Petra Báder (Department of Spanish Language and Literature) published her study in Kamchatka. Revista de Análisis Cultural.
Although the application of post-humanist theory (or theories) to literary works, i.e., the creation and methodological development of the so-called post-humanist literary criticism, is still pending, the study of non-human narrators may be a promising area of research. In her study, Petra Báder examines the novel When I Sing, Mountains Dance, by Irene Solà, a prominent figure in contemporary Catalan literature. What makes this novel unique is that each chapter is narrated by a different human or non-human narrator: in addition to the inhabitants of the border region of the Pyrenees, the dead, animals, plants, clouds, and even the mountain itself tell the story of its creation. The author of the study, published in Kamchatka. Revista de Análisis Cultural, attempted to describe the process by which human and non-human narrators are layered on top of each other, thus giving the text its essence and the novel's structure its posthuman nature through the network of voices, that is, the dialectical tension that arises between monologues and polyphony.
Two major theoretical frameworks provided guidance for the examination of non-human narratives: scholarly contributions dealing with critical posthumanism and its exploitation in literary criticism, which focus on posthuman texts in addition to the question of agency (Hayles 1999, Braidotti 2016, Rossini 2016, Ferrando 2018, Foster 2018, Nemes 2018, Horváth – Lovász – Nemes 2019, Kowalcze 2020), as well as unnatural narratology, which breaks with the narrow concept of the anthropomorphic narrator (Herman 2011, Alber – Nielsen – Richardson 2012, Bernaerts – Caracciolo – Herman – Vervaeck 2014, Tóth 2018). The intersection of posthumanism and narratology can be grasped through the process of verbalization, since it is precisely in language that we find the contradiction in the literary representation of non-human entities: the “incorporation” of inanimate and non-human voices into language can be interpreted as a turn towards the zoe, but this is only possible from the perspective of the human (language). The main question raised in this study is therefore whether non-human experience can be represented linguistically, and if so, to what extent.
After examining each chapter, Petra Báder concluded that the use of non-human entities as narrators is achieved through prosopopoeia, which serves not merely as personification, but as anthropomorphizing, i.e., endowing them with human consciousness, giving them a voice, and de Man's concept of "facialization" (Szathmáry, 2008). The narrators of When I Sing, Mountains Dance increasingly distance themselves from the purely human and move towards the non-human (i.e., they "turn" towards the zoe), while the author's main endeavor is to explore and verbalize the phenomenal world experienced by non-human agents. Solà uses the creative power of language to overturn the anthropocentric nature of narrative and language use, while constantly referring to the human, human materiality, and the de-centered role of humans in their relationship with the environment. The break with the narrow concept of the anthropomorphic narrator—as an act of fiction creation—involves the representation of things considered lifeless, inorganic, or static in the dynamism of becoming (Deleuze–Guattari, 2002), which in the novel occurs in the case of the narrators who are most distant from the human: in the organicity, networked logic, and thoughts of trumpet mushrooms, clouds, and the Pyrenees.