I. “A Change in Sensibility”

In the 1970s, scientists James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis formulated the Gaia hypothesis, a provocative, cybernetic articulation of biology, geology, and atmospheric chemistry through which the Earth is assumed to be a self-regulating system that sustains conditions favorable for life. As such, Gaia designates “The biosphere and all of those parts of the Earth with which it actively interacts” (Lovelock & Margulis, 3). In their wake, various inflexions of the Gaia paradigm² have emerged and informed recent work in the social sciences as well as cultural and literary studies, where scholars and critics have relied on Gaia theory to develop new, dynamic ways of understanding the living world, and offer original attempts at rethinking politics and aesthetics by turning to its material processes.

However, “as science, Gaia never really made it,” Michael Ruse writes (“Holy Fool?”). Geologist Robert Diffendal suggests that the ill-fated trajectory of the first iterations of the Gaia hypothesis comes partly from the naming of the proposition, which is loaded with dense mythological background:

Designating this theory ‘Gaia’ got Lovelock into trouble with some of his detractors, who found it a bit too unscientific. Testing of the theory is still ongoing by many researchers who think it sound, but under such less controversial terms as ‘Earth System Science’ or ‘Geo-physiology.’ (139)

Despite a recent paper by Déborah Bucchi delving into the riches of onomastics by comparing the scientific Gaia, its use in the environmental humanities, and the Greek Goddess of the same name in the works of Aeschylus and Hesiod, a major protagonist in this story has suffered disregard, namely William Golding, one of Britain’s major 20^th-century writers.³ Indeed, Lovelock and Golding both lived in Bowerchalke, a village in southern England, and the two friends would discuss their respective ongoing projects and musings during evening strolls around the village or at the pub (Carey, 290). And Lovelock remembers:

In 1968 or 1969, during a walk, I tried out my hypothesis on him [Golding]; he was receptive because, unlike most literary figures, he had taken physics while at Oxford as an undergraduate and fully understood the science of my argument. He grew enthusiastic and said, “If you are intending to come out with a large idea like that, I suggest that you give it a proper name: I propose ‘Gaia.’” … Ge, of course, is the prefix of the sciences of geology, geophysics, and geochemistry. To Golding, Gaia, the goddess who brought order out of chaos, was the appropriate title for a hypothesis about an Earth system that regulated its climate and chemistry so as to sustain habitability. (Lovelock, Vanishing, 196–7)

Although his naming suggestion may have damaged the scientific reception of the hypothesis, Golding was an early advocate of the revolutionary proposition pushed forward by Lovelock and Margulis. Frédéric Regard timidly identifies in a footnote what he sees as a potentially “Green” discourse in Golding, before referring to two book-reviews written by the author for British newspapers (106). In “Gaia Lives, OK?” (The Guardian, September 1976), Golding positions himself as one of the early supporters of the paradigmatic change offered by Lovelock and Margulis. A review of Georg Gerster’s book Grand Design: The Earth from Above, “Gaia Lives, OK?” charts out the implications of considering the human point of view as limited. Situating the recent proliferation of aerial views in the history of perception, Golding observes that

To know intellectually that the Mediterranean lies to the south of England and on the other side of France is not the same thing as seeing the dark line of water beyond Marseilles in a photograph taken over Hampshire. But the possible change in sensibility was to be overwhelmed by the last and greatest expansion of the human ‘point of view.’ (85)

Such aesthetic revolution goes beyond the identification of “patterns” displayed in pictures of the earth, the “aerial views of the marks made on the earth by man’s repetitious activities.” Indeed, the “Blue Marble” picture or aerial views of Europe help us to have a different sense of the materiality of the earth, and the traces of human activity are merely “trivial alterations to her [earth’s] skin,” compared to the massive, geological impact of “the coral insects” that “have had more effect than we have” (85). The aesthetic quandary for Golding lies in the fact that the magnitude of life’s action in terraforming is deemed approachable only intellectually. Yet, as he argues, “our growing knowledge both of the microscopic and the macroscopic nature of the earth is not just a satisfaction to a handful of scientists. In both directions it is bringing about a change in sensibility” (86). Thanks to the perceptual enhancement that aerial views have provided, aesthetics appears as the most potent domain for apprehending the earth and fleshing out the reality of the milieu in which we find ourselves. Golding is familiar with “the Gaian view of the atmosphere” that Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan define as “a radical departure from the former scientific concept that life on Earth is surrounded by and adapts to an essentially static environment” (“Gaia and Philosophy,” 60; italics mine). Instead, according to them “life interacts with and eventually becomes its own environment.” Golding’s alert, “those who think of the world as a lifeless lump would do well to watch out” (“Gaia Lives,” 86), eventually appears as a call not only for a change of sensibility but also, as I will show, for an apprenticeship in signs, an evental aesthetics.⁴ Theological in tone, this threat is also an aesthetic challenge to move beyond what Bruno Latour calls an “image of the Globe” (Latour, 111–145) and pay attention to the material processes at work in the Earth system.

Although Golding described human action as “trivial alterations” to the Earth’s surface, his tone changed dramatically fifteen years later, in January 1990, when he published in The Sunday Times a piece titled “The Earth’s Revenge.” In this review of John Gribbin’s Hothouse Earth: The Greenhouse Effect and Gaia, Golding resorts to prophetic intonations made tangible by the title, an unequivocal condemnation of mankind. Beginning his review with the notion of “climatic disaster,” Golding shares his awareness of the reality of climate change, its irreversibility⁵ as well as its global scale. As he identifies the specifically human agency at work behind the destruction of a “balance of forces,” Golding describes the “process” as having “already begun.”

Most importantly, Golding reformulates what is at stake: “The picture, therefore, is not of humanity inconvenienced by nature, but of humanity struggling with her for bare survival—and not in the distant future but beginning now.” Golding displays a minute understanding of the intricacies of planetary ecology, thus developing an understanding of the Earth as a dynamic milieu. Indeed, he references “Professor James Lovelock whose view of nature some 15 or 20 years ago was to see our planet as a single system, a creature having some of the attributes of a living organism.” As he tries to identify the conditions for survival and the preservation of the ecological milieu, Golding turns to ancient culture and mythology: “The Greeks prized an emotion they called sebas, a word which could mean as little as respect for a worthy person and as much as a reverential awe before the gods. They felt this sebas for Gaia.” From this spiritual vantage point, Golding develops:

Most emphatically we post-industrial-revolution men have seldom felt a proper sebas for Gaia. We experience far more its opposite, hubris. We suppose that we own Gaia when the truth is that she owns us and we cannot expect her to continue to afford us ‘the means of life’ when we live on her like a disease which is no more than a continual and brutal disruption of her self-regulating systems.

In this Greek conceptual framework of sebas vs. hubris, Golding argues that beyond reducing fuel consumption and geoengineering humanity into the future, the key might be to cultivate sebas—“we need to feel ‘sebas’ for the whole earth,” he writes. An irrebuttable dénouement follows suit:

There are signs that this revolution in feeling may be at hand. Otherwise, the only motive power which will drive our actions will be self-interest, starting in concern, heightened by way of worry to dread: and if the seas really do become a monster, and Gaia an outraged and avenging stepmother, the end will be panic and terror.

As a writer, Golding refines his articulation of aesthetics in the climate catastrophe that he anticipates. However, his aesthetics remains sheathed in the spiritual, rather than the historical: despite his dismissal of fossil fuel development models, his view remains Occidental and somewhat unaware of political contradictions. In his view, to take political action against climate change and ecological destruction can only occur through an aesthetic and spiritual apprenticeship that makes tangible the human and non-human processes of the Earth system.⁶

II. The Island As Intensive System

In his 1983 Nobel prize lecture, Golding opens a space for what he sees as the future of literature:

Words may, through the devotion, the skill, the passion, and the luck of writers prove to be the most powerful thing in the world. … Then there is hope that we may learn to be temperate, provident, taking no more from nature’s treasury than is our due. It may be by books, stories, poetry, lectures we who have the ear of mankind can move man a little nearer the perilous safety of a warless and provident world. It cannot be done by the mechanical constructs of overt propaganda. I cannot do it myself, cannot now create stories which would help to make man aware of what he is doing; but there are others who can, many others. There always have been.

In this part of his speech, Golding charts out a literary path towards political change as an alternative to “overt propaganda.” Unlike Amitav Ghosh, who writes that the “most intransigent way that climate change resists literary fiction lies ultimately in its resistance to language itself” (84), Golding believes language and literature are the appropriate vectors for such an aesthetic apprenticeship. Although he claims that he “cannot do it” himself, his most canonical novel Lord of the Flies is one of the most vibrant anticipations of Gaia as a dynamic, ecological paradigm. Thus, the irony in his statement is not to be overlooked. Neither is Golding’s public advocacy of environmental thought merely yet another occasion to boast the merits of cross-pollination between the sciences and the humanities; rather, it is an invitation to rethink the topicality of Golding’s 1954 book through the prism of ecological crisis and critical thought.

Now a classic of the British novel, Lord of the Flies is the story of a group of young boys who crash-land on a desert island.⁷ A postlapsarian rewriting of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), Golding’s novel sets up the space of the desert island as the virgin land on which British boys will have their masculine, colonial, feral drives result in destructive failure. Some have argued that Lord of the Flies belongs to the past, that its contents and style are merely the reflection of an era haunted by the Holocaust and the atom bomb—an interpretation that either immobilizes Golding’s novel as a symptom of the disenchantment of his generation or reduces the novel to the status of a Christian fable, or an allegory of evil as Hélène Cixous claims in her 1966 article. Yet, if there was a decline in popularity for Lord of the Flies, as James Baker suggests a couple of years later, this should not be the case anymore, for Lord of the Flies “forces us to recognize the likelihood of … the wanton abuse and destruction of environmental resources” (447). Although the novel is not about climate change per se, direct textual references to the atom bomb⁸ and the colonial destruction of milieus participate in the aesthetics of anthropogenic, global scale ecological disaster.

In Lord of the Flies, Golding anticipates the discrepancy between the Robinsonade where the island is merely the background for human action, and the dynamic ecosystem the Gaia hypothesis eventually reveals. Golding dismisses what Amitav Ghosh calls “a habit of mind that proceeded by creating discontinuities” (56), which is typical of the Modern tradition in Western literature. A constant mapping and encoding of space, the trait is exemplified by the boys on the island who establish such discontinuities. The “platform” (Golding, Lord of the Flies, 88) is transformed into the democratic space where assemblies are called, a political agora that contrasts with the “top of the mountain” (38) and its features of primitive acropolis, while the “Castle Rock” (118) becomes the fortress of Jack and his “tribe” (140). The urge to create discontinuities also appears in the early chapters of the novel, when the boys are eager to “draw a map” (27) of the island and claim it as theirs—“This belongs to us … All ours!” (29) one of the boys shouts. This iteration of the colonial sensibility of the past century overlaps with a Modern ecological model and participates in “a way of thinking that deliberately excludes things and forces (‘externalities’) that lie beyond the horizon of the matter at hand: it is a perspective that renders the interconnectedness of Gaia unthinkable” (Ghosh, 56). At the end of Golding’s novel, however, the scorching up of the island discards such attempts at establishing the land as the external background for human action. As it dramatizes the boys’ failure to “become emplaced” (Ghosh, 59), Lord of the Flies first plays with and ultimately turns away from what Ghosh claims to be distinctive features of the modern novel.

But Golding provides more than cartographic evidence, since it is the insular nature of the setting—similar to “our mother, Gaia Mater, set like a jewel in space” (“Nobel”)—that allows him to develop an original ecological aesthetics at a time of crisis. The island comes to life as a proto-Gaian system as Golding gives a body to the island as organism—it has a “scar” (Lord of the Flies, 7), a “lip” (28), a “brow” (96), a “backbone” (146), and a “neck” (174). Beyond mere personification, Golding grants actual agency to the islandic system: chapter 9 opens with “a steady current of heated air” while “revolving masses of gas piled up the static until the air was ready to explode” (145). The self-organizing property of the island’s intensive meteorological system has echoes in the numerous storms that all bring about crises in the novel, and all point to the way Golding understood the Gaia hypothesis as a cybernetic milieu structured along principles of energy dissipation. Such dynamism is made visible beyond shorter, more human temporal scales. Indeed, the narrative also often takes place at the level of the island’s geology: “The subsoil beneath the palm trees was a raised beach, and generations of palms had worked loose in this the stones that had lain on the sands of another shore” (62). The deep time of palm trees, life shaping the geology of the island is evidence of a story that exceeds the all-too-human categories of understanding of a group of British boys. The island becomes a dynamic ecosystem, albeit spread across various temporalities. In The Great Derangement, Amitav Ghosh sees an almost unbridgeable gap between the narrative means of the novel genre and the amplitude of temporalities mobilized by anthropogenic climate change.⁹ Despite the fact that Golding’s novel does address climate change directly, it experiments with the dynamic relationship at work within the milieu we humans and non-humans find ourselves together. Paying attention to both the deep time of palm trees as well as human time, in which the swift scorching up of the same palm trees takes place, Golding explores the tensions at work between the various temporalities of the island’s ecosystem.

In Lord of the Flies, a double refutation is at work, destabilizing the traditional view of space (the failure to become emplaced), as well as temporal homogeneity (with the heterogeneous imbrication of various orders of temporality). As a result, Golding offers a more complex apprehension of the milieu as a dynamic ecosystem. The novel does not need to be concerned with the data-based, sprawling representation of climate change to make a critical intervention in that alley: the feeling of sebas that Golding uncovers in his later articles is already at work in Lord of the Flies with the intrusion of Gaian ecology as a character in the story. Indeed, the boys see darkness on the island and grant it animal features—“full of claws,” but most importantly “full of the awful unknown and menace” (99). As the boys seek to ward off such anxiety, Golding himself invites the reader to feel the terror and awe that a dynamic ecosystem inspires. However, Golding’s attention to material processes allows us to move beyond the transcendental decoding we too easily impose on the text. As his novel deconstructs the aesthetic norms of modernity, Golding not only offers an aesthetics relevant for our age, but he also formulates a demand for a critical regime that takes into account the evental properties of intensive systems. It is this shift in critical endeavor that I would like to explore now.

III. The Failure of Idealist Critique

In his Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Karl Marx argues that Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe erases the historical and social relations of production in favor of a fiction naturalizing a state of affairs that is reversible (Bachofen, 88). The Robinsonade narrativizes the foundational move in ideology: in Capital, Marx jokes that “the relations between Robinson and these objects that form his self-created wealth are … so simple and transparent that even Mr Sedley Taylor [an economic popularizer of the time] could understand them” (170). In Lord of the Flies, such simplicity is at work with Piggy’s character, who is invested in ideology so much that he too easily dismisses the contradictions at work on the island—“We know what goes on and if there’s something wrong, there’s someone to put it right” (Golding, Lord of the Flies, 84), he says, turning away from material reality in favor of “rational” critique and a technicist view that considers the island from the outside. As he becomes the embodiment of stubborn, ideological rationalism, Piggy projects an image of the world as a lump waiting to be tamed through rational planning, and his remark that “life’s scientific” (88) displays a blind belief that ideas and logic precede reality; that everything should make sense and is meant to be acted upon by human intentionality. Piggy’s glasses are the symbol of knowledge and mastery by providing fire to the boys. Yet, his “specs” (40) also manifest his blindness to material, social and environmental processes. Piggy’s embodiment of ideological rationalism attempts to negate the material processes at work on the island: his plan to organize power over the insular territory and establish an ideal democratic constitution ends in chaos, as he fails to see, confront, and compose with the forces at work in the social and environmental ecology of the island.

Ultimately Piggy’s failure is that of the Robinsonade, it enacts the fantasy of an outside, which reveals itself as nothing more than a simulacrum steeped in ideology. Such a blind spot becomes more tangible when, directly after Simon’s murder, the rationalist and wishful thinker Piggy is unable to process what just took place. The dilemma eventually takes the form of the unspeakable: “It wasn’t—what you said,” Piggy says to Ralph, “gesticulating, searching for a formula” (156). The “unspoken knowledge” (158) of Simon’s murder is the space where the “fading knowledge of the world” (162) opens a breach in the ideological, utopian program. Piggy’s modernity is of no use when confronted to the reality of material contradiction. So is Jack’s promise to solve antagonism through killing rituals; it merely wreaks destruction and chaos. As a result, Golding presents Piggy and Ralph’s social-democratic ideals and Jack’s own proto-fascism as antagonistic only superficially: rather, they support each other dialectically, a dialectics from which Simon allows to diverge.¹⁰

While Piggy is unable to picture the existence of the beast in which the boys believe, thus blocking the possibility to deconstruct it, Simon offers a major critical move: to go and see the beast—“what else is there to do?” (128, 145), he whispers twice in the novel—the utterance of a proairetic code (Barthes, 19), that of action, decision-making and moving on. The central figure of a highly polyphonic novel, Simon belongs to the space of experience. His name—from the Hebrew שִׁמְעוֹן (hearing), matches his own behavior on the island: towards the end of chapter 3, as he wanders through the clearing of the island for the first time, he undergoes an intensive, sensory experience narrated through internal focalization: “Holding his breath he cocked a critical ear at the sounds of the island … the sounds of the bright fantastic birds, the bee-sounds, even the crying of the gulls” (Golding, Lord of the Flies, 57). Simon’s “critical ear” parallels the way Golding defines artists, those “who have the ear of mankind” and “can move man a little nearer the perilous safety of a warless and provident world” (“Nobel”). The primacy of experience becomes a defining feature of Simon’s critical position. As Reilly suggests, “Simon’s centrality to the text is related to … the sheer inadequacy of what passes among us for education.” Indeed,

Golding presents us with only two alternatives for Simon: to dismiss him as a holy imbecile, incomprehensible and irrelevant; or to concede that there are modes of knowing different from and perhaps superior to those based on rational insight and mathematical reasoning. (9)

Yet, such modes of knowing do not operate a shift towards otherworldly cognition, be it religious or more broadly transcendental. On the contrary, Simon’s character develops on a plane of immanence; his learning is not the excavation of a fundamental system of thought. Simon’s mode of learning has nothing to do with the assimilation of preexisting contents or pieces of information (which would introduce a form of idealism that his character resists). Instead of the Platonic conception of education famously exposed in Meno, where the contents of knowledge preexist the cognitive act of recollection, Simon learns through intensities.

In a section of Proust and Signs, Deleuze reveals the idea of education at work in In Search of Lost Time, which Ronald Bogue summarizes as follows:

Only through a chance encounter with an unsettling sign can thought be jolted from its routine patterns, and only through such an encounter will the object of thought cease to be arbitrarily selected and attain the necessity of something that itself chooses thought, that constrains thought and sets it in motion. (329)

Indeed, new, virtual possibilities become available to Simon as he perceives the saturation of “riotous colors,” the green of the candle buds, their whites and their “scent [that] spilled out into the air and took possession of the island” (Golding, Lord of the Flies, 57). He encounters such “riotous” and “spilling” signs not as preexisting units of a system, but as asignifying ruptures¹¹ creating new, unexpected paths that break away from the routine patterns of the boys’ expedition. As “the susurration of the blood” (57) becomes more audible than the sea, Simon also establishes himself as a point of view. Eventually, Simon’s situatedness embraces an evental aesthetics of immanence: instead of abstracting himself from the world and establishing a transcendental subjective position, Simon is enmeshed within a cloud of material forces (human and non-human) which he encounters as signs, themselves concrescing with his own point of view.

Yet, Simon’s critical ear is not only a mode of sensual availability that reveals an immanent position; it also implies political responsibility in the context of catastrophe. When he eventually discovers the dead body of the pilot, animated like a puppet by the lines of his parachute as the wind blows, he understands that it is this rotting body that the boys mistook for the beast they are afraid of. Having understood the dangerous illusion, “he took the lines in his hands; he freed them from the rocks and the figure from the wind’s indignity” (146–147). As he untangles (quite literally) the symbols against which society contingently constructs itself, Simon’s critical position becomes political. When during an assembly the boys discuss the possibility of there being a beast, Simon leaves open such a possibility, and replies “maybe it’s only us” (89). Is he suggesting that the beast is only a projection of the boys’ imagination? Or that the beast is none other than themselves? In both cases, Simon displays once again a form of situated consciousness that Piggy, embodying the all-too-evident certainty of ideology, violently dismisses by abruptly cutting in: “Nuts!” (89). Piggy’s ideological blindness prevents him from deconstructing the illusion that his feral fellows are subject to, because it blocks the possibility of there being anything exceeding what he knows already. On the contrary, Simon’s availability and his open apprenticeship in signs constitutes him as a potent resisting force against ideology, a political position unto itself.

Neither theological nor spiritual at heart, Simon’s material critique does not unveil any bleak truth of the human condition; there is more at work in his position than mere potential for enchantment and wonder. Lord of the Flies, far from merely upturning the theme of the Robinsonade, constitutes an immanent reckoning with material processes. It is a profound endeavor to chart out the possibility of emergence of critique, beyond the idealism that is so typical of the utopian genre of the Robinsonade and its transcendental, ideological foundations. Against the artificial immediacy of such relations, Golding’s material depiction of a micro-society stranded on a desert island allows him to take up the critical gesture and reveal the socius as a dynamic field of forces and events that is open to transformation.

IV. Flight Without Escapism: Simon’s Critical Drifts

In a 1968 article, Henri A. Talon expresses his frustration with his perception of Golding as a moralist who does not offer anything, rendering him an ironic moralist. As a response, Baker convincingly suggests that Golding’s

steadfast opposition to the outworn public myths of the modern age is not simply negative or nihilistic. … All of his fiction shows us the possibility of a new mentality struggling to be born against the terrific odds imposed by the patterns of our social heritage and the limitations of our species. (460; italics mine)

Rather than carrying a supposedly “Goldingian” truth of the human condition, Lord of the Flies draws lines of becoming and transformation that move beyond metaphorical readings¹² and ideological takes on human perfectibility.¹³ Instead of interpretation (Skilton) and the quest for “truth” (Sullivan), I am interested in the experiment Golding conducts. Indeed, both Lovelock and Golding shared a taste for “‘what-if?’ situations” (Carey, 291) and the appeal of making the text an active locus of experimentation is what allows Golding’s work to unfold well beyond the European cultural production of the time and its typical post-war anxiety: far-reaching, ecological questions that Golding foresaw in the middle of the past century are only entering the stage now.

In this regime of reading, the critical shift Lord of the Flies operates precisely as an exploration of the conditions of emergence of a “new mentality,” to use Baker’s expression. It is along such lines, instead of seeing Golding as an ironic moralist, that I read his novel as an active, non-representative,¹⁴ and anti-ideological experiment highly relevant for our age of climate catastrophe. Indeed, Simon’s materialism offers a way out of the self-sustaining, disastrous dialectic of ideology, the failure of which is dramatically embodied by Piggy. Many have read Simon as a tragic figure, the incarnation of Judeo-Christian, soteriological paradigms, bearing the weight of human guilt on his shoulders. Readings of Lord of the Flies use his death to give a sense of closure to the novel by transforming it into an easily-assimilable moral apologue, as is the case with Baker, who writes: “In Lord of the Flies we have perceived a re-enactment of the fall of man … and an awful fulfillment of the gloomy prophecies of Revelation; but these are only descriptive metaphors and not definitive analogues or parallels” (454). Yet, in this meticulous dismantling of ideology, “the intention is to undermine our naïve faith in the moral progress we like to read into modern social theory,” he continues. Eventually, he concludes that “we are not asked to abandon hope. We are only urged to recognize that “human nature” is dynamic and capable of extraordinary transformations which may result in social good or ill,” depicting Golding as a “relativist.” Indeed, symbolical readings of the novel have reterritorialized Simon’s ethics in an age-old ideological debate around good and evil in human nature.

In Jacques Lacan’s analysis of sexual maturation as the creation of a territory and partitioning of space, “territorialization” describes the emplacement of the subject and commands the investment of desire into given loci in the stable structure of the socius. Deleuze and Guattari are interested in the opposite processes that seek to liberate the body from such territory. They turn instead toward the milieu (an idea they poach from Jakob von Uexküll and his notion of Umwelt), which coextensively develops with what lives within it (such a move echoes Margulis and Sagan’s Gaian metaphysics). The milieu being a dynamic system, and not a territory, it allows for deterritorialization as the undoing of the fixed image of the subject, favoring virtual flows over actual territorialization. Simply put: “to deterritorialize is to free up the fixed relations that contain a body while exposing it to new organisations” (Parr, 69). Deleuze and Guattari’s interest in pure deterritorialization stems from the difficulty that deterritorialization never lasts and the potential creative assemblages it contains are blocked in reterritorialization. Simon precisely dwells in the virtual opening of deterritorialization, the knot of the event.

To pay tribute to what he embodies, one must instead turn towards the ways in which he materially embodies an immanent critical position. Instead of offering yet another interpretation of Simon as a Christlike martyr figure whose belief in moral values makes him stand out from the rest of the group, I read Lord of the Flies affirmatively by focusing on the active critical work that Simon’s character operates.

To unglue the novel from territorializing readings, I suggest a shift towards a Deleuzian mode that echoes the work done with Félix Guattari in Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. For Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka has too often been read as a pessimistic, resigned writer of inexorably absurd worlds. In response, they open Kafka’s literary machine to display the transformative potential it bears. Just as “The Trial is the dismantling of all transcendental justifications” (51), they write, Kafka’s other works all aim at deterritorializing critique: against a critical position that is fixed on the outside, Kafka’s work operates from a position of immanence. Simon embodies the critical move quite literally during the subtle, delicate, yet perceptibly decisive event that occurs when he and the other boys wander during the land-surveying expedition: “Simon turned away from them and went where the just perceptible path led him” (Golding, Lord of the Flies, 56). The tension at work between the adverb “just” and the adjective “perceptible” echoes the nuance of the “flicker of incredulity” when Simon was considering the impossibility of a beast on the island; both locutions express an oscillatory, atopic opening in Simon’s critical sensibility, the immanent “care of the event” (Conley, 344). A method “much more intense than any critique,” (Deleuze & Guattari, Kafka, 48) deterritorialization as practiced by Simon is a deviation from the dialectics of power in which Ralph, Piggy, and Jack are engaged, as well as the mark of his experimental characterization. The evental quality of Kafka’s stories allows characters to engage in processes of immanent becoming, resisting the monolithic categories of idealist critique. Simon is able to go through such a process, but when he comes down from the mountain to share the news of his discovery with the other boys, in Zarathustrian fashion, they are unable to hear him and instead unleash their deadly urges:

It was crying out against the abominable noise something about a body on the hill. The beast struggled forward, broke the ring and fell over the steep edge of the rock to the sand by the water. At once the crowd surged after it, poured down the rock, leapt on to the beast, screamed, struck, bit, tore. There were no words, and no movements but the tearing of teeth and claws. (Golding, Lord of the Flies, 152–153)

Still, like in The Trial, when K. displays a becoming-animal as he is killed and cries “like a dog” (Kafka, 165), Simon’s becoming-animal occurs during his murder. The point of view is that of the boys, as the focalization shows: with the third person singular neuter pronoun “it,” Simon is referred to as “the beast” and displays animal features. Yet, the boys can only loosely refer to Simon’s animality: his becoming contrasts with Piggy’s fixed position in the animal realm throughout the story, since he is narrowly territorialized as a pig and condemned from the outset. The lack of generic precision in “beast” reveals from inside the diegesis the boys’ inability to give precise contours to what Simon embodies, thereby showing the latter’s deterritorializing potentiality. Ultimately, Simon’s initial sidestepping, his deviation¹⁵ from the track returns in the movement of his eventual death:

Somewhere over the darkened curve of the world the sun and moon were pulling, and the film of water on the earth planet was held, bulging slightly on one side while the solid core turned. The great wave of the tide moved farther along the island and the water lifted. Softly, surrounded by a fringe of inquisitive bright creatures, itself a silver shape beneath the steadfast constellations, Simon’s dead body moved out toward the open sea. (Golding, Lord of the Flies, 154)

In his short piece “Desert Islands,” which was written in the 1950s but published posthumously, Gilles Deleuze identifies two types of islands: oceanic, a force from the depths, such as volcanic islands; or continental, separated from a continent through erosion, disarticulation (9). In both cases, the island materializes a derivation, either vertical or horizontal. The materialization of an immanent thrust, a conflict between sea and land, the island is an event that pushes towards deterritorialization. The ideological failure of the Robinsonade is to believe in a pure origin, outside of ideology; yet “in its very failure, Robinson gives us some indication: he first needed a reserve of capital” (13). Deleuze then demonstrates that an island is always a “second origin” (13), a serial deviation. Islands are taken in a process of continual deviation, sites of resistance to territorializing attempts, leaving open a virtual field of differentiation. Such an opening, affirmative movement is at work in Simon’s death. While Piggy’s inert body is engulfed by the sea—“then the sea breathed again in a long, slow sigh, the water boiled white and pink over the rock; and when it went, sucking back again, the body of Piggy was gone” (Golding, Lord of the Flies, 181)—the trajectory of Simon’s dead body is an instance of becoming-island, the agent of a deterritorializing moving out. Far from being an arrêt de mort or death warrant, his killing is an immanent envoi “toward the open sea.”

As such, Golding uses Simon to open the critical situation, to feed the event, to untangle its knot and better identify a line of flight, unleashing transformative potential. As Deleuze and Guattari write:

Rather, it was the world and its representation that he [Kafka] made take flight and that he made follow these lines. It was a question of seeing and speaking like a beetle … Even more, in the novels, the dismantling of the assemblages makes the social representation take flight in a much more effective way than a critique would have done and brings about a deterritorialization of the world that is itself political. (46–7)

Likewise, and at one remove from ideological matters that would territorialize or close the event of Simon’s death as a sign of failure, Golding provides us with a character whose death is meaningful not ideologically but effectively; the beauty of Simon is his material “care of the event” as the other boys look for constant reterritorialization, be it Piggy’s rationalist scheme, or Jack’s proto-fascist fantasy. While they remain invested in the drive towards territorialization—materialized by the British officer who fetches the boys in an escapist move of salvation, Simon offers an alternative movement of drifting away, his ultimate death not as an act of closure, but as the ultimate affirmation of a “becoming” that pierces the horizon along a line of flight; fuite both as flight and leak—flight without escapism.

Conclusion

Using the novel’s own potential as a material and experimental critique, my reading of Lord of the Flies not only raises the question of society’s blindness to critique and the violence it unleashes against the figure of the critic who engages in deconstructive practices, it also questions the very idea of critical thinking in the current climatic, social, and political context. Simon speaks “almost in [Ralph’s] ear” (Golding, Lord of the Flies, 111), and yet he fails to be the consulting agency of politics. Does the failure to be heard mean that critique is condemned to roam? Should the critic mourn Simon’s death?

Although Golding was a “disillusioned modernist” (Baker, 457), he was not of the “despairing” (460) kind. Through aesthetics, he believed monumental change could take place. As he writes in one of his Gaia essays, “Surely, eyes more capable than ours of receiving the range of universal radiation may well see her, this creature of argent and azure, to have robes of green and gold streamed a million miles from her by the solar wind as she dances round Helios in the joy of light” (“Gaia Lives” 86). Of course, such Nietzschean, sun-worshipping flight of lyricism easily reads as merely theological or spiritual, but Simon’s critical work as immanent deterritorialization, and his “care of the event” manifests such an affirmation of life, even in death.

As we face historical and historic demands (Butler, 4) in the current ecological catastrophe, Lord of the Flies brings the affirmative impetus of deterritorialization into the critical discussion, while at the same time warning us: in the end, the island is but a piece of scorched earth. If Simon gives us an ethics, we still need a politics.

1 I would like to thank Tom Conley, Sarah Dimick, Alba Elliott, and the anonymous peer-reviewers whose attentive readings and generous feedback were immensely helpful in the preparation of this article. My gratitude also goes to Frédéric Regard for his mentorship. In many ways, his work made my intervention possible.

2 Bruce Clarke identifies two major figures of Gaia: Isabelle Stengers’s “Gaia the Intruder,” and Bruno Latour’s “secular Gaia” (Clarke “Rethinking Gaia”).

3 Golding and some of his works are mentioned several times in Ruse, M., The Gaia Hypothesis: Science on a Pagan Planet, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2013 (although a study of Lord of the Flies in relation to Gaia is beyond the scope of Ruse’s project).

4 See “What is an event?” in Deleuze, G., The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Conley, T., Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1992.

5 Interestingly, instead of “crisis,” Golding uses the notion of climatic “disaster.” See Blanchot, M., The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Smock, A., Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 1995.

6 Golding’s ecological aesthetics might also have to do with his interest in esoteric, and spiritual movements. In his biography of Golding, John Carey writes that he praised Rudolf Steiner, the founder of the pseudoscientific school of anthroposophy, “for trying to find a bridge between the world of the physical sciences and the world of the spirit” (Carey 243). Indeed, an example of such direct influence has been identified in Golding’s use of the colors that form the basis of Steiner’s system (green, pink, white, and black) as the basis for the color symbolism in Lord of the Flies. For an analysis of the influence of Steinerian thought on Golding’s oeuvre, see Miyahara, K., “William Golding にRudolf Steiner 思想が与えたと思しき影響に関する覚え書き,” 英語と英米文学, vol. 38, 2003, p. 33–60. Miyahara suggests that Golding’s interest in Steinerian thought was sympathetic rather than fully committed. For a study of anthroposophy in relation to Gaia, see Ruse, The Gaia Hypothesis, p. 122–5.

7 For a recent exploration of islandic art and literature in the face of climate change, see DeLoughrey, Elizabeth, Allegories of the Anthropocene, Durham and London, Duke University Press, 2019.

8 In what could be called his ars poetica, “Fable,” Golding, explains that “Before the Second World War [he] believed in the perfectibility of social man” until he “was unable to.” Written in the wake of the atom bomb, Lord of the Flies turns it into a leitmotiv: soon after the boys are stranded on the island they heave a rock from the top of the top of the mountain and let it smash into the forest, “like a bomb” (25). In the second chapter, the boys make a fire that quickly leads to dreadful images of atomic blasts: “For yards round the fire the heat was like a blow” (41); “A tree exploded in the fire like a bomb” (47). The internal focalization creates surprise and fear before the realization that it is “just” trees burning. This momentary surprise connotes the deeper trauma of the atomic bomb. Episodes of fire scattered about in the novel develop a genealogy of the notion of progress from the early dreams of mastery over nature to the deadly illusion of technics that end up transforming the island into a waste land. This of course feeds into the pessimistic reading of Lord of the Flies as a dark fable about entropy and the destructive drives of humanity. As will become clear later on, I am quite resistant to this conservative reading that brackets off the active, immanent critique that Golding offers in his novel.

9 Gould, S. J., Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1987, p. 173. Cited in Ghosh.

10 Here, Golding’s experiment with proto-Gaian critique and Simon’s role allows to resist Lovelock’s own drive towards ecofascism. Indeed, Lovelock expresses the need for democracy to be suspended as part a global effort to tackle the anthropogenic climate disaster (Lovelock, Vanishing 95; Sagan, “Uchronia” 163). On ecofascism, see Dubiau, Antoine, Écofascismes, Caen, Grevis, 2022.

11 Deleuze and Guattari use the example of the rhizome to define an asignifying rupture. Cutting a rhizome allows for two divided branches to grow. An asignifying rupture takes place as an act of amplification promoting differentiation.

12 For Baker, Lord of the Flies has faced rejection precisely because it has too often be read as metaphor (459).

13 C. B. Cox insists upon the religious dimension of the novel and depicts Golding as a writer for whom “every detail of human life has a religious significance.” Thomas Marcellus Coskren leans towards a more optimistic approach, one that differs from mine insofar as he emphasizes individual responsibility while I seek to “de-moralize” the novel in favor of a materialist critique. I am more inclined to agree with Kenneth Watson, for whom the novel has been too often and too easily assumed to be a religious work.

14 On the “representative” regime of art, see Rancière, Jacques, Le Partage du sensible, Paris, La Fabrique, 2000.

15 On another level, a deviation but also a deviancy if we follow accounts of Simon as a queer character, as embodying a becoming-homosexual.

Résumé : La relation entre la littérature et l’environnement peut prendre de multiples formes et s’étendre dans de nombreuses directions. Mais avant de se manifester dans des genres littéraires, ou dans des discours et des perspectives critiques, cette relation est construite par des pratiques de lecture, d’écriture, de discussion, ou, dans un cadre institutionnalisé, d’enseignement, de recherche et de recherche-création. Je propose un examen de certaines de ces pratiques, pour ensuite mieux établir des conjugaisons possibles entre des pertinences littéraires et des pertinences environnementales. Une orientation pragmatique, mettant de l’avant la littérature comme ensemble de faires, anime ma réflexion.

Au mois de novembre 2021, une conférence tenue à l’Université Sorbonne Nouvelle nous invitait à réfléchir à une crise double, voire commune, qui bouleverse le climat et la littérature. Cet article est issu de ma communication¹. Animé par une volonté de conjuguer l’enseignement et la recherche, j’engagerai ma réflexion sur les crises climatiques et littéraires par des remarques qui concernent ma présence en classe. Que fait-on lorsqu’on enseigne les lettres ? Ou, plus précisément, en assumant les différences dans les savoir-faire et les pratiques (je ne doute pas que différentes universités, différents programmes, différents enseignants et enseignantes ont des manières de faire différentes) : qu’est-ce que je fais lorsque j’enseigne les lettres ? Je déplierai cette question, qui n’aborde pas spécifiquement des questions environnementales, dans les deux premières sections de l’article. Par la suite, je préciserai mon interrogation : comment conjuguer des considérations ou des pertinences environnementales avec celles de la littérature ? Je ferai état d’activités de recherche et de recherche-création, en cours, dans le champ des lettres et des humanités environnementales. Je ne présente pas tant l’aboutissement d’un travail, que des interrogations et des hypothèses, des réflexions programmatiques et méthodologiques sur des rencontres possibles entre la littérature et l’environnement. Étant sémioticien et littéraire, je mettrai de l’avant des pratiques interprétatives communes en littérature, et j’envisagerai des transformations que peuvent subir ces pratiques à la rencontre des lettres et des humanités environnementales.

I. Littérature, monde, soupçon

Une des choses que je fais en classe, c’est d’insister sur l’épaisseur et sur la diversité des voies de l’interprétation qui fondent nos engagements littéraires. Je reviendrai à ce mot clé d’interprétation. Je note cependant que les engagements en question peuvent être (ou paraître) très simples et ordinaires (flâner dans une librairie, lire dans un parc, s’identifier à un personnage de roman), ou au contraire être (ou paraître) raffinés et experts (participer à un séminaire, rédiger un article, préparer une communication). Autrement dit, j’invite les étudiantes et étudiants à porter attention à l’attention qu’ils portent à la littérature. Cette invitation présuppose que nos engagements littéraires ont des raisons qui peuvent faire l’objet d’une analyse et d’un dévoilement. Au fond, j’amène les étudiantes et étudiants à entretenir une disposition soupçonneuse dans leurs tractations littéraires.

Dans ce mot soupçon, on entend évidemment Nathalie Sarraute, qui, dans les années cinquante, invitait ses lectrices et ses lecteurs à entretenir « un état d’esprit singulièrement sophistiqué » (1956, 62) à l’égard de leurs expériences littéraires. Rendant compte du caractère constitutif (et troublant) de l’interprétation dans nos expériences littéraires, Sarraute propose que les mutations importantes dans l’art romanesque moderne (fin du XIX^e et début du XX^e siècle), particulièrement en ce qui a trait à la construction des personnages, font émerger l’ère du soupçon. Sarraute écrit à ce sujet :

Le lecteur [d’œuvres modernes] doit se tenir constamment sur le qui-vive. Au lieu de se laisser guider par les signes qu’offrent à sa paresse et à sa hâte les usages de la vie quotidienne, il doit, pour identifier les personnages, les reconnaître aussitôt, comme l’auteur lui-même, par le dedans, grâce à des indices qui ne lui sont révélés que si, renonçant à ses habitudes de confort, il plonge en eux aussi loin que l’auteur et fait sienne sa vision. (1956, 75-6)

Devant ces œuvres nouvelles, le lecteur « a si bien et tant appris qu’il s’est mis à douter que l’objet fabriqué que les romanciers lui proposent puisse receler la richesse de l’objet réel. » (1956, 69) Sarraute poursuit : « Nulle réminiscence de son monde familier, nul souci conventionnel de cohésion ou de vraisemblance ne détourne [… l’] attention [du lecteur] ni ne freine son effort. » (1956, 76) La littérature procure un effet de défamiliarisation (un effet qui était au cœur des théories formalistes quelques années plus tôt), ce qui explique pourquoi « c’est à contrecœur que le romancier […] accorde [à son personnage] tout ce qui peut le rendre trop facilement repérable : aspect physique, gestes, actions, sensations, sentiments courants » (1956, 74) Le soupçon diagnostiqué par Sarraute opère donc une critique de la référentialité, effondrant (ou montrant en ruines) la certitude que l’œuvre littéraire renvoie sans médiation au monde.

Dans son roman Les fruits d’or (1963), Sarraute aborde de manière créative cet enjeu en mettant en scène (et en abyme) le langage littéraire. Lire Les fruits d’or, c’est lire un emmêlement de discours d’appréciation sur un roman intitulé Les fruits d’or. Ces discours ne portent pas sur le roman que nous tenons entre les mains. Mais le titre du roman, son nom, joue sur une ambiguïté référentielle et linguistique, qu’un personnage exprime éloquemment : « Les Fruits d’Or, moi, je ne sais pas, je m’en méfie un peu. On en parle tellement… » (1963, 26). Autrement dit : il y a trop de langage et trop de littérature qui se trame dans/autour/sur Les fruits d’or, nous devons faire attention. Et une fois cette méfiance apprise, il n’y a pas de retour possible :

Il y a ceux d’avant Les Fruits d’Or, et il y a ceux d’après.Et nous sommes ceux dès. Marqués pour toujours. La génération des Fruits d’Or : nous resterons cela. (1963, 89)

Je reviendrai à cette remarque selon laquelle celles et ceux d’après Les fruits d’or en sont marqués pour toujours. Mais je rappellerai avant que la disposition soupçonneuse présentée par Sarraute est caractéristique d’un pan de théorie littéraire (française) de l’après-guerre.

À cet effet, on retrouve chez Roland Barthes certaines affirmations qui appuient l’idée selon laquelle les expressions littéraires, recelant une ambiguïté intrinsèque, devraient être accueillies avec méfiance. Dans Critique et vérité (1966), son essai sur la nouvelle critique, Barthes s’oriente résolument vers le langage. Nourrie notamment par la sémiologie et la psychanalyse, Barthes emboîte le pas avec les formalistes des décennies précédentes dans sa distinction du langage pratique et du langage littéraire. Il pose cette distinction en ces termes, je le cite en long :

les ambiguïtés du langage pratique ne sont rien à côté de celles du langage littéraire. Les premières sont en effet réductibles par la situation dans laquelle elles apparaissent : quelque chose hors de la phrase la plus ambiguë, un contexte, un geste, un souvenir, nous dit comment il faut la comprendre, si nous voulons utiliser pratiquement l’information qu’elle est chargée de nous transmettre : c’est la contingence qui fait un sens clair.

Rien de tel avec l’œuvre : l’œuvre est pour nous sans contingence, et c’est même peut-être ce qui la définit le mieux : l’œuvre n’est entourée, désignée, protégée, dirigée par aucune situation, aucune vie pratique n’est là pour nous dire le sens qu’il faut lui donner ; elle a toujours quelque chose de citationnel : en elle l’ambiguïté est toute pure : si prolixe soit-elle, elle possède quelque chose de la concision pythique, paroles conformes à un premier code (la Pythie ne divaguait pas) et cependant ouverte à plusieurs sens, car elles étaient prononcées hors de toute situation—sinon la situation même de l’ambiguïté : l’œuvre est toujours en situation prophétique.

Retirée de toute situation, l’œuvre se donne par là même à explorer : devant celui qui l’écrit ou la lit, elle devient une question posée au langage, dont on éprouve les fondements, dont on touche les limites. L’œuvre se fait ainsi dépositaire d’une immense, d’une incessante enquête sur les mots. (1966, 786-787)

Sans que Barthes en rende compte explicitement, il semble y avoir plusieurs pièges, distincts et dissimulés, dans des œuvres littéraires. D’une part, les énoncés linguistiques (avec lesquelles la majorité des œuvres littéraires sont construites) ne sont pas des doubles, immédiats et parfaits, du monde (le mot n’est pas la chose). Ensuite, l’art n’est pas tenu à reproduire le monde ou à l’appuyer (l’œuvre est retirée de toute situation— on reconnaît une énième critique de Barthes à l’égard de Sartre). Enfin, il y a rupture entre le langage quotidien et le langage littéraire (les écrivaines et les écrivains n’utilisent pas la langue comme le font les gens ordinaires). Intransitivité, autonomisation, littérarité, autant de notions ou d’enjeux à considérer lorsque nous abordons la littérature.

Retour à l’enseignement de la littérature. En m’inscrivant, forcément, dans son histoire, je me retrouve à endosser une certaine disposition qu’on peut entretenir dans nos expériences littéraires : une méfiance à l’égard de ce qui, dans la littérature, pourrait faire penser au monde réel, à des modes d’interprétations spontanées, et des expressions habituelles.

II. Du soupçon critique à la critique du soupçon

’elle déploie un imaginaire subversivement féministe ; ou qu’elle engage une conception de la Nature qui bouleverse des codes et les stéréotypes occidentaux.

Armée de « l’intelligence réfléchie et de l’indépendance de la pensée » (2015, 8), la critique est dirigée sur ce que Felski nomme une « herméneutique de la suspicion » (2015, 1). Felski reprend ici à son compte une expression formulée par Paul Ricœur qui, dans ses lectures de Marx, Nietzche et Freud, considère que les significations (des œuvres, des discours, des genres, etc.) doivent faire l’objet d’un dévoilement. La critique est prudente et suspicieuse pour éviter de se faire accuser d’être une lectrice naïve. Or, comme le fait remarquer Felski, cette suspicion est « une posture affective qui nous oriente » (2015, 18), une disposition qui « “donne le ton” pour notre engagement avec le monde » (2015, 20). Felski spécifie sa pensée :

La critique n’est pas qu’une affaire de contenu (« savoir que » telle chose est le cas) mais aussi une affaire de style, de méthode, d’orientation (« savoir comment » lire un texte ou suivre un raisonnement), ce qui implique l’émulation à la fois de ton et de technique. Des manières de penser sont aussi de manières de faire. (2015, 26)

Une conséquence de la suspicion, c’est que les études littéraires deviennent des interrogatoires musclés où il est bien vu de malmener les éléments constitutifs de la littérature pour leur faire dire la vérité. Felski remarque en ce sens : « Quelque chose, quelque part—un texte, un auteur, un lecteur, un genre, un discours, une discipline—est toujours déjà coupable d’un crime. » (2015, 39)

Sans répudier l’héritage et la valeur de la critique littéraire comme elle s’est développée dans le siècle dernier, Felski insiste cependant sur le fait que la posture critique n’est qu’une manière de s’engager avec la littérature—entendue : une manière parmi bien d’autres. Et bien qu’elle se présente comme un accès à la littérature redoutable, efficace, intelligent et sophistiqué, Felski nous met en garde, au contraire, contre la « banalité potentielle » de l’interprétation suspicieuse, qui « sert d’option par défaut dans les études littéraires » (2015, 115). La critique est tellement répandue que « d’autres façons de faire deviennent remarquablement difficiles à imaginer. » (2015, 21) Felski renchérit : « nous sommes inondés par trop de récits savants qui adhèrent à la même formule et au même format » (2015, 113). La critique suspicieuse est devenue un « protocole professionnel » et une « norme disciplinaire » (2015, 119). Felski s’interroge donc :

Mais si la critique était limitée, pas illimitée ; si elle était finie et faillible ; si nous concédions que la critique fait certaines choses correctement, et que d’autres choses elle ne les fait pas bien, voire qu’elle y échoue ? Au lieu de nous empresser à tout rapiécer et de boucher frénétiquement toutes les fuites avec la critique, nous pourrions admettre qu’elle n’est pas toujours le meilleur outil pour la tâche. Comme le suggèrent ces formules, mon orientation est pragmatique—différentes méthodes sont nécessaires pour les multiples objectifs de la critique, et il n’y a pas forme de pensée unique qui permet d’atteindre simultanément tous ces objectifs. […] En laissant de la place à des approches différentes, nous pouvons voir que les lectures critiques sont une voie possible, et non le destin manifeste des études littéraires. (2015, 8-9, je souligne)

L’adoption par Felski d’une posture pragmatique est cruciale : ce faisant elle nous invite à envisager la littérature comme un ensemble de manières de faire. Critiquer, c’est une manière de faire, c’est un accès à la littérature. Une image : comme le marteau ne saurait remplacer le tournevis (ce sont deux outils qui ont des fonctions propres), la critique n’est pas un outil à tout faire.

Je résumerai ainsi les limites de la critique, voire leurs crises, diagnostiquées par Felski : la critique s’impose comme discours ou pratique par défaut, et son surinvestissement crée une disposition à la méfiance qui nous désensibilise à d’autres accès à la littérature. Suivant ce constat, on peut continuer à pratiquer la critique (en assumant ses limites), mais on peut aussi embrasser d’autres manières de travailler avec la littérature et développer ce que Felski nomme « un langage et des habitudes analytiques pour réfléchir à nos attachements esthétiques plutôt que de les répudier. » (2015, 181)

ère la perception et le jugement ; il exprime quelque chose sur le statut social ; la fabrication du vin transforme autant la vigne que son environnement, etc. Similairement, un contexte d’enseignement et d’apprentissage mobilise et consolide une foule d’habitudes interprétatives. Une discussion en classe peut engendrer des interprétants qui ne se limitent pas au sujet propre de la discussion³. Par exemple, un échange sur l’usage des références scientifiques par Rachel Carson dans Silent Spring (1962) peut certainement donner lieu à des apprentissages sur la question, en l’occurrence l’utilisation libre que fait Carson des références scientifiques, qui ne sont pas explicitement intégrées dans le texte. Mais la discussion peut aussi faire émerger des connaissances sur d’autres thèmes, comme la place accordée en sciences aux non-experts et aux des femmes. La même discussion peut aussi faire découvrir à des participantes et des participants certaines affinités et donner lieu à une collaboration éventuelle ; cette collaboration n’était pas le sujet de la discussion, mais elle en dérive légitimement. La lecture d’un essai sur l’usage dérégulé des pesticides catalyse alors une foule de processus de signification, plein de modes d’interprétation, et tout un tas de pratiques littéraires—finalement, autant de manières s’y engager.

III. Et le climat, l’écologie, les lettres et les humanités environnementales ? On en fait quoi ?

’ai emboîté le pas à Felski qui défend l’idée selon laquelle la critique est une manière de faire parmi plein d’autres, qui méritent elles aussi d’être envisagées. Mais en quoi ce (bref) survol historique/théorique est-il pertinent pour les lettres ou les humanités environnementales ? Plus précisément, vers quelles articulations de la littérature et de l’environnement peuvent déboucher ces remarques sur la critique ?

Cette question prend tout son sens à la lumière des approches analytiques que sont l’écocritique et l’écopoétique. Ces approches sont abondamment documentées, étudiées et employées (Buell, Heise et Thornber 2011) (Garrard 2012) (Schoentjes 2015) (Blanc, Breteau et Guest 2017). Je sais qu’elle ne se recoupent pas complètement et qu’il y a des discussions visant à les distinguer. Je ne mettrai certainement pas en doute leur fonction ou leur importance pour la littérature en général. Et je vois mal comment l’enseignement, la recherche, ou la recherche-création qui chercheraient à explorer les rapports entre la littérature et l’environnement pourraient faire l’économie de ces approches. Mais mon argument est ailleurs. Car si nous pouvons certainement proposer une explication très cohérente pour montrer que l’imaginaire environnemental dans tel roman est problématique ou inspirant, il n’en demeure pas moins que c’est exactement le genre de pratique interprétative, critique, que Felski suggère de modérer. Pour conjuguer autrement la littérature et l’environnement, il me semble nécessaire de porter attention aux manières de faire la littérature, aux savoir-faire linguistiques et textuels auxquelles elle se reconnaît.

Quelles conjugaisons, donc, de la littérature et de l’environnement ?

Une réponse à cette question serait d’adopter un regard transversal sur la littérature, tenter de la saisir dans sa généralité et dire que ses habitudes de travail sont écologiquement malsaines. Nous pourrions signaler que la surproduction littéraire (avec sa multiplication d’appareillages conceptuels, de colloques, de revues, de festivals, les grandes liesses que sont les rentrées littéraires, le pilonnage des livres invendus, etc.) participe à un esprit de croissance proprement insoutenable. Déjà dans les années soixante-dix, dans son texte fondateur de l’écocritique, William Rueckert avertissait ses lectrices et ses lecteurs contre l’obsession par la nouveauté dans la recherche universitaire. Rueckert attire l’attention aux multiples discours critiques qui abondent dans la critique littéraire depuis le début du XX^e siècle, et dont la quantité constitue un sérieux problème :

Individuellement et collectivement, nous avons rencontré tant de grands esprits originaux, qu’on pourrait se demander avec quel genre de critique expérimentale il reste à expérimenter maintenant—en 1976.

De plus, il y a tant d’esprits ingénieux et énergiques, qui travaillent à partir des plus simples suggestions, que les permutations de théories et de méthodologies les plus complexes sont vite épuisées. Si vous ne vous consacrez pas une nouvelle théorie dès sa naissance, elle est déjà éteinte avant que vous ne puissiez y penser, la mobiliser, et rédiger quelque chose pour une publication. L’entrepôt incroyable de théories et de méthodes existantes, couplé au vieillissement rapide de nouvelles méthodes et théories critiques (on dirait même un vieillissement précoce), donne lieu à un environnement critique bien curieux. […] Mais la création insignifiante de nouveaux modèles critiques pour déplacer ou remplacer les modèles plus anciens, ou pour battre un compétiteur dans le marché intellectuel ne devrait pas être le résultat [de la critique]. […] Confondre la vie de l’esprit avec l’économie démente de l’industrie américaine de l’automobile serait la pire chose à faire. (1978, 72)

Dénonçant ce qu’il nomme le « syndrome de Détroit », en l’honneur de la tristement célèbre ex-capitale mondiale de la voiture, et vilipendant une évidente obsolescence programmée des discours universitaires, Rueckert plaide alors pour une décroissance académique. Concrètement et par exemple, on interrogerait la spontanéité avec laquelle s’impose le dictat du publish or perish (publier ou mourir), insoutenable autant pour des raisons individuelles (le chercheur n’est pas une inexhaustible machine à produire des idées), sociales (le partage des ressources associées à la recherche se fait souvent au prix d’importants déséquilibres entre les chercheurs et chercheuses), qu’environnementales (les outils communément employés pour mener à bien les recherches, des ordinateurs aux colloques internationaux, ont une lourde empreinte écologique).

Il y a évidemment un certain paradoxe dans ce genre de proposition : d’une part Rueckert vante la décroissance, d’autre part il produit un article annonçant une approche novatrice en études littéraires (qui entraîne, à son tour, la création de revues, des conférences, des anthologies, etc.) Mais Rueckert reconnaît et assume cette contradiction en affirmant que sa conjugaison de la littérature et l’environnement ne répond pas à tant à un désir d’innovation, mais qu’elle est dirigée sur « un principe de pertinence » (73). Ce mot de pertinence (relevance) n’est pas le signe que Rueckert adopte une approche (naïvement) utilitariste de la littérature, résumée à une formule lapidaire du genre « la littérature doit être au service de l’écologie ». À mon sens, le mot indique plutôt une disposition pragmatique de Rueckert, et sa reconnaissance que la littérature se pratique et s’inscrit (forcément) avec les choses du monde⁴.

ème page. Mais ces chiffres faramineux nous donnent l’impression d’être chez un genre de grossiste inépuisable de matériaux et de perspectives académiques (situation justement dénoncée par Rueckert…)

’elle est (globalement) correcte ; et (je l’admets) c’est une formule que je pourrais utiliser moi-même. Mais ce genre de déclaration générale, facile à reproduire, et quasi impossible à démontrer, peut se livrer avec une assurance telle qu’elle apparaît comme une réponse ultime et sans appel, un énoncé définitif qui jugule l’action alors qu’il devrait, au contraire, servir à la stimuler. L’articulation de la littérature et de l’environnement ne peut pas se faire uniquement sur le terrain du discours critique.

Une autre réponse serait de dire que les activités littéraires (désignant un ensemble aux contours assurément flous) devraient se dérouler de manière écologiquement consciencieuse. On pourrait alors admettre nos fautes écologiques et modifier les paramètres très concrets de nos recherches. Toute une palette de possibilités s’offre à nous :

• Le livre est-il écologique ? Matières, artisans, fictions 2020)⁵.

Si les activités littéraires se déploient nécessairement avec le monde, il est tout de même prudent de ne pas croire en leur simple réification. Autrement dit et par exemple, ce n’est pas en servant un café doté de l’approbation de la Rain Forest Alliance dans le cadre d’une causerie avec une poète, que l’intervention littéraire sera écoresponsable ou écoconsciencieuse. J’admets que je préfère consommer ce genre de produit—je me règle, moi aussi, sur les mythes de mon temps… Et même si cette boisson peut devenir essentielle dans le travail littéraire (on connaît l’histoire de Balzac, romancier prolifique et auteur du Traité des excitants modernes 1839, qui aurait trouvé la mort dans la surconsommation de ce breuvage psychoactif), il n’en demeure pas moins que boire du café n’est pas une activité proprement littéraire.

’est l’action qui consiste à transformer une première expérience signifiante en une seconde d’un autre ordre. Dans un cadre littéraire :

• tenter expérience, par exemple lire des instructions et faire une recette ou construire un meuble, voilà des interprétations.

’insiste sur le fait que cette dimension fait ressortir le caractère biosémiosique et corporel (embodied) et de nos tractations littéraires⁷. Considérant que nos états affectifs sont au diapason avec des stimuli environnementaux (ou, dans le sillage de James Gibson [1979], d’affordances), nous pourrions expérimenter avec une diversité de ces stimuli. Par exemple, du travail in situ est une expérience qui a de très réelles implications environnementales, un travail qui peut être mené sans présumer que la relation entre le lieu et la pratique textuelle tient sur une simple relation de causalité matérielle.

Une autre option serait de reconnaître la pluralité des textes et des expériences textuelles. Bien qu’il peut paraître normal de vouloir démonter un roman en versant sur lui toutes sortes de cadres analytiques, cette pratique très spécialisée a surtout cours dans des départements de lettres. À l’extérieur de ces départements, plein d’autres personnes utilisent de textes à d’autres fins. Pour être clair, le but n’est pas d’amener les littéraires à remiser leurs manières de faire, sous prétexte qu’elles seraient trop compliquées, raffinées ou expertes. Pas de retour à ce qu’on appelle commodément le gros bon sens. Plutôt, je poserais la question suivante : que savons-nous des textes et de leurs fonctions, que savons-nous des arts du langage qui pourrait être exploré, opérationnalisé dans d’autres disciplines⁸ ? Et plus précisément, pour m’insérer dans l’argument de ce numéro thématique : en quoi savoir-faire linguistiques et textuels littéraires peuvent-ils être déployés en fonction d’enjeux environnementaux ?

’impact des populations de castors dans les environnements forestiers est, quant à elle, réécrite sous la forme d’un récit documentant, dans une perspective écoféministe, le quotidien de la chercheuse sur son terrain et sa relation avec les trappeurs.

Les fruits d’or, nous en sommes marqués pour toujours. Cela dit, je dois également mettre de l’avant la diversité d’expériences à partir desquelles les étudiantes et étudiants peuvent s’engager avec la littérature. Et justement, ce qui émerge de nos rencontres avec des écologistes c’est que la littérature est un ensemble de faires qui peuvent sans cesse se renouveler.