The trout opera: a South-South reading: thinking with fish

Abstract

This article engages Matthew Condon’s novel The Trout Opera (2007) in a form of South-South dialogue. As a South African literary studies academic, with an interest also in the environmental humanities and trout themselves, I bring perhaps different questions to this Australian novel than those raised in the critical literature I have found on the novel. Australian critics and reviewers seem to focus on the novel’s status as national narrative or allegory. This is a common theme in colonial and postcolonial writing, and it was a recurrent theme in both critical and creative writing in South Africa, especially in the post-apartheid period. But, perhaps because it is so clear that any coherent national narrative has failed or was always doomed to failure in South Africa, my reading of The Trout Opera is less concerned with its implications for my own somewhat resonant historical and political context, than instead with what seem to me the novel’s more far-reaching implications: its narration of interspecies relationships between humans and animals (mainly trout) in ways that are enormously important in this age of the Anthropocene and the post-humanist.