The Post-Exotic novel wants to destroy reality
This is the second part of two: the first part is available here. Translated from the French by Jeffrey Zuckerman.
• But it’s also about characters dear to us who we trot out without any qualms or fear when it’s a question of embodying ourselves in them, because they’re exactly like us. There isn’t the least difference between them and us. These are our favorite heroes, heroines, animals, and dead. Men and women at their wits’ end, Untermenschen about to die who keep within their hearts, as consolation before the void, the delight of this or that happy memory, dazzling love, faithfulness to their comrades in battle, faithfulness to those they have completely loved.
• Characters who know to say “I” in our stead. They are our admirable deceased, who never renounced their feelings, their beliefs, their lies, their mistakes, their hopes, their forgiveness, their violence. They know to say “I” posthumously in our stead.
• Depending on one’s point of view, there is basic autobiographical transparency in the most baroque and unlikely of our structures and images. Or, on the contrary, only the freewheeling haze of the fantastical hovers over our landscapes and our heroes and heroines. But we are talking here about the pedants’ declared points of view. For us, clarity and haziness are equal.
• The stories we tell have come to pass or will do so.
• When asked, one of our spokespeople began listing heroes and heroines with patent autobiographical characteristics. He stammered through several dozen names, including Mevlido, Breughel, Dondog, and Ingrid Vogel, and just when he said Jean Vlassenko’s name, he stopped. “I’m joking,” he suddenly said with a fairly cynical offhandedness. “They’re all just as unfamiliar with our adventures as with yours.”
• As ideologically clear as we may be on the subject, we have trouble respecting humanoids and the like, and believing wholeheartedly in a radiant future they might easily bring to pass.
• In We Monks and Soldiers, for example, Lutz Bassmann sadly describes humanity in its terminal phase, already ready to give way to a civilization of tarantulas and land crabs. At the end of Dreams of Mevlido, Volodine suggests that after humanity’s extinction, its ruins will then be inhabited by house spiders and tropical spiders. In Naming the Jungle, the torrential egalitarian speech that declares Gutierrez dying is given to a public consisting solely of caranguejeiras, enormous spiders from the deep forest that several explorers claim to have seen living in organized groups. Several of our books follow in the same vein. We willingly speak to those who will people the future, we do not disregard the possibility that there may no longer be any hominids or related species.
• Humanity, in due time, will itself be shunted aside, without any ambiguity and not without any authority, by intelligent spiders.
• The critic of official literature feels confused by the parallel worlds that our books describe. He suddenly feels hyper-rational and accuses the post-exotic authors of cobbling together gratuitous phantasmagorias. What are these camps? he asks irritatedly. Which interminable wars are we talking about? Which prisons are the narrators locked up in? What are these continents on fire? Which era is this? Why these odd last names? Often conspiring with the police investigators vigilantly monitoring their tape recorders and their OCR software, they like to know how the discrepancy between names, places, and dates add up to a logical code. That would make their work easier. But no answer comes.
• No answer. Especially because the question isn’t asked. There aren’t any metaphors, any codes. Our heroes are deeply integrated into the world around them and only talk to themselves and their kind. They have no reason to jeopardize the normalcy of their everyday lives, nor to ponder the nature of the air they breathe, much less when they will breathe next.
• What about the birds? someone exclaims. What about these dead bodies still living, as if nothing happened?
• In our imaginary worlds, every defeat of egalitarianism happens practically without limit. Failure’s wantonness is total. In the end, that’s what we’ll find in the world outside these walls: exactly what comes to us ceaselessly in our nightmares. No battle has ended. Capitalism instated its thousand-year Reich. The Bolsheviks are displayed as monsters in the fairground stocks, next to the yetis and the extraterrestrials. Human civilization has hit rock bottom, and is hobbling along toward its extinction. There wasn’t any apocalypse, but we’re already somewhere beyond the end.
• Beyond the end, at least for those who are still moving, two last ideological fogs still exist: one of proletarian morality, the other one a philosophy of destitution, impotence, abandonment.
• But then what? we ask. Can’t we at least put a stamp on certain moments, certain events? They show us calendars and history books, numerous documents, witness accounts. We know that some of us actually lived through that, or did so vicariously. All of us vicariously lived through that. They brandish atrocities and genocides much like those our characters are trying to negate or camouflage the memory of. There are cross-references to make. The images are recognizable. The facts are barely camouflaged by the veils of fiction. The concentration-camp settings don’t fool anyone. Well? we ask. Well then, of course, certainly, you’re right, nothing was made up, there isn’t even the thickness of a cigarette paper between reality and our fictions. You’re exaggerating there, we retort after some silence. All right, we’re exaggerating. Another silence. We love exaggerating until reality’s death ensues.
• RUIN THEIR REALITY! RUIN THEIR DREAMS! AND THEN, NICHEVO!
• Who’s talking? This question makes us smile. We half-shrug noncommittally. A few seconds of embarrassed silence go by. Because at the heart of it all, we’re not very sure of the answer.
• In some of our books, theater’s importance is so strong that we talk not of readers but of listeners and even spectators.
• Elsewhere, post-exotic writers are often presented as speakers rather than writers.
• Shamanism implies a mediation between indescribable forces, known only to the shaman, and a clientele of beggars, anxious querents, and sometimes tourists who have come at random. Mediation takes the form of a dancing trance and a breath. Don’t tell us that the core of post-exotic processes and the basis of its relationship with its sympathizers can’t be found there.
• The majority of our books are unavailable outside these walls. It’s an unconsultable literature that only evolves within the vacuum of the prison. So we are the sole recipients, the sole transmitters, and the sole interpreters. Nothing more need be said.
• During the few seconds preceding death, it is customary to initiate quickly a dream of what one is leaving, what one has known, and what could have happened if one had lived differently somewhere else. It is a dream full of visions, memories, and deliriums, an extraordinarily rich dream, and if one has prepared for it ahead of time, it can be prolonged indefinitely. These few seconds can become days, weeks, or months of adventure, and even more. Our characters are used to this practice. During this hard-to-measure time they live and relive imagined lives.
• This drifting, endless, immeasurable dream, where a thousand memories transform into a thousand lurid and strange adventures, we call the Bardo. It’s a term Buddhists invented, and we sympathetically reuse it in turn. And, within our novels and elsewhere, we often feel that traveling through the Bardo is one of the best things that could happen to us. In case of death, in any case, we’d prefer that to the complete silence of death.
• Our wounded revolutionaries are just as at home in the Bardo as guerilleros within rural populations, and often even more at home, come to think of it.
• An investigation led outside these walls. Question: “What longing motivated your work as a writer?” Answer from one of our comrades, Maria Henkel, Maria Schrag, or Manuela Draeger or someone else: “Something despite all incites us to survive, an anguished, vengeful longing to keep this right, to keep on going against those who would reduce us to less than nothing, and, at the same time, against those who audibly dream of imposing silence. To follow at all costs the experience of a scream in the dark, to leave behind delayed-action beacons, this is the overarching impulse. When battle time is finite, the arena contracts endlessly. Will they let me go toward freely chosen muteness, toward my last sentence, will they let me speak the ‘je me tais’ of the last sentence? Should death be bleakly near, several books will be there, handed down, self-sufficient, continuing to propagate somewhat this last breath, this footstep.”
• At a given moment, it won’t be possible anymore to say whether it’s Volodine talking or whether the voice he’s transcribing as a spokesperson has caught hold of him and is speaking clearly and without mediation.
• At a given moment, the voices mingle, the prisoners’ languages interweave, there is now only one novelistic emission, whether it comes from this or that male or female author scarcely matters. Whether it’s signed by Volodine, Manuela Draeger, Lutz Bassmann, Maria Schrag, or Elli Kronauer, a post-exotic text is above all the result of collective expression. We keep on repeating that, but the lesson, I don’t know why, is hard to learn.
• We care deeply about those who disappeared before us and we carry on their existence in their stead. When the time comes to speak a poem or to murmur the germ of a text, we’re not afraid to slip into one of our comrades, to put on his shadow and her voice and to speak in his or her place. We call this practice a homage. But it’s also a shamanic moment, in a way. We generally avoid all religious ceremony, we dispense with drums and trances, but it’s still a shamanic moment.
• Sometimes the trance takes place. Listening to a text is also entering into a trance. Reading is a trance. The post-exotic writers don’t hesitate to dive deep into their images, they take place in the profound spectacle that the images lead them into, they are at the heart of the image to speak it.
• Destroying reality until not a stone remains, living in the ruins of reality, then clearing the way to welcome, out of the ruins, those who survived.
• Another question from the investigators of official literature: “Does something like literature exist?” Lutz Bassmann’s answer: “When it’s every man for himself, let’s all be sure that none of us stays faithful for this question. Each one of us must try, within this solid and gigantic public discharge we call the publishing realm, to draw attention to himself or herself, each of us doing our best not to be mistaken for something vile. Because each one of us, when it’s our turn, deposits a piece of flesh into the sludge, in hopes of good garbage men deigning to keep the worst from happening to it, to this piece. And if something like literature still breathes, if it still lives, it only does so in this dance of death.”
• Then Manuela Draeger takes control of Lutz Bassmann’s shadow and voice. I’m like the listeners witnessing this incursion, I appreciate it without judging it, I don’t jump when I realize it, I don’t see anything abnormal there. I don’t complain; why would I? Must I know at every moment where the narrators and their accomplices’ voices and bodies are?
• We’re not lacking for enemies. We’re well within reach, while they’re inaccessible. The requirements for a humiliating defeat have been met. But a disaster humor keeps our heads held high.
• Often those who talk in our books resemble us. In any case, they, too, claim to have killed lots of people and not to have regretted it. What we know for sure is that they had plenty of opportunities to imagine that they would assassinate assassins, and maybe, for some of them, the opportunity to do so. Their dreams arouse some sympathy in us. As for actually doing so, if they ever did, we wouldn’t have the least reason to disapprove.
• NO REGRETS, NO RETREAT, ONLY KILL WISELY, ONLY DIE WISELY!
• Murdering the murderers, assassinating the assassins: silly images, symbolic statements of immature madmen. Magical gestures belonging to the criminal world of childhood. Nonetheless, we are also at home there, in the criminal world of childhood, where we destroy dolls and totems, where we wish for the wicked to be punished, where being locked up alone means hopelessness.
• Volodine sometimes wears Lutz Bassmann’s shadow and voice. I don’t complain about it. Only the psychologists and the police take exception, because that complicates the rapport they’ve promised the authorities. That makes them less reliable. Myself, quote honestly, I’d say there isn’t any reason to complain.
• We put our books out in front of the public, often in front of unknown people, a bit like how we leave food on a windowsill so the birds, after having seen and examined it, might take it away.
• Our characters talk and act like humans, but often they’re birds, or monsters, and sometimes they might even happen to be writers.
• For us, being a writer doesn’t mean strutting in the spotlight or grandstanding in front of a microphone; for us, being a writer means whispering behind grilles, in the anguish of death, craziness, and life sentences, without expecting any retribution beyond the affection we bear for our comrades and sympathizers outside these walls.
• For us, being a writer means constructing a precarious land of exile to no avail and trying again and again to get there within our dreams.
• Ultimately, if we had accepted the luxury of silence, post-exotic literature would have never existed. And nobody in the public sphere would have suffered from that lack. But we cannot deny that while our imprisonment would have been more degrading, more detestable. And we, all of us, would by now have disappeared.
• To begin with, the texts are spoken, murmured, or yelled in the solitude of a cell, and they’re addressed to the comrades who hear it, who mutter crazily or sleep in an adjoining cell. Upon being heard, the text undergo many transformations and are passed along by many prisoners’ voices. But, if their form is different from what they had at first, they still retain this original, driving concern: to be heard.
• Nothing disgusts us as much, when we’re speaking, as sterile and imageless hermeticism.
• Appearing together, in the same season’s publishing schedule, under three names that had already broken into official literature, is one of our feats of battle. We won’t strain the metaphor of a warrior’s pride, because we know perfectly well what books are worth compared to Kalashnikovs, but all the same, we’re not unhappy. The official valets, the clowns with muddied paint, the egotistic mercenaries and the minstrels paid it little attention, but, as far as we are concerned, we feel that post-exoticism hasn’t failed in its goals of organizing this proclamatory manifesto. It had to be done. Demonstrations of force are automatically associated with a complementary demonstration of contempt for institutions controlled by faded glories, the domestic rearguard, and the enemy’s full array of puppets.
• Getting images out. Transmitting images. A large number are black and white, but images rather than words. Strong images rather than useless language.
• Embedding images into our readers’ memory, speaking images to our sympathizers, guiding readers to the heart of the image. Allowing the first images, borne from our prison and borne from our prison literature, to mingle smoothly and willingly with the images everyone bears within themselves from birth, allowing our images to become, within each of you, private and secret and jealously guarded and fundamental and terminal images. And waiting for this miracle to happen, for them to resurface, one night, within one of your dreams.
• Sometimes one of our spokespeople is asked for his or her favorite post-exotic work. The resulting answer would be the beginning of a list, at which point the interrogated interrupts himself or herself and begs for leniency: “We don’t have the space to list them all,” he or she might say, before continuing: “We’ve only named these titles at random.” In reality, all our books published outside these walls are our favorites.
• No mystery. Many voices because we are many. A single, obsessive universe, because we are locked up together and we will be until the end.
• We stay by the wayside of the path of official literature and we applaud its writers as they go by. Then we go back to our encampment, we sit around the fire, and we tell stories.
• We all agree on this principle: “Write every book as if it were the last one.” It goes back, this principle, to the time when we had weapons, and it echoes in another context: “Approach every fight as if it were fatal and final.” We can discern some suicidal tendencies there. In my opinion, it mostly has to do with an attraction to work well done.
• There is a point in a book’s creation when Manuela Draeger’s presence is so strong that the very idea of attributing it to another author becomes absurd. Like all the novels that we author, Eleven Sooty Dreams was constructed collectively, repeated, and ruminated to the point of erasing all the particular accents that characterized its origin. Then Manuela Draeger’s voice was overlaid and she united the whole. Manuela Draeger’s voice, her language, her anxiety, her hallucinations, and her wonder run from the first page to the last and she inhabits and individualizes the images. In this way the definitive text is born. Eleven Sooty Dreams is certainly a collective n?velle, a novel from our prison, but it’s the voice of our comrade Manuela Draeger that makes it resonate in the secular world.
• INTERPRET THE SCREAMS, IMAGINE THE ELSEWHERE, ENTER THE STRANGE IMAGE, AND SPEAK THE WORLD!
• There is a point in a book’s creation when Lutz Bassmann’s presence is so strong that the idea of attributing it to another author becomes absurd. Like all the novels that we send beyond these walls, The Eagles Reek was produced together, recited, and ruminated until all the most recognizable excesses of this or that prisoner had disappeared. Then Lutz Bassmann’s voice united the whole. Lutz Bassmann’s harshness, the violence of his convictions, the darkness of his irony, his language, his anger, and his visions of a bleak future seized the text, sentence by sentence. They reoriented all the images and made a nest in them. In this way the definitive text is born. The Eagles Reek is a n?velle that was born between the walls of our cells, but it’s also by all accounts a novel that had its final embodiment fashioned by our comrade Lutz Bassmann in order to be able to exist in our stead in the profane world.
• There is a point in a book’s creation when Volodine’s presence is so strong that the idea of attributing it to another author becomes absurd. Like all the novels that we confide to our spokespeople, Writers was imagined in various cells, it was whispered beneath doors, it circulated from mouth to mouth in so many forms that there was no longer the least individually identifiable poetic sound. Then Volodine’s voice became dominant, with the intent of harmonizing the whole. Volodine revised every image and every phrase, every intention, every unsaid thing, in light of his own uncertainties, his own sensibility, and his own fantasies. He suppressed everything that stood out musically and poetically. In this way the definitive text is born. Writers is a penal n?velle composed by all of us, but sung outside these walls by one of us, our comrade Antoine Volodine.
• Compassion. Empathy. Accompaniment up to hell and within hell. Accompaniment in the impossibility of speaking. Sharing amnesia. Camaraderie regardless of absence. Camaraderie regardless of flames. The terminal grip.
• DON’T GIVE BIELA FREEK YOUR BLOOD! DON’T GIVE BIELA FREEK THE BLOOD OF BIELA FREEK! BECOME BIELA FREEK!
• For us the figure of the writer is that of a ragged stranger dying.
• We are internationalists, cosmopolitans, opposed to discrimination, fervent opponents of capitalism, and even though our defeat has made our minimum program temporarily obsolete, we remain members of a society founded on radical, fanatic egalitarianism without any tolerance for old masters, and steeped not in blood but in intelligence, freedom, and brotherhood.
• We consistently push aside what the enemy in power calls the national community. When we are forcibly registered in a society of any kind, we work our hardest at every moment to show our resistance to all integration, our unwillingness to accept norms and codes, our aggressiveness against those who would teach us lessons, give us advice, watch over us, or are simply moronic.
• For us the figure of the writer is that of a madman who has lost everything, even the comfortable prospect of being quiet. Barely Mute Bodies could have been another title for our novel Writers.
• Our birds have arms and rarely wings and, often, they wear survival suits or work suits. We have problems with official ornithology. Our birds are more likely to be cormorantes than cormorants, more easily seagulles, ospreyes, snowy owlettes, and pelicanes.
• Our pachyderms more likely elephantes.
• Maybe one day, owing to our brain cells’ degradation, or because the last of us will have gone back to the final dust, maybe one day we’ll have forgotten. But forgiven, no. What is this story of forgiveness? No, we’ll never forgive, we’ll never have forgiven, never.
• We see the figure of the writer as a wounded animal in an interrogation room, confiding lies about its lifestyle, about its presumed crimes, and about its dreams to recording instruments and to its torturers.
• FORGET YOUR STRANGE SOBBING! FORGET YOUR STRANGE SOBBING TO THE LAST! BRANDISH YOUR FACES OVER YOUR HEAD, GO TO SILENCE! WITH OR WITHOUT YOUR FACES, WALK TO SILENCE!
• For Eleven Dreams of Soot, the title could have also been Meeting at Bolcho-Pride, or Fire Deep Down Below or Station in the Heart of the Flames or Granny Holgolde’s Stories or The Liars’ Bridge or Eve of Battle after the Defeat, or Never without My Embers, or Good-Bye to Death, or Fire Stories, or Terminal Childhoods, or Granny Holgolde’s Childish Sickness, or even The Nursing Home Is in the Line of Fire, etc. Inside the prison we change our titles again and again, we exchange our authorial identities, our wartime identities, our detainee identities, again and again, without paying any heed to our original sexual or ethnic identities or any resemblance to actual legal status.
• We exchange our texts and our poems’ titles, we exchange our screams of despair, we confuse our insanity, we mix up our physical and mental degradations, we merge together, we shamanize together, we are locked up for the same reasons, we have the same memories of horrors and battles, we draw our stories from the same murky wellspring of madness, revolutions, and wars, we have experienced the same adventures.
• We have experienced the same blinding loves. We remain faithful to our beloveds despite death’s abominations, we never renounce egalitarian ideology and our maximum program no matter how much our hope for victory has turned to ashes.
• Our readers are gathered into a circle around us and they wait. They do not hope for the same thing we do, but they listen without hurling stones at us and they wait.
• Our sympathizing readers share blinding love with us. Deep within love scenes, their nostalgia pulsates in harmony with our own.
• The enemy is always present and the text speaks to him as well, which is why we increase the oratorical measures: talking about something else, modifying the places and names, turning one’s attention toward the accessory, confessing the impossible, manipulating information, distorting data, accumulating unresolved enigmas, making the unbearable fantastical, feigning naïveté, feigning incomprehension, passionately insisting on what doesn’t concern us, hiding the war within reflections of moonlight on calm water, feigning literature.
• From the beginning, from the first arrests, the first encounters with fire, the first attacks, the first executions: we grafted the Bardo within ourselves evasively.
• We suffer from many chronic ailments, including madness and cancer, but we should add painful access to polyphonic fever, along with, of course, a severe oneiric incontinence.
• Crossing the Bardo happens in the most complete solitude. The traveler walks without companion over the ashen lands of his or her own nothingness. But at least he or she can talk with specters, the welcoming deities and the terrible deities that spring at every moment out of his or her memory. He or she brings them to mind and speaks to them. It’s neither a real dialogue nor a true monologue, but something has happened, with words, lies, and dreams, and the task of every post-exotic writer is to reproduce it, and to make of it poetry and silence.
• ABANDON THE IDEA OF TRAVELING! NO MATTER WHICH WAY, TURN AROUND! NO MATTER HOW YOU DIE, DON’T REINCARNATE IN A RUSH! DISGUISE YOURSELF IN A LOST BODY! KEEP YOUR DREAM IN A BAG!
• NO MATTER YOUR LANGUAGE, DON’T TALK! GO WITH YOUR SCREAM! NEVER DECODE IT!
• The books speak. Here are the books. They are so numerous now. Their voices rise over each other. Their authors pile up, incarnate themselves, reincarnate themselves. The spokesperson’s words: “I am part of the group. I can carry these books’ words until they become books outside these walls. We are all always on the same wavelength.” After these words: “But the task sometimes seems impossible. It’s possible I can’t keep on chattering in everyone’s name for long.” Then the spokesperson clears his throat, stands up straight, and continues from where he had broken off: “It’s late,” he finally says. “We must finish. Thank you for accompanying us this far.”
This piece was first published on remue.net as part of a dossier titled “Écrire un roman aujourd’hui” on January 11, 2014, and translated into English on January 11, 2015.
This is the second part of the essay. Part One is available here
Jeffrey Zuckerman is Digital Editor at Music & Literature Magazine. His writing and translations have appeared in Tin House, Best European Fiction, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and The White Review. He is currently translating Antoine Volodine’s Radiant Terminus for Open Letter Books