the blog where nothing happens, a lot more often than just twice

“He [the narrator of L’Arrêt de mort] wants to maintain his privacy by establishing absolute closure, by making change impossible. But he cannot close himself off without also including Nathalie. As is the case with the animal protagonist of Kafka’s story ‘Der Bau [The Burrow],’ the narrator’s dwelling is the locus of his most intense privacy and self-communion; and, as in Kafka’s story, it is just here that the Other’s proximity becomes inescapable…” Steve Shaviro, Passion & Excess, (and here he cites both Blanchot’s discussion of Der Bau and Libertson’s commentary on it in Proximity).

In L’Arrêt de mort, as Shaviro points out, Nathalie is just there, in the room, she doesn’t have to burst in or sneak in. Or anyway, the récit doesn’t concern itself with narrating Nathalie’s arrival, nor with the narrator’s dawning sensory perception of her presence; the narrator just knows someone is there with him in the dark: “Whatever he does, she is already there; she has always preceded him, she is waiting for him in the very place he thinks is most authentically and inalienably his.”

And likewise, in Kafka’s Der Bau & in Libertson’s reading of Blanchot’s reading, neither the allegedly missing pages of Der Bau (about the final combat between one burrowing creature and another) nor the matter of how or when this other entered the burrow are of interest. Libertson: “The barely perceptible noise which becomes the terror of the approach, does not begin… The essence of this noise is its lack of beginning. It ‘may have been there before,’ ‘may have been there all along.’ And this is the sense of the story’s final sentence: ‘all remained unchanged.’” (Proximity, 100).

The golem in the central shaggå of Manuela Draeger's Herbes et golems, the golem of the Shaggå du golem presque étérnel, is aware of the proximity of another from the very beginning of his imprisonment (he is confined in a sort of magical or astral-plane prison; he was whisked there by incantations, after having defied the rabbi his master). As in so many post-exotic works, the golem’s solitude was devised by someone else, with the intention (I think we can assume) of preventing any communication. The post-exotic prisoners resist their solitary confinement by being aware of the proximity that is enclosed along with their solitude, there in the place where the jailers think they are most irremediably alone.

This awareness and this proximity are often figured as magical or shamanic; in any case, it’s never quite a face-to-face, intersubjective experience of prisoner and fellow prisoner—nor is it ear-to-ear, in the case of the murmured and tapped post-exotic novels, whose auditors are so often dead or not listening, or, to put it another way, these others insist, they approach, but there can be no ordinary dialogue between them—there is no ordinary “between.”  So for example (for an example of the the way the solitary post-exotic cell is already a fraternal revolutionary cell but only in such a way that the other writer-dissident is not another self): the others who persist as scotch-taped photos of the dead comrades in Volodine's Le post-exotisme en dix leçons, leçon onze. Or again, the two sets of auditors for Linda Woo’s “Discours aux nomades et aux morts” in Volodine's Écrivains: she repeats a narrat, or maybe it’s a leçon, or an extract from a romånce (three distinct post-exotic genres), she narrates to a dead prisoner in the cell next to her, and, at the same time, on another, more onieric plane, she is declaiming on the steppe before some “nomades sympathisants,” but these nomads are much too far away to hear her. And that’s a matter of indifference, to the writer-dissident (even if, quite often, the poverty or paucity of the writer-dissident’s audience is the stuff of comedy in post-exoticsm: in Bardo or Not Bardo, a writer in a concentration camp recites his dramatic works to an audience of none, while birds shit on his head).

The post-exotic novels often end as does Der Bau: all remains unchanged. There is no jailbreak, just as Der Bau does not end in a confrontation  and neither do the post-exotic texts become or incite actions in their worlds, the world of the fiction; the post-exotic texts (particularly the books-within-the-books) aren’t comminques in that sense. They issue in nothing but more post-exotic texts.

Something apparently unique to the Shaggå du golem presque étérnel is this: the difference between intersubjective experience and this other kind of proximity is narrated. It’s a discovery which the narrator-prisoner thinks through, step by step. (Maybe because it’s a children’s book by Manuela Draeger, or anyway a book for young readers, something is explicitly thought through here that tends to be assumed in other post-exotic books by other post-exotic writers.)  From the start, the golem senses another’s presence in the cell with him. Darkness (of a perhaps magical kind) prevents an ordinary investigation; the golem can’t just look at this other and figure it out that way.

At first, the golem supposes this other to be “my double,” another golem. He then becomes aware of a voice, distorted, distant, barely comprehensible (a sound as uncanny as the one the burrowing creature hears in Der Bau). When the voice sounds the golem retreats to meditate on “le paradoxe de ton existence sans présence dans ce lieu hermétique ” (61). He then realizes that this other isn’t a golem and isn’t there in the cell with him, but that he has been magically exiled into the mind of a defeated, imprisoned guerrilla; the voice is hers, but he can hear it only as from a great distance, distortedly and infrequently. They cannot converse in any ordinary way, are never present to one another intersubjectively, not even he to her as someone “in her mind.”

The next step, for another day (as always, this imaginary continuation of my text is the only part that really interests me)—there ought to have been a sort of Droste effect to the golem’s imprisonment: the golem was imprisoned inside a prisoner. And, ok, there is a Droste effect, or at least one can think about the story that way. But the inside-inside (the prison-cell inside the prisoner, who is herself inside a prison…) turns out to be an outside:  “notre dialogue se dérouler sous ta memoire et dans tes rêves,” says the golem. Which won’t sound definitive of anything to you, reader, won't sound like definitive proof that this inside is an outside, until you read Blanchot (and/or Farbman), and see that the dream, too, is the approach of the outside. (“Le dehors, la nuit.”).

Ach. I almost have it. Something about metafiction, the initial take that the meta-fiction is an inturned fiction (the prisoner inside the prisoner inside the cell…) but that, too, like any fiction, is a turning toward the outside. And this turning-to-the-outside (which I’ve been calling the fact that the Other is already enclosed along with the solitary prisoner) is what the resisting writer-dissidents of post-exoticism make use of, in their very literary resistance. A resistance that, because so literary, is something that insists beneath the world of negation, beneath the world of action… (oh, it’s me that’s in a Droste effect, writing in circles...)

from the beginning again

“He [the narrator of L’Arrêt de mort] wants to maintain his privacy by establishing absolute closure, by making change impossible. But he cannot close himself off without also including Nathalie. As is the case with the animal protagonist of Kafka’s story ‘Der Bau [The Burrow],’ the narrator’s dwelling is the locus of his most intense privacy and self-communion; and, as in Kafka’s story, it is just here that the Other’s proximity becomes inescapable…” Shaviro, Passion & Excess, (and here he cites both Blanchot’s discussion of Der Bau and Libertson’s commentary on it in Proximity).

In the post-exotic works, too, this often happens to the solitary inhabitants of jail cells, that they find the Other enclosed along with them. But this is something that works against the jailers in post-exotic books, and the whole situation is slightly different than it is in Der Bau. To some extent, the post-exotic writer-dissidents are unwillingly jailed, though their characteristic amor fati makes the question of their will a vexing one.

Like the unnamable’s “it speaks of a prison… I’ll go there now,” the post-exotic writer-dissidents sometimes appear to have chosen prison (in this, they’re like the inhabitant of Der Bau); for example, in Le post-exotisme en dix leçons, leçon onze, there’s a complex circular route by which the post-exotic writer-dissidents return themselves to prison, in solidarity with those who remain: if released “before their term, that is, before the end of their agony,” they then kill themselves, in order to get their “necrologies” into the newspapers, newspapers which will molder for at least eight months before the remaining living prisoners are finally allowed to have them:

Mais une nouvelle photographie finissait par être epinglée ou scotchée sur nos murs, quelque part sur les parois de cet univers parallèle… quelque part dans ce lieu fermé où notre utopie, bien au-delà de son naufrage, florissait, croissait radieusement, rayonnait, se reformulait, souffrait de maladies rares, ni infantiles ni séniles et jusque-là non-décrites, s’enfonçait dans des cauchemars, dégénérait, se régénerait, entre deux songes flottait. Nous examinions leurs portraits de nos défunts et nous leur parlions, ne rédigeant plus nos textes sur du papier, introduisant de plus en plus de silence et de non-dit dans la pâte romanesque avec quoi nous modelions les destins des êtres qui avaient été pour nous de fraternelles variantes de nous-mêmes. 

This narrating “we” is also already in photographs on the walls of Lutz Bassmann’s prison cell, as is made clear at the beginning and end of the book.  And, as I keep saying all over the place, the after-the-end narrative instance frees the work from having to make certain judgments: for example, beyond its wreck (au-delà de son naufrage), their utopia flourishes, and its maladies are not susceptible to diagnosis in terms of whether they’re behind or ahead of the world-historical revolutionary moment (“ni infantiles ni séniles”—neither the “infantile disorder” decried in Lenin’s Left Communism, nor the senility of still reading Lenin in this day and age. To do a bit of violent interpretation there).

All very interesting; none of that is really what I meant. One gets so carried away, quoting Volodine; it’s just so beautiful.

Shaviro notes that Libertson notes that for Blanchot, the whole matter of the irony of the burrow’s entrance—is it secure? will the outside get in by way of the entrance?—is beside the point, is never mentioned by Blanchot in those pages in L’éspace littéraire. Beside the point, because what matters is that the burrow has already, from the beginning, enclosed the Other along with it. (Edit: or, the burrow has already enclosed the solitary burrower in, in the path of, the approach of the other.)

Just so, breaking out of prison is mostly beside the point for the post-exotic writer-dissidents (and note that they’re not dissident writers, jailed for writing, but dissidents who turn to writing, having been jailed). Jailbreak interests them so little that they commit suicide to get back in; and likewise, they don’t much care about smuggling out samizdat post-exotic books (though that happens, to be sure, at least sometimes). As in the cited passage, it’s much more the case that the works smuggle themselves inside: more and more silent, less and less written down, the unsaid (le non-dit) between fraternal variants, between or among repetitions (and again, both the “nous” speaking here and those they describe are dead, are in photographs on cell walls). Which is to say, the solidarity and the resistance of the post-exotic writer-dissidents occurs in and as proximity—at a strange depth, or rather, to quote Le post-exotisme, between two dreams.

To put it in a less airy though still somewhat abstruse way: the post-exotic writers resist their jailers by communicating, but one would have to understand that term more the way Libertson does than as a straightforward smuggling of messages from inside to outside. (Or: the carceral world of post-exoticism turns on both senses of the word “cell,” both the solitary jail cell and the clandestine, fraternal revolutionary cell; the solitary is already the fraternal one, if only asymmetrically or onierically.) This is why it is so often a matter of indifference—of insouciance—whether the post-exotic auditor is dead or absent or inattentive.

"…into which Beckett might enter, quoting..."

I meant for this post to be about quotation (hence the title), but it seems to be about heteronyms. Or rather, it's about how the post-exotic  writers practice quotation, inside and outside their works. This post’s title is from Herschel Farbman’s The Other Night: Dreaming, Writing, and Restlessness in Twentieth Century Literature. About which, more later. (It’s a great book.)

Or rather, this post is about how to understand metafiction as central to all fiction, and not a mere variant, a trick beloved of Gide and Robbe-Grillet and some others. I give these hints, because for the next few paragraphs it sounds like I’m just taking my hobbyhorse out for a trot: Things I Noticed While Reading Volodine. It isn’t just that, even if it looks as like it as dammit.

Volodine’s eleventh published book, Le post-exotisme en dix leçons, leçon onze, has two frontispieces, one right after the other. Both give the book’s title, and publisher (Gallimard); both include the little “nrf” logo. The first frontispiece lists a single author, Antoine Volodine. The second frontispiece lists eight authors, in alphabetical order by last name: Lutz Bassmann, Ellen Dawkes, Iakoub Khadjbakiro, Elli Kronauer, Erdogan Mayayo, Yasar Tarchalski, Ingrid Vogel, Antoine Volodine.

Already, apart from the relationship between the two frontispieces, and between the two mentions of Antoine Volodine (one real, the other fictional), there are complex inter-relations among the eight authors on the second frontispiece: Lutz Bassmann is a focalizing character and narrator of Le post-exotisme en dix leçons; soon, a number of children’s books will have been published under the name “Elli Kronauer,” though only after Le post-exotisme; Ingrid Vogel is a character in and in some ways an intra-digietic metafictional narrator of Lisbonne, dernière marge (she isn’t its narrator, but she proposes to write a book, Clarté des secrets, which somehow is and isn’t the book within the book one holds in one’s hands); all these names, but for Volodine’s, are also contained in the list of 343 books “du même auteur, dans la même collection,” which forms the book’s tenth “lesson.”

The second frontispiece reclaims the authorship of Volodine’s book, Le post-exotisme en dix leçons, leçon onze, in the name of eight post-exotic heteronyms. Saint-Gelais calls this procedure of post-exoticism “enunciative capture” (in “Le polytexte Volodine"). 

Consider another paratextual threshold, the “avant-propos” of the reissue of Volodine’s first four novels, initially published severally in the 80s and 90s under a science-fiction imprint of Denoël, now republished in 2003 in a single omnibus volume prefaced with seven brief forewords, or rather, with a single, seven-part foreword authored by Iakoub Khadjbakiro, Wernieri, Julio Sternhagen, Lillith Schwack, Vassilissa Lukaszczyk, Yasar Tarchalski, and Antoine Volodine—each of whom writes their brief paragraph in the first-person plural. Strictly speaking, the authorship of the four novels isn’t altered, but rather, subsumed in a larger project of the seven post-exotic heteronyms.

As I said, Saint-Gelais gives this procedure the name “enunciative capture.” He’s right to point it out; once he does, you can see it all over post-exoticism. It happens intra-diegetically, too. In Le post-exotsime, for example, when a post-exotic writer dies, his or her comrades form a collective in their name, they author works in that name (here, too, the proximity of heteronymy and quotation), or, the other way round, they reclaim the deceased one’s “works and crimes,” or they quote and insert the deceased one’s work in its entirety, insert it into one of their own larger works, a process Le post-exotisme calls “hommage” [sic].

Saint Gelais concludes that what he calls the Volodinian “polytext” (there’s only one, for Saint Gelais, a single, vast, constantly shifting and re-connecting text) is made “unstable” by enunciative capture and is therefore interpretatively infinite: a critic can never be finished reading any one Volodinian book, because it could later be changed by a subsequent or anterior book.

The complexity of describing Volodine’s work often leads to just this emphasis on intellectual pleasures. No doubt, the post-exotic works, both published and imaginary, make adequate supports for interpretative infinity. But that isn’t what’s interesting. Metafiction tempts one to a vocabulary of uncertainty (or structure), but its real power, its affective power and its centrality to all fiction, not just to a few mad or jokey or tricky exemplars, is in this: the experience of being trapped within an inside (of the fiction) that is an outside.

Volodine’s solitary prisoners are like Kafka’s burrowing creature; they have not built their own cells, as did the creature, but they, too, find the outside is trapped in with them. For Kafka’s creature, that outside is the sound, always there from the beginning, of the Other's digging. For post-exoticism’s solitary writer-dissidents, it’s the murmuring of the other writers—just as Blanchot, in his reading of Kafka, Libertson tells us, ignores the irony of the burrow’s exit, so too, Volodine’s carceral novels are indifferent to the drama of jailbreak (and fairly indifferent to smuggling their samizdat jail-novels out). The burrow and the cell alike have enclosed the outside in, along with its solitary inhabitant.

(footnotes to follow, to Shaviro, Libertson, Blanchot, Kafka).

The Farbman quotation I meant to get to:

“Though Blanchot, sharing a fascination widespread in his generation, reflects often on this structure, he never names it mise en abîme, the going term for it since Gide in France… He tends, rather, to redescribe it, in every instance, from scratch. His sense of his own implication in the structure, whenever he encounters it, makes it impossible for him to speak from the outside of it, in the structuralist, as it were scientific, nomenclature. He tends to speak of what many of his contemporaries would call mise en abîme from the inside… No grand abysses here, just the turning of things inside out and back again in such a way that the source of fiction cannot be safely located outside of it and, in turn, the inside of the fiction becomes an ‘outside.’” (Farbman, 127-8, n 33, ellipses and gross excisions mine).

amor fati

There are seldom any debates about revolutionary tactics or aims, in post-exotic fiction (and absolutely never any novel-of-ideas conversations about why world communism or why radical egalitarianism). For one thing (I think Volodine says this in an interview somewhere), the characters are ordinary militants, not leaders, not members of an intellectual-political vanguard. And then, too, the battle has usually been lost long before the start of the book (but the vanquished revolutionaries haven’t conceded or repented, they haven’t yet adapted themselves to the renewed barbarism that has swept over the earth, not even if several generations have passed since then).

Alongside that refusal to adapt, the revolutionaries of post-exoticism often display a kind of amor fati. Not a “thus I willed it,” but it’s no mere resignation, either: a love for the horrors of revolution-in-decay. Again, this stoicism may be in part because the narrative structure puts the future out of play. But in their embrace of horror, post-exotic militants resemble twentieth-century militants as Badiou understands them in The Century:

“It has often been remarked that the barbarity of the twentieth century was a consequence of the fact that its main actors—be they revolutionaries or fascists—accepted horror in the name of a promise, in the name of ‘glorious tomorrows.’ On the contrary, I am convinced that what fascinated the militants of the twentieth century was the real. In this century there is a veritable exaltation of the real, even in its horror. The century’s key players were anything but a bunch of simpletons manipulated by illusions. Just think what the endurance, the experience, or even the disenchantment of an agent of the Third International must have been! During the Spanish Civil War, when a Russian communist envoy to the International Brigades was abruptly recalled to Moscow, he was fully aware that he was returning to certain arrest and execution. From an early date, he knew that Stalin—who was not fond of people experiencing anything that might lie beyond his control—had undertaken the liquidation of practically all the veterans of Spain. Was the envoy going to escape, defend himself, remonstrate? Not at all. In this situation, the envoys spent the night getting drunk and returned to Moscow in the morning. Is someone really going to tell us that this was the result of illusions, promises, and glorious dawns? No, the fact is that for these subjects the real included that dimension. Horror was nothing but an aspect of the real, and death a part of it. 

“Lacan correctly perceived that the experience of the real is always in part the experience of horror. The genuine question is in no way that of the imaginary, but rather that of knowing what it is in these radical experiments that assumes the role of the real.” (19, emphasis mine)

It’s not that one could subsume the post-exotic project under this one (either Badiou’s or the twentieth century’s). No doubt there are some characters with the discipline of Badiou’s hard-drinking, resolute Russian envoys, but there are also wildcat activists (of Natacha Woo and Linda Grimm, the two factory girls in “Un univers prolétarien de secours,” it’s said that they aren’t in the Party and the Party has no intention of admitting them anytime soon); the lumpen-proletariat victims of the purges (all the named dead in “Demain aura été un beau dimanche,” in the last section of Écrivains, all of whom are listed as “sans parti”), and especially the renegades (Breughel, for example, in Le port intérieur, fleeing with his friends Machado and Gloria Vancouver and a sizable stash of Party funds).—But this is somewhat trivial, it’s the kind of fanboy commentary I love to make but it’s drifting…

The difference isn’t only, or mainly, in some political attitude certain characters might represent.

As in the Badiou citation, in post-exoticism, there is nothing purely foolish about even the most hardline of Volodine’s radical egalitarians and world communists; they tend to be simultaneously unrepentant and disenchanted, as when a narrator remarks, in full awareness of the tragedy but without any regret, without any sense that it ought to have been otherwise, “all those who built that ideal brick by brick in spite of the wars and the massacres and the privations and in spite of the camps and the guards in the camps, and went on building it heroically until it wouldn't stand anymore, and even until it would never stand again…” (Minor Angels). It seems to me also unrepentant and disenchanted when a post-exotic narrator or character refers to “those responsible for unhappiness” and “the struggle against unhappiness” and “the assassination of those responsible for unhappiness.”

There’s an irony to those phrases (an irony and a lightness I’m forever eclipsing when I write about post-exotic books; in my hands, they become great tracts peopled with immense marble heroes; that’s all wrong; it misreads an insouciant disenchantment about the prospects for a struggle against unhappiness, it overlooks, for example, the comedy of the bumbling efforts of the two signature-gathering protesters in “North of the Wolverines” [In the Time of the Blue Ball])

This isn’t it, at all, what I’ve written here. Another day. What’s interesting is this: post-exoticism’s suspending of the question of illusion/disillusion, which had been the central drama of political novels, and the question of what assumes the role of the real in (or just outside of) post-exotic fiction.

alone alone

Why should quotations even need a surrounding skein of apercus and explications? Couldn’t someone award me a degree (an honorary degree? or even just a dishonorary degree?) just for these quotations alone:

Quand je suis seul, je ne suis pas seul, mais, dans ce présent, je reviens déjà à moi sous la forme de Quelqu’un. Quelqu’un est là, où je suis seul.—Blanchot, L’éspace littéraire .

...it speaks of a prison, I’ve no objection, vast enough for a whole people, for me alone, or waiting for me, I’ll go there now, I’ll try and go there now, I can’t stir, I’m there already, perhaps I’m not alone, perhaps a whole people is here, and the voice its voice, coming to me fitfully [m’arrivant par des bribes], we would have lived, been free a moment, now we talk about it, each one to himself...—Beckett, The Unnammable.

J’ai dit “nos” visages, parmi “nous,” “nous étions”. C’est un procédé du mensonge littéraire, mais qui, ici, joue avec un verité tapie en amont du texte, avec un non-mensonge inséré dans la réalité réelle, allieurs que dans la fiction. Disons, pour simplifier, que Lutz Bassmann fut notre porte-parole jusqu’à la fin, la sienne et celle de tous et de tout. Il y a eu de plusieurs porte-parole: Lutz Bassmann, Maria Schrag, Julio Sternhagen, Anita Negrini, Irina Kobyashi, Rita Hoo, Iakoub Khadjbakiro, Antoine Volodine, Lilith Schwack, Ingrid Vogel. Cette liste que je donne contient des informations volontairement érronées et elle est incomplète. –Antoine Volodine, Le post-exotisme en dix leçons, leçon onze.

That last quotation, besides presenting certain difficulties for its attribution, is perhaps not the only one to juxtapose with these other two; instead, I would like to cite post-exoticism passim, or anyway some of its many carceral texts in their entirety (Le post-exotisme; Herbes et golems; the “Discours aux nomades et aux morts” from Écrivains; “La plongée” from Avec les moines-soldats); in all these, solitary confinement opens on collective enunciation, but there, too, "each speaks to himself alone." The post-exotic texts seem as if announced in these Blanchot and Beckett passages, both in Blanchot’s essential solitude and in the unnammable’s fleeting prison (which edifice is dissolved again soon enough: “now we talk about it, each one to himself, each out loud for himself, and we listen, a whole people, talking and listening, all together, that would ex, no, I’m alone, perhaps the first, or perhaps the last, talking alone, listening alone, alone alone, the others are gone...”).

Dominique Viart is right and wrong to say that in the end, the entire post-exotic community is only “un homme seul” (“Situer Volodine? Fictions du politique, esprit de l’histoire, et anthropologie littéraire du ‘post-exotisme.’” écritures contemporaines, 8. 2006. 29-67.) If a man alone, then a man alone as the unnamable is alone alone, which is to say, forever descending or ascending* into a prison full of an entire people. Or, if the many post-exotic writers really are “in fine, one lone man,” in Viart’s words (Englished), then this is so in the same sense that Blanchot tells us that, in answer to the question “who is speaking” in The Unnamable, “by a reassuring convention, we answer: it’s Samuel Beckett.”

That convention isn't just wrong (but Viart mostly is, about this. For example, he seems to think he's posing a challenge when he asks, in a footnote, what would happen if someone else were to write a post-exotic text. But it already has happened, hasn't it? Brian Evenson used a post-exotic title, maybe Sylvain Nicolino has [this last, according to an article by Saint-Gelais, "Le polytexte Volodine"]; and there has been criticism that doesn't remain quite outside post-exoticism, such as Pascale Casanova's. It's already happened, and it hasn't upended post-exoticism).

More on this later. I mean, more on how Blanchot isn't mentioning the reassuring convention only to scorn it, not entirely. With Beckett, as with the post-exotic narrators: "Pour un narrateur post-exotique, de toute façon, il n’y a pas l’épaisseur d'une feuille de papier à cigarette entre la première personne et les autres..." (Le post-exotisme...)]

*descending or ascending into a prison: in English, the unnammable (or whoever) says, "it calls that a vault, perhaps it's the abyss..." But in French: "elle appelle ça des voutes, c’est peut-être le firmament, c’est peut-être l’abîme..."

It's that celestial or paradisical aspect of prison/the vault that comes to the fore in post-exoticism, probably already there in Beckett (at least in French), but still more strongly emphasized in post-exoticism... Though the following, to put it en abîme, describes a golden age of post-exoticism already long past before the narrative instance of  Le post-exotisme en dix leçons, leçon onze:

Nous avions fini par comprendre que le système concentrationnaire où nous étions cadenassés était l’ultime redoute imprenable de l’utopie égalitariste, le seul espace terrestre dont les habitants fussent encore en lutte pour une variante de paradis. Dans l’imaginare de notre âge d’or, la gueusaille des cellules d’isolement reçut de plus en plus souvent le rôle principal que nous avions autrefois, dans nos romånces, réservé pour les geurriers et pour les prophètes avec armes, pour tous ces voyageurs de l’onirisme et de la subversion que tendrement nous accompagnions, mettions en textes et adorions –Volodine, Le post-exotisme en dix leçons, leçon onze.

Aux poubelles de l’histoire

Volodine’s novels begin after the failure of revolution. There is a heroism to Volodine’s defeated revolutionaries, but the tale of their defeat is not narrated, and neither is their sentimental or political education as individuals. (There is a no post-exotic political Bildungsroman, no Princess Cassamassima, in which one has to decide in favor of either aesthetics or insurrection, nor any Sentimental Education.) The novels are somewhat mute about the “world revolution” they assume as a preceding fact of their unfalsifiable fictional worlds. This silence suspends the novel's judgment about revolution, and suspends the possibility of receiving instruction or agitation-to-insurrection from the novels. And yet, the defeated revolutionaries’ failure is powerfully charismatic, or partakes of the particular glamour of the decay of charisma; not the fall of a sovereign, but the fall of a dictatorship of the proletariat, its transformation into trials, exclusions, camps, state powers, or its transformation under the weight of losing battles against other forces. (But that fall isn't itself dramatized, in post-exoticism; the narrative instance is after.) (But what I really want to write, but somehow can’t fit in here, is that the affective experience of that poetry of failure is not necessarily a-political or anti-revolutionary, in Volodine’s novels, even though there are valid a-political or anti-revolutionary readings of Volodine. Another post, perhaps.)

Imprisoned (or dead), Volodine’s defeated revolutionaries often turn to writing, but as writers, too, they are failures. Their books are “trashcan literature,”[i] extant in only one or a few exemplars, or none at all, murmured in prison cells or in the “black space” of a post-death existence. As failed writers, they are not unlike Beckett’s writer-narrators (who lose their pen or are unable to lift their hand to write), though here, too, Volodine’s characters sometimes display an abject glamour, which is probably only conferred on Beckett’s writer-narrators by misreading them. 

In 1962, Raoul Vaneigem, Attila Kotànyi, and Guy Debord proposed a revaluation of values in their “Theses on the Paris Commune." (French text here [pdf]; English here.)They wrote that what had been counted as revolution’s successes were actually its fundamental failures, such as “reformism or the establishment of a state bureaucracy”; what had been considered revolution’s failures, such as the Paris Commune or revolt in Spain, were “its most promising successes so far, for us and for the future.” (The surprise of Vaneigem et al’s reversal is perhaps unavailable to us today; there was a communist party when they were writing, an official institutional weight to throw off.)

Volodine’s novels take their points of departure in both kinds of revolutionary failure (the fundamental and the apparent, in Vaneigem et al’s terms), the bureaucracy of trials and exclusions as well as the failed combat with counter-revolutionary forces. In Volodine’s novels, though, these failures are not viewed with an eye to what is promising about them, “for us and for the future,” as the Theses have it. The future, too, precedes the narrative instance. 

Thesis number 11 reads, in its entirety:

Les théoriciens qui restituent l'histoire de ce mouvement en se plaçant du point de vue omniscient de Dieu, qui caractérisait le romancier classique, montrent facilement que la Commune était objectivement condamnée, qu'elle n'avait pas de dépassement possible. Il ne faut pas oublier que, pour ceux qui ont vécu l'évènement, le dépassement était là.

All this is as if tilted and re-arranged in post-exotic fiction. There isn’t an “omniscient point of view” in Volodine’s novels, but that’s hardly a promising avenue,  detailing the differences between Volodine and a “classical novel.” Vaneigem et al oppose to theory the lived, the event, as the surpassing of the Commune’s objective limitations: “pour ceux qui ont vécu l'évènement, le dépassement était là.”

But where is there, when we’re speaking, not about the objective Commune in history, but about the “habitable worlds” invented by post-exotic narrators, the post-exotic writer-revolutionaries of Le post-exotisme en dix leçons, leçon onze, for one example. It’s easy enough to see that Volodine’s fiction is not a call to arms; the “minumum programs” and “maximum programs” which Volodine’s characters sometimes allude to could never simply be made operational in our world (if they were even described in any detail, which they’re usually not). In this, I’m saying nothing more than that Volodine’s novels are literature. In a way, it’s as Barthes writes in S/Z: a novel, however realistic, cannot be simply executed in reality, as if it were a program. But the inoperability of post-exoticism needs particular underlining; in an interview with La Femelle du requin, in 2002, Volodine: “En tout cas, inutile de chercher dans le post-exotisme des messages cryptés pour l’action, pour l’insurrection...”[ii]

Even so, the “vécu” in literature (to use the Theses’s term) what is lived, the event in literature (the event of literature), is not nothing. It is lived as dead. A corpse, a remainder: in Maurice Blanchot’s terms, here quoted by Joseph Libertson, “Literature discovers ‘the existence which remains [demeure] underneath existence, like an inexorable affirmation, death as the impossibility of dying” (Proximity, 71).

Sous l’existence, l’éspace littêraire? Maybe it’s a gross reduction, on my part, to see in the dead revolutions and dead revolutionaries of Volodine the uncanny immortality of Blanchot’s impossibility of dying (Libertson’s Blanchot, since I depend so heavily on his anomalous but exact reading, his thought, even while I garble it). Even so… the distinction between Volodine and “engaged literature” matters, and maybe no one thought about what that kind of engagement had failed to engage more deeply than did Blanchot (but La part du feu is checked out of the library; some of this has to wait for a future draft). (The notion of the impossibility of littérature engagée  is shallow in Barthes, or rather in my version of him; the inoperable amounts to a “littérature désengagée,” purely aesthetic, purely nothing in the world of action.) Literature becomes a question for itself in Volodine’s dead revolutions and dead revolutionaries (to use the terms of Foucault’s Blanchot essay); it goes impossibly on after the end. The dead revolution might well mean something in Volodine’s novel (a judgment about the impossibility of revolution, the necessity of its failure), but beyond that, it is something. The dead revolutionaries in Volodine demonstrate something Libertson already saw in Blanchot’s thought in 1982: “Literature does not change the world, as does an action rooted in the negative. Instead, it reveals the paradoxical and contaminated subsistence of a world underneath negation” (70). That’s where the event of dépassement is for some readers of Volodine, in the contaminated subsistence of the revolution after the end of revolution, in what subsists beneath the world of action:

Une fois ecrasés et condamnés, reprend-elle, les écrivains du post-exotisme se sont obstinés à exister encore, dans l’isolement des quartiers de haute sécurité et dans la clôture monacale définitive de la mort… Leur mémoire est devenue un recuil de rêves. Leurs marmonnemants ont fini par façonner des livres collectifs et sans auteur clairement revendiqué. Ils se sont mis a ruminer sûr les promesses non accomplies et ils ont inventé des mondes ou l’échec est aussi systèmatique et cuisant que dans ce que vous appelez le monde réel (Écrivains, 35-36).

Markers for a future post: 

Libertson, 155: “fiction’s problematic rapport with phenomenality and negation." 

And this, from a part of the Femmelle du requin interview that's not online, but is quoted in Ruffel's Volodine monograph, p 299: 

L’idee de revolution littéraire ne me concerne pas. Ce n’est pas du tout mon propos. C’est bien dommage, que ça simplifierait l’explication de ce que je fais… Fondamentalement, je respect trop l’idée de révolution, pour imaginer que le champ littéraire ait une quelconque importance là-dedans. 

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[i] The phrase is from Lisbonne, dernière marge, though at times Volodine criticism has taken it up for Volodine’s project as a whole, in light of Volodine’s abject writer-revolutionaries and their ragged, scarcely existing texts. 

[ii] This is why that review in The Collagist is wrong to use a byline that links post-exoticism to actual, imprisoned activists (wrong, as a reading of post-exotic fiction, though right enough as a kind of semi-belle-lettristic, semi-political action of its own). See here also the footnote near the beginning of L’éspace littéraire, p 16 in the folio paperback: “Le livre, comme tel, peut devenir un événement agissant du monde (action cependant toujours réservée et insuffisante), mais ce n’est pas l’action que l’artiste a en vue….” The Collagist review is in that sense a book.

Monks and Soldiers

The Collagist’s review of We Monks and Soldiers misspells the name “Schwahn;” the review gets that pivotal name wrong, along with so much else.

The first section  of Lutz Bassmann’s Avec les moines-soldats (We Monks and Soldiers) is titled “Un exorcisme en bord de mer” (An Exorcism by the Sea). Its narrator  has come to a decrepit seaside house to persuade its newly dead inhabitants to leave this earth, to leave these bodies to which they so uselessly cling. He persuades them by way of ritualistic exhortations that echo the Tibetan Book of the Dead, addressing the dead as “little sister!” and so on (slight echo of the Bardo Thödol’s “Oh, noble son!”). Apart from that semantic resemblance, the fact that he’s there to persuade the dead to go—to exhort the dead to die—is an echo of the Bardo Thödol’s purpose.

Nonetheless, this man is no Buddhist, and no believer of any sort. Apropos the prayer-flags fluttering outside the house, he remarks (as narrator, not to anyone in the story), “We monks and soldiers have no culture of magic. Not of this sort, clearly marked by shamanism, nor of any other….. We entrust our fate to far surer powers, powers lodged within us, formidable powers that practical studies have enabled us to cultivate and control” (7/14; I’m using Jordan Stump’s translation, giving page numbers of that edition, followed by page numbers for the original).

The narrator has other tools at his disposal: a flamethrower, a Yarygin pistol. These may not be the “surer powers” those monks and soldiers rely on; the use of weapons is hardly to be described as a power “lodged within.” And indeed, shortly after he thinks to himself that these “military” methods aren’t working, that he had better also rely on his training as a monk, he offers to name the dead: “I’m going to give you a name, and then help you to leave” (12/22) and “I’ll give you my name if you like… I can help you by giving you my name” (16/27).

These dead, the ones the ones this man names, exhorts, sets fire to, and shoots in the head—they too have powers. They are ambulatory (perhaps). They are capable of hearing and comprehending his exhortations (perhaps). Or maybe these aren’t their powers at all, but their weaknesses. To put it in Blanchot’s terms: dead, they have fallen from the power to die; they are the impossibility of death, in person. They go on existing: walking, listening, catching fire, falling down. But at least one of the dead in “An Exorcism by the Sea” shares with the narrator his power to name; she calls him by name, and she exhorts him to leave, as though he, too (or he only) were dead.

(But the impossible happens all the time in Blanchot [Farbman, The Other Night]; people die. Here, in We Monks and Soldiers, that impossibility seems literalized. Or figured.)

The narrator gives the newly dead his surname, “Schwahn”: he names them Avariam Schwahn, Alexandra Schwahn, Sarayah Schwahn, Nadiejda, Anniya, and Mariya Schwahn. But the name Schwahn, his own name, isn’t necessarily his. Already, even before he names the other dead, he’s told us this much: “Je dis ‘je,’ mais je m’apperçois que je ne me suis pas présenté encore. Disons que je m’appelle Schwahn. Les noms et les surnoms sont des manières commodes à d’étiquer les gens, mais ils ne signifient pas grand-chose. Il n’y a pratiquement rien derrière” (17).

As insouciant as he is about the name he gives himself, it is weightier when he gives it to the others. Not long before he names them, he tells the dead to “Imagine you remember me” (13/22), as apparently this will aid them. But in naming one of them “Mariya Schwahn,” he has done the same for himself: he has imagined her as someone he remembers, or rather, someone he wishes he did not remember: “Je ne voulais pas me rappeler ce qui nous avait liès, autre-fois, Mariya Schwahn et moi.”

“An Exorcism by the Sea” is the ghost story Maurice Blanchot might have written, had he written “The Turn of the Screw.”

In one way, Mariya Schwahn’s and Jean Schwahn’s deaths seem incompatible: each exhorts the other to depart; logically, it would seem that one must be dead and the other not. There is plenty of reason to think the dead one might be Jean Schwahn (or “Jean Schwahn,” since his name seems only the temporary label of a deeper anonymity). He may be dreaming; he perceives the floor of the house to be coated in a supernatural substance “from another world,” but that perception of his already makes a reader wonder if it’s not Jean Schwahn who’s from the other world. Still, he persists in his task, exhorting the dead to die. It’s as though Jean Schwahn were reasoning to himself like Beckett’s Molloy: “But where are the famous flies? It’s not you who are dead, but all the others.”

In another way, Mariya’s and Jean’s (second) deaths are made compatible by being recounted on the same level: the number of bullets in the Yarygin pistol gives both deaths the same standing within the narrative: there are two bullets left; Jean shoots Mariya, then there is one bullet left, for himself.

There’s an asymmetry to Bassmann’s turn of the screw: in James’s story of the governess, either the ghosts are ghosts, or they are the governess’s hallucinations. No character in the story confirms or disconfirms either supposition; both work, and neither works; each is the ruin of the other.

But why do I say there’s an asymmetry in "An Exorcism by the Sea"? I might be wrong. (I am trying to say something about the logic question being orthogonal to the whole matter of "An Exorcism by the Sea." The tension of James's story--ghost or hallucination, real or not?--is slightly flattened in "An Exorcism by the Sea," with post-exoticism's characteristic amor fati: why shouldn't both be dead? Both "real," both dead?)

A few last remarks, as always I have squandered my limited powers on summary and quotation, and left the thinking for last:

Maybe the monk-soldiers’ "formidable power" is repetition, of which naming is just one mode.

As in L’Arrêt de mort, only the other’s death can be an experience for me. An experience that dispossesses me. Even Jean Schwahn experiences his own death only to the extent that he becomes a sort of doubled being toward the end, naming himself again, exhorting himself to leave.

The jacket copy of the English translation of We Monks and Soldiers is quite right to intimate that in the later sections of this book, we “perhaps” encounter those exorcised spirits again, the ones from “An Exorcism by the Sea,” if indeed they were spirits. The burning, wounded creature in “An Exorcism by the Sea,” isn’t she the burning girl at the threshold of the hotel, in both sections called “Crisis at the Tong-Fong Hotel”? (There, too, only the other’s death is an experience, which the operative, Brown, can do nothing but attend.) And Mariya Schwahn, is she all the other Mariyas and Myriams?

The beauty of We Monks and Soldiers is not in fitting these parts together. It's impossible to close the circle in just that way, telescoping the segments together so that the later Mariya is “really” the first one, or the later burning girl is a repetition of the one at the seaside. Already, from the first, Mariya was a repetition, a quotation (or an image). This doesn’t make her any less real; I don't mean by the words "repetition" or "quotation" or "image" to denote anything secondary. That there is no first term in the chain of Mariyas (or burning girls) makes the series endless, and we, too, are implicated in this series.

(There is no first term in the other direction, either: Jean Schwahn is already a fictional name, a label behind which there is "practically nothing." Almost nothing.)

But that’s for another post. How we are implicated in the open series.

And also for another post: the other things wrong with that Collagist review.