World-Ecological Literature and the Animal Question

Abstract

In recent years, the Marxist method of world-literary theory has given birth to world-ecological literary criticism, a practice of materialist comparativism that analyses how literary texts register the environmental crises of capitalist modernity. Although its practitioners have penned incisive essays on literary engagements with the extraction and exhaustion of resources like water, oil and cacao, there has been no work published on industrialized animal agriculture and the global expansion of meat production. This is not a simple omission, but rather a product of Marxism’s longstanding ambivalence towards animals. With this argument as the foundation of this essay, I set out to both extend and challenge the world-ecological analytic by paying attention to literary registrations of meat production across different socio-ecological regimes. I do so by turning to Jean-Baptiste Del Amo’s 2016 novel, Règne animal, published in English as Animalia in 2019. I show how the novel embraces forms of literary naturalism which, by depicting farm workers and their animals as jointly expendable to the laws of profitability, registers the meatification of France across two centuries. Yet if naturalism ultimately depicts human characters who are powerless to stop predetermined natural laws, then to what extent does Animalia truly challenge the conditions of factory farming it wishes to expose? Put differently, what are the affordances and limitations of naturalist form for critically mapping factory farming?