SubStance

SubStance 32.2 (2003) 67-78

Minor Angels:
Toward an Aesthetics of Conflict

Jean-Louis Hippolyte

If, some time in the future, a literary critic or a cultural anthropologist were to conduct a survey of literature from its beginnings up until the end of the twentieth century, that scholar would realize that representations of violence and conflict feature prominently across periods, traditions and genres. She or he would then come to the realization that it is the war narrative, from Greek epics to historiographic metafictions, that has most significantly contributed to the popularization of violence in literature. If this critic were to pursue his or her inquiries further, and attempted to catalogue works that address the related issues of conflictual violence and war, he or she would have to include, among many: Agrippa d'Aubigné (Les tragiques), Rabelais (Pantagruel, Gargantua), Voltaire (Candide), Victor Hugo (Les orientales, La légende des siècles), Gustave Flaubert (Salâmmbo), Maupassant (Boule de suif), Zola (La débâcle), Malraux (Les conquérants), Sartre (Les mains sales), Patrick Modiano (La place de l'étoile), and Jean Rouaud (Les champs d'honneur). In an addendum to this prestigious list, our critic would then list a somewhat less-known writer who went by the pen-name of Antoine Volodine. Having added Volodine's name to the footnotes of his or her magnum opus, and sent the final manuscript to the publisher, our critic would think no more of it, and go on to pursue other lofty academic projects. A few days later, a commando of anonymous radicals would seize the manuscript, drown the unsuspecting editor in his own blood, and finally set our unsuspecting critic on fire with the pages of his or her book. At this point, you will have guessed that, for Antoine Volodine, literature "is" a serious business, and that, like Prometheus, one always gets burned when one plays with fire.

Antoine Volodine does not write about the war-related calamities that have plagued the twentieth century, from the horrors of Auschwitz and the Kolima, to the protracted ethnic conflicts and stillborn revolutions of the post-Soviet era. Yet these events constitute a likely backdrop to his texts. What Volodine writes about is the slow and fatal agony of the revolution. The narrators of his novels are former activists, anarchists and dissidents who have been committed to state-run psychiatric institutions and gulags. [End Page 67] In the privacy of their own cell, between and during torture sessions, they write. They write their memories of the revolution, of the glory days of the revolution, they write their egalitarian dreams, their hopes, all eliminated and destroyed. They write to each other, exclusively, despite the incessant interference of state censors, and the occasional beating that tends to disrupt their storytelling in more ways than one. Their narratives end up constituting a complex web of interconnected texts, invariably radical, designed to violate aesthetic canons. The sum of these texts constitutes what Volodine calls the post-exotic archive (343 titles total), and includes such arcane titles as Du bon usage de la guillotine au coucher du soleil, Kromwell appelle Tassili, and its sequels, or prequels, Tassili appelle Korogho, Euwe appelle Tassili, Igor Euwe appelle Igor Euwe, as well as the cryptically allegorical De l'interdiction des lancers de nains et de ses conséquences sur l'environnement.

The post-exotic universe is a world devastated by wars, a dystopia where violence has marred reference points, erasing geographical, historical and ontological differences. Violence is, as we know, the behavioral component of aggression, but the violence of the post-exotic chaosphere goes beyond the mere depiction of violent scenes or acts. Rather, violence operates here as a narrative device, used for dramatic purposes, forcing characters and events toward a brutal and often gruesome end. If violence is, as the Webster's states, "an intense and directed action toward a person or object," it also points toward narrativity, plotting and rhetorical intent. And as importantly, it compels the text to reach its own end, its own closure (before its eventual revival in other...