Beyond the human/nonhuman binary: fluid borders in A.S. Byatt’s onto-tales

• Autores: María Jesús Martínez Alfaro
• Localización: The posthuman condition in 21st century literature and culture: interdisciplinary Insights / María Ferrández Sanmiguel (ed. lit.), Esther Muñoz González (ed. lit.), Carmen Laguarta Bueno (ed. lit.), 2025, ISBN 978-3-031-83701-2, págs. 145-162
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Byatt’s writing recurrently crosses borders between disciplines. Recent critical studies, like those by Emilie Walezak and Barbara Franchi, have seen this epistemological reassemblage as concurring, in Byatt’s fiction of the 2000s, with an ontological remodelling that increasingly approaches the human in nonhuman terms. In this light, my essay traces the evolution of Byatt’s short fiction towards the “onto-story”/“onto-tale”—terms coined by Jane Bennett to describe her narrative in Vibrant Matter (2010) and that can be applied, I contend, to fictional narratives that similarly challenge ontological demarcations between the human and the nonhuman. My chapter focuses on three short stories: “Arachne” (2000), “A Stone Woman” (2003) and “Sea Story” (2013). The first two are tales of metamorphoses where organic and inorganic domains merge. For their analysis, I rely on what Italo Calvino called “universal contiguity” (1987) and combine this idea with more recent approaches by new materialists and material ecocritics. These conceptual frames serve as a bridge between the metamorphoses in the first two stories and the theme of environmental crisis in the third. Thus, the analysis of “Sea Story” explores the possibilities of the onto-tale to articulate the view that nature is us and warn about human beings’ alienated relationship to the earth.