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.)