divagation after Herschel Farbmann

“The end, the end.”—Paul Griffiths, let me tell you.

In the late nineteenth century, the psychophysicist Gustav Theodor Fechner speculated thus about immortality: Before birth, our life in the womb is nothing but sleep; during life, we alternate between sleep and waking, though sleeping less and less as we age; therefore after death, so Fechner reasoned, our immortal life can consist of nothing but endless waking. Fechner’s insomniacal eternity is at once horrible and comic: a blaze of nonstop alertness, a gibbering manic restlessness without end.[1] Nonetheless, in Fechner’s vision, beyond the alternation of sleep and waking, beyond the opposition of life and death, what obtains is not their admixture (grogginess? quasi-animation?), but something that goes on after the end. If death had long been pictured as the brother of sleep—a darker, longer sleep—Fechner revealed a profound uneasiness in that endless night.

There is no reason to think that Beckett or Blanchot ever read Fechner, but it is as if they had continued Fechner’s work, refining his idea by freeing it of its trammeling teleological schema. Their writings uncover something watchful that goes on waking or dreaming, speaking or writing, after the end.[2] But they don’t locate this watchful something only after death; their writings uncover it in the heart of night, and even beneath the calm of day. In Death Sentence, the narrator notices that J’s sleep has “the strange trait of scattering in an instant,” so that “behind her sleep” J “seemed to remain awake” (45/26). Shortly before the second of her two deaths, J wakes in just this way: “though her eyelids were lowered…she went on waking [elle veilla],” the narrator says, a phrase that suggests nothing punctual (on the order of “she woke up”), but something durative, ongoing: elle veilla, as if to say, she waked the night through, she kept watch, she went on “vigiling” behind her sleep (47).[4] A similarly unending restlessness is evident in Beckett’s The Unnamable, in the book’s endless ending, the oft-quoted “I can’t go on, I’ll go on.” Out of context, this phrase tends to sound heroic, in a Man of La Mancha mode, a pledge that this narrator will never say die. But from the book’s first page it is clear that The Unnamable’s restlessness is an impersonal one, evident in the tightly compressed and polysemic “off it goes on” (premier pas va) (291/7). “Off it goes,” it’s underway, but also: its first step (premier pas) puts an end to going (pas va); “off, it goes on”: behind sleep, J goes on waking; unable to lift his hand to write, the unnamable can only go on writing.

[1] Das Büchlein vom Leben nach dem Tode, (Insel-Verlag zu Leipzig, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/44575/44575-h/44575-h.htm ) Kathryn Davis, in her novel Labrador, could almost have been writing about Fechner’s ideas when she described insomnia as “the wish to be immortal, granted by an ass.” But where did I get the Fechner anecdote? Kittler? Rickels? 

[2] This formulation, and this insight, and indeed this whole post, are indebted to Herschel Farbman’s book on Beckett and Blanchot, which calls the watchful something “restlessness.” 

[3] Scene/summary distinction and Davis’s translation.

[4] Or, more common-sensically, “she lay awake,” as Lydia Davis’s translation has it. But “keeping watch” is also an important sense of “veillir.”

[5] Reference Farbman and the Beckett passage. 

From the start of The Unnamable, as the unnamable watches Beckett’s fictional character Murphy pass by, we are tempted to call this relation between a narrator and his “vice-existers” a reflexivity; it’s the text’s self-awareness. Awareness and reflection, mirrors and knowledge, the classical terms of mise-en-abîme, may not be the best description of the unnamable’s dream of a semblable—subjective and objective genitive combine: the dream a semblable has; one’s dream about a semblable.

Late in The Unnamable, the unnamable is speculating that “they” might come to coax him out—out of where he is, out of his immobility, into their world. He can’t go and won’t go, but this refusal is passive. Should “they” come, they won’t find a stalwart resistant, holding out: “let them come and get me, they’ll find nothing, then they can depart, with an easy mind.” But they might not all show up at once; they might send only a representative (they have their “vice-existers” too, it seems):

“And if there is only one, like me”—if they send only one—“he too can leave without remorse, having done all he could, and even more, to achieve the impossible and so lost his life, or stay here with me, he might do that, and so be a like for me [ça me ferait un semblable], that would be lovely, my first like, that would be epoch-making [ça ferait date], to know I had a like [me savoir un semblable: to know myself a semblable], a congener, he wouldn’t have to be like me, he couldn’t but be like me [il n’aurait pas besoin de me ressembler, il me ressemblerait, forcément],"

Their vice-exister would not “be” a like for the unnamable, or not only: ça me ferait un semblable means both “that would make a like for me” and “that would make a like of me.” The translation, too, reverses something in the French, the unnamable’s knowledge: “to know I had a like” is me savoir un semblable: to know myself a semblable. Far from knowing he has a like, the unnamable knows himself a like. But this self-knowledge, too, is something other than the classical "know thyself." It's an unknowing, an unconscious, a dream: 

he’d dissappear, he’d know nothing either, there we’d be the two of us [there; having disappeared, they would be there], unbeknown to ourselves, unbeknown to each other [chacun à son insu, à l’insu l’un de l’autre], that’s a darling dream I’ve been having, a broth of a dream [c’est un beau rêve que je viens de faire là, un excellent rêve]. And it’s not over. [Et qui n’est pas fini.]

An involution: because the dream is not yet over, the dream the unnamable has been having (or the dream he has just now “made,” in the French text) now comprises the narration as well—narration of the dream, narration of the whole novel, the writing of all that the unnamable writes that he cannot lift his hand from his knee to write, all this is folded into the dream. We could call this reflexivity, a self-aware text, but the figure the unnamable brings before us is not that of knowing: “each to his unknowing” [my own translation of chacun à son insu], unbeknown, the one to the other [à l’insu l’un de l’autre].

Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Storyteller” contrasts the collective wisdom (counsel, Rat) once found in stories with the communicated information found in modern novels. Only at the end can a novel point beyond its limitations, namely, its lack of counsel, but the novel can only point. Of L’Education sentimentale’s ending, Benjamin writes: “The novelist… cannot hope to take the smallest step beyond the limit at which he invites the reader to a divinatory realization of the meaning of life by writing ‘Finis’” (page). 

Having no counsel about life, modern novels can proffer only the protagonist’s death, as if the novel’s invitation—‘Finis’—were always written on a dying character’s forehead: Benjamin again: “What draws the reader to the novel is the hope of warming his shivering life with a death he reads about.” 

In Oscar Wilde’s The Decay of Lying, one of the speakers in the dialogue, Vivian, hyperbolically praises the warmth a fictional death yields: “One of the greatest tragedies of my life is the death of Lucien de Rubempré. It is a grief from which I have never been able completely to rid myself. It haunts me in my moments of pleasure. I remember it when I laugh.” 

Can't really keep up this silly august academic tone. Though I don't have another.

Stoekel, in his intro to his translation of The Most High, writes as if Blanchot's novel is about the Sunday of life, the end of history--as if it were the novelization of Kojeve's reading of Hegel.--I'm sure I meant something by this, meant to go somewhere. It'll come back to me. 

I couldn't say, with Vivian, that the deaths of J in Death Sentence are among the greatest tragedies of my life. At least, not the way Vivian seems to mean it. Vivian goes on to say that Balzac created life, he did not copy it. But on the other hand, yes, those tendernesses in Death Sentence, the outbursts of anger, the struggle, my real fidelity to the quasi-fictional oath that comprises the suppressed ending of Death Sentence (the post-script about the task of the reader)--those haunt me. 

Me, too, Viv. Me too. 

Une scène de théâtre montrant ce qui arrivait après la fin.—Volodine, Terminus radieux. 

“the voice is failing… that’s how it will end again, I’ll go silent, for want of air, then the voice will come back and I’ll begin again. My voice. The voice. I hardly hear it any more. I’m going silent. Hearing this voice no more, that’s what I call going silent. Then it will flare up, a kindling fire, a dying fire. … I’m going to stop, that is to say, I’m going to look as if I had, it will be like everything else” (The Unnamable). 

Is this fibrillating around the end the same thing as the “after the end” in Terminus radieux? (“Terminus radieux”: scabrous inversion of the communist paradise, the lendemain radieux.) Well, there’s no lack of “fibrillating” in Terminus radieux, and by fibrillating I mean the flare of a kindling-dying fire, or the way that going on after the end looks like everything else: Terminus radieux is full of mort-vivants, irradiated dream life, and the Second Soviet Union (also fallen). 

There’s a Kafka-like fable in The Unnamable (though it’s not a “Kafka-esque” fable, if that means to be caught in pitiless and absurd bureaucratic machinations [“That the impossible should be asked of me, good, what else should be asked of me? But the absurd!”]):--This is the fable: word of the end will come, or rather, word that the last word has already been said will come, if it comes at all, via messenger. That messenger has gone to his master in the desert. (A bit before the fable properly begins, we get the figure of the master in the desert: “And if there is only one, he will depart all alone, towards his master, and his long shadow will follow him across the desert, it’s a desert, that’s news… Oh, it’s not necessarily the Sahara, or Gobi, there are others…”) And until the messenger returns from the desert with the master’s verdict (ver-dict) on what’s been said, the voice goes on, its pauses looking like endings, its resurgences looking like continuations. 

In Volodine, there’s a sense of the story's having begun long after a historical catastrophe: which catastrophe, though, and whose history, the history of what civilization, that remains unknown or unknowable. 

“We gain our knowledge of life in a catastrophic form. It is from catastrophes that we have to infer the manner in which our social formation functions. Through reflection, we must deduce the ‘inside story’ of crises, depressions, revolutions, and wars. We already sense from reading the newspapers (but also bills, letters of dismissal, call-up papers and so forth) that somebody must have done something for the evident catastrophe to have taken place. So what then has been done and by whom? Behind the reported events, we suspect other occurrences about which we are not told. These are the real occurrences. If we knew these incidents, we would understand. Only History can inform us about these real occurrences – insofar as the protagonists have not succeeded in keeping them completely secret. History is written after catastrophes. The basic situation, in which intellectuals feel that they are objects and not subjects of History, forms the thought, which they can display for enjoyment in the crime story. Existence depends upon unknown factors. ‘Something must have happened’, ‘something is brewing’, ‘a situation has arisen’ – this is what they feel, and the mind goes out on patrol. But enlightenment only comes, if at all, after the catastrophe. The death has taken place. What had been fermenting beforehand? What had happened? Why has a solution arisen? All this can now be deduced.”—Bertolt Brecht, ‘On the Popularity of the Crime Novel’ (quoted in Ernest Mandel, Delightful Murder: A Social History of the Crime Story)[via Cartographies of the Absolute]

“The mind goes out on patrol.” In The Unnamable, the mind that has gone out on patrol (or the mind that has stayed in on patrol, in a room, in a jar)—that mind has company, in the form of the voice, or the noise (“there is I, on the one hand, and this noise on the other, … I and this noise…”), or the vice-existers (“Perhaps it is Molloy, wearing Malone’s hat. … To tell the truth, I believe they are all here, from Murphy on, I believe we are all here, but so far I have only seen Malone”). 

That’s not what I meant.

In The Unnamable, the mind goes out on patrol, or stays in (“with what would I patrol?” one can hear the unnamable asking), but nothing can now be deduced, contra Brecht’s paraphrase of the crime novel’s narrative poetics: “All this can now be deduced.” It may be that we underestimate Beckett, in understanding the unnamable’s predicament as an epistemelogical one, one that satirizes philosophizing (“if only they’d stop committing reason”); it’s also a literary predicament: a bare, an excoriated state of being-fictional: 

“he feels me in him, then he says I, as if I were he, or in another, let us be just, then he says Murphy, or Molloy, I forget, as if he were Malone, but their day is done, he wants none but himself, … it’s always he who speaks, Mercier never spoke, Moran never spoke, I never spoke, I seem to speak, that’s because he says I as if he were I, I nearly believed him, do you hear him, as if he were I, I who am far..”

I seem to speak, that’s because he says I as if he were I... My own mind has perhaps gone out on patrol, or is carousing with the rest of the arrière-garde, perhaps when it comes back something better will be written. 

Je finirai peut-être par être très entouré, dans un capharnaüm.—Beckett, L’Innommable.

Life emerges from non-life, but at the cost of an unexperiencable death (a trauma, writes Caruth). Life cannot assume that death, not even by dying (writes Brassier). At the same time, the unassimilable death is not in a forever receding future—it’s here, it’s inside (a dead and scarred-over ‘vesicle,’ writes Freud; it’s the remnant of monocellular life that sacrificed itself in the furnace of unassimilable experience). As such, the impossible death happens, despite its being impossible; happens all the more, recurs: “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).

The anterior is lost: there is no emergence and no beginning, only a continuing. This is the logic that animates (or re-animates) the fictions of Beckett and Blanchot. Molloy doesn’t know how he came to the room; neither does Malone; and as for the unnamable, not only does he begin (or continue) by asking where now, who now, when now, but the beginning of his narrative is lost to him, too: “Can it be that one day, off it goes on, that one day I simply stayed in, instead of going out, in the old way, out to spend the day and night as far away as possible, it wasn’t very far. Perhaps that is how it began.”

Writing emerges from non-writing, wakes up with its “death” already behind it—unconscious, unassimilable experience of death—and also inside it, a recurring end. For Friedrich Kittler, the nature of that non-writing is determined by the media age: around 1800, poetry emerges from the pure “O” of expressivity, the O that is the soul’s call; around 1900, writing emerges by differing from nonsense, from a kind of machinic/echolaliac stutter (think Dada, think Christian Morgenstern, though what registers as ‘nonsense’ in Europe around 1900 tends to be Africa or the New World: “Der Architekt jedoch entfloh/ nach Afri- od- Ameriko.” Or a better example, Stevens’s “Yillow, yillow, yillow,” in the poem “Metamorphosis.”)

In neither case—the O of expressivity, the jibber of nonsense—is it a matter of writing’s opposite. The differentiation that produces writing also exceeds it,* and the name of that excess might be O, might be nonsense, might be “persecutory prehensilism,” the hand that grasps and halts the writing hand (Blanchot). Or, in the case of Beckett’s unnamable, narrative emerges from and repeatedly terminates in the capharnaüm: “Je finirai peut-être par être très entouré, dans un capharnaüm,” considers the unnamable at the beginning of the novel. The English translation has “throng”: “perhaps I shall smother in a throng.” But the capharnaüm is not only a throng (a mass of unrelated, disunited persons); it’s also a place of massed, unrelated, useless things. The definition from Reverso—“endroit en désordre, où s'entassent de nombreux objets, l'ensemble de ces objets”—sounds like nothing so much as Benjamin’s descriptions of the Baroque stage, littered with ruined objects in a state of decay.

*[this isn’t quite right, oracular and vague, and “excess” is all wrong] 

Life emerges from non-life, but at the cost of an unexperiencable death (a trauma, writes Caruth). Life cannot assume that death, not even by dying (writes Brassier). At the same time, the unassimilable death is not forever receding future—it’s here, it’s inside (a dead and scarred-over ‘vesicle,’ writes Freud; the remnant of monocellular life that sacrificed itself in the furnace of unassimilable experience, overwhelming stimuli.) The anterior is lost: there is no emergence and no beginning, only a continuing. This is the logic that animates (or re-animates) the fictions of Beckett and Blanchot. Molloy doesn’t know how came to the room; nor does Malone; and as for the unnamable, not only does he begin (or continue) by asking where now, who now, when now, but the anterior is lost to him, too: “Can it be that one day, off it goes on, that one day I simply stayed in, instead of going out, in the old way, out to spend the day and night as far away as possible, it wasn’t very far. Perhaps that is how it began.” In Blanchot’s Death Sentence, the lost anterior is the text of the story that is present in the world of the story—but present as absent, as destroyed or lost, commanded to be burnt or locked away: “I must not forget that I once managed to put these things into writing. … Inactive, in a state of lethargy, I wrote this story. But once it was written I reread it and destroyed the manuscript.” 

In the first part of Death Sentence, the written story exists in the world of the story, but as absent: as destroyed, abandoned, or forbidden.

“Plusieurs fois déjà, j’ai tenté de leur [les évènements] donner une forme écrite. » But the attempts are abandoned : the narrator destroys the manuscript he has just written. Aussitot j’étruisit cet manuscrit.  But it also exists, not just as destroyed, but as locked away and forbidden : « I have kept “living” proof of these events. … I hope those who love me will have the courage to destroy it, without trying to learn what it means.”

At the outset of the second part of Death Sentence, the written story exists in the world of the story: “After these events, several of which I have recounted—but I am still recounting them now…” Everything said in Blanchot, as in all literature, is writing. Still, this written story exists in the world of the story primarily as an absence: “The only strong point was my silence” and

“…I who am now speaking turn bitterly to those silent days, those silent years, as to an inaccessible, unreal country, closed off from everyone, and most of all from myself, yet where I have lived during a large part of my life, without exertion, without desire, by a mystery which astonishes me now.” 

Writers

At 3:AM Magazine, a review of Volodine's newly translated Writers.

The review mentions The Unnamable, but the real Beckett intertext for Writers might be Krapp's Last Tape: "Seventeen copies sold, of which eleven at trade price to free circulating libraries beyond the seas. Getting known."

Getting known. In Beckett's French translation La Dernière bande, which came after: "Dix sept exemplaires de vendus, dont onze au prix de gros à des bibliothèques municipales d'au-delà les mers. En passe d'être quelqu'un."

The Lonesome Crowded Steppe

“…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.

all together now: shamanize, philologize

I only recently realized that "chamaniser" is actually a French verb, not one that Volodine made up. And, intriguingly, it seems to be something you do alone: the Reverso dictionary sez that to shamanize means "chanter et danser comme un chaman, mais seul et hors de toute fonction sociale."

Which is of course not how the post-exotics "shamanize"; "elles chamanisaient ensemble," it's said of Dondog's grandmother and her friend Jessie Loo:

"Elles ont été aimies, elles luttaient ensemble pour l’élimination du malheur. Elles interrogeaient les ennemis du peuple et elles chamanisaient ensemble. Toutes ces choses."

It's social in another way, in several other ways, but among them, this: Volodine's Bolshevik variant of shamanism constructs a narratee (a sympathisant/e, in Volodine's terms*), for whom interrogating the enemies of the people and shamanizing together are just what you do. Are just what is to be done. in the struggle against misery. 

*the sympathisant/e": in the intervew in which Volodine expands on this term, "sympathizer," he identifies it as the term the police and the journalists used during Germany's leaden years in the 70s, "to characterize those likely to appreciate the rhetoric and actions of the Rote Armee Fraktion." And thus, post-exoticism addresses itself to that narratee, the sympathizer: "My narrators always address themselves, over the heads of the police who force them to speak, to listeners who are friends and accomplices, real or imaginary."

BUT: "sympathetic" is also a term of art in hypnotism, and therefore in shamanism, at least to the extent that shamanism was theorized by Western-European ethnologues coming out of those traditions rooted in hypnotism and Mesmerism. 

Occupy the Bardo

In Volodine’s Bardo or not Bardo, characters who wander the black space of post-decease existence attempt to resist both rebirth and accession to godhead. In one chapter, Schmollowski the assassin of bankers and Dadokian the mad banker (deemed mad because he attempted to overturn the system by giving away the entire wealth of his bank) meet in the Bardo and become fast friends. A comic duo, like Didi and Gogo. Each is delighted to be free of the tedium of existence—the having to eat and shit, the waiting for death, the life made ridiculous by knowledge of certain but indefinite death.

Schmollowski suggests to Dadokian that they simply stay where they are, in this indefinite black space:

--Le Livre [the Tibetan Book of the Dead] propose une seule méthode [of avoiding reincarnation]. Il suggère qu’on s’anéantisse dans la Claire Lumière. Et ça, ça ne me plaît pas.
À moi non plus, s’indigne Dadokian. S’anéantir!...Ils ont tout prévu pour nous détruire complètement!...
--Moi, je pense à autre chose, dit Schmollowski. Il faudrait essayer de construire ici un monde habitable. Vous comprenez, Dadokian? Il faudrait réussir à se maintenir indéfiniement dans le Bardo.
 --Ici? Sur le tas de sable?
--Ici ou ailleurs, un peu plus loin. On pourrait construire un réfuge agréable, un paysage… J’ai bien étudié le Livre. Nous sommes ici ni dans l’espace, ni dans le temps. La plupart des images viennent de notre imagination. Si on s’arrangeait pour les stabiliser, pour les matérialiser autour de nous, on réorganisirait le Bardo à notre convenance… (ellipses in the original, emphasis mine). 

Some of the ensuing comedy has to do with the clash between Dadokian’s essentially bourgeois notion of settling and Schmollowski's more nihilistic ideas. Dadokian's Bardo would include a beach, “une petite station balnéaire”; Schmollowski demurs, saying “j’ignore si on réussira à fabriquer un paradis.” Schmollowski’s notion of a “monde habitable,” a "paysage" seems more post-exotic than Dadokian’s, more stringently Volodinian: Volodine, in a 1997 interview: “Cette déchirure permanente que vit l'humanité, c'est quelque chose qui me hante, qui a rapport avec cette volonté d'écrire, de crier, de créer quelque chose qui est le reflet de tout ça, un refuge possible, hors de tout ça. Mais le refuge est un peu cauchemardesque, c'est le moins qu'on puisse dire.”

The nightmarish refuge: there’s an accord between post-exotic black space and Blanchot’s Kafkan desert. This applies to post-exoticism as a whole; the entire novelistic edifice is a nightmarish refuge, at least on the intra-fictive level of the accomplishments of “the post-exotic writers,” that indeterminate, quasi-anonymous and legendary mass; for them, post-exoticsm is “un base de repli” and “une secrète terre d’acceuil” (Le post-exotisme en dix leçons, leçon onze).

Libertson, in Proximity, on Blanchot’s desert:

There is no “right way” in the desert because its “time without decision” and “space without location” describe a universe without negation, without presence, without accomplishment, and without power: a universe inadequate to manifestation. The only phenomenality in this dimension is the mirage: the spectacle of a location out of its location, “in the middle of nowhere,” the spectacle of subjectivity’s inherence in the exterior, and above all the proximity of the image, which can neither be seized nor let go, and whose only intentional access is Blanchotian fascination.

Hence, to Dadokian’s question “Ici?”, to the question of where they'll locate their habitable world, Schmollowski responds, “Ici ou ailleurs, un peu plus loin.” (This post isn't a thesis about Buddhism, only about post-exoticism).  Occupying the Bardo would take place, if at all, “ici ou ailleurs, un peu plus loin,” in Schmollowski’s words, because, in Blanchot’s words, the desert is “not time, or space, but a space without place and a time without production [engrendrement].” There, subjectivity is “in the outside,” and cannot locate itself (nor build a beach resort, a paradise), but can only wander.

Land and Freedom, Degree Zero

Le comité de soutien aux ivraies respecte les herbes sauvages, les herbes de la steppe immense sous le ciel, les herbes de la prairie immmense, les herbes des hauts plateaux immenses sous le ciel, les herbes de la toundra.—Communiqué du comité de soutien aux ivraies, “Shaggå de la révolte des humbles simples.” 

Some of the shaggås in Manuela Draeger’s collection of shaggås, Herbes et golems, liberate the steppe by naming the wild grasses of the steppe and the tundra and the prairie in a non-hierarchical, non-Linneaen way, “dans une langue accessible et populaire qui sans concession s’oppose au latin de l’ennemi, au latin des églises de l’ennemi, des dictionnaries agricoles de l’ennemi.” A fictive polemical commentary on the “Shaggå de la révolte des humbles simples” points out that the the poetic list of wild grasses opposes not only settlers and their attendant agricultural-civilizational transformations of the earth, not only the agronomic and scientific knowledge of grasses that will lead to their increasingly efficient despoliation, but the committee’s poetry is even opposed, if more mildly, to the nomad’s minimal cultivation, and finally to the entire ungulate-and-human system that first dominated the Earth. The committee is thus against both the nomos of the Earth (in Carl Schmitt’s sense: enclosure, partition, rule) and against Deleuzo-Guttarian nomadic distribution (of featherless bipeds, anyway).

Land and freedom without possession; land and freedom beyond anthropic interests.

quasi-intra-diegetic narration

You can't not notice post-exoticism's formal strangeness, its frenzy of invention of genres ("mais pourquoi une telle frénésie?" asks the literary-journalist-interrogator in Le post-exotisme). But then again, approaching post-exoticism by way of narratology might not get you to post-exoticism's most affecting powers: its sober compassion for the end of the world, its scabrously literal interpretation of the impossibility of death, its love for (its recognition of the necessity of) "la lutte contre le malheur."

But.

What the hell is happening to narration in Bardo or not Bardo*? It's amazing.

In the first chapter, a narrator relays dialog tags and descriptions and &c,; from the very first sentence, it's a standard literary mise-en-scène: "Les poules caquetaient derrière le grillage...". But there's also a narrator/"exploratrice"/"describer" in the scene, existing in some ways on the same fictive level as the other characters, but ignored by them. (She's named Maria Henkel, but she's sort of a bird, rather more bird than human, and the characters take no note of her, the way you don't with beautiful avian women in post-exotic narratives). I'm already making all this sound much creakier and clunky and boring than it is.... She's nothing other than a narrator, but she's not the narrator and neither is she an "intra-diegetic narrator" in the way you'd know from Heart of Darkness (it's always Conrad with narratology....) Yeah but also, she's not contesting the narrator, her presence doesn't cause any problems about reliability or what the reader can trust the way some metafictional turns might.

z.B: here are the narrator and Maria Henkel, in quick succession; I haven't spliced this together, this is how it is on the page:

...Strobusch haussa les épaules. La proximité du décès de Kominform l'impressionnait. Il était écrasé par le poids de la responsabilité qu'on lui avait confié.
--Strobusch se rapproche les oreilles de Kominform sans prendre garde aux tache de sang, décrivit Maria Henkel. La proximité du décès de Kominform l'impressionne...

You could say there is some sort of nesting; someone relays to us the tag (the narration tag?) that marks Maria Henkel's narration: not just the em dash but the "décrivit Maria Henkel." The patterning is musical but it's hardly regular. (And no one in the scene notices that she is "describing"--is her "describing" an aural phenomenon? a written-down one? It's certainly writing, in the general, Of Grammatology sense, but she doesn't seem to be generating a text that exists in the world of the story.)

The more you (by which I mean I) try to formalize the rules for the shifts from one narrative strand to another (the more you propose that "one is nested in the other" or "the verb tenses differ"), the more you not only find that the patterns break or alter, but, worse, you start representing the narratologist's consternation as the reader's experience. For a reader, it's a musical experience, a sort of sub-representational cognizance of pattern (where pattern is the only occasionally discordant accord of different narrative faculties). The reading experience is not an epistemological riddle, which is where a lot of Volodine criticism that's attentive to structure ends up (viz Saint-Gelais, for all his strengths).

(Maybe it's worth recalling here that one of the loveliest and least Linnaen of narratological works is Genette's; for every category Genette sets up, Proust confounds it, and soon you realize that the categories have been created only to fail to describe Proust's indescribable narration.)

Edited to add: But where I want to go with this is: It's like a more stoic, less denuded, less excoriating experience of the impossibility of writing than in The Unnamable. At least part of the impossibility of writing, for the unnamable, is a generalized situation of quotation (but here I'm garbling Farbman's book, which I don't have with me): one wakes up in a language not one's own; writing has already begun. Bardo or not bardo is like that, but tilted toward gorgeous profusion rather than dispossession, or a dispossession that is a gorgeous profusion. (In Beckett, someone speaks in the unnamable's place, and one can't help volunteering a little anxiety for the unnamable on that account. In Volodine, the someone creates an echo-y repetition; someone says, after the narrator, "moi aussi, moi aussi" (in the Linda Woo chapter of Ecrivains), or someone, let's call her the narrator, says, of the quasi-intra-diegetic narrator, "Elle s'appelait Maria Henkel, comme moi."

#

*The French book has this English title, Bardo or not Bardo. It took me forever, but finally the centime dropped: the title is a play on Hamlet's "to be or not be," that's why it's in English. The reason it took me so long is something Brian Evenson points out: the similarity is evident to Francophones, who tend to hear the English sounds "to be" and "bar-do" as spondees, but for Anglophones Hamlet's "to be" is an iamb. Evenson said this without using the metrical terms, though. It's in the collection Volodine etc - post-exotisme poétique politique, forthcoming.

hurrah! greetings to la flambulance

Apparently Corbis owns the image of the burnt-out Litovsky prison in Petrograd, set on fire in the February Revolution in 1917. In its place, just imagine this on fire:

The photo Corbis has isn't the picture I wanted to put here anyway; in Corbis’s photo, the smoke-blackened stone looks more permanent than ever. Richard Stites's Revolutionary Dreaming shows a Soviet postcard of the event; the caption reads, "Hurrah! Greetings to Freedom!" Stylized, intricately curling art-deco flames pour out the prison's windows and fill the sky. In that postcard, the flames appear more eternal than the prison.

I hesitate about gathering together all the images of flames in post-exoticism; I think of the boastful competence of the journalist Blotno, in Le post-exotisme en dix leçons, leçon onze. He's so certain that "les thèmes animalières" are a key, so certain that his having noticed the animals in post-exotic texts gives him a kind of authority: "Nombreux sont les auteurs post-exotiques qui insèrent une présence animale aux cours de leurs narrations,” says Blotno. He’s technically correct but somehow he seems all wrong, with his emphasis on the thematic, with his sense that animals have been “inserted” into the narratives. Or, it’s the rightness itself that’s wrong, the pomp and authority—wrong, that is, from the perspective of post-exotic contempt for intellectual collaboration with authority.

Even so. It’s not wrong to attend to the images in post-exoticism. (See Volodine’s letters to Ruffel in Ruffel’s monograph, and Maria 313’s lecture in Ecrivains.) Numerous post-exotic surnarrateurs pause before something like the paradoxical permanence of flames in that celebratory Soviet post-card: “la pétrification de la durée,” is what one prisoner discovers in this ceaseless fire. “La flambulance,” it’s often called: a way of traveling, a kind of strange persisting in existence, a temporal anomaly in the heart of fire. A practice that sometimes combines self-immolation and transmigration, and, obviously, ambulation and flames.

The perspective, though, isn’t that of the jubilant onlookers, or even the jubilant arsonists outside the prison; flambulance is petrified duration as experienced from within the heart of the fire:

Soudain, la téléphone sonne…. C’est Gardel, un révolutionnaire qui appelle depuis sa cellule, ou il est en train de s’immoler par le feu, et qui, à cette occasion, découvre la flambulance: le déplacement dans le feu, la pétrification de la durée, la migration d’un corps à l’autre.--Le post-exotisme

Just as the Breughel of Le port intérieur isn’t the Breughel of Nuits blanches en Bhalkhyrie, maybe the image isn’t the same from one book to the next. In Des enfers fabuleux, a sort of trickster monk lures a young boy from a miserable industrial city into traveling the cosmos by means of la flambulance: the boy escapes his miserable poverty, but only at the price of eternal torment. In Voix d’os, a “murmurat inédit en 777 mots,” the paradoxically petrified duration that is revolution is long since over, but a narrator recalls “les paroles que nous avions prononcées au cœur des flammes.” There are numerous other examples, including Draeger’s Onze reves de suie, and the much more malign bombs of Les aigles peux, the unseen flames that burn the city in a terrifying air war; and the terrible photos of the factory-girl activists executed by being set on fire, in Avec les moines soldats.

The more I pile these up, the more I sound like Blotno. (Who, coincidentally, asks his smart-stupid question, a surnarrateur of Le post-exotisme tells us, on the very day of Wolfgang Gardel’s suicide “par le feu” in cell 234.) Just two  such images, then: Gardel’s flambulance, a method of transmigration accidentally discovered in the midst of self-immolation ; and the flames of the burning, desperate spider-girl-creature in Avec les moines soldats.

Gardel’s act recalls the news photograph of Thich Quang Duc's self-immolation in Saigon in 1963, his upright stillness in the midst of intense, engulfing flames. As well, the wrathful deities encountered on the eighth day of the bardo are haloed by flames: in the French translation of W.Y. Evans-Wentz’s translation, the book Volodine would have had, the great mandala of the wrathful deities is reproduced, showing these flames, and in the words to be recited on the eighth day is a description of the wrathful deities on fire : « (Emanant des deux diètes) de radieuses flammes de sagesse, brillant… » None of this means that post-exotic  flambulance is something Buddhist, and not only because of post-exotisme’s self-proclaimed heresy and atheism; the Bardo Thodol is less an important Buddhist text than a ubiquitous Western one, especially in the immediate post-68 days. (In Olivier Assayas’ Après Mai, the main character keeps picking up books on Mao, and then in one shot he’s holding the Bardo Thodol.)

All I wanted to say about Gardel, before that digression, was that there’s another dimension to la flambulance; apart from the obvious echoes of sacrifice, martyrdom, and protest in Gardel’s act, there’s a broader current of revolutionary destruction, even before 1917: Bakunin, "The passion for destruction is a creative passion.” And maybe flambulance has a connection to the strange temporality of revolution, in this pétrification de la durée.

But with the burning of the spider-girl-creature in Avec les moines-soldats, it’s otherwise. It’s as though the poles are reversed; here is no auto-destruction, and no anarchic creative destruction. This fire is (I think) deployed by the enemy, and la flambulance is a desperate exigence: the dying girl appears at the heart of an invisible fire, she's menaced by unseen flames (unseen because they burn in another world, and maybe also unseen because that’s their sinister nature). She receives a name from Brown, then she sees that he weeps for her, and then she vanishes, or rather, turns back, runs back into the unseen fire in the other world. All la flambulance can do is prolong her magical existence (and let her appear before a sympathisant) without reversing her fate or delivering her unscathed into a new world.

Francois Bizet does post-exoticism a tremendous philological service in pointing out that the girl-spider-creature of Lutz Bassmann's Avec les moines soldats, to whom the operative Brown gives the name Natacha, is from another text: Outrage  à  mygales, a radio piece by Volodine…

I thought this was going to be the place I wrote casually and thus interestingly; this has all the tedium of scholarly prose and none of its achievements...

notes

Excerpts from a Volodine interview (titled “L'écriture, une posture militante”) which appeared in La matricule des anges, in 1997. 

La place de la politique est aussi omniprésente dans vos fictions. Est-ce que vous tenez pour sûre la perte des idéologies?
Ne parlons pas de moi. Mes personnages ne considèrent pas du tout que les idéologies soient perdues. Ils sont mus, ils sont totalement habités par des idéologies radicales, extrémistes, égalitaristes. Ce qui est en face d'eux, ce n'est pas la perte d'une identité révolutionnaire; ce à quoi ils sont confrontés, c'est la disparition des conditions permettant à l'utopie généreuse de se concrétiser. C'est la défiguration du rêve généreux qui les fait souffrir.

And, later, regarding the fact that post-exoticism’s characters move in an extremely hostile world:

Cette situation d'hostilité les oblige à construire un monde virtuel. Cette distance, ça serait la façon la plus objective de décrypter le sens du réel?
En effet, la distance permet de refabriquer quelque chose d'original avec le réel. Mais je ne procède pas à un décryptage, il s'agit plutôt d'une attitude hostile à l'égard du réel, d'une observation méfiante. Les narrateurs mènent une sorte de combat obscur contre le réel, qui se superpose à l'entreprise romanesque. Il y a une vibration, une tension qui traduisent une urgence agressive dans la prise de parole. L'écriture, quel que soit le sujet du livre, devient une posture militante, un geste de combat contre le monde ennemi.

The Refusal of Death

“…it is over and still it goes on, and is there any tense for that?”—Molloy.

I haven’t yet understood something very basic, something I think a lot of people have long since understood: how it is that the end doesn’t end, how the end can be involuted. For example, in Beckett’s trilogy especially, though also in Blanchot’s L’Arret de mort. It must be something very basic to narrative—to all narrative. I can conceptualize it philosophically better than narratively/literarily. Although you’d think the one understanding would illuminate the other.

For Blanchot, the impossibility of death is closely related to Heidegger’s ideas in Being and Time, to the distinction between death as ontological possibility and death as material actuality: these two deaths never converge. Ray Brassier,* Nihil Unbound: “But to say that death ‘is’ precisely insofar as it is never actual is to say that though Dasein is already dying, it can never actually die, since death is its transcendental and hence unactualizable condition of (im)possibility.”

The impossibility of death, though, doesn’t mean immortality. Beckett’s unnamable can’t stop failing to stop going on, but that “survivance parlante” (as Blanchot calls the unnamable) isn’t the same as an immortal soul. Herschel Farbmann: “In its restlessness, the dead body—the corpse-image—is, in Blanchot’s analysis, the image of the absence of the subject of that death and not, in any way, an image of the subject of the experience of death.”

In Volodine, the impossibility of death is sometimes along these Blanchotian-Heideggerian lines. In Ecrivains, the chapters of which so often end on words of ending, such as rendomir, se pender, etc, the writer Bogdan Tarrassiev is obsessed with a very Beckettian problem: how to come to the end of writing. But the impossibility of death also happens (or fails to happen) on a world scale in post-exoticism, to all of human life on Earth. In the death throes of humanity, or even after its death throes, a survivance parlante goes on narrating post-exotically, goes on talking. (Is it Des enfers fabuleux that ends at the seaside, where it’s revealed that the narrator has been speaking this book to the only creatures that still live, to crabs and other tidal life?)

But sometimes Volodine seems to embrace a bolder, more contrarian but also more naïve impossibility of death—a kind of furious utopianism. Closer to Nikolai Fyodorov’s “common task”** than to Dasein’s task. So, for example, Volodine in this interview: “Personnellement, je ne supporte pas l’idée de la mort, que cette mort applique à mes proches ou à moi-même… Et c’est avec le poids de ce refus, cette répugnance, que depuis toujours je transforme littérairement la fin de mes personnages en un moment de réalité ou de rêve où leur vie se prolonge. Je puise dans l’imaginaire pour annuler et ridiculiser la mort…” He’s not flat-out crazy: “Reste que l’insulter la mort n’apporte qu’une satisfaction passagère. Le néant existe, il est horrible… il est la réalité, et, on se rend compte que la parole, en face de la réalité, ne peut rien.”

I meant for this to be about la flambulance and post-exoticism’s attack on the real. Next time

*It's weird for me to quote Brassier as if he were Heidegger's approving explicator. His point is something else: attempting to assert finitude, Heidegger's philosophy finds itself saddled with "something like an actual infinity" because it can't think a time before or after Dasein's temporalizing. (Enter Dasein, temporalizing...).

 **mankind’s task of perfecting himself so that he stops dying and so that he can also resurrect all the previous dead. What I know about Fyodorov comes from Jonathan Flately's tracking of his influence on Platonov’s Techenvgur, in Affective Mapping. And Stites's Revolutionary Dreams.

post-exoticism decoded

In one of his contributions to a book of Volodine criticism entitled Défense et illustration du post-exotisme  en vingt lecons, in the essay "A la frange du réel," Volodine writes:

Sur les trois ou quatre mille pages [!] que nous avons aujourd’hui publiées, on peut mettre en évidence des tonalités bien différentes, mais je crois qu’on aurait du mal à déceler la moindre contradiction idéologique. Il y a des pages baroques, fantastiques, lyriques, des cris et des murmures, mais toutes obéissent à une seule et même vision de la société et de l’histoire. … aucune voix post-exotique ne s’écarte d’une philosophie de jusqu’auboutisme politique, d’une philosophie fondée sur l’insurrection et l’égalitarisme. Cette unité idéologique est voulue, cette philosophie n’est invoquée par hasard. La communauté post-exotique s’est constituée sur une base militante radicale bien précise.

Reading Volodine criticism, I sometimes think the consistency of post-exotic ideology hasn't been fully appreciated; book reviews that blandly evoke "the tragedies of the twentieth century" seem to pass over the centrality of revolution's tragic defeat in post-exoticism (even if Volodine himself sometimes uses that phrase, the tragedies of the twentieth century, revolution's defeat isn't just one tragedy among the others, for post-exoticism).

On the other hand, I'm cautious about writing in a such a way that "la sympthatisante, c'est moi." Because post-exotic jusqu'auboutisme is so consistent and so frank ("Elles ont été aimies, elles luttaient ensemble pour l’élimination du malheur. Elles interrogeaient les ennemis du peuple et elles chamanisaient ensemble. Toutes ces choses."), because its extreme-leftism is so upfront, it seems silly to decode it. I might end up writing a leftist equivalent of a history of Hogwarts, a kind of ponderously academic fan-fiction, fully immersed in the world of the fiction.

On the other other hand, I think post-exotic texts produce narratees (sympathizers) for whom chamanizing and interrogating the enemies of the people are just what you do. Are just what is to be done. That narratee needs no persuading, so post-exoticism never stages debates, never poses problem-tales about whether something else ought to have been done instead.

One could wish Volodine hadn't used the word "insurrection" there; to American ears, at least, it recalls insurrectionary anarchism. The revolution (and the party) so obscurely* evoked in post-exoticism seems to me to have less to do with spontaneous actions and more to do with "the totalising temporal imaginary of revolution that so marked the visions and strategies of the modern left" and "an advancing, unifying and largely homogeneous planetary movement of liberation." (Alberto Toscano, "Logistics and Opposition").... Then again, so many of post-exoticism's clashes are between ultra-leftists and party stalwarts, but always within the horizon of "la revolution mondiale."

["obscure" only to the extent that revolution is never narrated in post-exoticism.]

post-exoticism, antidote to Left melancholia

In the quarter-century or so since the obscure disaster of the Soviet bloc’s collapse, two words have been pinned to that of ‘communism’ with liberal abandon: ‘tragedy’ and ‘transition’. Tragedy, to signify the magnitude of suffering, but not the greatness of the enterprise; the depth of the fall, but not the rationality of the ambition. Transition, to capitalism, shadowed by the enumeration of crimes, through a ‘transitional justice’ that is both an exorcism and a prevention of any attempt to repeat that doomed exploit.

and:

Revolution is only tragic from the standpoint of a commitment to its drive, process and aims.

Alberto Toscano, “Politics in a Tragic Key,” Radical Philosophy, July/August 2013.

Post-exoticism never debates revolution; there are no post-exotic novels of ideas. Instead, there are post-exotic texts about post-exotic writers, texts shot through with a revolutionary discourse stripped of any historical reference to our world but made all the more haunting for that. We learn about the post-exotics only in a mass, obscurely; we're told that the post-exotic writers participated in “the war for egalitarianism and the punishment of the pogromists;” that they “rose up to destroy unhappiness, root and branch” (Ecrivains); that their post-exotic writing joined in the “bare-handed plot…against the universe of capitalism and its countless degradations" (Le post-exotisme).

The disaster of revolution's defeat remains obscure in post-exoticism. It is not narrated, and, for all that post-exoticism is suffused with a poetic, tragic discourse ("la lutte contre le malheur"), its texts are not "about" revolution (they do not tell its story), though they're about almost nothing else. Post-exoticism writes the defeat of revolution (a long defeat, for example from the founding of the Cheka all the way to 1989, not the abrupt failure of Germany 1919) but without ever recounting the incidents of the defeat. It writes revolution's defeat in such a way that it answers Toscano's criticism: post-exoticism evokes the depth of the fall and the justness of the ambition, the magnitude of the suffering and the rationality (even if doomed) of undertaking a global lutte contre le malheur.

(To the extent that post-exoticism harks back to the Soviet Union, it refers us to our own past [and present]; to the extent that it harks back to “la revolution mondiale,” it refers us to a past we never had, not really, even though anti-colonialism was global, even though communist revolutions were all over the world but only in staggered, uncoordinated ways. But in a way this is worse: revolution there succeeded on a scale never seen in our world, and it failed all the more.)

Even if, as Toscano says, revolution is tragic only from the standpoint of a commitment to revolution, I am not sure that is the novels' standpoint. Commitment to revolution is the standpoint of the characters and writers of post-exoticism (but with this latter, we enter the vexed ground of post-exoticism's borders: in a way, one can say with certainty that Volodine shares his characters' commitments, but only because "Volodine" is interior to the fictional edifice of post-exoticism, in that he writes pseudonymously and speaks publicly only as a spokesman of post-exoticism.) Post-exoticism is addressed to sympathizers, but those may not be its actual readers. But within the closed (fictional) world of the (fictional) creation of (fictional) post-exotic texts, where to write is to struggle against the universe of capitalism, there, the failure does not occasion Left melancholia but amor fati. Freed of anxieties, calculations, doubts, regrets; in some ways, the exemplary post-exotic bearing is that of this atheistic monk from Bardo or not Bardo: "Il se fiche tranquillement de tout sans éprouver d’anxiété nihiliste."

post-exotic anarchism II

L'homme qui s'adressent aux mineurs est le coordinateur des secours, un ingénieur brutal, Kamatchkine, avec qui Moreno et Lougovoï ont été plusieurs fois en conflit pour des raisons syndicales. Ils n'ont pour lui aucune estime et lui, de son coté, les déteste pour leur anarchisme.--Volodine, Bardo or not Bardo.

Post-exoticism's heretical Buddhists seem entirely different, to me, than its defeated communists. It's a question at all, their similarity or difference, because of their frequent co-occurrence & strange entanglements, as in the above quoted passage, where these anarchist miners trapped in a mine (these miners who also have had dealings with "reseaux de soutien à la lutte armée") become dissident Buddhists of a sort, for a little while.

(Or, it's a question at all because, despite the strange entanglements--"revolutionary shamanism" and the respect afforded the unrepentant revolutionary who takes refuge at the lamassary in the first segment of Bardo or not Bardo--despite those entanglements, it's not as though post-exotics are doubly, comfortably ensconced in some disenchanted world after "the end of grand narratives.")

Throughout Bardo or not Bardo, there's the the peculiar fact that heresy (for example, atheism) hardly goes against Buddhism. It almost seems like Buddhism perfected. Here, in Des enfers fabuleux, a foundling named Wikeyoon has been brought up in an Arctic lamassary known as Wookarone:

À dix-sept ans il reçut enfin les dernières verités, une compréhension globale du monde. Rien n’avait de substance, sinon le terreur d’être. Dans ce néant, Wookarone n’était qu’un pivot secret, cher à ton couer Wijeyekoon, mais remplaçble, à l’égal de millards d’autres miroitements de réalité. Vous suivez? Et Wookarone était seulement une légende, un alignement de rochers basaltiques que balayait le vent glacial, à la lisière d’un océan sur lequel marchaient les ours, onze mois sur douze. 

But the defeat of the revolution is not a "last truth," and revolutionary activity doesn't come to an end in post-exotic books, even though they're set after the end.

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."