Le point de vue animal dans "Dingo": l'inscription ambiguë de l'altérité

We would like to approach Octave Mirbeau’s last novel, Dingo, published in 1913, using Alain Rabatel’s linguistic theory concerning the representation of the point of view (PDV) in fiction and Anne Simon’s approach about the “zoopoétique”. From a narrative perspective, the protagonist of the novel, half-dog and half-wolf, is certainly Mirbeau’s mirror of the soul, that is to say the voice of his desires, his torments, his inadequacy. Nevertheless, some passages of the novel evoke the total “alterity” of the animal in comparison to the human (cf. Derrida): his ancestral instinct, as well as the abundance of his sense organs. After a short presentation of the PDV theory applied to animals in fiction, we will analyse Mirbeau’s use of some recurrent stylistic devices to represent the dingo’s thoughts and words. If, on one hand, the anthropomorphism of the dog is excessive, and quite traditional indeed, on the other Mirbeau’s novel shows the first steps of empathy: some of his literary constructions, conjuring the animal’s universe up, relate a non-human world. Only here the modernity of this novel is completely manifest.