The Narrative Agency of Female and Nonhuman Bodies: Interpretation and Translation of Material Textuality

Abstract

Material ecocriticism heeds matter as a text, and traces natural-cultural interactions by reading them as material narratives. According to this, all bodies are living texts that recount stories. All material bodies embody their memory of social and physical experiences, integrating their ongoing process of becoming. The intra-actions between human interpreter and material textuality are significant since material narratives are conveyed in nonlinguistic ways. This paper aims to explore how the narrative agency of matter and human creativity, intra-acting, coemerge in new levels of reality, that is, how the stories of matter and bodies are interpreted and translated with the intervention of human imagination, so that human and nonhuman, reality and text are creatively becoming together. In this narrative, the interpreter and the interpreted emerge together, in intra-action. This study demonstrates that translation is not simply epistemological practice but ontological performance which is part of the differential constitution of reality, and translation is the condition and task of all beings, although there is the untranslatable in the story of matter, referring to Ricoeur and Derrida. First, it examines how fossil collector Mary Anning discovers the fossil of an ichthyosaur, which, intra-acting with the interpretation of Anning and geologists, produces new meanings. Second, by reading Woolf’s “On Being Ill” and Mol’s The Body Multiple, it maintains that interpretation and translation are material-discursive medical practice and ontological performance which participate in bodily production, and the narratives of female bodies should be actively and carefully translated.