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.”

Blanchot on Borges

it's all a tangle today. 

The burrow & the desert, Libertson points out, are spaces of proximity and errance in Blanchot. For Volodine, these are the cell and the steppe, or the cell and "black space." As with Blanchot's (Kafka's) desert, the post-exotic black space is differentiated--in Manuela Draeger's Herbes et golems, sections of the book are devoted to long poems that consist of nothing but names of grasses of the Mongolian steppe; invented, post-exotic names; non-Linnaean, non-hierarchical names: the empty space of the steppe is differentiated, but not in accordance with our familiar schemes for representing / containing difference, such as division into genus and species. (And Bardo or Not Bardo, too, is a marvel of putting black space en scene, letting characters wander in a nothing that is not quite nothing.) 

The two spaces, the cell and the steppe... often, in Volodine, one finds oneself in both spaces at the same time, or they're abruptly near, or capable of transforming into one another. (In Écrivains, Linda Woo simultaneously declaims in a prison cell and on the steppe.) Perhaps because, as Blanchot writes in the essay on Borges, a place without an exit becomes infinite. But also because errance begins at home, so to speak: "Mais supposons que, dans cet étroit éspace [apparently, this space is/could be notre chambre, notre vie, our bounded world?], soudain obscur, soudain aveugles, nous égarions."

*

No one forces the unnamable to speak, he/it says somewhere in The Unnamable. Someone forces the post-exotic writer-dissidents to speak, sort of (the police, the torturers). And yet, the police don't matter, maybe they've already stopped mattering before the book begins. The post-exotic writers resist by yielding to this survivance parlante (Blanchot's phrase, in his essay on Beckett) this remnant that won't cede, that goes on speaking when it has stopped. 

There's a disjunction between the harm done in being confined to the finite prison (a prison administered by jailers, visited by literary-critical journalists, etc) and the resistance that is sought (found) in the differentiated black space of the steppe or the bardo. I'm not getting this right at all, because it sounds like I'm talking about the physical and the mental; it's not "you can jail my body but my mind is free." It's something else. The post-exotics really are in prison, in the bad infinity, as Blanchot says in the Borges essay, in the literary infinity: "For the man of the desert and the labyrinth... the same space will be truly infinite, even if he knows that it is not, all the more so because he knows it is not."

At the end of Le post-exotisme, when the literature of post-exotisme has  achieved itself* has come to its end (has ended "itself," s'achevait) in its last book (Le goudron final Retour au goudron), and Lutz Bassmann is dead--the book began on the last day of his life and now he is dead-- there is still narration, still a voice that goes on past Bassman's death. Bassmann has been "devoted to the error of a journey" (Blanchot in the essay on Borges) that "necessarily lasts a little longer than his life."

*do I even know French? not really. 

what is to be done with all these notes

In Lutz Bassmann’s Danse avec Nathan Golshem, Nathan Golshem reflects with some regret on his choice—made in the instant, under torture—to pretend to be an itinerant storyteller and litterateur, one Gurbal Bratichko. Under the beatings [which are not narrated], Bratichko proved himself an inexhaustible font of useless stories [but these aren't narrated, either; we learn about them, but we don't read them]. These stories are pure inventions, without any interpretive path back to the actions of Golshem and his comrades. Talking and talking, Bratichko achieved Ingrid Vogel’s wish, in Lisbonne, derniere marge, to write a literature indecipherable by the police. Bratichko speaks to his torturers, volubly, but he is a man without secrets, “a poet, that is to say, less than nothing.”

But this is Golshem's regretful reflection: 

“…il avait toujours été tourné vers l’action… la palabre littéraire, quand il n’avait pas de relation directe avec la propagande, lui avait toujours paru méprisable.” 

N names

Dans Un navire de nulle part, Jane Austen est introduite parce que Jane Austen rime avec Lénine. En réalité Jane Austen est le pseudonyme d’un des sur-narrateurs ou sur-narratrices qui sont à l’origine de la prose post-exotique, dont, je le rapelle, nous ne connaissons que des fragments.—Volodine interview; emphasis mine.

As a pseudonym (or heteronym), Austen rhymes with Lenin in another way; “Lenin” was one of several names used by the man christened Vladimir Illich Ulyanov, who signed his articles (I’m relying on Lars T. Lih’s biography of Lenin):  K. Tulin, Vladimir Illin, Vl. Illin, and then in his own underground newspaper Iskra, he signed with what became his habitual signature, “N. Lenin.” Lih notes that a contemporary of Lenin’s recalled that “In Pravda, [Lenin’s] articles were signed with the most diversified combinations of letters, having nothing in common with his usual literary signature, such as P.P, F.L -ko, V.F., R.S., etc., etc.”

(I love the N in “N. Lenin,” which is just so suggestive: nobody, Niemand, nikto/никто. As well as no, non, nein, nyet/нет. And it’s the first letter of the word “number” as well as the letter (in English, only?) that stands in for all numbers: n. It suggests both infinity and anonymity: “etc., etc.” as Kamenev says of N. Lenin’s n names.)

I seem to be drifting into my own habitual literary signature here: the akribisch dissection of an extra-literary remark of Volodine’s, more or less violently wrenched by me toward an interpretation that emphasizes post-exoticism’s political and historical points of departure (in communism, in anarchy, in revolution). It was Volodine himself who brought up Lenin in this context, and then, too, in nearly every post-exotic text, heteronymy rhymes with the Resistance (army of shadows), and with clandestinity and subversion in other politcal and historical contexts, too. (But yes, the Resistance; Beckett’s network was named Gloria; so, too, a character in Le port intérieur). But for all heteronymy’s obvious entanglement with clandestinity, that is not heteronymy’s only resonance in post-exotic literature.

(Or maybe one could make a distinction between secrecy, the weapon of the state, and clandestinity, from below…? But I dislike that kind of good/bad conceptual doubling. It might be Lenin’s kind of doubling [“but there is spontaneity and there is spontaneity,” Lenin writes, i.e., a correct spontaneity and an incorrect one, a historically propitious and an unpropitious one; this a formula he uses throughout What Is to Be Done?—“there is politics and politics,” and so on. {Not to mention, there is What Is to Be Done and there is What Is to Be Done, Chernyshevsky and Lenin, the novel and the tractatus…}] It might be that post-exoticism’s kind of repetition is closer to Blanchot’s non-dialectical conceptual doubling than to Lenin’s: in L’éspace littéraire Blanchot writes about the night and the other night, he writes about la double mort. In these doublings, one part of the pair isn’t wrong or illusory; the relation is not opposition [it’s not even a matter of terms and relations in the general economy, as I read or imagine Libertson’s voice pointing out here], and profound experience inheres in the ordinary, not in something exalted, not in something that’s reached only by dispensing with or seeing through the “false.”)

But I was saying: heteronymy isn’t only a function of clandestinity. In describing post-exoticism’s heteronymy from the outside, one ends up falsely emphasizing falsity: in book reviews and blogs and in other branches of the literary-police complex, in recounting post-exotic heteronyms, in literary-critical comments on their profusion and their similarities, in all this one falsely builds up a picture of the heteronym as deceit, illusion, trickery. This is the kind of thing that makes Viart point out, with a certain verve, that the post-exotic community is “in fine, one lone man.” That’s okay, as far as it goes, but heteronymy, besides being clandestine, is another way of sharing-out voices.

For example:

In Proximity, Libertson explains what I think is the guiding force, or anyway the inter-layered organization, of his book as a following out of something that’s already there in the texts signed Levinas, Bataille, and Blanchot (but which I don’t think we noticed before Libertson, and certainly not after, once all those names became normalized as tributary to Derrida’s):

“The anomaly which haunts these disparate and exceptionally private texts is the following: each of these thinkers has the capacity and the inclination to speak in the voices of the other two thinkers. This inclination is perceptible not only in the occasional thematic or lexical congruencies which link these texts, but also at the most solitary level of their definitions and predications.” (emphasis mine.)
And again: “….within this very privacy and marginality, each of these thinkers remains involved with the other two.” (emphasis mine, again.)

It would be going too far to call this heteronymy, but conceptually, what Libertson is pointing out here is closer to post-exotic heteronymy than it is to filiation or influence. (What Libertson points out is nothing like filiation, which in a way is another reason Proximity's "method" accords so well with post-exoticism; in post-exoticism, the most frequently foregrounded relations are grandmothers, not parents, and fraternal/sororal/comeradely bonds rather than filial ones; even romantic love, not absent here, often slides into the fraternal, with apostrophes to “little sister” and “little brother.”)

Heteronymy is the way that, at the most solitary level, the post-exotic writers speak (write) in one another’s voices; it’s not the disguising of voice A under heteronym A' (a trick just waiting to be unmasked by a critic). Rather, in writing heteronymically, the post-exotic writers (so often in solitary confinement, but here I mean the writers within the novels, or “in reality,” as Volodine refers to it in the quotation at the start of this post)—in writing heteronymically, the post-exotic writers take up one another’s voices, are intricated with the others: hence, the so-frequently collective authorial signature (the eight authors' names on the "interior" frontispiece of Le post-exotisme en dix leçons, leçon onze; or again, within that book, the “signing” or claiming of certain works by collectives named for the dead, such as the “Collective Ingrid Vogel.” To take just two examples of a plethora of heteronymic practices in post-exoticism.)

*
There are two Breughels in post-exoticism, and two books named Des anges mineurs (but one could have used so many examples here: Balbaians, Schlumms, Ingrids, Marias, and not only by twos.) But it can't be said that there Breughel and there is Breughel in post-exoticism. In La femelle du requin, an interviewer remarks on the two different publication dates attributed to Des anges mineurs: 1997 1977 in the list at the end of Le post-exotisme en dix leçons, and 1999 in the version published by Seuil. In response, Volodine offers a different precision: there are two works named Des anges mineurs: "il y a un romånce écrit par Maria Clementi en 1977, et les narrats en 1999." (Nice, the elision of the author’s name that second time.)

All of this is just a propadeutic to re-reading the very funny and profound “La stratégie du silence dans l’ouevre de Bogdan Tarrassiev,” a chapter in Écrivains in which the writer Tarrassiev achieves the damned success of the minor writer; he is a writer of unread novels whose name is nonetheless familiar “puisqu’on l’associe à un tic d’auteur très aisément caricaturable: c’est ‘le type qui appelle tous ses personnages de la même manière.’”

how it is, again

In the previous post, I approached the question of a last book signed by Volodine (and/or a last post-exotic book, since the publication of subsequent post-exotic books wouldn’t necessarily mean that Écrivains was not the last one)—I approached it from a fanboy perspective, with the kind of nutty hermeneutic precision one sees on TV-show fan sites (and a fan’s obsessive anxiety: will it continue, or was this one already the last?).

Despite that list of last words, it’s not certain that Écrivains is somehow more final, its endings more punctual and less interminable, or that this book is more concerned with endings than are the other post-exotic books. Or if yes, then it’s a matter of degree rather than of kind, and even within Écrivains’ several (seven) endings, there is a range, from the finality of  the final chapter’s “il se pend” to the recursive nature of “rendormir.” In that range, where would one place the word finir (final word of the chapter “Comancer”)?

Nor is it certain that Volodine’s “today, I write in order to end” means the writing will come to an end; as in Blanchot’s remarkable passages on préhension persécutrice…

(I, on the other hand, might never start; I write here in order to hurry after a perpetually receding beginning. In this I’m like Volodine’s helpless Kouriline, in Écrivains, a writer who is hardly suited to writing, he’s not even especially literate; his projected work has a title he’s in love with but he has no idea how to write the thing. Me, too; me either: mine is After the End, which title I continue to like despite the fact that everyone writing about apocalypse seems to come up with it sooner or later, and despite, too, the fact that Lionel Ruffel already worked this idea out in his Le dénouement.)

(But I am not writing about apocalypse, or about post-apocalypse; despite their end-of-the-world décor, Volodine’s books accord ill with the conventions of post-apocalypticism, because they’re so indifferent to notions of apocalypse: the uncovering, the last revelation. They unfold in a milieu in which revolution has long since died, but to say this it’s necessary [for me, not for Volodine] to understand that death in a Blanchotian sense: having fallen from the power to die, revolution cannot die. This is the strange “harmony” and the “utopian” character of camps and prisons in Volodine; this is what is monastic about the enclosure of death into which the post-exotic writers retreat [cf the “Discours aux nomades et aux morts,” in Écrivains, and this why the carceral is the last redoubt of utopian egalitarianism in Le post-exotisme.] But beginning the narrative instance after the end of revolution does not mean the erasure of revolution, in a triumph-of-capitalism sense, and it’s far, too, from a Benjaminian, messianic always-still-to-come of revolution [farthest of all from Negri’s sense that kairos is now]. The revolution in Volodine is not a power [not any longer]; post-exoticism is revolution’s vie non-vie, its mort non-mort, to take up some Volodinian phrases which appear in both the Femelle du requin interview and Le post-exotisme.)

An attempt to gloss these terms, vie non-vie and mort non-mort, though that attempt is de trop, comme on dit; already the interview and Le post-exotisme explain them. Still: in Proximity, Libertson, like Deleuze in Difference and Repetition, writes about a Freud who tends to fall behind his own discoveries in the philosophy of difference, tends to return those discoveries to a logic of opposition and negation:

Freud’s difficulty in Beyond the Pleasure Principle is his tendency to pose reality and pleasure principles, repetition and death instinct in configurations of opposition, and his reluctance to point out and explain their inextrication from, or communication with each other—a communication which is required by the logic of differentiation which is their condition. … the death instinct is not a return to inanimation, but a tendency toward the same differentiation which produces and exceeds life (22). 

You know who else discovers that the death instinct is a tendency toward the differentiation that produces and exceeds life? Gardel, that’s who, in the second lesson of Le post-exotisme en dix leçons, leçon onze. The jailed revolutionary Gardel is in the process of immolating himself in his cell, when he thereby discovers la flambulance: “le déplacement dans le feu, la pétrification de la durée, la migration d’un corps à l’autre.” What is that migration but differentiation, individuation, ceaselessly repeated?

*

Maybe Écrivains isn’t the last book, but it might be among the saddest. Volodine has a version of Blanchot’s “impossibility of dying,” often made grotesquely humorous in books like Bardo or Not Bardo. Again, to go back to Libertson (who is probably the thinker I mean every time I write the name “Blanchot”): “Involuntary prehension is one index of a most fundamental Blanchotian moment: the notion of a reality without power. This reality, whose dimensions are suggested by the burrow and the desert [for Volodine, the cell and the steppe, or the black space of the bardo], and whose mode of manifestiation is indecision and erreur, is not without differentiation.” That’s where Bardo or Not Bardo unfolds, in differentiated black space, where characters face the exhortation to stop being reborn, face it or rather turn repeatedly away from it, in indecision and error, in obtuseness or fatigue.

But I was saying, Écrivains might be among the saddest of Volodine’s books; alongside the black humor, there are moments when a nothingness surges up, a nothingness about which it’s not intimated that individuation might go on within it, passing from one body to another as in la flambulance. (There's no reason to think Kouriline's death will issue in a voyage like Gardel's, even if there's no reason not to think it.) In an interview with Jean-Didier Wagneur, in the longer version of it that’s in écritures contemporaines, Volodine remarks on his resistance to the notion of death. It’s a peculiarly atheistic resistance; against mortality, he doesn’t oppose the certainty of a religious belief. But then in response to the question “quelle est votre image de la mort (non celle de vos personnages),” Volodine answers, in part, that his stories insult death, that he allows himself that pleasure, but that such a pleasure is only transitory, and that “le néant existe, il est horrible, il est indicible…”

*
LATE EDIT: But how did I overlook this?

C’est très important, et même fondamental, de savoir vers quel text on va, vers quelle phrase, vers quel moment, comment se fera la dissolution de tout, comment on arrivera à la nuit, au noir, au silence. (Volodine, La Femelle du requin interview, 2002.)

How It Is

How It Is, Comment c’est, Beckett’s pun on commencer. 

“Comancer,” the childishly misspelled title of a child’s first literary work (which work appears, a bit of realia, in Volodine’s Écrivains).

In an interview with La femelle du requin, published in 2002:

[Interviewers]: Vous êtes plus optimiste actuellement, puisque vous pouvez dire “on verra ça dans d’autres livres”, alors qu’à une époque vous disiez: “j’écris chaque livre comme s’il devait être le dernier…”

[Volodine]: J’ai déjà écrit le dernier livre…

Will one recognize that last book as the last (assuming it’s still to come, hasn’t yet been published)? And will any other books follow the last one? That would seem only fitting, because so Beckettian, like Molloy’s obsession with the last but one but one.

And in an interview in SubStance, published in 2003:

My first story was written before I knew all the letters of the alphabet… it had a title, which was ‘Commencer,’ spelled ‘Comancer.’ After that, I had to write in order to continue. Today I believe that I write in order to end.

In Écrivains, in the chapter called “Comancer” (which includes the text of Comancer), the focalizing character, under questioning by violent crazy fellow-revolutionaries in an asylum, keeps returning in his memory to this scene of initial poesis, the child’s discovery of writing, the novel entitled Comancer.

…et il se rapelle qu’au temps où il écrivait encore, à une époque où il n’avait pas délaissé l’écriture pour la camisole de force, il avait songé a clore son édifice littéraire, évidement dans un context romanesque où celà s’imposerait, sur le verbe “finir” ou “terminer”….

All this quoting. I feel like a thief. 

Edit: last words and/or sentences of each of the chapters of Écrivains: 
rendormir; 
conclure; 
finir; 
"Enterré à Boutovo, région de Moscou;" 
[this chapter concludes with a text that is something like a suicide note, penned by a writer who killed himself, though it is signed by a fictional character and is discussed as the writer's last work, "Opus 25"]; 
"à la fin, et quand je dit la fin c’est vraiment la fin, seule compte l’image;" 
"Et ensuite, il se pend." 

magical socialist realism, antidote to left melancholia

(redrafted)

Post-exotic heroes are suffused with the charisma of their defeat. Even though those defeats are not narrated, are not the drama of post-exotic literature, they are sometimes distantly enumerated, in a very compressed way.

For example, in Écrivains, in the chapter called “Discours aux nomades et aux morts,” one learns of defeat after defeat of the post-exotic writers (who were not just “scribblers of junk,” the Discours tells us, but clandestine subversives). The one who tells this story-within-the-story, Linda Woo, is in jail for what the narrator says she herself (or he himself) would have loved to do: “Elle a assasiné, comme j’aurais aimé le faire, des assassins qui avaient tué indirectement des centaines de milliers et même des millions de personnes.” (Who would not love to have done that? I realize this identification is less universal than I like to imagine. But still, when Linda Woo gets around to reciting aloud her post-exotic text, the rhetorical heightening is hard to resist: “Les écrivains post-exotiques… se sont engagés en politiques pour tenter de bouleverser de fond en comble tout ce qui était établit comme à jamais sur la planète, tout ce qui favorisait l’éternel malheur et obligeait cinq milliards de gueux humains à vivre dans la boue, dans la poussière et dans l’absence d’espoir. Il se sont levés pour détruire les racines et les graines du malheur et, dans un premier temps, pour en finir avec les maitres et avec les chiens des maîtres.” –It kills me to cut off this quotation; it’s like stopping the St Crispin’s Day speech in the middle.)

I say “Linda Woo” and “the narrator”—or rather, the narrator says “Linda Woo” and “I” — but there is hardly any difference between them, as the narrator says again and again: “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.”

The series of repetitions (the narrator recounting Linda Woo's recitation; Linda Woo recounting the deeds of the post-exotic writers; Linda Woo repeating/taking up the voice of Maria Iguacel; Linda Woo reciting a post-exotic lesson she herself did not compose; the narrator’s rapport of being-after Linda Woo: “Moi aussi… Moi aussi..."): that series is open; it's without a first or last term. So it's open to the reader, as well. Quotation (or repetition, or nesting tales inside tales) doesn’t mute affect, doesn’t turn the reading toward the dryly cerebral: it heightens affect.

I haven’t gotten around to what would make this heroism an antidote to left melancholia. Maybe, actually, it wouldn’t cure left melancholia so much as… be irrelevant to it. The post-exotic heroes lose everything, and their failure is gorgeous, charismatic, tragic, beautiful; again, it pains me not to quote at still greater length, but: “combat après combat, ils perdaient tout. Ils leur arrivaient même de perdre la certitude qu’un jour les enfants des misérables ouvriraient les yeux sur un monde non ténébreux, non mafieux, non inégalitaire.” Post-exoticism’s peculiar amor fati, and its love for the revolution-in-ruins, make irrelevant sadness and ressentiment alike.

*

There is no first term to the series of repetitions: Did the text that Linda Woo recites originate with Maria Iguacel, the prisoner in the cell next to Linda Woo’s? To recite it, Linda Woo takes up Maria Iguacel’s voice, which is why it might be said that Maria Iguacel narrates the recited text. But Maria Iguacel is long dead; and now Woo and the narrator become her (one after the other; the narrator always comes after Linda Woo, like a sympathetic reader: moi aussi, moi aussi).

(Receptivity is such a strange thing here: to be narrated to [as Linda Woo narrates to Maria Iguacel] is to have the narrator take up your voice. And to narrate [as the unnamed narrator narrates the recitation of Linda Woo] is to read, or to repeat sympathetically: moi aussi.)

From a letter of Volodine’s to Lionel Ruffel, dated 2001 and quoted in Ruffel’s monograph Volodine post-exotique:

“…il y a une posture particulière du héros post-exotique par rapport à la figure du ‘héros positif’ de la littérature réaliste socialiste. Le héros post-exotique (homme/femme) se sait être un héros défait, mais, de plusieurs manières, il établit une relation entre lui (elle) et le héros soviétique. Même générosité utopiste à l’origine, même destin tragique souvent, mais une impossibilité à croire au lendemain radieux, un pessimisme fondamental qui entre en contradiction avec les normes du héros positif/négatif. Le héros post-exotique connaît les modèles de la littérature soviétique et il en tient compte dans son comportement (en dernière analyse).”  (emphasis original)

This rapport establishes the post-exotic hero as a repetition, from the start, or from before the start. Without narrowly interpreting the post-exotic heroes’ knowledge of Soviet heroes (I mean, their familiarity might or might not come from reading books; maybe also from hearing tales, or via some other rapport available to fictional beings), still, one could think of this rapport among heroes as a kind of quotation. Or indeed as a kind of metafiction—not the classic the-author-is-a-character-in-the-book kind, or even the this-book-is-written-about-Writers kind of metafiction, but this: “meta” means "after": the post-exotic hero comes after, repeats, the Soviet hero. (Moi aussi, I’m forever adding. Unnecessarily.)

The fact of quotation doesn’t distance the post-exotic books, doesn’t make the experience of reading post-exotic books a cerebral one. The rapport between the post-exotic hero and the Soviet hero is an open one, an open series of repetitions, available, too, to the reader of post-exotic literature.

(Or, maybe it’s a bit more complex than that: the series of repetitions is open to post-exoticism’s narratee(s) and to the sympathisant, though those are not quite the same as the reader.)

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.