French as a Foreign Language: The Literary Enterprise of Antoine Volodine

Volodine’s fictions all resemble each other save for names and settings. They expose a world where the Revolution has failed and its protagonists are either dead, incarcerated, or holed up in the putrefying carcass of an abandoned building. Protagonists keep the memory of their political dreams alive by telling the stories of lost comrades, in works tapped out in code on the drainage pipes of a high-security prison or the asylum where they are held without charge, or else circulated, samizdat-style, among sympathizers. The authors of these narratives are themselves the subjects of others. So the characters created by Volodine become the authors of his work, such that Antoine Volodine is just one name among the many contributors to the literature of the post-exotic world. With formal roots in science fiction and thematic sources in France's continuing nostalgia for the revolutionary road, Volodine's dreamworld seems quite unrelated to the main trends of contemporary writing, yet it forms one of the most ambitious literary projects of our times. Couched in language of exquisite precision and grace, Volodine's not entirely imaginary construction of a ruined world simultaneously denies individual authorship and reasserts human individuality through the memorializing function of storytelling. This article is available in Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature: http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol36/iss1/8 French as a Foreign Language: The Literary Enterprise of Antoine Volodine David Bellos Princeton University The fifteen novels published under the name of Antoine Volodine since the 1980s together with a half dozen stories appearing under the names of Elli Kronauer and Manuela Draeger, probably one published as the work of Marina Soudaieva and perhaps other works purportedly translated from Russian make up one of the strangest and most compelling literary projects of modern times.1 All these prose works are of the same broad kind: narrative fragments of an imaginary universe that is at once a re-enactment and a complete reversal of the project first brought into fiction by Balzac when he said “la Societe francaise allait etre l’historien, je ne devais etre que le secretaire” (“Avant-propos” 11). ‘French society would be the historian, I would be only its secretary.’2 Like Balzac, Volodine purports to be the transcriber of a myriad stories about other people, but in his work the stories are actually told by others, and the transcriber called Volodine performs his secretarial role with utter self-abnegation. Each of his hundreds of named narrators are his friends and masters: “La premiere personne du singulier sert a accompagner la voix des autres, elle ne signifie rien de plus” (Le post-exotisme 19) ‘The first person singular serves to accompany the voices of others, it means nothing more than that.’ It is for them, on their behalf and in their service that he writes or speaks—the two words marking a distinction, not an equivalence. As in La Comedie humaine, several narrator-characters recur in different roles in various texts; similarly reminiscent of the Balzacian project is the consequent fact that it does not really matter whether you read Volodine in the order of publication of the separate titles, 1 Bellos: French as a Foreign Language: The Literary Enterprise of Antoine Published by New Prairie Press 102 STT as with Proust, you do not have to read everything to know what kind of a universe it is. But however much of Volodine’s work you do read, you still do not quite know what you have got into. Volodine is the pen-name of a French writer, a long-time resident of Orleans, who was for a time a teacher of Russian in the French secondary school system. (He is also a translator from Russian, and, under another pseudonym, the writer of adapted Russian folk tales or bylini for French children.) His knowledge of Soviet and contemporary Russian literature and history is substantial, but for many years he has been increasingly fascinated by the cultures and traditions of the Far East, notably Siberia, Tibet and southern China, where he has spent a good deal of his time. He does not belong to the literary milieu of contemporary Paris and he takes no account of it. “Cette masse romanesque a ete ecrite, a ete construite sans tenir compte des gouts, des tendances, des traditions du monde editorial dans lequel elle a pris place” (Volodine, “Ecrire en francais” 2) ‘This collection of fictions has been written and constructed without taking into account any of the tastes, tendencies and traditions of the editorial world in which it occurred.’ His published works have appeared, in sequence, with Denoel, Minuit, Gallimard and Seuil—an unusual trajectory that signals Volodine’s unclassifiable position in contemporary French literature. Like any radically new project, his work cannot usefully be situated in the cartography of the contemporary field, only—and very tentatively—on the much grander landscape of literature itself. Volodine has frequently formulated his writerly project as the composition of a foreign literature written in French, most notably in a self-presentation given to a round table of French and Chinese writers in 2001, when he said: “des l’origine mes romans ont ete etrangers a la realite litteraire francaise. Ils forment un objet litteraire publie en langue francaise, mais pense en une langue exterieure au francais...” (“Ecrire en francais” 3) ‘From the start my novels were foreign to the literary reality of France. They constitute a literary object published in the French language, but conceived in a language external to French.’ Remarkably, he would like his works to be thought of as translations, not originals. He is by no means the 2 Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature, Vol. 36, Iss. 1 [2012], Art. 8 http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol36/iss1/8 DOI: 10.4148/2334-4415.1773