Poétique, politique et traumatisme : Le Post-exotisme et ses témoins imaginaires

Abstract

These brief theoretical musings on post-exoticism take as their focus the issue of historical memory as it is raised by what one might call the strange “temporality of the disaster” in the works of Antoine Volodine and his various heteronyms. Taking this peculiar aspect of the poetics of post-exoticism as my starting point, I borrow from the Freudian theory of trauma in order to think through the implications of Volodine’s “literary” project for the complex relationship between fiction and reality, memory and politics, “literary lies” and historical testimony. In particular, I examine how a traumatic event might not only allow for, but effectively require precisely the kind of “imaginary” witnesses that populate the pages of the post-exotic fictions. On this reading, post-exoticism enacts a relationship to the event—and in particular to the traumatic defeat of the great egalitarian aspirations and political movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—that proves irreducible to any traditional forms of memory and narration, the “official” wardens of an impoverished, consensual, and resigned (indeed, repentant) reality. In Volodine & Co., the traumatic memory of political disaster instead gives rise to a flat-out rejection and active subversion of any and all traditional strategies of narration, recounting and reporting, by means of the continual, obsessive invention of new, dissident literary forms and genres of discourse designed to speak the unspeakable real of History.