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...
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