still more failure

Their writing is miserably “published” in handwritten exemplars of two or three,  or it is recited to the dead,  or murmured or whispered,  or tapped on pipes in prison cells.  The texts sometimes approach a vanishing point of near immateriality (save for the materiality of the signifier): texts murmured or whispered, or, still more spectrally, “suspended in a sigh” of Lutz Bassmann, post-exoticism’s final narrator. And at other times the post-exotic texts are abjectly physical, if fragilely so and therefore still approaching material ob-literation: Fred Zenfl’s penciled works in Des anges mineurs; the birdshit-spattered performances of Dondog’s plays in Bardo or not bardo. Even the first sentence of the first actually existing post-exotic book  (Volodine’s own first novel), describes a typically abject post-exotic book-within-a-book: “Le livre traînait dans les déjections et le sang, il fallut, pour l'ouvrir, décoller au racloir la paille qui avait durci et coagulé le long des pages.”

In The Unnameable, the unnameable narrator can't lift his hand from his knee to write, writing is impossible, it's a failure, and yet the unnameable can't stop failing to stop going on writing. That syntax--the unnameable can't write, can't speak, the others speak in his place, and yet he can't stop failing to stop going on-- post-exoticism's engagement with mortality and defeat is something like that. The characters' engagement with revolution (the defeated, failed, long-past revolution) is something like that, even or especially when it's in the form of writing post-exoticism in their cells.

But this isn't it. I keep meaning to get around to post-exoticism's intransigent rebelliousness, its ongoing attack against the real (Les narrateurs mènent une sorte de combat obscur contre le réel, qui se superpose à l'entreprise romanesque.) I keep meaning to getting around to distinguishing post-exoticism's failure from resignation and from Left melancholia.

The journalist Blotno, interrogating the post-exotic Yasar Tarchalski, in Le post-exotisme, regarding the many forms invented by post-exoticism "in the 70s":

Pourquoi une telle frénésie? [asks Blotno.] Oh, dit Tarchalski, ils prévoyaient l’horreur qu’allait représenter la clôture à la perpétuité, ils s’organisaient en fonction du futur.

And:

Sous-titrer un livre « romånce », c’était déjà, en soi, une démarche d’adieu violente à votre univers.

But these quotations explain nothing, especially ripped out of their layered context. That future referenced by Tarchalski, too, was in the past. Still, the post-exotics attend to failure (of revolution, of the world, of writing) with such compassion and stoicism that they don't allow themselves the luxury, the inattention, of resignation. And to that extent, there is a future in post-exoticism, a future other than sheer endlessness of failing to stop failing to stop going on.

In We Monks and Soldiers, in one of the segments on the Tong Fong Hotel, Brown asks Cuzco why they do it, what purpose their Organization serves, and Cuzco says, in part, "Humans are nearing the end of their agony. We're here with them, that's all."

Just so, when the post-exotics persist in existing in the closure of death (Ecrivains) and they "ruminate on unachieved promises," their engagement with revolution's failure can't take refuge in any complacency about "the end of ideologies" or "the dangers of all fanaticisms," nor in any Left melancholia. (Recent Bassmann is almost programatically, bluntly against mournful Left nostalgia, especially in Danse avec Nathan Golshem.)