literature , anchored in the French soil and closely linked to specific regions, which has until very recently been excluded from the field of criticism and ignored by official literary history. In France, the rural world, which “is of major interest for its proximity to both domestic and farm animals” (Romestaing and Schaffner 2014, 6), has been largely disregarded since the nineteenth century because of its lack of interest in the city and the idea of progress, or because it is not avant-garde. Another reason is the effect of the anthropological difference , that is to say, the anthropocentrism of Western philosophy which, at least since Descartes, has denied animals’ emotions, rationality, subjective world, culture, and individual history. Many French writers of animals and rurality, by contrast, had, well before their time, proclaimed “the end of the human exception” (Schaeffer 2007). I am thinking in particular of those authors of the early twentieth century who did not view humanity as an exception with dominion over all of creation, but rather asserted an ontological equilibrium between human and nonhuman animals.
Indeed, at the end of the nineteenth century and in the first decades of the twentieth century, the status of the animal in Francophone literature underwent a considerable shift. Whereas literary animals previously had been the protagonists in fables , fairy tales, and legends, serving predominantly as metaphor s, symbol s, or allegories of the human , 3 around the turn of the century they increasingly acquired “subject” status with a personal experience and a rich emotional life . Literary animals became living beings with complex semiotic and cognitive abilities, even being recognized as friends and family members. The various roles these animals embody bear witness to the economic, scientific, cultural, political, and legal changes that had taken place in France during the nineteenth century, especially from 1850 onward. These literary animals came to be seen and represented in a more concrete and specific way—as living beings rather than mere metaphors—and, moreover, in this respect they also come closer to humans (cf. Romestaing and Schaffner 2014, 10–11). Game animals occupy a privileged position in many of these works, testifying to the writers’ passion for hunting , both as a personal pursuit and as a more bookish practice. In what follows, I will consider works by four different authors, all of which revolve around the hunt. While the hunting practices presented in these texts are very diverse, all are exercised in the plains, woods, and forests of France in the first half of the twentieth century. The earliest of these, Le Roman de Miraut, is a biography of a hunting dog , written in 1913 by the Franc-Comtois Louis Pergaud (1882–1915), in which the author recounts episodes of hunting “à la billebaude,” whereby the hunter moves through the territory with or without precise objectives and hunts whatever small game the dog raises (mostly bird s, hare s, and rabbits). “La chasse au sanglier” (“The Boar Hunt,” 1923) by the Gascon writer Joseph de Pesquidoux (1869–1946), by contrast, evokes what is known as drive-hunting , where trackers and dogs noisily drive the game in the direction of the hunters lying in wait. In “Chasse de nuit” (“Night Hunting ,” 1934), Gaston Chérau (1872–1937) tells of a rare wild cat hunt with dogs in Haut-Berry. This text , as well as “Automne” and “Les Seigneurs noirs” which will also be discussed, forms part of Chasses et plein air en France, a 1934 collection of nature and hunting stories in which Chérau gives expression to his passion for and conception of hunting . Finally, in his novel Raboliot (1925), Maurice Genevoix (1890–1980) focuses on hunting with dogs, with night lights and rabbit snaring. The novel tells the life story of a poacher who, caught in the act of illegal hunting and unable to stop, is forced to flee and live in the woods. In La dernière Harde (The Last Hunt, 1938) and Forêt voisine (Neighboring Forest, 1931), Genevoix focuses on deer hunting with hounds in the medieval tradition—as an allusion to Gaston Fébus’s Book of the Hunt (1388). 4 Contrary to traditional hunting texts, La dernière Harde does not merely set out the hunter’s point of view: it imagines the way in which the deer experience the hunts and how they foil the hunters’ traps. What is more, this novel prese...