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.