Traité du Corail (A Treatise on Coral)

Traité du Corail takes as its starting point the discovery in 1744 by the scientist Jean-André Peyssonnel that coral, which was then called a "stony plant", is in fact an animal. However, the book does not claim to reconstitute the biography of the naturalist, who remains a forgotten figure in the history of science. Based on a few key episodes in his life, the text is first and foremost a pretext for exploring the fascination between man and the object of his study, through the mystery of its threefold nature (mineral, vegetable and animal). This confrontation of scientific mind and archaic life is orchestrated throughout a text that is also generically composite (theatre, poem, scientific treatise, philosophical dialogue), and a narrative that is mostly handled by the coral itself. Since a reef is a multiple creature, a multi-headed hydra, a kind of super-individual, I thought it would be interesting to have Peyssonnel's terrestrial destiny and his scientific adventure told from a point of view that was not overhanging or transcendent, but by a new kind of narrator — a polyphonic, voluble and inexhaustible super-narrator with several voices. Traité du Corail is thus designed to give the impression of an organism-like proliferating text, mimicking its object. The strictly individual scale is thus exceeded, the human subject is overwhelmed by an incalculable number of elements, species, materials, energies, physical laws, and the narrative is, so to speak, anthropo-de-centred. Man is no longer considered to be above all else, but rather one phenomenon among others. He no longer moves through the world as a conqueror, he is himself crossed by the world. This is a way of putting him back in his place within the enormous movement of geological and cosmic time, within the incessant flow of genesis and apocalypse. In this sense, Traité du Corail could ironically be summed up as follows: appearance, expansion and disappearance of Homo sapiens.
 

(Written by François Bizet, Associate Professor, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences / 2021)