And so the author vanishes—that spoiled child of ignorance—to give place to a more thoughtful person, a person who will know that the author is a machine, and will know how this machine works.
“Cybernetics and Ghosts” in Uses of Literature, Italo Calvino (1980)
Antoine Volodine’s Mevlido’s Dreams folds fitfully into the universe of post-exoticism, a space of self-enclosure. It settles resignedly onto the jagged edge left behind after the failure of revolutions, another text among the forty-nine novels of post-exoticism—forty-three published by a collective, under pseudonyms. How many pseudonyms? Antoine Volodine is himself an invention, yet, as spokesperson for the collective, he names its other members as Elli Kronauer, Lutz Bassmann, and Manuela Draeger and provides commentary upon the translations of their texts to English. In Volodine’s Post Exoticism in Ten Lessons, Lesson Eleven (1998), the narrative also names Maria Schrag, Julio Sternhagen, Anita Negrini, Irina Kobayashi, Rita Hoo, Iakoub Khadjbakiro, Lilith Schwak, and many others as authors.
The scholar David Bellos cites Lionel Ruffel’s study of post-exoticism, published in French as Volodine post-exotique, as the definitive text that contains a list of Volodine’s translations. In an interview with Jean-Louis Hippolyte, Volodine himself states that the final post-exotic book will be published under a collective which will put an end to the business of authorship once and for all. He says in Post-Exoticism and Its Voices, “The first-person singular serves to accompany the voices of others, it means nothing more than that.”
As such, the encounter with this “post-exoticism” is overwhelming. Each text resembles the other, demands to be read along—even as—the other. Mise en abmye, certainly, but Bellos calls it “more than mise-en-abyme. Literature is the only form of existence of the post-exotic world; post-exotic literature is the world it represents. Literature, in Volodine’s deeply thoughtful enactment of it, is the demiurge creating its own subject, which is itself.” Then there’s the matter of the quasi-movement’s influences, resemblances, and leaking inflections—in criticism and scholarship as well as in fiction. It is likely that we have to give up the fiction of authorship to read post-exoticism.
Volodine called his form “anarcho-fantastic post exoticism” first, which only in later tellings was narrowed to “post-exoticism.” Within post-exoticism, too, are further invented movements, genres, and styles (paratexts such as the romånces, shaggås, the nouvelle, narrats, the leçons, féeries, and more). Particular novels often correspond to one or the other form—worse still, they mingle, become bastards and hybrids as well. The monstrosity of literature coalesces with the monstrosity of characters—minor, passing, repeating—becoming the motif of an arachnid, a dream, an institutional position or an ideological one. The still-beating heart of all this, heard through the floorboards of dystopia and dreams, is anti-humanism. But, before it can be recorded with any certainty, post-exoticism will remind you that this anti-humanism is an account of humanism’s world-historic failure.
To say anything about Mevlido’s Dreams itself, one must begin here, in this aftermath. Oulang-Oulane, the city of the novel, is benighted, dark, and damp; too hot and humid. In other iterations of post-exoticism, we’re in Paris or Russia; in Mevlido’s Dreams we’re most likely within the set pieces of Hong Kong noir cinema: references are strewn throughout the text in the form of imagery (the seedy flats, the neon lights, the dank timelessness), but the most explicit is the innocuous detail that mevlido’s therapist is named Maggie Cheung, and mevlido keeps forgetting her real name. Light and darkness, too, are their own characters, their own unflappable prisons: The moon, for example, is hostile in how it withholds and overexposes spaces in the city. There are mutant fowl, and soldiers who have committed genocide in their childhood. The socialist, communist, communitarian collectives that once succeeded in this world, only to be replaced again by capitalism, persist in rituals of self-abnegation and urgency through onanistic performance. They defeatedly bumble through whatever functions are left to them—and so there is something of the buddy cop, the detective novel, the spy thriller to post-exoticism’s shifting guises. Of mevlido we read: “His culture will always be of defeat, of sabotage, of score-settling, of violence.”
mevlido’s function in society is one of the few productive roles remaining in the aftermath of socialist apocalypse. He has a job with the police—although it is never clear whether he acts as an officer infiltrating socialist camps, or as a socialist infiltrating the police, or even as a being of some larger bureaucracy that infiltrates this particularly ruined world. We know, however, that his role is subversive, a dissenter who has forgotten his initial purpose for dissension, seeking only to be reunited with his lover, Verena Becker, who was killed by child soldiers twenty years ago.
He [mevlido] will have to construct his survival in a context of genetic mutation, moral turpitude, technological regress, duplicity, and forgetfulness. He will become just one more left behind like all the others. Like many demobilized soldiers, he will end up joining the most disdained of the social structures put on place by the pacifiers—he will join the police.
His fate is ours, that of the subhuman and the vanquished.
The aftermath that mevlido exists within—the one that post-exotic narratives persist in keeping alive—is neither innocuous nor banal. It is the result of the failure of various communists to stop the “re-establishment of capitalism.” This produces the effect of a satirical critique of Bolshevism, alive and well in a strangulated form, in a perverted form in the social structures of the police, the concentration camp, the ghetto—as well as the sectarian rituals of Stalinist bureaucracy. Where Fredric Jameson’s utopias are autotelic promises, these are dystopias of autotelic dissolution. [1]
But radical politics, and political acts, are at the heart of post-exoticism, whether in mevlido’s Dreams where strained attempts at action become dreams, or Post-Exoticsm in Ten Lessons, where jailed actors continue to evade sublimation, or even in the Buddhist rituals of reincarnation and escape in Bardo or Not Bardo (2016). Affectively, in style and form, post-exoticism keeps radical politics salient; it partakes of acts of directed dissimulation, infection, and evasion. For example, when it takes the position of the prison or the police, or any other state structure, it plays to the crime/detective novel—on the one hand, playing to and exceeding law but, on the other, placing readers and protagonists in positions of witnessing violence immediately. Headier still, it places the reader in a position of interrogation, skewering hermeneutics as surveillance for and of the state—nowhere more than in Post-Exoticism in Ten Lessons, in which scholarly journalists are akin to prison guards, demanding the authors explain themselves. As such, post-exoticism continually works through capture, proliferating to avoid co-optation or subsumption. [2]
For all their stochastic sojourns, post-exotic narratives work rather hard, showing their seams and stitches. mevlido’s Dreams, in particular, employs techniques of evasion—trailing off in ellipses and dispersing: “The next day, or rather, the following night./In those days every night was like the rest …” or moving into oneric dimensions from one page to another; double-talk: “Touch me with your vertebrae, Yasar”; choral repetition: “The night rippled like the air in a furnace./The night./It rippled like the air in a furnace”; parataxis and hypotaxis and catechism: “ONLY KILL AFTER YOUR DEATH/KILL THE DEATH IN YOU”; new forms and heteronyms: “Ulan Bator”, “the romance”, “Manuela Drager”; paranoid reading: the “hostile moon”, “invading” moon; the sudden insertion of the first person: “I’ve already spoken about this … The moon. Its role in our story”; and intertextuality, then polyphony. All are used in excess and as propagation. Melvido’s Dreams, like the other post-exotic narratives, is incorrigibly annotative—annoyingly, enthrallingly so. And while it shares with the Oulipian and other post-modern traditions an emphasis on meta-fictive worlds and puzzles, it keeps shifting gears to reveal only non-answers and stratagems. There is no thread that does not become a complicated nexus when followed by the reader. At best, it is fictive; at best, figural; at best, inconspicuously infectious.
Post-exoticism is related to science fiction not only by being self-enclosed or inventive, as David Bellos remarks; it remains within the ambit of the genre. [3] It draws on established science fiction traditions, such as the Russian science fiction of the Arkady brothers, the post-nuclear novel of the golden age, the Cold War dystopias of Stanislaw Lem or Philip K. Dick. Its palette is often a retro futurism, a bleak, overexposed monochrome. It is exceedingly cinematic. In a seminal interview, Volodine says:
Most of our narrators have a shamanic way of telling stories. They speak to evoke history, but they also create characters to go with them, or instead of them, down the difficult path of fiction, their painful path toward memories, toward the present, or toward black space. Narrators assume this somewhat priestly function, and in this way, they don’t just tell stories, they also live them. Entering a post-exotic anecdote or image is often accompanied by a trance. The reader doesn’t simply watch a story—passively, objectively—he or she is invited to plunge into the image, into a cinematic succession of images, to psychically and maybe physically accompany the shamans who speak, repeat, and sing the story.
It may appear—to readers of contemporary science fiction—that post-exoticism reads like hard science fiction, yet there isn’t any technological science to it. Dreams, or dream worlds, take the place of physics and come with their own intricate and brutal rules. It is didactic, but to no determinate end. In mevlido’s Dreams, we traverse through worlds of differentiated cadres from failed revolutions, and through small, cramped spaces that negate breath. One emerges from a post-exotic novel feeling like there’s a lot of Beckett in there: a tinge of a corpsed, dead world, which remains, to its end, unnameable. [4]
There is also the relation of post-exoticism with the outside: The form’s very name arrives by way of the other “post”-prefixed literatures (“post-colonial”, “post-modern”), as well as through association to exoticization of the other. This is the source, of course, of Volodine’s contention that post-exoticism is the language of the “foreign other” translated into French. And then translated to English, lest we forget—Stamm’s translation of mevlido’s Dreams doubles down on this solitude and alienation. This particular novel’s tendency is to render anew temporality, memory of devastation, and collective struggle. In another way, then, Volodine’s excess and evasion marks the limits of incorporating the alien into the interiority of a text, a character, or a world.
Ultimately, the novel largely situates itself within mevlido’s attempts to discover where he is and to return to his wife. We still return to the revolution in the novel, and not to the stratagems of evading capture (of which there are many), nor only to the witnessing of the other (despite the traumatic recollections), nor to the limitless proliferation of a text without end (not Finnegans Wake [1939] anew). We return to the revolution as an act outside of biography, personalization, chronology, of bringing a relational politics of otherness into historicized experience and immediacy. In mevlido’s Dreams, we constantly move from dream to dream in an attempt to get somewhere, to keep alive the promise and meaning of our existence.
Drawing on Kristin Ross, there is something of the question of function (that is, the position, role, place of a text or event in historical politics) when we run back to the police and the prison:
In the immediate aftermath of ’68, years that saw a veritable hypertrophy of the French state in response to a palpable panic among the elites, French theory became populated with police figures. The police appear regularly … Thirty years later, the trace of May and its aftermath can still be found in Rancière’s theoretical conceptualization of “the police” as the order of distribution of bodies as a community, as the way places, powers, and functions are managed in the state’s production of a chosen social order, and in his analysis of politics.
The buddy cop, the crime drama: The police politicize and order novels after revolution and in history and sociology. As Ross says, “May [1968] was a crisis in functionalism.” [5] mevlido’s Dreams depicts a crisis of function, moving readers from tenement to police stations to party meeting to bureaucracy, staying within none of them coherently. Post-exoticism proliferates, produces, overwhelms—only to make nothing function like it should, only to record affective polyphony in the contemporary moment of endless literature, endless barbarism, endless unreality. mevlido’s Dreams, like the other post-exotic novels, records this crisis of function as ongoing. We do not know what we have lost, even if we remember it.
Endnotes
[1] It may be appropriate to mention that Volodine “was born in 1950, came of age during the 1968 student protests in Paris, and taught Russian in France for some fifteen years before devoting himself entirely to writing. His debut, Comparative Biography of Jorian Murgrave, appeared in France in 1985.” Not much is known, but this biographical detail has been recorded by translators J. T. Mahany and Jeffrey Zuckerman in an interview in The Paris Review. [return]
[2] Lionel Ruffel writes that this is like being “ensnared by fiction, projected into the examiner’s position, forcing the meaning of the text.” [return]
[3] Volodine won the French Grand Prix de l'Imaginaire for Rituel du mépris, variante Moldscher in 1987. Radiant Terminus (translated by Jeffrey Zuckerman, Open Letter, 2017) has commonly been called the most science-fictional. [return]
[4] Bruno George’s unpublished doctoral thesis, After The End: Antoine Volodine and Samuel Beckett traces the many relationships of post-exoticism to Maurice Blanchot and Beckett. [return]
[5] Kristin Ross, May ’68 and Its Afterlives, The University of Chicago Press, 2002. [return]