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.