Occupy the Bardo

In Volodine’s Bardo or not Bardo, characters who wander the black space of post-decease existence attempt to resist both rebirth and accession to godhead. In one chapter, Schmollowski the assassin of bankers and Dadokian the mad banker (deemed mad because he attempted to overturn the system by giving away the entire wealth of his bank) meet in the Bardo and become fast friends. A comic duo, like Didi and Gogo. Each is delighted to be free of the tedium of existence—the having to eat and shit, the waiting for death, the life made ridiculous by knowledge of certain but indefinite death.

Schmollowski suggests to Dadokian that they simply stay where they are, in this indefinite black space:

--Le Livre [the Tibetan Book of the Dead] propose une seule méthode [of avoiding reincarnation]. Il suggère qu’on s’anéantisse dans la Claire Lumière. Et ça, ça ne me plaît pas.
À moi non plus, s’indigne Dadokian. S’anéantir!...Ils ont tout prévu pour nous détruire complètement!...
--Moi, je pense à autre chose, dit Schmollowski. Il faudrait essayer de construire ici un monde habitable. Vous comprenez, Dadokian? Il faudrait réussir à se maintenir indéfiniement dans le Bardo.
 --Ici? Sur le tas de sable?
--Ici ou ailleurs, un peu plus loin. On pourrait construire un réfuge agréable, un paysage… J’ai bien étudié le Livre. Nous sommes ici ni dans l’espace, ni dans le temps. La plupart des images viennent de notre imagination. Si on s’arrangeait pour les stabiliser, pour les matérialiser autour de nous, on réorganisirait le Bardo à notre convenance… (ellipses in the original, emphasis mine). 

Some of the ensuing comedy has to do with the clash between Dadokian’s essentially bourgeois notion of settling and Schmollowski's more nihilistic ideas. Dadokian's Bardo would include a beach, “une petite station balnéaire”; Schmollowski demurs, saying “j’ignore si on réussira à fabriquer un paradis.” Schmollowski’s notion of a “monde habitable,” a "paysage" seems more post-exotic than Dadokian’s, more stringently Volodinian: Volodine, in a 1997 interview: “Cette déchirure permanente que vit l'humanité, c'est quelque chose qui me hante, qui a rapport avec cette volonté d'écrire, de crier, de créer quelque chose qui est le reflet de tout ça, un refuge possible, hors de tout ça. Mais le refuge est un peu cauchemardesque, c'est le moins qu'on puisse dire.”

The nightmarish refuge: there’s an accord between post-exotic black space and Blanchot’s Kafkan desert. This applies to post-exoticism as a whole; the entire novelistic edifice is a nightmarish refuge, at least on the intra-fictive level of the accomplishments of “the post-exotic writers,” that indeterminate, quasi-anonymous and legendary mass; for them, post-exoticsm is “un base de repli” and “une secrète terre d’acceuil” (Le post-exotisme en dix leçons, leçon onze).

Libertson, in Proximity, on Blanchot’s desert:

There is no “right way” in the desert because its “time without decision” and “space without location” describe a universe without negation, without presence, without accomplishment, and without power: a universe inadequate to manifestation. The only phenomenality in this dimension is the mirage: the spectacle of a location out of its location, “in the middle of nowhere,” the spectacle of subjectivity’s inherence in the exterior, and above all the proximity of the image, which can neither be seized nor let go, and whose only intentional access is Blanchotian fascination.

Hence, to Dadokian’s question “Ici?”, to the question of where they'll locate their habitable world, Schmollowski responds, “Ici ou ailleurs, un peu plus loin.” (This post isn't a thesis about Buddhism, only about post-exoticism).  Occupying the Bardo would take place, if at all, “ici ou ailleurs, un peu plus loin,” in Schmollowski’s words, because, in Blanchot’s words, the desert is “not time, or space, but a space without place and a time without production [engrendrement].” There, subjectivity is “in the outside,” and cannot locate itself (nor build a beach resort, a paradise), but can only wander.

Land and Freedom, Degree Zero

Le comité de soutien aux ivraies respecte les herbes sauvages, les herbes de la steppe immense sous le ciel, les herbes de la prairie immmense, les herbes des hauts plateaux immenses sous le ciel, les herbes de la toundra.—Communiqué du comité de soutien aux ivraies, “Shaggå de la révolte des humbles simples.” 

Some of the shaggås in Manuela Draeger’s collection of shaggås, Herbes et golems, liberate the steppe by naming the wild grasses of the steppe and the tundra and the prairie in a non-hierarchical, non-Linneaen way, “dans une langue accessible et populaire qui sans concession s’oppose au latin de l’ennemi, au latin des églises de l’ennemi, des dictionnaries agricoles de l’ennemi.” A fictive polemical commentary on the “Shaggå de la révolte des humbles simples” points out that the the poetic list of wild grasses opposes not only settlers and their attendant agricultural-civilizational transformations of the earth, not only the agronomic and scientific knowledge of grasses that will lead to their increasingly efficient despoliation, but the committee’s poetry is even opposed, if more mildly, to the nomad’s minimal cultivation, and finally to the entire ungulate-and-human system that first dominated the Earth. The committee is thus against both the nomos of the Earth (in Carl Schmitt’s sense: enclosure, partition, rule) and against Deleuzo-Guttarian nomadic distribution (of featherless bipeds, anyway).

Land and freedom without possession; land and freedom beyond anthropic interests.

quasi-intra-diegetic narration

You can't not notice post-exoticism's formal strangeness, its frenzy of invention of genres ("mais pourquoi une telle frénésie?" asks the literary-journalist-interrogator in Le post-exotisme). But then again, approaching post-exoticism by way of narratology might not get you to post-exoticism's most affecting powers: its sober compassion for the end of the world, its scabrously literal interpretation of the impossibility of death, its love for (its recognition of the necessity of) "la lutte contre le malheur."

But.

What the hell is happening to narration in Bardo or not Bardo*? It's amazing.

In the first chapter, a narrator relays dialog tags and descriptions and &c,; from the very first sentence, it's a standard literary mise-en-scène: "Les poules caquetaient derrière le grillage...". But there's also a narrator/"exploratrice"/"describer" in the scene, existing in some ways on the same fictive level as the other characters, but ignored by them. (She's named Maria Henkel, but she's sort of a bird, rather more bird than human, and the characters take no note of her, the way you don't with beautiful avian women in post-exotic narratives). I'm already making all this sound much creakier and clunky and boring than it is.... She's nothing other than a narrator, but she's not the narrator and neither is she an "intra-diegetic narrator" in the way you'd know from Heart of Darkness (it's always Conrad with narratology....) Yeah but also, she's not contesting the narrator, her presence doesn't cause any problems about reliability or what the reader can trust the way some metafictional turns might.

z.B: here are the narrator and Maria Henkel, in quick succession; I haven't spliced this together, this is how it is on the page:

...Strobusch haussa les épaules. La proximité du décès de Kominform l'impressionnait. Il était écrasé par le poids de la responsabilité qu'on lui avait confié.
--Strobusch se rapproche les oreilles de Kominform sans prendre garde aux tache de sang, décrivit Maria Henkel. La proximité du décès de Kominform l'impressionne...

You could say there is some sort of nesting; someone relays to us the tag (the narration tag?) that marks Maria Henkel's narration: not just the em dash but the "décrivit Maria Henkel." The patterning is musical but it's hardly regular. (And no one in the scene notices that she is "describing"--is her "describing" an aural phenomenon? a written-down one? It's certainly writing, in the general, Of Grammatology sense, but she doesn't seem to be generating a text that exists in the world of the story.)

The more you (by which I mean I) try to formalize the rules for the shifts from one narrative strand to another (the more you propose that "one is nested in the other" or "the verb tenses differ"), the more you not only find that the patterns break or alter, but, worse, you start representing the narratologist's consternation as the reader's experience. For a reader, it's a musical experience, a sort of sub-representational cognizance of pattern (where pattern is the only occasionally discordant accord of different narrative faculties). The reading experience is not an epistemological riddle, which is where a lot of Volodine criticism that's attentive to structure ends up (viz Saint-Gelais, for all his strengths).

(Maybe it's worth recalling here that one of the loveliest and least Linnaen of narratological works is Genette's; for every category Genette sets up, Proust confounds it, and soon you realize that the categories have been created only to fail to describe Proust's indescribable narration.)

Edited to add: But where I want to go with this is: It's like a more stoic, less denuded, less excoriating experience of the impossibility of writing than in The Unnamable. At least part of the impossibility of writing, for the unnamable, is a generalized situation of quotation (but here I'm garbling Farbman's book, which I don't have with me): one wakes up in a language not one's own; writing has already begun. Bardo or not bardo is like that, but tilted toward gorgeous profusion rather than dispossession, or a dispossession that is a gorgeous profusion. (In Beckett, someone speaks in the unnamable's place, and one can't help volunteering a little anxiety for the unnamable on that account. In Volodine, the someone creates an echo-y repetition; someone says, after the narrator, "moi aussi, moi aussi" (in the Linda Woo chapter of Ecrivains), or someone, let's call her the narrator, says, of the quasi-intra-diegetic narrator, "Elle s'appelait Maria Henkel, comme moi."

#

*The French book has this English title, Bardo or not Bardo. It took me forever, but finally the centime dropped: the title is a play on Hamlet's "to be or not be," that's why it's in English. The reason it took me so long is something Brian Evenson points out: the similarity is evident to Francophones, who tend to hear the English sounds "to be" and "bar-do" as spondees, but for Anglophones Hamlet's "to be" is an iamb. Evenson said this without using the metrical terms, though. It's in the collection Volodine etc - post-exotisme poétique politique, forthcoming.

hurrah! greetings to la flambulance

Apparently Corbis owns the image of the burnt-out Litovsky prison in Petrograd, set on fire in the February Revolution in 1917. In its place, just imagine this on fire:

The photo Corbis has isn't the picture I wanted to put here anyway; in Corbis’s photo, the smoke-blackened stone looks more permanent than ever. Richard Stites's Revolutionary Dreaming shows a Soviet postcard of the event; the caption reads, "Hurrah! Greetings to Freedom!" Stylized, intricately curling art-deco flames pour out the prison's windows and fill the sky. In that postcard, the flames appear more eternal than the prison.

I hesitate about gathering together all the images of flames in post-exoticism; I think of the boastful competence of the journalist Blotno, in Le post-exotisme en dix leçons, leçon onze. He's so certain that "les thèmes animalières" are a key, so certain that his having noticed the animals in post-exotic texts gives him a kind of authority: "Nombreux sont les auteurs post-exotiques qui insèrent une présence animale aux cours de leurs narrations,” says Blotno. He’s technically correct but somehow he seems all wrong, with his emphasis on the thematic, with his sense that animals have been “inserted” into the narratives. Or, it’s the rightness itself that’s wrong, the pomp and authority—wrong, that is, from the perspective of post-exotic contempt for intellectual collaboration with authority.

Even so. It’s not wrong to attend to the images in post-exoticism. (See Volodine’s letters to Ruffel in Ruffel’s monograph, and Maria 313’s lecture in Ecrivains.) Numerous post-exotic surnarrateurs pause before something like the paradoxical permanence of flames in that celebratory Soviet post-card: “la pétrification de la durée,” is what one prisoner discovers in this ceaseless fire. “La flambulance,” it’s often called: a way of traveling, a kind of strange persisting in existence, a temporal anomaly in the heart of fire. A practice that sometimes combines self-immolation and transmigration, and, obviously, ambulation and flames.

The perspective, though, isn’t that of the jubilant onlookers, or even the jubilant arsonists outside the prison; flambulance is petrified duration as experienced from within the heart of the fire:

Soudain, la téléphone sonne…. C’est Gardel, un révolutionnaire qui appelle depuis sa cellule, ou il est en train de s’immoler par le feu, et qui, à cette occasion, découvre la flambulance: le déplacement dans le feu, la pétrification de la durée, la migration d’un corps à l’autre.--Le post-exotisme

Just as the Breughel of Le port intérieur isn’t the Breughel of Nuits blanches en Bhalkhyrie, maybe the image isn’t the same from one book to the next. In Des enfers fabuleux, a sort of trickster monk lures a young boy from a miserable industrial city into traveling the cosmos by means of la flambulance: the boy escapes his miserable poverty, but only at the price of eternal torment. In Voix d’os, a “murmurat inédit en 777 mots,” the paradoxically petrified duration that is revolution is long since over, but a narrator recalls “les paroles que nous avions prononcées au cœur des flammes.” There are numerous other examples, including Draeger’s Onze reves de suie, and the much more malign bombs of Les aigles peux, the unseen flames that burn the city in a terrifying air war; and the terrible photos of the factory-girl activists executed by being set on fire, in Avec les moines soldats.

The more I pile these up, the more I sound like Blotno. (Who, coincidentally, asks his smart-stupid question, a surnarrateur of Le post-exotisme tells us, on the very day of Wolfgang Gardel’s suicide “par le feu” in cell 234.) Just two  such images, then: Gardel’s flambulance, a method of transmigration accidentally discovered in the midst of self-immolation ; and the flames of the burning, desperate spider-girl-creature in Avec les moines soldats.

Gardel’s act recalls the news photograph of Thich Quang Duc's self-immolation in Saigon in 1963, his upright stillness in the midst of intense, engulfing flames. As well, the wrathful deities encountered on the eighth day of the bardo are haloed by flames: in the French translation of W.Y. Evans-Wentz’s translation, the book Volodine would have had, the great mandala of the wrathful deities is reproduced, showing these flames, and in the words to be recited on the eighth day is a description of the wrathful deities on fire : « (Emanant des deux diètes) de radieuses flammes de sagesse, brillant… » None of this means that post-exotic  flambulance is something Buddhist, and not only because of post-exotisme’s self-proclaimed heresy and atheism; the Bardo Thodol is less an important Buddhist text than a ubiquitous Western one, especially in the immediate post-68 days. (In Olivier Assayas’ Après Mai, the main character keeps picking up books on Mao, and then in one shot he’s holding the Bardo Thodol.)

All I wanted to say about Gardel, before that digression, was that there’s another dimension to la flambulance; apart from the obvious echoes of sacrifice, martyrdom, and protest in Gardel’s act, there’s a broader current of revolutionary destruction, even before 1917: Bakunin, "The passion for destruction is a creative passion.” And maybe flambulance has a connection to the strange temporality of revolution, in this pétrification de la durée.

But with the burning of the spider-girl-creature in Avec les moines-soldats, it’s otherwise. It’s as though the poles are reversed; here is no auto-destruction, and no anarchic creative destruction. This fire is (I think) deployed by the enemy, and la flambulance is a desperate exigence: the dying girl appears at the heart of an invisible fire, she's menaced by unseen flames (unseen because they burn in another world, and maybe also unseen because that’s their sinister nature). She receives a name from Brown, then she sees that he weeps for her, and then she vanishes, or rather, turns back, runs back into the unseen fire in the other world. All la flambulance can do is prolong her magical existence (and let her appear before a sympathisant) without reversing her fate or delivering her unscathed into a new world.

Francois Bizet does post-exoticism a tremendous philological service in pointing out that the girl-spider-creature of Lutz Bassmann's Avec les moines soldats, to whom the operative Brown gives the name Natacha, is from another text: Outrage  à  mygales, a radio piece by Volodine…

I thought this was going to be the place I wrote casually and thus interestingly; this has all the tedium of scholarly prose and none of its achievements...

notes

Excerpts from a Volodine interview (titled “L'écriture, une posture militante”) which appeared in La matricule des anges, in 1997. 

La place de la politique est aussi omniprésente dans vos fictions. Est-ce que vous tenez pour sûre la perte des idéologies?
Ne parlons pas de moi. Mes personnages ne considèrent pas du tout que les idéologies soient perdues. Ils sont mus, ils sont totalement habités par des idéologies radicales, extrémistes, égalitaristes. Ce qui est en face d'eux, ce n'est pas la perte d'une identité révolutionnaire; ce à quoi ils sont confrontés, c'est la disparition des conditions permettant à l'utopie généreuse de se concrétiser. C'est la défiguration du rêve généreux qui les fait souffrir.

And, later, regarding the fact that post-exoticism’s characters move in an extremely hostile world:

Cette situation d'hostilité les oblige à construire un monde virtuel. Cette distance, ça serait la façon la plus objective de décrypter le sens du réel?
En effet, la distance permet de refabriquer quelque chose d'original avec le réel. Mais je ne procède pas à un décryptage, il s'agit plutôt d'une attitude hostile à l'égard du réel, d'une observation méfiante. Les narrateurs mènent une sorte de combat obscur contre le réel, qui se superpose à l'entreprise romanesque. Il y a une vibration, une tension qui traduisent une urgence agressive dans la prise de parole. L'écriture, quel que soit le sujet du livre, devient une posture militante, un geste de combat contre le monde ennemi.

The Refusal of Death

“…it is over and still it goes on, and is there any tense for that?”—Molloy.

I haven’t yet understood something very basic, something I think a lot of people have long since understood: how it is that the end doesn’t end, how the end can be involuted. For example, in Beckett’s trilogy especially, though also in Blanchot’s L’Arret de mort. It must be something very basic to narrative—to all narrative. I can conceptualize it philosophically better than narratively/literarily. Although you’d think the one understanding would illuminate the other.

For Blanchot, the impossibility of death is closely related to Heidegger’s ideas in Being and Time, to the distinction between death as ontological possibility and death as material actuality: these two deaths never converge. Ray Brassier,* Nihil Unbound: “But to say that death ‘is’ precisely insofar as it is never actual is to say that though Dasein is already dying, it can never actually die, since death is its transcendental and hence unactualizable condition of (im)possibility.”

The impossibility of death, though, doesn’t mean immortality. Beckett’s unnamable can’t stop failing to stop going on, but that “survivance parlante” (as Blanchot calls the unnamable) isn’t the same as an immortal soul. Herschel Farbmann: “In its restlessness, the dead body—the corpse-image—is, in Blanchot’s analysis, the image of the absence of the subject of that death and not, in any way, an image of the subject of the experience of death.”

In Volodine, the impossibility of death is sometimes along these Blanchotian-Heideggerian lines. In Ecrivains, the chapters of which so often end on words of ending, such as rendomir, se pender, etc, the writer Bogdan Tarrassiev is obsessed with a very Beckettian problem: how to come to the end of writing. But the impossibility of death also happens (or fails to happen) on a world scale in post-exoticism, to all of human life on Earth. In the death throes of humanity, or even after its death throes, a survivance parlante goes on narrating post-exotically, goes on talking. (Is it Des enfers fabuleux that ends at the seaside, where it’s revealed that the narrator has been speaking this book to the only creatures that still live, to crabs and other tidal life?)

But sometimes Volodine seems to embrace a bolder, more contrarian but also more naïve impossibility of death—a kind of furious utopianism. Closer to Nikolai Fyodorov’s “common task”** than to Dasein’s task. So, for example, Volodine in this interview: “Personnellement, je ne supporte pas l’idée de la mort, que cette mort applique à mes proches ou à moi-même… Et c’est avec le poids de ce refus, cette répugnance, que depuis toujours je transforme littérairement la fin de mes personnages en un moment de réalité ou de rêve où leur vie se prolonge. Je puise dans l’imaginaire pour annuler et ridiculiser la mort…” He’s not flat-out crazy: “Reste que l’insulter la mort n’apporte qu’une satisfaction passagère. Le néant existe, il est horrible… il est la réalité, et, on se rend compte que la parole, en face de la réalité, ne peut rien.”

I meant for this to be about la flambulance and post-exoticism’s attack on the real. Next time

*It's weird for me to quote Brassier as if he were Heidegger's approving explicator. His point is something else: attempting to assert finitude, Heidegger's philosophy finds itself saddled with "something like an actual infinity" because it can't think a time before or after Dasein's temporalizing. (Enter Dasein, temporalizing...).

 **mankind’s task of perfecting himself so that he stops dying and so that he can also resurrect all the previous dead. What I know about Fyodorov comes from Jonathan Flately's tracking of his influence on Platonov’s Techenvgur, in Affective Mapping. And Stites's Revolutionary Dreams.