Post-exotic faits divers

We called this post-exoticism. It was a construction that had a rapport with revolutionary shamanism and with literature, a literature written down or learned by heart and recited, because sometimes the [prison] administration would forbid us any paper for years at a time; it was an interior construction, a fallback position, a secret welcoming land (une secrète terre d’acceuil), but also an offensive that participated in the plot that some were waging bare-handed against the universe of capitalism and its countless degradations. To Bassmann’s lips, alone, that struggle had now been entrusted. It was suspended in a sigh.  —Antoine Volodine*, Le post-exotisme en dix leçons, leçon onze (my own rough translations).

WHAT IS POST-EXOTICISM? Insolent question, all the more so for being asked on the day of Bassmann’s death, but that this question comes up here at all demonstrates that, half a century after Maria Clementi’s Minor Angels, the sympathizers, on the outside, have not...—Volodine, Le post-exotisme (broken-off sentence in the  original).

Open Letter Books will publish a translation of Le post-exotisme en dix leçons, leçon onze (sample here, including the same passages I translated above, and with better choices than mine). And they plan to publish translations of two other post-exotic books, by Manuela Draeger and Lutz Bassmann. Dalkey Archive, too, is translating Volodine.

*Attributing the book to "Volodine" is problematic, since it has a second, paratextual, supposedly fictional frontispiece attributing authorship to eight heteronyms, where Volodine is just one name among others.

Le post-exotisme begins and ends with Bassmann's death--with the death of the last post-exotic narrator, the one to whom the struggle has been entrusted--and it doesn't necessarily loop back to before his death, not exactly.

More soon.


Nous avons appelé cela le post-exotisme. C’était une construction qui avait rapport avec du chamanisme révolutionnaire et avec de la littérature, avec un littérature manuscrite ou apprise par coeur et recitée, car parfois pendant des années l’administration nous interdisait de posséder du matérial de papeterie; c’était une construction intérieure, une base de repli, une secrète terre d’acceuil, mais aussi quelque chose d’offensif, qui participait au complot à mains nues de quelques individus contre l’univers capitaliste et contre ses ignominies sans nombre. Aux seules lèvres de Bassmann cette lutte maintenant était confiée. À un soupir elle se trouvait suspendée.


QU’EST-CE QUE LE POST-EXOTISME? Insolente question, fort mal venue en ce jour où meurt Bassmann, mais dont le surgissement à cet endroit démontre qu’un demi-siècle après Des anges mineurs, de Maria Clementi, les sympathisants, à l’éxterieur, n’ont pas...”—Le post-exotisme, (broken-off sentence in the original). Volodine has a way of sometimes breaking off his sentences a-grammatically, sometimes even ending them with a full stop rather than an ellipsis; Wagneur comments somewhere that this makes Volodine’s words into a “trou noir.”