Homage, homage (homage, homage)
Is coming back around (is coming back around)
Coming back through you (coming back through you)
Is something I can't understand (something I can't understand)
”HOMAGE”
To pick up from where I dropped the ball, namely, somewhere between the angels and the archaoelogy, and proceed into Volodine’s novel, Minor Angels (translated by Jordan Stump) with carpool at my throat—
Names change; they designate nothing more than a moment in time. Volodine continues vexing identity by having the angels play double roles, living under different names, acting out different parts of themselves.
Identity is ‘fragmented’, and the names toggle between persons and cover stories. So we meet "Sofia" in the nursing home, where she sorts and delivers mail to the crones, and the role of letters is salvific, as letters carry the words of other worlds into the prisons of this one. But the experiments conducted on the crones to study their immortality are finished: scientific interest has moved on. What remains are the scent memories of apparatuses, rubber sheets, and dental prostheses. The smell of the future is rich in plastic apparatus!
Every angel does the grunt-work speaking for ghosts. There is no single voice that remains singular.
"Unknown martyrs and anonymous mostly red peoples spoke through the voice of the old women, and now they speak through the voice of Will Scheideman."
Here, Volodine applies what he has called "the practice of homage," allowing the voices of the missing to be taken up by others who refuse their disappearance, who reject the feel of ending, itself.
“I’ve never done something where the sound alone is already an entire film…
where there’s so much to hear simultaneously, because so much is being told.”
- Wim Wenders on Wings of Desire, with its overhearing angels
CRONES, EPIC CORRECTIVES, AND FAILED REVOLUTIONISTS
The post-cataclysmic landscape of Minor Angels includes the "battered facades" of big avenues, the "gaping wounds" where buildings once stood, the ruins of consumerist temples and shopping malls; this field of debris continues expanding, swallowing, enveloping the world. The "barbarism" of the present is laid, loosely, against the lustrousness of remembered revolutionary ideals. The background noise is the "roar of the marketplace," but the real sound, the anchor, is the "clapping of little waves, the clapping made by loving bodies in an embrace." There are prisoners and those who demand their own execution for betraying the cause – for allowing the mafias and capitalists to take over.
The 12th narract belongs to Varvalia Lodanka, one of the formative revolutionists, a “crone” who invokes the choral repetitions of Greek tragedy, retracing the litany "before us, we see," layering memories, names, and places from motion which resembles the percussive effects of a jazz brush circling a top-hat drum. Lodanka names the offenders: "the multi-national mafia", the "duplicitous language" that erases the poor, the present, the folk wisdom.
Will Scheidenmann slumps on the bed in Varvalia Lodanka's yurt, a place he never felt at home, imagining the sixteen years since he had left, and the time before his birth: "the time of the dormitory, where his grandmother's manipulated his embryonic form and growled over his body to fill him with their vision of the world."
Annoyed by the disruptive voices of memory, Will, who "hates being interrupted when ... reciting a strange narract," realizes the crones know him so well that they recognize him in any costume, any voice, any uniform.
After a crone calls him out on the narract, Will admits:
"I gave him that name so I wouldn't seem to be forever speaking of myself and never of anyone else. But it was me."
It is always me or us in the post-exotic oneirism; the one includes the countless. The we invokes the silenced. Does this conflict with the speakers’ refusals to be indicted for the past, as one sees in the monologue on “what matters” written "in the language of today and no other”?
The past is not something he can be responsible for, the speaker assures the reader.
"To build new ruins without shame, or, at least, to live without shame in the endless ruins before them:" this is what Volodine's characters were free to do after "the corrective epic of our Varvalia Lodenko, her appeals for a massacre of the powerful, her nostalgia for a total abolition of every sort of privilege" had taken place. The question isn't whether Varvalia's daydream was "right-minded". To interrogate it in this way would be to re-enact its massacres in reaction, to answer by affirming the importance of the end. Varvalia's goal was "to rip out the human roots of unhappiness"; another angel admits to assisting her with assassinations on an as-needed basis. The matter-of-fact narrative tone isn’t quite confessional, nor is it penitent.
“Mao Zedong said that the revolution “is not a dinner party,” Volodine has said:
Post-exoticism stages stories and projects images that have nothing to do with elegant descriptions of “dinner parties.” The stories often take place in the ruins of war, after the disasters of ethnic cleansings, after failed revolutions, atrocious counterrevolutions, in societies where violence, social injustice, and capricious masters hold sway.
Books and stories preserve the past but they also defy it completely, and forge new fantasies that may become actionable as a future. “What we had called post-exoticism,” Volodine writes in J. T. Mahany’s translation of Post-Exoticism in Ten Lessons, Lesson Eleven:
“ . . . was a construction connected to revolutionary shamanism and literature, literature that was either written by hand or learned by heart and recited, as the administration through the years would sometimes forbid us any paper material; it was an interior construction, a withdrawal, a secret welcoming land, but also something offensive that participated in the plot of certain unarmed individuals against the capitalist world and its countless ignominies.”
Volodine has said a “backfiction” lies behind post-exotic narratives. Again, one senses an unarticulated loyalty on the author’s part—-something he wishes to say without being responsible for having said it. In that sense, he is a time-bound as the rest of us.
ASIDE WHEREIN MY TIME DIFFERS FROM THAT OF THE ANGELS
If I were a better person, I’d excerpt the long quotes on advantages and hypocrisy found on page 32. But no one has the proper time to fulfill the duties of imagining to be the person they determined as better. My time differs from that of the angels, in the fullness of its etc.
THE PORT OF THE “WE” WE MUST BE UNTO OTHERS
In narract 34, Malecka Bayarlag describes life on a ship in a port plagued by power outages, physical fights among sailors in hard-bitten poses. As a self-described “subhuman” with some knowledge of shamanism, Malika locates a town in Peru from the dreams of a woman he slept with, and the dreams pass through the bodies of lovers like settings. This is the setting Volodine and gives us, namely, the place as trumped by others who passed through prior. The perspective tangoes through multiple minds remembering lovers, beds, ports. These "interior worlds" impinge continuously on conversations between characters, as when a ship captain remembers "his most absurd convictions," namely the love a man has for a son back when sons existed, when fatherhood was a locus of identity.
Safe harbor vs. the Untermenge one must be to others. But safe harbor is simply the act of narrating —- or “narracting”— the story. Hannah Arendt’s ghost tips her cigarette holder over narract 41, in which Constanzo Cossu describes the mass displacements of the End-Times, and the significance of the refugee's legal status. The refugee tries to buy his way to safety with gold, but the ship will not accept him. He begs the watchman to let him on as a company baggage, or to be in the untermenge category, or even to be added as a "a cadaver . . . As miscellaneous merchandise" or a "found object." Finally, he begs the watchman to accept him as "an extraterrestrial covered with ants," but the watchman does not reply. It's business as usual for borders.
“THIS CONFUSION OF ONE WORD FOR ANOTHER”
In a month without rain or magnetic storms, a narract shifts from Witold Yanschog to the second person address. The epistolary nature of the narract glimmers after claims of "shamanically-assisted copulation," which the speaker asserts as "this confusion of one word for another."
"I wouldn't like to be penetrated by an admirer of the capitalist system,” one lover says to another in quotation.
A character quotes his love interest back to her across memory, and then overnarrates Witold Yanschog, who might "dream of her and her naked body as he lay on top of you." The next line goes on to explain or qualify: “I say you, I used the second person singular to avoid continually saying Bella Mardirassian, and so it won't seem that I only talk about myself and my own experiences.”
This is how the son speaks to the crones who want to know what happened to their friends that were imprisoned. The fate of the disappeared is the hearth and hedge of this novel. At one point, Scheidemann does locate himself in time, saying he has been in the yurts for sixteen years since being pardoned. In the apocalypse, as in the beginning, "the distances were not on a the human scale.
Antoine Volodine in conversation with Jeffrey Zuckerman, Paris Review (July 8, 2015)
NEVER TRUST A NARRATOR OR A NARRACT
Hierarchy doesn’t vanish in Volodine’s post-apocalypse. Status-seeking behavior characterizes life in the camps. Loyalty to the nouveau-riche is frowned upon – better to identify as a "rubble-clearer." The questions posed by class-related identification are not elided.
And how effective, really, identity becomes when it buffs itself into a proper elite. Sex aside (for there is not enough of it), our species’ polymorphous perversity peaks at rationalizing massacres, genocide, and holy wars. Give us a gun and we’ll find something to shoot. Better still, send a cloud-carrying revelation across the green or the screen, a revelation that makes some of us part of a chosen, secret elect anointed to usher in the Future. *
Whether one calls it the Vanguard, the 144,000, the Saved, the Miraculous, the Remnant, the Q-Cave, Strauss’ Exoteric Readers, Bohemian Grovers, or the Billionaire League, the self-anointed Elect have everything to gain from disdaining the average and ordinary humans who deliver their groceries and struggle to budget healthcare deductibles. * Volodine's angels don't belong to a creed or nation; postexoticism, according to Volodine, remains a "foreign literature written in French."
Although there are many mothers, children are mostly absent from Volodine's scenes.
The world is old or middle-aged: it has lost its youth like a teen in an early fiction by Mircea Eliade.
Is this sort of lost youth consistent with the sort of Neo-Buddhism Voldodine has described? Is the absence of gender accomplished?
“The writer is a male-identifying human,” I said to my partner while reading Minor Angels on the small portion of sofa left to me by our dog.
“How can you tell?” he asked.
“I can just smell it,” I replied. “He thinks blood is tremendous and unusual. He fears like a man.”
To be clear, women play ‘leading’ roles in the novel— they drive the vehicles, they turn off the lights over their designer license plates at night. Yashreene Kagen, Linda Siew, each name too crowded by cultural resonances to provide a stable cultural referent. I think there are many ways to read this, and one of them is obvious: Volodine refuses to be read through conventional gender or genre commitments. The question of whether he earns this right is, I think, a different one. This confusion of one word for another makes interpretation shaky.
Never trust a narrator—- including yours truly.
OTHER “INFRASTRUCTURES OF THE APOCALYPSE”
Back on my bullshit, namely the last horse of the apocalypse, staring at the burning skyline and wondering if the end of teleology can lead us backwards-forward into a hopeful post-catastrophism.
Apocalypse trends in hard times, Dan Sinykin noted in “The End of the World As We Know It,” an essay surveying literary apocalypso, or what he calls "a form concerned with the possibility of redemption through destruction." The Book of Revelation abandoned the prophetic tradition of warning against apocalypse, focusing instead on how the world would look when God brought it to an end. Prophecy assumes that humans can change their ways, or that one's actions have a relationship to outcome. Not so with the apocalypse's dead end: the warnings don't matter when it's over. Sinykin interrogates the doom-note created by the abundance of "Christian apocalyptic narratives that find a self-fulfilling prophecy in the devastation around us."
By looking for signs of end-times, we commit to a sort of fatalism, an irrevocable despair that, to me, cannot be separated from the popularity of teleological takes. For it is teleology that abandons ontology for a reading of runes and signs, for a predicative direction that characterizes our ideas of Progress, apocalypse, salvation, exceptionalism. Sinkykin is right to notice salvationist dreamwork is tied to messianism—or, "the arrival of some transcendent rapture" that causes us to lean into fatalism (though I suspect this depends on one's position as a consumer or creator of time, as a spectator or maker of revolution). The idea of an ending foregrounds the marketplace of afterlives; it draws significance to belief; we choose which god, deity or lifestyle is preferable to rule the end-times.
Enter Sinykin's discussion of Jessica Harley's Infrastructures of the Apocalypse: American Literature and the Nuclear Complex, which looks at writers working inside "colonial tradition" to imagine "forms of escape without salvation." Harley rejects what others take as Walter Benjamin's "redeemed time," aiming instead for a "non-utopian reorientation", a "narrative embrace of futurelessness," or what she calls "transfiguration."
If my lasso seems rodeos away from Volodine's minor angels, it may be due to our difficulty in imagining other ways of being, living, surviving, and thriving. Capitalist realism, which Mark Fisher defined as "the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it," is as critical to Volodine's angels as it is to Harley's transfiguration.
The most compelling hitch in Volodine's hierophany is it’s refusal to divest from hope. Instead, his characters invest in the look of longing, in memory, in places treasured by intimacy. The traces of angels sacralize the gaze. Volodine's postexoticism privileges the unseen and invisible: it is the immaterial that signifies.
In a prior conversation, Volodine suggested that postexoticism de-fangs the apocryphal, normalizing the apocalypse as a condition rather than a party fetish, an aberrance, or a religious revenge-fantasy. This sounds like a way of welcoming Fisher’s encouragement to imagine the impossible, and to question the possibilities inherent in the construction of the definition. We leftists are terrible at this part—- the imagining, I mean; the labor of visioning a scene without staging the shoot-out and congratulating ourselves on how we have used the master’s tools to temporarily take over the master’s house. I am paraphrasing Audre Lorde because her voice is significant, and her theory remains critical.
There is money to be made from the problem-solving, self-helping passion of the neoliberal subject. Thinking outside the given formulations requires facing the terror of the unpredictable and losing old labels, nations, names, all the ways we know ourselves, all the ways we are known by others, all the assumptions that keep us from knowing how to live in the present. Or what the present involves.
What comes after the death of prescriptions for personal and collective self-actualization? Perhaps something collaborative, non-redemptive, anterior to eschatology. If apocalypse is insignificant, then Progress, itself, is challenged by the Volodine's commitment to narrative polyphony and non-linearity.
Volodine as photographed in 2014 by Samuel Kirszenbaum.
AU FIN, NON-FIN!
I like Volodine’s eyebrows. And his Minor Angels.
The book jacket refers to Volodine as a "Slavic writer," which begs the old question of how much a group can “describe” us. Or what we hope to achieve by affiliating ourselves with such a description. And whether an affiliative description is an inscription, a thing that makes us, an identifier that flirts with the possibility of self-definition while absconding the labor of meaning anything.
Volodine drills holes in time and refuses to resolve the disorienting effects of such temporal fracking. I like that about him. Perforations in time won't kill us. Volodine's minor angels, like those demoted from the church canon, give us incisions in time which aren't incisive, cuts which aren't decisive in the way we have come to expect a progress of time, of the history that is part of a process requiring expert explanation.
Conventionally, historians produce meaning by explaining the event (why a war begins, what ends it), and perhaps the momentum of directionality overdetermines the present in relation to the past or future. In the ambiguous terrain between imagination and reality, Volodine proffers no Hegelian climax, no proper end of history—there is a "journey towards nothingness" which layers narracts of tender, witnessed connection. But there is also a longing that feels radical in context. Where Guido Morselli's final fiction builds post-catastrophe from the loneliness of last-man syndrome, Volodine evokes a more sentimental post-disaster phase, where humans seek to preserve connections among themselves and their stories.
I’m not arguing for pastoralia. There is no golden age worth huffing. A sentimental affection for stories doesn’t imply a longing for Edenic innocence. * Does innocence exist in story unmortified by sin and expiation? My daughter has stopped asking me to tell her a story at night.
Look, one comes to the post-catastrophic novel imperfectly, lugging the culture’s apocalyptic assumptions. Teleological ordering points towards finality, that dot of an end point in which time is fulfilled. I’m not sure it’s fair to say Volodine entertains teleology as much as he attempts to reveal a space beyond it. The dreams of the reader are the text. Dreams are precise because they aren't infected by capitalist realism—-they are as real as the inaudible pain of unwatered porch plants, and “listening” to the lamentations of plants widene our perception of the possible.
There is an illicit metaphysicalism, a supranatural voyeurism, involved in perusing the dream-states of others.* Overhearing a dream is like reading a stranger's intimate letter.
As a communicative form, the dream is private, expressible, fragmented. In recalling our own dreams aloud, we become voyeurs of the self, voyeurs of the sleeping self whom we can never meet in real life, since to wake is to become a different self. There are so many selves in time, Volodine suggests.
If the dialectical oomph of the American consumerist fetish for self-actualization mirrors our former commitment to historical progress, Volodine offers fiction against the self's final product. There is no ideal human, no final perfection. By expanding time to make space for the expunged angels, Volodine avoids overdetermined good vs. evil binaries. We read him to overhear the future, or enter the realm of anti-capitalist realism. "It's memories that I'm stealing," whispers Tom Waits. We're innocent when we dream.
Alternative Ways of Reading; i.e. the asterisks
“…once they’ve received the revelation that makes them part of a chosen, secret elect anointed to usher in the future.”: For the elitism of the vanguard, the hierarchy of status based on access to Party politics, see Henri Lefevbre's life-long effort to create a Marxist sociology that would dethrone the idea of labor as a solution to alienation.
“… and struggle to budget healthcare deductibles.”: Monks are interesting in that they withdraw from the world in order to save the world, and their vows to community are metaphysical commitments that balance between collective embodiment, devotion, and solitude, usually on the basis of their own vision or revelatory event. Unlike the monk who belongs to an order, the mystic heads for the desert and drafts maps from found signs. The mystics relationship to revelation is thicker, which is to say, their commitment to God is sustained by revelation more than ritual.
“A sentimental affection for stories doesn’t imply a longing for Edenic innocence.”: Does innocence exist in story unmortified by sin and expiation? My daughter has stopped asking me to tell her a story at night. “Things don’t happen in life the way they do in your stories,” she tells me when I offer an unsolicited one. The value of stories depends on the expectations we bring to our ontologies at any given moment in time.
“There is a sense of metaphysical illicitness, a supranatural voyeurism, in perusing the dream-states of others.”: For variations of the relationship between dreams and voyeurism, see Hugh Fulham-McQuillan's fabulous essay in a recent issue of Firmament (Sublunary Editions).