Article révisé par les pairs
| Résumé : | How should critics approach narrative temporality in times of ecological disorder? In the last decade, a new strand of literary critics has attempted to bridge eco-criticism with narrative theory, shifting attention from narrative content to narrative form. Econarratology studies how narrative shape our understanding of the environment. Yet, eco-critical interrogations of narrative form continue to lack. Grounded on a homogeneous conception of time, narratology often relays a dichotomy between narrativity and dysnarrativity; one that fails to translate the variety of temporal processes in film. First, I shall highlight the problem underlying Rancière’s critique of Deleuze’s film philosophy and its continuing relevance for narrative theory. The tensions between their conceptions of narrativity brings forth a philosophical problem: should narrative ambiguities be approached as variations and interruptions of the classical model or do they call for different theoretical paradigms? Recently event narratology has engaged with this issue: how to reflect positively current narratives’ poetics of discordance? Secondly, this dispute will be grounded in the examination of a film and its abundant critique: Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s award-winning feature, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010). Uncle Boonmee has been discussed for both its intermedial narratives and interspecies memory. Blurring the border between humans and non-humans, environmental past and political present, a film could hardly be less anthropocentric and linear. Yet, critics have invariably grounded their analysis on Boonmee’s remembrances. As I will show, both analytical shortfalls go hand in hand, i.e. boiling down narrative complexity to dysnarrative indeterminacy and accommodating non-human storylines into a human plot. Thirdly, I shall argue that Uncle Boonmee both confirms and bypasses the critique of linear narrative that is at heart of the Rancière-Deleuze discussion. In doing so, Weerasethakul’s feature calls for a new paradigm – different, yet unlike the crystalline narrative, positively determined. By bringing the event to the fore, Deleuze offers another theoretical backdrop for event narratology, that in turn proves useful to econarratology. |
