(Con)Temporary Animals: The Transgressions of Human Narration in Alain Mabanckou’s and Tristan Garcia’s Mémoires

Two Texts, Their Authors, and the Movements in Between

To what extent is the contemporary a concept limited by human experience? What would it mean to imagine an experience of being contemporary that accounts for nonhuman or more-than-human means of accessing the present? Would such an endeavor be possible, not to say necessary in the “contemporary moment” of ecological catastrophe and mass extinction? This essay answers in the affirmative through readings of two contemporary Francophone novels that fall under the genre of “animal autobiography”: Alain Mabanckou’s Mémoires de porcépic (2006) and Tristan Garcia’s Mémoires de la jungle (2010). Drawing on Jacques Derrida’s exploration of the autobiographical animal in “L’Animal que donc je suis” and Giorgio Agamben’s definition of the contemporary subject, I read these novels as examples of a narrative temporality whereby humans can both follow after and be present with animal others. I attribute this temporality to the novels’ shared technique of metalepsis, defined in narratology as a transgression of the boundary separating a given diegetic “storyworld” from the world outside of (extradiegetic to) the narrative: Although both novels initially assume the form indicated by their titles—“memoirs” authored by animal subjects (a porcupine in Mabanckou’s text; a chimpanzee in Garcia’s) who recollect past experiences—the intrusions made by voices of human narrators at the ends of both works draw attention to and undermine the artificial boundaries of this form. Readers thus encounter two alternative representations of contemporaneity, neither of which require the anthropocentric division between the speaking human subject, who manifests presence, and the mute animal other, who remains trapped within an evolutionary past.

Born in Congo-Brazzaville in 1966, Alain Mabanckou published poetry through the 1990s before winning the 1999 Grand prix littéraire d’Afrique noire for his first novel, Bleu-Blanc-Rouge. He then became one of the Francophone world’s most successful contemporary African novelists, winning both the 2005 Prix des cinq continents de la fran-cophonie for Verre cassé and the 2006 Prix Renaudot for Mémoires de porc-épic. Animals make frequent appearances in his work, but Mémoires de porc-épic is his only book narrated from an animal point-of-view to date. In the style of an autobiographical confession, a porcupine named Ngoumba recollects his life as the “harmful double” of a young man named Kibandi: leaving the “animal world,” the porcupine follows Kibandi’s orders to “eat” the bodies and souls of his enemies. When gluttony drives Kibandi to eat a few souls he should have left alone—an infant, for example—the spiritual world takes revenge and kills him, leaving the porcupine without a human host. Pursued by outraged villagers, the porcupine flees into the forest. After following his “instinct” for a couple of nights, he comes across a baobab tree on the bank of a river he fails to cross (38–39) and decides to confess to it his crimes.

Novelist and object-oriented philosopher Tristan Garcia was born in 1981 in Toulouse, France, but spent much of his childhood in Algeria. He won the 2008 Prix de Flore for his debut novel, La Meilleure Part des hommes (translated into English as Hate: A Romance), an exploration of AIDS and its impact on gay culture in 1980s Paris. As a philosopher, he is most known for his speculative realist work Forme et objet: Un traité des choses, published in 2011; he is also the author of Nous, animaux et humains: Actualité de Jeremy Bentham, an essay on utilitarianism and animal suffering published earlier that year. He received little attention in 2010 for his second novel, Mémoires de la jungle, a work of post-apocalyptic science-fiction narrated by a chimpanzee named Doogie. Doogie begins his story orbiting the Earth aboard a space shuttle, as an involuntary participant in a publicity stunt designed to save the failing experimental zoo where he has been raised. The shuttle crash-lands in the middle of the African jungle, where Doogie finds no...