SubStance

SubStance 32.2 (2003) 52-63

"The Clarity of Secrets"

Anne Roche

"He upsets a harmony without our knowing how he succeeds in doing it: perhaps because, used to the horror of Earth, we only see the alien horror he attempts to impose on Earth" (Jorian Murgrave, 95). Thus ponders Dojna, one of the two female soldiers sent to seek out Jorian Murgrave, the being (is he human?) who wants to destroy Earth. Thus perhaps thinks the reader, confronting the universe of Volodinian fictions, who shudders as he reads, and then, closing the book, looks peacefully on his daily horror—at least more comfortable than the desolate steppes or the ravaged cities where the characters wander. Also more reassuring than these paradoxical spaces where one advances without advancing, where the monastery promising refuge constantly eludes the advance of the two deserters, where the underground passages ineluctably lead to the same shop of the lute-player of the shadows. More reassuring than these no man's lands where dead people wander among several uncertain endings. Than these mental Moebius strips, where the linkage between dream and reality is imperceptibly made, where one can die in a dream, even if one awakens immediately in order to dodge the fire from flame-throwers, and where one investigates one's own death, at the risk of seeing oneself condemned to ashes: "Go away...you are dead..."

It is difficult to put your finger on what is being unhinged here, from one subconscious to another. The text calls upon historical references, but it would be a mistake to propose a kind of juxtalinear translation of Volodine's fictions into events of our twentieth or twenty-first centuries. But the temptation is great. The explicit setting of Lisbonne, dernière marge is a Portugal recently exalted by the Carnation Revolution, and the two protagonists are Germans born after World War II. Those readers who remember the 1970s can recognize in Ingrid Vogel's imaginary novel, Einige Einzelheiten über die Seele der Fälscher (Some Details on the Souls of Forgers), a certain number of indications that evoke with precision the Rote Armee Fraktion. Thus the characters in Ingrid's novel have in scattered form the first and last names of the members of that extreme leftist German group: Katalina Raspe (Jan-Karl Raspe), Verena Goergens (Irene Goergen), Angela Schiller (Angela Luther), [End Page 52] Gudrun Schubert (Gudrun Ensslin and Ingrid Schubert), Silke Proll (Astrid Proll), Ulrike Siepmann (Ulrike Meinhof). ¹ If the group itself is never named, its symbol is like a signature: "...enough blood to paint, on the wall of her room, a signature of revenge, with a five-pointed star and a sub-machine gun" (Lisbonne, 25), as well as allusions to "a life sentence on the fifth floor of Stammheim" (ibid., 10), ² or to "the rainy burial, the handful of sympathizers already carded and re-carded, members—in the widest sense—of the brood being exterminated" (ibid., 19). ³ The reader instantly recalls the burial of Pablo Neruda, in Chile, where all the participants were arrested, or the burial of Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin, filmed in Allemagne en automne (1977)—not unlike Volodine's burial of Slobodan-Kateth Minahualpa, which results in a dozen years of prison for those attending and 15 years of "special re-education" for the person giving the eulogy (Murgrave, 69-73, 75). And if the massacres and tortures that punctuate Volodine's novels do not lack earthly models, the white room with no exit where Astvo and Borshoïed find themselves trapped (ibid., 59) does not fail to evoke the sensorial isolation of Stammheim prison, as does the maximum security zone where Lutz Bassmann lies dying, at the other end of Volodine's oeuvre (Le post-exotisme en dix leçons, leçon onze).

This illustrates a whole strategy of writing in which the continuous bass drone of history doubles the narrative in a certain sense, occasionally emerging explicitly, as in the October Revolution, or in the portrait of Dzerjinski on Gabriella Bruna's wall (Dondog, 167). ⁴ And of...