Aux poubelles de l’histoire

Volodine’s novels begin after the failure of revolution. There is a heroism to Volodine’s defeated revolutionaries, but the tale of their defeat is not narrated, and neither is their sentimental or political education as individuals. (There is a no post-exotic political Bildungsroman, no Princess Cassamassima, in which one has to decide in favor of either aesthetics or insurrection, nor any Sentimental Education.) The novels are somewhat mute about the “world revolution” they assume as a preceding fact of their unfalsifiable fictional worlds. This silence suspends the novel's judgment about revolution, and suspends the possibility of receiving instruction or agitation-to-insurrection from the novels. And yet, the defeated revolutionaries’ failure is powerfully charismatic, or partakes of the particular glamour of the decay of charisma; not the fall of a sovereign, but the fall of a dictatorship of the proletariat, its transformation into trials, exclusions, camps, state powers, or its transformation under the weight of losing battles against other forces. (But that fall isn't itself dramatized, in post-exoticism; the narrative instance is after.) (But what I really want to write, but somehow can’t fit in here, is that the affective experience of that poetry of failure is not necessarily a-political or anti-revolutionary, in Volodine’s novels, even though there are valid a-political or anti-revolutionary readings of Volodine. Another post, perhaps.)

Imprisoned (or dead), Volodine’s defeated revolutionaries often turn to writing, but as writers, too, they are failures. Their books are “trashcan literature,”[i] extant in only one or a few exemplars, or none at all, murmured in prison cells or in the “black space” of a post-death existence. As failed writers, they are not unlike Beckett’s writer-narrators (who lose their pen or are unable to lift their hand to write), though here, too, Volodine’s characters sometimes display an abject glamour, which is probably only conferred on Beckett’s writer-narrators by misreading them. 

In 1962, Raoul Vaneigem, Attila Kotànyi, and Guy Debord proposed a revaluation of values in their “Theses on the Paris Commune." (French text here [pdf]; English here.)They wrote that what had been counted as revolution’s successes were actually its fundamental failures, such as “reformism or the establishment of a state bureaucracy”; what had been considered revolution’s failures, such as the Paris Commune or revolt in Spain, were “its most promising successes so far, for us and for the future.” (The surprise of Vaneigem et al’s reversal is perhaps unavailable to us today; there was a communist party when they were writing, an official institutional weight to throw off.)

Volodine’s novels take their points of departure in both kinds of revolutionary failure (the fundamental and the apparent, in Vaneigem et al’s terms), the bureaucracy of trials and exclusions as well as the failed combat with counter-revolutionary forces. In Volodine’s novels, though, these failures are not viewed with an eye to what is promising about them, “for us and for the future,” as the Theses have it. The future, too, precedes the narrative instance. 

Thesis number 11 reads, in its entirety:

Les théoriciens qui restituent l'histoire de ce mouvement en se plaçant du point de vue omniscient de Dieu, qui caractérisait le romancier classique, montrent facilement que la Commune était objectivement condamnée, qu'elle n'avait pas de dépassement possible. Il ne faut pas oublier que, pour ceux qui ont vécu l'évènement, le dépassement était là.

All this is as if tilted and re-arranged in post-exotic fiction. There isn’t an “omniscient point of view” in Volodine’s novels, but that’s hardly a promising avenue,  detailing the differences between Volodine and a “classical novel.” Vaneigem et al oppose to theory the lived, the event, as the surpassing of the Commune’s objective limitations: “pour ceux qui ont vécu l'évènement, le dépassement était là.”

But where is there, when we’re speaking, not about the objective Commune in history, but about the “habitable worlds” invented by post-exotic narrators, the post-exotic writer-revolutionaries of Le post-exotisme en dix leçons, leçon onze, for one example. It’s easy enough to see that Volodine’s fiction is not a call to arms; the “minumum programs” and “maximum programs” which Volodine’s characters sometimes allude to could never simply be made operational in our world (if they were even described in any detail, which they’re usually not). In this, I’m saying nothing more than that Volodine’s novels are literature. In a way, it’s as Barthes writes in S/Z: a novel, however realistic, cannot be simply executed in reality, as if it were a program. But the inoperability of post-exoticism needs particular underlining; in an interview with La Femelle du requin, in 2002, Volodine: “En tout cas, inutile de chercher dans le post-exotisme des messages cryptés pour l’action, pour l’insurrection...”[ii]

Even so, the “vécu” in literature (to use the Theses’s term) what is lived, the event in literature (the event of literature), is not nothing. It is lived as dead. A corpse, a remainder: in Maurice Blanchot’s terms, here quoted by Joseph Libertson, “Literature discovers ‘the existence which remains [demeure] underneath existence, like an inexorable affirmation, death as the impossibility of dying” (Proximity, 71).

Sous l’existence, l’éspace littêraire? Maybe it’s a gross reduction, on my part, to see in the dead revolutions and dead revolutionaries of Volodine the uncanny immortality of Blanchot’s impossibility of dying (Libertson’s Blanchot, since I depend so heavily on his anomalous but exact reading, his thought, even while I garble it). Even so… the distinction between Volodine and “engaged literature” matters, and maybe no one thought about what that kind of engagement had failed to engage more deeply than did Blanchot (but La part du feu is checked out of the library; some of this has to wait for a future draft). (The notion of the impossibility of littérature engagée  is shallow in Barthes, or rather in my version of him; the inoperable amounts to a “littérature désengagée,” purely aesthetic, purely nothing in the world of action.) Literature becomes a question for itself in Volodine’s dead revolutions and dead revolutionaries (to use the terms of Foucault’s Blanchot essay); it goes impossibly on after the end. The dead revolution might well mean something in Volodine’s novel (a judgment about the impossibility of revolution, the necessity of its failure), but beyond that, it is something. The dead revolutionaries in Volodine demonstrate something Libertson already saw in Blanchot’s thought in 1982: “Literature does not change the world, as does an action rooted in the negative. Instead, it reveals the paradoxical and contaminated subsistence of a world underneath negation” (70). That’s where the event of dépassement is for some readers of Volodine, in the contaminated subsistence of the revolution after the end of revolution, in what subsists beneath the world of action:

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 (Écrivains, 35-36).

Markers for a future post: 

Libertson, 155: “fiction’s problematic rapport with phenomenality and negation." 

And this, from a part of the Femmelle du requin interview that's not online, but is quoted in Ruffel's Volodine monograph, p 299: 

L’idee de revolution littéraire ne me concerne pas. Ce n’est pas du tout mon propos. C’est bien dommage, que ça simplifierait l’explication de ce que je fais… Fondamentalement, je respect trop l’idée de révolution, pour imaginer que le champ littéraire ait une quelconque importance là-dedans. 

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[i] The phrase is from Lisbonne, dernière marge, though at times Volodine criticism has taken it up for Volodine’s project as a whole, in light of Volodine’s abject writer-revolutionaries and their ragged, scarcely existing texts. 

[ii] This is why that review in The Collagist is wrong to use a byline that links post-exoticism to actual, imprisoned activists (wrong, as a reading of post-exotic fiction, though right enough as a kind of semi-belle-lettristic, semi-political action of its own). See here also the footnote near the beginning of L’éspace littéraire, p 16 in the folio paperback: “Le livre, comme tel, peut devenir un événement agissant du monde (action cependant toujours réservée et insuffisante), mais ce n’est pas l’action que l’artiste a en vue….” The Collagist review is in that sense a book.