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.