SubStance

SubStance 32.2 (2003) 64-66

Post-Exoticism, or Internal Literatures

Charif Majdalani

When I asked Antoine Volodine for a possible title of a future conference on his work, he replied, "Writing a Foreign Literature in French." This apparent paradox proposed by the novelist suggests that his work is similar to a literature from elsewhere—exotic—and therefore somewhat incomprehensible to his readers, like a foreign text that has been translated but stripped of any information on all the references that point back to its culture of origin.

However, not all of Volodine's texts could be called "foreign." In fact, Volodine's oeuvre can be divided into two parts. First of all, it describes a world of detention camps, a terrifying prison world where hundreds of inmates live. And despite the fact that we can't immediately situate this world, it is perfectly understandable. It harks back to a kind of archetype of the prison camp world, under the thumb of a totalitarian power—a universe and powers that have marked the twentieth century. But Volodine's oeuvre also recounts something else—or, at least, gives expression to, opens out onto other oeuvres arising from the very heart of this prison-camp world—works whose authors are prisoners, inmates. And it is this literature, this novelistic production of the camps, which seems exotic and even more—which presents itself as literally schizophrenic, autistic, closed in on itself and refusing any contact with what is not itself, with the outside world beyond the camps. Admittedly, there would be a lot to say about this outside world. However, the main thing is that it is an intra-novelistic "outside," corresponding to the outside world ruled by an obscure totalitarianism that is responsible for the existence of the camps. But this "outside" is also very probably extra-novelistic; it is constituted by the world of Volodine's readers themselves. In a metaphorical or analogical way, the schism between inside and outside proclaimed by the post-exotic novelists can easily appear as the expression of an awareness, ever-clearer and more painful, of the schism between, on the one hand, the writer immured in a stubbornness to speak outside of all worlds, outside of all conventions, in his own language, and, on the other hand, a world that no longer pays attention to literature, a world distracted by the interminable chatter of the media, a world that turns [End Page 64] away from authentic voices, and whose historic and social conditions (veritable or media totalitarianism, flabby democracy, conveyor of mediocrity and of a self-forgetting, according to Volodine) are the proximate or distant causes for literature's becoming "inaudible."

Thus Volodine's work is presented on two levels. The first recounts the camps and all their variations (torture chambers, interrogation cells, pseudo-psychiatric asylums) and thereby the genesis of post-exotic literature itself, which arises from this setting. These descriptions can be explicit (as in Vue sur l'ossuaire, Le Post-exotisme en dixleçons, leçon onze, Nuit blanche en Balkhyrie, and, very differently, in Lisbonne, dernièremarge), or implicit, (as in Des anges mineurs). The second level is constituted by the post-exotic texts themselves, which are interlocking or which finish, as in Des anges mineurs, by occupying the entire space of the novel. The post-exotic texts constitute a veritable literature, with its own laws, rules, genres, language and history, because the Volodinian universe of incarceration is a world unto itself, as old as the hills, where one lives, where one dies, and where, between life and death, writing (or simply the act of composing texts, of reciting them, of murmuring them to other prisoners, of recopying them if one has heard them composed and recited by another) appears as a last area of resistance to physical and mental oppression, to torture, to brainwashing. Here literature has a capital, Voltarian function, since it is the last refuge against the horrors of the world and against human barbarism.

Post-exoticism is thus an internal literature for more than one reason. First, it is a...