'The Ethics of Animal-Human Existence: Marie Darrieussecq?s Truismes'

One of the surprisingly serene passages In Marie Darrieussecq’s debut novel Pig Tales (Fr. Truismes; lit., “truisms;” “sow’s stories”) finds the heroine reclining on a bench in a Parisian park and sharing dreams with birds and bats: This shared space of (interspecies) kindness poses a startling opposition to the callousness, maltreatment, sexual abuse, and butchery that permeate the rest of the novel. Foregrounding the issues of wanton violence and exploitation, Darrieussecq’s politicized, eroticized, and darkly humorous tale of the predicaments of a womanturned-sow caused much commotion among the critics and the wider public alike when it was published in 1996. It re Invigorated the debates about female subjectivation and the competing meanings of femininity, and raised, again and forcefully, the question of the female body as a form of prime currency both in a globalized capitalist market and In totalitarian societies. Pungent and Intense, Pig Tales connected these concerns to the more general problem of human insolence, indifference, and willful exercise of power In an ecologically deteriorating world.1.