Impersonalising the We-Narrative: Jon McGregor’s Reservoir 13

Authors

  • Jean-Michel Ganteau Montpellier

Abstract

Jon McGregor’s Reservoir 13 is characterised by a poetics of impersonality relying on an idiosyncratic use of personal pronouns. This applies to the characters’ discourse, presented in a hybrid, unusual form, but also to the narrator’s, which at times erases all pronouns while at other times resorting to passive forms and “there was/were” impersonal forms that are concentrated to a remarkable extent. This logic of subtraction is instrumental in mediating the voices of the village, but also, through the juxtaposition of vignettes and cross-species non sequiturs, it helps give visibility and voice to the assemblages of the human and the nonhuman that characterise the life of the valley. In other terms, the novel paradoxically uses the appearance of a third-person narrative to achieve the collective effect of a we-narrative. In so doing, it edges towards nonhuman narration and helps destabilise the tenets of anthropocentrism. It contributes to the development of a brand of material realism that is itself a contribution to the evolution of the novel’s mimetic agenda in an age dominated by the effect of the Anthropocene and the hyperobject of species extinction.

Keywords: Reservoir 13, Jon McGregor, Anthropocene, de-anthropocentrism, impersonality, material realism, nonhuman narration, non sequitur, subtraction, we-narrative

Author Biography

Jean-Michel Ganteau, Montpellier

Jean-Michel Ganteau is Professor of Contemporary British Literature at the University Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3 (France). He is editor-in-chief of the journal Études britannniques contemporaines. He is the author of two monographs on David Lodge and Peter Ackroyd, of The Ethics and Aesthetics of Vulnerability in Contemporary British Fiction (Routledge, 2015), and of The Ethics and Aesthetics of Attention in Contemporary British Narrative (Routledge, 2022). He is the editor, with Christine Reynier, of five volumes of essays published by Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée on the impersonal and emotion, on autonomy and commitment, and on humility in modernist and contemporary British literature. He has also co-edited several volumes of essays with Susana Onega: The Ethical Component in Experimental British Fiction since the 1960s (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007), Trauma and Ethics in Contemporary British Literature (Rodopi, 2011), Trauma and Romance in Contemporary British Literature (Routledge, 2012), Contemporary Trauma Narratives: Liminality and the Ethics of Form (Routledge, 2014), Victimhood and Vulnerability in 21st-Century Fiction (Routledge, 2017), and The Wounded Hero in Contemporary Fiction: A Paradoxical Quest (Routledge, 2018). He has published articles on contemporary British fiction, with a particular interest in the relationship between trauma and literature, the ethics of affect, the ethics of vulnerability and attention.

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Published

2025-04-17

Issue

Vol. 16 No. 1 (2025): Variations pronominales

Section

ARTICLES

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