“…perhaps you'll emerge in the high depression of Gobi, you'll feel at home there.”—Beckett, Texts for Nothing.
“La steppe, la prairie déserte, la monotonie des hauts plateaux, les collines écrasées de ciel sont le point de départ et d’arrivée de notre liberté, de notre solitude et de notre solidarité onierique avec la planète difficilement rouge et ses populations mortes-vivantes.
“Commune Anita Negrini
“Commune Petra Kim
“Cellule Maria Schrag”
—Manuela Draeger, Herbes et golems.
“Ici Breughel, il fait très noir, répondez.”—Volodine, Le post-exotisme en dix leçons, leçon onze.
Among the readings of Blanchot Libertson offers in Proximity, the most illuminating for post-exoticism is the one that’s organized around the two dis-organizing, de-orienting spaces Blanchot finds in Kafka’s writing: the burrow and the desert. The burrow brings into suffocatingly close proximity that which it would wall out; the desert is that de-located space that gives one no place to rest, only restless, de-located wandering.
The post-exotic prison cell, like Kafka’s burrow, is an interiority intricated with an exteriority; the solitary prison cell is also a fraternal insurrectionary cell, if only in the hollow space of literature. Blanchot’s Kafkan desert is the spatial but in-ordinate and a-cardinal correlate of the time of the other night: “to be here or ici in the desert is already to be aillieurs” (Libertson).
The steppe (and the taiga, and the journey of la flambulance, and black space, and the Bardo) are post-exoticism’s deserts. As the other of closure, the desert is already inside the prison cell, inside carceral last redoubt of post-exotic anti-capitalism. Blanchot, on Borges: “For the man of the desert and the labyrinth, devoted to the error of a journey necessarily a little longer than his life, the same space [the enclosed space] will be truly infinite, even if he knows that it is not, all the more so since he knows it.” Linda Woo, in Ecrivains, is at the same time confined to a cell and onierically projected into the Mongolian steppe. In the cell, Linda Woo declaims a lesson of post-exoticism to a dead, long-gone prisoner who was once confined in the neighboring cell; on the steppe, Linda Woo declaims that same lesson to some distracted nomads, who are much too far away to hear her.
Such company as the steppe and the cell afford are more like dispossession than companionship: the dead neighbor, the deaf nomads. Even the deeply sympathizing sur-narrateur or –narratrice of the Linda Woo chapter of Ecrivains is almost too close for company: “C’est une femme magnifique. Elle pleure, il n’existe entre nous la moindre différence, rien jamais ne réussira à nous séparer, ni temps ni espace, je pleure avec elle.” And again: “Elle prend la voix de Maria Iguacel. Soudain elle est Maria Iguacel. Moi aussi.”
[that last bit doesn’t quite work, does it? It occurs to me that what I’ve elsewhere called “quasi-intra-digeitc narration” in Volodine and found so unique to him is already happening at the outset of Beckett’s Mercier et Camier: “Le voyage de Mercier et Camier, je peux le raconter si je veux, car j’étais avec eux tout le temps.”]
The lonesome crowded steppe: what I meant to say was something else entirely. The revolution is put out of work in post-exoticism, and at the same time, worklessness is crowded with figures. How baroque and full are Volodine’s post-decease, after-the-end spaces. In this, he departs from Beckett, at least in so far as Beckett is understood as the writer of exhaustion. No doubt, there are many empty wilds in post-exoticism, blacknesses that recall the Beckettian stage. But (and maybe this was true of Beckett, too?) those spaces are not uniform, indifferentiated. What post-exotic novels keep uncovering, as they go on speaking after speaking has ceased, is an insight Libertson credits Freud with: 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). Hence the lonesome crowded Mongolian steppe of Herbes et golems; two thirds of the book consist of nothing but (imaginary) names of the (imaginary) grasses of the steppe.