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.)