Le procès du cochon by Oscar Coop-Phane (review)

In his fifth novel, Coop-Phane explores the historical theme of animal trials that took place from the thirteenth to eighteenth centuries in France and throughout Europe. Supported by research into trials and practices of the period, many scenes are dramatizations of actual historical accounts. The text is divided into four parts followed by an epilogue. Part one opens with a pig who wanders into a backyard where he bites and kills a human infant. Quickly discovered with blood dripping from his mouth, he is imprisoned and later stands trial for his "crime." Questioning the preposterousness of an animal trial allows the writer to deconstruct an array of other social phenomena, notably the hyperseparation of humans and animals inherent in Cartesian rationalism and its philosophical inheritor the Enlightenment, paradoxically the time period with the greatest number of recorded animal trials. Language and speech are at the center of the text's reflection on the human/animal divide, given the mutism of the accused. Coop-Phane takes advantage of the unusual premise of the plot to cast a comic gaze on the insistence of the justice system to render senseless violence comprehensible, especially through language, a requirement that is destined to remain unsatisfied in the particular case of the pig. Additionally, Michel Foucault's oeuvre looms large as an intertextual reference for the novel, specifically in the second and fourth parts that recount the trial and subsequent torture and hanging of the porcine protagonist. The author, explicitly alluding to Foucault on multiple occasions, states in an interview with TV5Monde that he was inspired by "une curiosité historique judiciaire" to explore the theatricality of the justice system of the Ancien Régime. The narration of the trial itself reflects this Foucauldian thematic by switching to the format of a play, wherein the defendant is designated in the cast of characters as "le croqueur." Replete with judge, jury, lawyers, witnesses, and the avid crowd, the trial is perhaps where Coop-Phane's writing reaches its comic apotheosis. The ludicrousness of the trial is seconded only possibly by the ghastly absurdity of the novel's epilogue, another historical reenactment of what was known as the "jeu des aveugles": the gathering together of destitute blind people in a ring, where they are provided with clubs and then proceed to strike out wildly, injuring and killing one another in the process, with the ultimate objective being to put to death none other than a pig placed in the center of the ring. The comic mode gives way to the tragic in the fourth part of the novel: "Le supplice." The public sadism of the ritual torture and execution of the pig dramatizes juridical spectacle, once again with evident Foucauldian overtones. Although Coop-Phane's novel is set in an unspecified past, one cannot help but ponder the contemporary implications of the author's exposition of humanity's violent relationship with animals, begging the question: "Le spectacle est-il moins beau quand on y participe?" (114).