Post-Exoticism in Ten Lessons, Lesson Eleven. Antoine Volodine
Her chest seemed to me like that of a cow or a cowgirl. Her breasts made an impression on me, but I don’t remember exactly what that impression was. For that matter, they weren’t of any interest to—Lutz Bassmann went first and kept his mouth shut the whole time. In order to break the drawn-out silence, the Niouki summarized the stages that, according to her, post-exoticism had passed through since Minor Angels, Maria Clementi’s first romånce, written in 1977. Several generations have followed, continued the Niouki, founded by the same implacable ideology of radical egalitarianism. But these generations have reflected, she said, moments of difference, fractures with contemporary history that have widened with time. As soon as she pronounced the “u” in “fractures,” a gust of rank air blew in under the door, from the monitoring room, and surrounded us, her, the recorder, and me. I remember the composition of this bouquet: wet cardboard, sewer rat, mosses found in public urinals (certainly from those at the top of the avenue), rotten seafood, laundry from the communal district, rust, sludge, scrap iron, vegetable soup, fritters. I analyzed and enumerated all of them, pretending to be sullenly meditating. I regret that I no longer know if, at the time, the shape of the journalist’s breasts displeased or charmed me, and if the other prisoners beheld her with rapacity or boredom, based on what they guessed of her body through the grille and through her clothing. The memory of our reactions would have added a bit of life to this hammered-out, heavy-voiced exposé, as if the Niouki were addressing a studious and humorless audience. The first generation included historical figures from the guerilla, discoursed the Niouki, those who hadn’t died with guns in hand and who one day had believed that the proletarian torrents would unfold in the capitals . . . that the poorest of the people would rally in incendiary utopias and triumph . . . and that they would put them into action around the globe . . . Maria Iguacel, Maria Arostegui, Julio Sternhagen, Maria Clementi, Maria Echenguyen, Irena Echenguyen, Maria Schrag, Wernieri, Maria Soudayeva, Wolfgang Gardel, Iakoub Khadjbakiro, to cite only some, had hoped for that . . . Once incarcerated, this vanquished army, this hard kernel of egalitarianism, discharged its unfaded passion under romanesque form . . . under disheveled form, under sumptuous, fantastical, exuberant forms, under thunderous form. It is evident that the Niouki, bogged down in the fact that she has always written in the aesthetic of the best sellers, was not speaking in these terms, but I recall that she tried to cheer Bassmann up by flattering him, evoking our names with grandiloquence. I also noticed that she avoided treating us like murderers or monsters. It was a period, she elaborated, when hope of global upheaval always vibrated somewhere on the surfaces of your texts. Correct, Niouki, I thought, the cornerstones of post-exotic literature were developed during the sixties . . . during those years when, in spite of defeat, the possibility of revival still remained . . . Years of underground hope, luminous despite the lead and despite the violence of the prisons, I told myself. While the Niouki’s didactic discourse spread, Lutz Bassman hadn’t opened his mouth at all. The Niouki swelled her mammal flesh to epic proportions, and she shook, reciting a speech she had doubtless already given on a talk show or at a conference in front of an audience of policemen and academics. The calendar indicated a springtime date, let’s say April, let’s say April thirteenth since false precisions are indispensable, since the act of speaking requires one to lie, then to rummage through minutia in one’s lies. April thirteenth or fourteenth. The rain beat against the walls of the prison, as it would during the days preceding Lutz Bassmann’s death, in that spring to which I have already alluded. Some streams bubbled on the outside, the damp spread, all the objects in the room looked like they had been coated in glue. The sewer odor dispersed, little by little. Bassmann sniffed. His eyes were open, but he wasn’t listening. He fixed his gaze not on the face of the journalist, nor on her breasts, but on the grille that divided the room in two. The iron stank less than in the rooms of the ordinary condemned, with the common criminals, as, on account of the political prisoners’ isolation, it rarely received their spit, their snot. Rarely, if ever. Visitors were permitted, in theory, but none ever came. Our contacts and allies had disappeared, our advocates had been mutilated or killed, one after the other. But let’s be brief. On the surface of your texts, the Niouki repeated while readjusting her bra. The rain grew in intensity. A hand moved and polished something on the tape recorder. No matter which mammary the Niouki emphasized, the police officer remained stony, only interested in the optimal quality of the sound. The Shaggå, the romånce, the interjoists, the fantasia, continued the Niouki, nodding, and the sub-genres such as the recitact, the lesson, and the narract, are present from the first lyric manifestations by the first-generation writers. And the murmuract? I thought. That fat cow forgot the murmuract. And we were wondering, Blotno and I, said the Niouki. Is this not an extraordinary phenomenon? You make up new literary genres that don’t seem experimental at all; instead they seem viable, and like they won’t
A debate both playful and erudite has always surrounded the question of the origins of the Shaggå. Several authors’ names occur in concurrence from which it must be determined who invented the form and who, subsequently, immediately afterward, materialized its beauty. This competition has no concrete base; its motive can be found neither in susceptibilities, nor acts of disloyalty. It is, quite simply, one of the poetic artifices by which the genre expresses its very, very great particularity.
The very first collection of Shaggås is signed Infernus Iohannes, the pseudonym behind which dozens of creators or post-exoticist collectives could have concealed themselves. Its title is Mirrors of the Cadaver; it came to light in 1979. Not much later, Myriam’s Silence by Jean Wolguelam (1979) and The Cold Princes by Maria Echenguyen (1980) appeared.
These three works established the rules of the genre, without which it would have spent much time groping about for a sense of itself. From its birth, the Shaggå has reached an unsurpassable level of perfection, a maturity that does not suffer from childish illness. Mirrors of the Cadaver is not an experimental prototype, but a work that belongs to the domain of post-exoticist academism. The authors who, as a result, have chosen the Shaggå as a mode of expression have not felt the need to alter any of its characteristics. To the contrary, they have imitated the canonical models, introducing no variants besides the inoffensive, under no pretext do they diverge from the path, ever vigilant to avoid betraying Infernus Iohannes.
A Shaggå always breaks down into two distinct textual masses: one part, a series of seven sequences rigorously identical in length and tone; the other, a commentary, in which the style and dimensions are free.
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