When Ecocriticism Meets Existentialism: Vercors’s You Shall Know Them

Abstract

[O]n their own and without trying, animals have never ceased to make the border-boundary between humans and beasts an unsettled one. – Jean-Christophe Bailly, The Animal Side 5 One cannot be a humanist if one is not an ecologist; … one cannot be an ecologist if one is not also a humanist. – Philippe Desbrosses, interviewed by Denis Cheissoux, CO2 mon amour, 16 May 2015 In his fine introduction to ecocriticism, Greg Garrard writes that the broadest definition of ecocriticism “is the study of the relationship of the human and the non-human, … entailing critical analysis of the term ‘human’ itself” (5). Nature writing and pastoral are no longer the foundations of ecocriticism, whose “key task” has become the “reconsideration of the idea of ‘the human’” (15). Ecocritics long ago discarded Descartes’s claim that animals are mere mechanical creatures possessing movement and a life force (anima), but lacking a thinking, reasoning, feeling cogito (animus). As J. Baird Callicott explained in 1994, “[t]he emerging postmodern model of nature is more organismic than mechanistic” (“Role of Technology” 67). The flourishing field of animal studies1 confirms what pet owners have always known: that animals are not machine-like objects, but sentient, emotive subjects, and as such share “troubled boundaries” (Garrard 148) with human beings. One of the most intriguing French literary treatments of the human–animal continuum is undoubtedly You Shall Know Them (Les Animaux dénaturés), a little-known novel by Vercors (Jean Bruller), published in Paris several years after the end of World War II, at the height of the existentialist movement. While grappling with the question of what separates humans and animals, Vercors shows how “the question of the animal” (Calarco 4–6) is intimately bound up with notions of power, racism, imperialism, and capitalism.