Solovki, utopia

Somewhere in his monograph on Volodine, Ruffel says that what makes Volodine difficult for those who try to fit his work into a utopia/dystopia scheme is that the camps, alone, are utopian, and everything outside them dystopian, and that this is so contrarian it's often not even noticed.

He's right: "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" (Le post-exotisme).

Ruffel goes on to cite a contemporary documentary film about the Solovki prison camp, saying that here you can see that a variant of anarcho-communism was actually carried out in the early days of the camp, as nowhere else in the Soviet Union. --Or something like that; I don't have the book with me.--Not having seen the film, I can only imagine that Ruffel means something about prisoners sharing their rations or some other kind of mutual aid; it can't have anything to do with the prison administration or the deaths and executions.

I think he's wrong, maybe not about sharing rations in Solovki prison, if that's what he meant by his scandalous remark, but about the aptness of the example, the fit of the analogy between post-exotic prisons & ration-sharing in the early gulag. Wrong to look for a correlate in our world, because post-exotic utopia isn't even in the world of post-exoticism.

This is the strange thing about the "egalitarian utopia" of the post-exotic camps & prisons: it's not achieved, it's not a positive (an actual, or actually recounted) utopia. It's completely inactual, in the world of the fiction; either still to be struggled for. Or meditated upon, as in this passage I quote once a week or so, from Écrivains:

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.

Like Ruffel, I need a naive reader to trump, for my point to be legible at all. I keep finding it remarkable that the post-exotic writers don't "invent worlds" in which the defeat is reversed, but worlds in which the failure unfolds just as before.

Maybe it's not remarkable at all. Blanchot writes, of Kafka: "L'art est d'abord la conscience du malheur, non pas sa compensation. La rigueur de Kafka, sa fidélité à l’existence de l’œuvre, sa fidélité à l’exigence du malheur lui ont épargné ce paradis des fictions ou se complaisent tant d’artistes faibles que la vie a déçus."

l’échec, l’écriture, repetition, immortality

Oui, nous sommes liés au désastre, mais quand l’échec revient, il faut entendre que l’échec est justement ce retour. Le recommencement, comme puissance antérieure au commencement, c’est cela, l’erreur de notre mort.—Blanchot, L’éspace littéraire.

dream of the burning child

A double failure: the creation of a dissident literary “edifice” that affirms the failure of revolution, and a “struggle against the universe of capitalism” that takes place in and as the failure of writing. Writing after the end, the post-exotics exhibit amor fati but not resignation. The fictional worlds invented by the (fictional) post-exotics affirm their defeat, but that doesn’t mean peril and hope are long past. Long after the end, they write for the future, although perhaps nothing of them will reach the future except a Beckettian survivance parlante (the phrase is Blanchot’s, referring to Beckett, in that essay in which every time Blanchot says Beckett he nearly always means that which goes on unnameably on, that which goes on speaking when speaking has ended). Post-exotically, then, the survivance parlante that post-exoticism sends to its future is  “a corpse on the march toward the nothing”  or “a pair of conscious lungs…talking lungs.”

In post-exotic books, the revolution returns in the condition of its ruin: in its defeat or its disastrous victory, in its dispersal into fragments or its deformation into monstrous state powers. This return—this temporary, imperiled repetition of a vanquished form of life— is an idyll like that of the dream of the burning child, and it’s a return brought about in and as literature.

In Le post-exotisme en dix leçons, leçon onze, a dead narrator’s “tantric” practice of whispering post-exotic texts is said to prolong the existence of the “worlds we had intensely built and defended,” although—like a dream—it prolongs that existence only temporarily, by just “[o]ne hour longer, two and a half hours longer, one night longer." In Écrivains, we are told of “the post-exotic writers” who “went on existing in the high-security prison sectors or in the definitive monastic closure of death” where they “invented worlds in which the defeat was just as systematic and bitter as in what you call the real world.”

Post-exoticism recalls the dream of the burning child, both in the imperiled prolongation of the post-exotic worlds for just “one night longer,” and in the post-exotic writers’ exact, exacting repetition of the end. As in the dream, what one loves has come back again, but this return is fragile, temporary, and in no wise a reversal of fate, in no wise a compensatory fantasy presence that negates the absence. The absent has returned as absent.

still more failure

Their writing is miserably “published” in handwritten exemplars of two or three,  or it is recited to the dead,  or murmured or whispered,  or tapped on pipes in prison cells.  The texts sometimes approach a vanishing point of near immateriality (save for the materiality of the signifier): texts murmured or whispered, or, still more spectrally, “suspended in a sigh” of Lutz Bassmann, post-exoticism’s final narrator. And at other times the post-exotic texts are abjectly physical, if fragilely so and therefore still approaching material ob-literation: Fred Zenfl’s penciled works in Des anges mineurs; the birdshit-spattered performances of Dondog’s plays in Bardo or not bardo. Even the first sentence of the first actually existing post-exotic book  (Volodine’s own first novel), describes a typically abject post-exotic book-within-a-book: “Le livre traînait dans les déjections et le sang, il fallut, pour l'ouvrir, décoller au racloir la paille qui avait durci et coagulé le long des pages.”

In The Unnameable, the unnameable narrator can't lift his hand from his knee to write, writing is impossible, it's a failure, and yet the unnameable can't stop failing to stop going on writing. That syntax--the unnameable can't write, can't speak, the others speak in his place, and yet he can't stop failing to stop going on-- post-exoticism's engagement with mortality and defeat is something like that. The characters' engagement with revolution (the defeated, failed, long-past revolution) is something like that, even or especially when it's in the form of writing post-exoticism in their cells.

But this isn't it. I keep meaning to get around to post-exoticism's intransigent rebelliousness, its ongoing attack against the real (Les narrateurs mènent une sorte de combat obscur contre le réel, qui se superpose à l'entreprise romanesque.) I keep meaning to getting around to distinguishing post-exoticism's failure from resignation and from Left melancholia.

The journalist Blotno, interrogating the post-exotic Yasar Tarchalski, in Le post-exotisme, regarding the many forms invented by post-exoticism "in the 70s":

Pourquoi une telle frénésie? [asks Blotno.] Oh, dit Tarchalski, ils prévoyaient l’horreur qu’allait représenter la clôture à la perpétuité, ils s’organisaient en fonction du futur.

And:

Sous-titrer un livre « romånce », c’était déjà, en soi, une démarche d’adieu violente à votre univers.

But these quotations explain nothing, especially ripped out of their layered context. That future referenced by Tarchalski, too, was in the past. Still, the post-exotics attend to failure (of revolution, of the world, of writing) with such compassion and stoicism that they don't allow themselves the luxury, the inattention, of resignation. And to that extent, there is a future in post-exoticism, a future other than sheer endlessness of failing to stop failing to stop going on.

In We Monks and Soldiers, in one of the segments on the Tong Fong Hotel, Brown asks Cuzco why they do it, what purpose their Organization serves, and Cuzco says, in part, "Humans are nearing the end of their agony. We're here with them, that's all."

Just so, when the post-exotics persist in existing in the closure of death (Ecrivains) and they "ruminate on unachieved promises," their engagement with revolution's failure can't take refuge in any complacency about "the end of ideologies" or "the dangers of all fanaticisms," nor in any Left melancholia. (Recent Bassmann is almost programatically, bluntly against mournful Left nostalgia, especially in Danse avec Nathan Golshem.)

spoiler alert

What is affirmed, in the (fictional) post-exotic writers’ affirmation of failure? Le post-exotisme en dix leçons, leçon onze and the "Discours aux nomades et aux morts" chapter of Écrivains each stage a double failure: the creation of a dissident literary “edifice” that affirms the defeat of revolution, and a “struggle against the universe of capitalism” that takes place in and as the failure of writing. The task of my own project my own failed project would be was to have been to understand the positivity of the post-exotic affirmation of failure. 

There is a futural, generative immortality to post-exotic failure.

When the prisoner Gardel, in Le post-exotisme, by immolating himself in his cell, accidentally discovers la flambulance (the post-exotic method of using flames to prolong duration and to transmigrate from one life to another), Gardel repeats Freud's discovery that the death instinct is not a longing to return to a previous, inanimate state; it's a source of problems and questions, a source of repetitions (Deleuze's Freud), it's "a tendency toward the same differentiation which produces and exceeds life" (Libertson's Freud). [Here, too: Brassier's Deleuze's Freud.]

Lutz Bassmann, the last post-exotic narrator, the one to whose breath the struggle has been confided, the one who dies in the last pages of Le post-exotisme (as in the first pages of Le post-exotisme) is a survivance parlante, as Blanchot described Beckett's unnameable. Bassmann's breath becomes a last breath, a weak and rattling one, mixed with the air of the prison and unable to make the post-exotic book resound except so feebly that post-exoticism's last book is "à peu près sans auteurs et sans auditeurs, pour rien." So, too, the dead post-exotic writers who "go on existing in the closure of death" in Écrivains, they are also survivances parlantes: "Leur  respiration n’a plus servi qu’assurer leur survie en tant que corps inutiles, en tant que poumons avec conscience, en tant que poumons bavards."

annals of revolutionary heteronymy: Vladimir Mazin, Irina Kobayashi

[Vladimir Ossipovich] Lichtenstadt was condemned to death, then pardoned; he spent ten years in prison at Schlüsselberg [in Petrograd] ... 

One morning in March 1917 the prisoners of Schlüsselberg were called to the courtyard by guards bearing weapons. They believed they were going to be slaughtered; they could hear the cries of a furious crowd surrounding the prison walls. Actually, this crowd was deliriously joyful; it broke down the doors, the blacksmiths with their tools at the head of the crowd, to break the prisoners' chains. ...On the day he got out of prison, Lichtenstadt and the anarchist Justin Jouk took charge of the town of Schlüsselberg. ... After the death in battle of another prisoner, Lichtenstadt adopted the dead man's name and called himself Mazin, to remain faithful to his example.--Victor Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary.

*

Irina Kobyashi Kobayashi  trépassa la même année, d’une hémorragie que quelqu’un avait provoquée sur sa personne tailladant les poignets jusqu'à l’os. Comme toujours lorsque l’un de nôtres était assassiné, nous constituâmes un collectif portant son nom. Sa voix vibra avec la nôtre, dans la nôtre. Sa mémoire continua à exister, a remuer des souvenirs pour que nous pouvions nous approprier, et elle continua à fabriquer des images où nous nous déplacions avec bonheur, des rêves qui niaient le réel et qui le subvertissaient. … Plusieurs d’entre nous disparurent a cette époque : Jean Khorrasan, Verena Nordstrand, Rita Hoo, William Lethbridge, Vassilissa Lukaszczk. Comme pour tous ceux qui les avaient précédé dans la liste des morts, nous leurs rendîmes hommage. Dans le quartier de haute sécurité, les survivants ont toujours considéré qu’ils pouvaient servir de support vocal et physique à l’intelligence de ceux qui ne répondaient plus aux appels.--Volodine et al, Le post-exotisme en dix leçons, leçon onze (gross emphasis mine).

Lutz Bassmann, Ellen Dawkes, Iakoud Khadjbakiro, Elli Kronauer, Erdogan Mayayo, Yasar Tarchalski, Ingrid Vogel, and Antoine Volodine (the eight authors listed on the second frontispiece of Le post-exotisme) needn't have read Victor Serge. Needn't have been thinking of Lenin and all his heteronyms, either. It's in the logic of the thing: not only do clandestinity, subversion, and friendship make it self-evident that one would write in the name of another, particularly in the name of the dead friend comrade, but it's also in the logic of fragmentary writing: "any fragmentary text already had an indeterminable, that is, always future relationship with the other or with others... any fragmentary text was already a text with multiple authors; it was by definition a collective text that might be signed in a gesture of irreducible singularity by each and every indeterminable other..." (Leslie Hill, Maurice Blanchot and Fragmentary Writing). They needn't have read Blanchot, either; it's not a question of influence (in the case of Blanchot) or reference (in the case of Serge).

Reader contest: Where is this phrase, in what post-exotic text: so long as there remains a voice and a fragment of love...? Extra difficulty: it's probably not been translated into English yet.
                                                                                                                                                               

post-exotic anarchism

Catégorie littéraire, oui, mais on pourrait parler avant tout de construction littéraire, puisque derrière ce mot un peu pompeux et terminant en ‘-isme’ je crois qu’il n’y a pas énormément de théorie mais beaucoup de pratique, de pratique de l’écriture. De construction littéraire justement. Effectivement, au début des années quatre-vingt-dix c’est apparu ce nom, ce terme qui me permettait de m’écarter de cette étiquette que j’avais souligné, j’ai toujours refusé pour mes livres, qui était celle de science-fiction.* La première fois que j’ai utilisé ce terme, c’est à la suite d’une question de journaliste, qui a demandé ce que j’écrivais, dans quelle catégorie littéraire justement je me rangeais, et par boutade j’ai inventé immédiatement quelque chose, et j’ai dit j’appartiens à l’anarchisme post-exotique.

Or was it: Effectivement, au début des années quatre-vingt-dix c’est apparu ce nom, ce terme qui me permettait de m’écarter de cette étiquette que--je vais souligner--j’ai toujours refusé pour mes livres, qui était celle de science-fiction. 

Volodine, interviewed by Alain Veinstein, on Du jour au lendemain, [Radio] France Culture, 8 September 2010. My own faulty transcription. Apologies.

Edited to add: This isn't to say that Volodine or the other post-exotic writers are anarchists, fundamentally, secretly anarchists at heart. Obviously, Volodine made a decision to prefer the empty '-isme' of post-exoticism to 'anarchism.'

The victims of mass execution in "Demain Aura Été un Beau Dimanche" are all "sans parti," but that's not a considered position, a rejection of the party form; they're workers and beggars, and the label "sans parti" just underlines how incredible their executions as counter-revolutionaries are. The wildcat activists in We Monks and Soldiers, the two factory girls, don't belong to the Party and the Party isn't thinking about recruiting them anytime soon, but there, too, I wouldn't want to subsume them under a label of anarchist. It's not as though they had a program, a canon of anarchist theorists. (Nor does "not in a party" mean "anarchist.")

Still... For me, when I read post-exoticism, I always read there an intense sympathy for the heroes of revolution and for the party renegades and doubting agents and wildcat activists like the two factory girls, even in the somewhat satiric account of the showy blustering hero in Les aigles puent, whatever that's called...

Here's the thing: there's still a relationship in disavowal leave-taking. It matters what one disavows is affirming the defeat of, and how one affirms it. I read the hatred for Social Democrats "straight," relatively un-ironically (in Lisbonne, derniere marge, for example), and the affirmation of the defeat of post-exotic revolutions as something quite different. [For example, the post-exotic writer-dissidents retreat to prison or death, in Ecrivains, to "meditate on unachieved promises"--of communism, surely (or radical egalitarianism, or whatever it's called in that world) and not to meditate on the false promises of liberal democratic capitalist societies.] The affirmation of the failure of the revolutions is something closer to the following, from Jorian Murgrave, rather than to any kind of flat, liberal "all ideologies are dangerous":

--Tu verras toi-même, expliqua Greko. Tu penses bien que ce serai trop beau si quelque part sur cette planète on pouvait se réfugier à l’abri de napalm et des coups de sabre. A mon avis, ton monastère n’est qu’une saloperie de plus parmi tous les pièges de Terre. Tu comprends? C’est perdu d’avance, nous n’y arriverons jamais.
*
Je marche droit, tu penses, ce n’est pas à moi que l’on aura l’idée d’apprendre comment marcher droit. J’ai avancé donc en droite ligne pendant cinq jours, avec ce maudit monastère devant les yeux. Mais il y a toujours autant d’obstacles et la distance ne change pas. C’est comme si le paysage se déformait et se reformait sans cesse.
--Comme dans les contes?
--Tu parles d’un conte de fées! … Une saloperie terrienne de plus, oui. Un piège, je suppose. Ils essaient de maintenir à distance.
Greko se tut, les mâchoires soudain crispées, têtues, l’œil acide, cruel, un œil d’épervier traquant sa proie. Jorian comprit que devant eux se dressait la haine de Terre, l’hostilité de Terre, et que ce refuge impossible appartenait à un monde qui avait décidé de les rejeter jusqu’à leur dernière minute, et qu’il faudrait encore se battre contre Terre pour survivre dignement.

Hard to say what I mean for those quotations to prove; somehow, I think there are certain saloperies terriennes that are close to post-exoticism's heart, saloperies though they they ultimately prove to be. There are ways, doomed ways, to look for a refuge from the napalm, ways that post-exoticism's underpeople have to try, and there are some other ways--finding yourself a comfortable perch near those in power, collaborating with the police--that just don't enter into it.

And since this is just devolving into Causabon-like notes to myself, private, obscure, here's something from an "undergraduate" paper on Wittgenstein: the thread running through Wittgenstein’s many statements on negation, reversal, and asymmetry in Philosophical Investigations is something like: there is not (or not only) an empty or mechanical reversal, but a variegated grammar of “not” and “un-“ and of reversed propositions, reversed perspectives, a grammar that has grown up with our nature.

Post-exotic faits divers

We called this post-exoticism. It was a construction that had a rapport with revolutionary shamanism and with literature, a literature written down or learned by heart and recited, because sometimes the [prison] administration would forbid us any paper for years at a time; it was an interior construction, a fallback position, a secret welcoming land (une secrète terre d’acceuil), but also an offensive that participated in the plot that some were waging bare-handed against the universe of capitalism and its countless degradations. To Bassmann’s lips, alone, that struggle had now been entrusted. It was suspended in a sigh.  —Antoine Volodine*, Le post-exotisme en dix leçons, leçon onze (my own rough translations).

WHAT IS POST-EXOTICISM? Insolent question, all the more so for being asked on the day of Bassmann’s death, but that this question comes up here at all demonstrates that, half a century after Maria Clementi’s Minor Angels, the sympathizers, on the outside, have not...—Volodine, Le post-exotisme (broken-off sentence in the  original).

Open Letter Books will publish a translation of Le post-exotisme en dix leçons, leçon onze (sample here, including the same passages I translated above, and with better choices than mine). And they plan to publish translations of two other post-exotic books, by Manuela Draeger and Lutz Bassmann. Dalkey Archive, too, is translating Volodine.

*Attributing the book to "Volodine" is problematic, since it has a second, paratextual, supposedly fictional frontispiece attributing authorship to eight heteronyms, where Volodine is just one name among others.

Le post-exotisme begins and ends with Bassmann's death--with the death of the last post-exotic narrator, the one to whom the struggle has been entrusted--and it doesn't necessarily loop back to before his death, not exactly.

More soon.


Nous avons appelé cela le post-exotisme. C’était une construction qui avait rapport avec du chamanisme révolutionnaire et avec de la littérature, avec un littérature manuscrite ou apprise par coeur et recitée, car parfois pendant des années l’administration nous interdisait de posséder du matérial de papeterie; c’était une construction intérieure, une base de repli, une secrète terre d’acceuil, mais aussi quelque chose d’offensif, qui participait au complot à mains nues de quelques individus contre l’univers capitaliste et contre ses ignominies sans nombre. Aux seules lèvres de Bassmann cette lutte maintenant était confiée. À un soupir elle se trouvait suspendée.


QU’EST-CE QUE LE POST-EXOTISME? Insolente question, fort mal venue en ce jour où meurt Bassmann, mais dont le surgissement à cet endroit démontre qu’un demi-siècle après Des anges mineurs, de Maria Clementi, les sympathisants, à l’éxterieur, n’ont pas...”—Le post-exotisme, (broken-off sentence in the original). Volodine has a way of sometimes breaking off his sentences a-grammatically, sometimes even ending them with a full stop rather than an ellipsis; Wagneur comments somewhere that this makes Volodine’s words into a “trou noir.”