"Glittering corpses" : les natures mourantes dans les nouvelles de Rick Bass

In Rick Bass’s short stories, the descriptions of the bodies of dead animals reveal how the author attempts to approach the mysteries of the nonhuman world without trying to capture them. When trying to describe a dead animal, the writing is faced with the challenge to name an object that is disappearing. Because Bass is well aware of the limitations of his descriptive project, he resorts to narrative dissections and hypotyposes, and goes as far as interlacing scientific terms and poetic digressions. The variations of the author’s writing do not hint at his wish to capture the otherness of animal worlds. They rather testify to the capacity of words to adjust themselves to the vibrant energy of the nonhuman world. With the descriptions of skeletons or rotting bodies that are not so much still-lifes as they are dying-lives, Bass invents a performative writing that exposes its author’s literary and activist project. Fiction does not only aim at testifying to the unspeakable suffering of animals; it also provides a vital model of regeneration for humans