"No Continent Is an Island: Jon McGregor’s Lean Fall Stand"

• Main Author: Ganteau, Jean-Michel
• Other Authors: Etudes montpelliéraines du monde anglophone (EMMA), Université Paul-Valéry - Montpellier 3 (UPVM), EA741-EMMA, Nuova Trauben, Pier Paolo Piciucco
• Format: Book Part
• Language: English
• Published: HAL CCSD 2023
• Subjects: cli fi; dependence; disability; embeddings; entanglements; interdependences; natural environment; vulnerability; [SHS]Humanities and Social Sciences; Antarc*; Antarctica
• Online Access: https://univ-montpellier3-paul-valery.hal.science/hal-04173420

International audience Like his previous novels, Jon McGregor’s Lean Fall Stand (2021), goes on attending to human precariousness and ontological vulnerability. It turns its back on the world of excluded addicts and outcasts that Even the Dogs (2011) chose to throw into visibility and ties in with the story of personal trauma and attendant incapacitation at the heart of So Many Ways to Begin (2006), even while exploring the human subject’s relation to his/her natural environment that is prominent in Reservoir 13 (2017). Lean Fall Stand provides a story of human dependence on the natural environment that partly takes place in Antarctica, echoing contemporary concerns about the climate crisis and showcasing the shift of agency from the human subject to the extreme natural and climactic elements coming along with the Anthropocene. Its second half takes place in England and both thematises and presents the physical and social consequences of a stroke that affects the protagonist. It provides a linguistic immersion into the world of partial aphasia and gives experiential, incarnated knowledge of the reality of what it is to be dependent. The link between the apparently separate parts of the narrative pulls on the thread of vulnerability, in its human and non-human aspects, insisting on the vulnerability of all the living and thereby building up a picture of interdependences, embeddings and entanglements.