From the River-as-milieu to the River-as-machine: Literature and Dams in the Age of Hydraulic Modernity

Abstract

This article analyses the transformation of the river into an energy infrastructure in contemporary French literature devoted to hydroelectric dams. Through a study of Barrage sur le Nil by Christian Jacq (1994), La Verticale du fleuve by Clara Arnaud (2023), and Mémoires sauvées de l’eau by Nina Leger (2024), it shows how these works narrate the passage from the river-as-milieu to the river-as-machine. Situated within the long history of hydraulic modernity, these texts reveal a process of separation between flow and territory that leads to increasing energy abstraction: the river becomes a resource and, ultimately, a calculable variable. The analysis highlights the fragility of this regime of flow governance, whose technical devices, rather than stabilizing ecological equilibria, displace and amplify their effects. While these works make perceptible the historical and material depth of the extractivist regime, they belong less to the time of repair than to that of fracture. Dam literature thus emerges as a privileged site for thinking through the dynamics of acceleration and the forms of infrastructural dependency characteristic of the Anthropocene.