Abstract
Informed by medical science and biotechnology, Karoline Georges’s novel Under the Stone offers a reflection on suffering bodies and imagines responses to an overwhelming sense of fear and passivity that embodied trauma and the world’s many crises can create. In line with the editors’ reclaiming of the milieu for the medical humanities, I draw on Deleuze and Guattari’s geophilosophy and Sara Ahmed’s notions of stranger and encounter for reading the novel’s spatialization of oppressive power dynamics and its imagination of subversive emergence. I also complicate the literary text’s discourse on space and body by relying on wonder studies to examine further its alternative forms of careful attunement enacted through the protagonist’s affective and disembodied awakening, the latter fueled by his escape from “the incessant movement of automatic components that delineat[e] [his] presence in the world” (Georges 2016, 61). Happening from and because of the Tower’s milieu, this escape becomes a mitigating force to physical, affective, and social struggles. I thus contend that Georges’s text provides thought-provoking material about the functions and effects of art for addressing the dangers and promises of bioethics, body sovereignty, and life protection.
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Endnotes
1 Jacob Homel translated the novel in 2016 ass Under the Stone. I am using his version.
2 Georges has won, among several other prizes, the Governor General’s Award for French Fiction in 2018 for De Synthèse, a text she wrote while caring for her terminally ill mother. Sous béton was a finalist for the Prix des libraires du Québec in 2012.
3 Deleuze (1988, 127) writes: “A body can be anything: it can be an animal, a body of sounds, a mind or idea; it can be a linguistic corpus, a social body, a collectivity.”
4 In “Milieu, Territory, Atmosphere: New Spaces of Knowledge,” Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos (2016, 83) explains: “An encounter for Deleuze and Guattari pushes the encountered parties off their comfort zone of categories and identities and throws them in a ‘mad becoming’ (Deleuze 2004, 141).”
5 In the title, something seems lost from the original “béton.” While it makes sense to avoid the ambiguous “concrete” in the title, “stone” does not convey the airtight, impervious quality of “béton.” As such, it is interesting to note that in the novel, béton is translated as concrete; for instance, “Béton total” becomes “Total Concrete.”
6 Sous béton adds to a growing category of post-apocalyptic fiction published in Canada and Québec since 2000. For example, Atwood’s trilogy MaddAddam (2003–2013) and Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven (2014) have gained significant popular and critical praise, while in French, the novel Faune, by Christiane Vadnais (Fauna, translated by Pablo Strauss, Coach House Books, 2020), and L’Avenir, by Catherine Leroux (The Future, translated by Susan Ouriou, Biblioasis, 2023), have also been acclaimed for imagining the environmental and traumatic impact of apocalyptic destruction. Georges’s novel confirms Marlene Goldman’s observation in Rewriting Apocalypse in Canadian Fiction that “contemporary Canadian fiction … typically portrays the apocalypse from the perspective of marginalized individuals” (Goldman 2005, 18). It also resonates with Susan Watkins’s analysis in Contemporary Women’s Post-Apocalyptic Fiction, more specifically in the chapter “The Posthuman Body,” of the political, ethical, and symbolic significance of fictional bioforms as new figures of kinship reimagining the world and its relationalities (Watkins 2020).
7 I first analyzed Sous béton in comparison with Emma Donoghue’s novel Room in an article (Hétu 2015) that focuses on the role of the nonhuman in the child characters’ development of a spatial and affective sense of wonder as a survival strategy.
8 To better situate its potential for literary analysis, I first mapped a genealogy of wonder in “Of Wonder and Encounter: Textures of Human and Nonhuman Relationality in Two Novels” (Hétu 2015).
9 I also mobilized the notion of wonder to analyze the fiction of Anglo-Québécoise writer Heather O’Neill. The latter uses the term repeatedly in her work, at times juxtaposing it to that of “squalor,” such as in her novels Lullabies for Little Criminals and The Girl Who Was Saturday Night as well as in her collection of short stories Daydreams of Angels (Hétu 2020, 2021). While I recuperate some of the general framework to study Under the Stone, I rely on it differently in my previous work on O’Neill by tying it to the notion of the ordinary.
10 My critical analysis is also indebted to Michel Foucault’s concepts of the biomedical gaze and panopticism: his understanding of power relations in medicalized and scrutinized spaces is crucial for reading the narrator’s vulnerable and intertwined rapport to space, body, discipline, and health.
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Hétu, D. On the Lookout for a Crack: Disruptive Becomings in Karoline Georges’s Novel Under the Stone. J Med Humanit (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-023-09833-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-023-09833-x