Ecospirituality: Vegetal Ghosts in Antoine Volodine’s Le Nom des singes (1994)

Abstract

Abstract Antoine Volodine’s idiosyncratic “post-exotic” fiction has been remarked for its singular cyclical temporality and its post-apocalyptical aesthetics. In this essay, I explore the ecocritical implications of Volodine’s nonlinear time—as it disrupts the underlying assumption of progress, and its inherently binary organization of life, that sustain our current ecological crisis. Drawing from Frédéric Neyrat’s “spectral ecopolitics” and Anna L. Tsing’s tracking of the matsutake in The Mushroom at the End of the World (2015), I follow the spectral and nonhuman beings that populate the novel Le Nom des singes (1994) and interfere with its narrative enterprise. The characters of the story appear as ghost-like figures whose constant re-telling of lists and lives (or stories) leads, voluntarily or not, to the production of worlds—or, rather, (spectral) glimpses of worlds. The taxonomic work of naming lists of indigenous flora and fauna engaged by the human characters conjures uncertain and unfamiliar beings that slightly escape our grasp and, in turn, swarm and attempt to take over the narrative space—at once blurring and, in the process, contributing to the work of narration.