Nature, a Love Story: Marie Nimier’s éco-critique in La Plage

Abstract

Marie Nimier’s recent fiction highlights the importance of natural ecology in the fictional protagonist’s search for self and for reparations with the past. In La Plage (2016), the juxtaposition of the Anthropocene’s disastrous destruction of nature with the emotional catastrophes of a heroine known to the reader simply as “l’inconnue” provides the background for a story of healing and redemption. Among the many aspects of the text that metaphorize its subject—the search for a new language, the return to a metaphorical Garden of Eden of childhood, reassemblages of relationships in the past and present—, is that of the protagonist’s emergence as a “terrestrial” in Bruno Latour’s sense of the word, that is, as part of a network of actors engaged in saving the planet. Through a process of deterritorialization on the “plage,” equated with the “page,” she discovers a renewed, hopeful language and a belief in love. A story of re-writing, re-living, and re-building one’s memories in and with nature leads to a regeneration of the human belief in a future for the planet.