Antoine Volodine
Once past the intersection, the voyage lasts a long time still.[1] Hours and more. Hours or millennia. Impossible to know. Time passing gets bogged down, night is permanent. Infinity coagulates in the somnolence of the travelers. The bus continues on its trajectory. It is driving, for better or for worse, on Park Avenue, alongside the factory, but old age infiltrates it and gnaws at it. It becomes more and more fragile. One lovely evening, after having hit the edge of the sidewalk, it breaks up. In the shadows the metallic parts scatter. They immediately begin to decompose, they peel off without losing any time, but it would be necessary to count to 767,767 several times before the debris would truly blend in with the dust. The axles, the brakes, and the steering wheel are the pieces that most resist degradation. For innumerable decades, when nothing solid remains near them, they resist, then, in turn, they vanish.
During this time, Mevlido is camping not far from an axle that has buried itself in front of the factory gate. He is not animated by a great desire for sociability, and he doesn’t form any relationship with those who find themselves on the ground in his company, but he doesn’t feel any hostility toward them, and, fundamentally, the survivors of the bus form a sort of little group clearly distinct from the other residual elements and soot. There are two or three in the same situation, including Linda Siew, Deeplane, and he, Mevlido. They can’t be observed restlessly exploring the ruins around them, no, and they are even characterized instead by an absolute inertia, but rare among them are those who have abandoned the prospect of reaching the gate of waste treatment plant number nine. They don’t know if the number nine refers to the plant or the waste and if, once they get in, they’ll be treating or being treated, but the idea remains. Without moving in any meaningful manner, they are camping, all two or three of them, near the axle, in the calm, black landscape, in this image of a motionless city, so motionless that even the idea of an attack seems to have been withdrawn permanently.
Then the axle disintegrates, and they are left with no points of reference. Everything is still. Neither wind nor tide comes to bother the terrain, the hills, and the dunes of dust. The moon, which had long been absent above Henhouse Four and the Shambles, has made its reappearance. It is illuminating the world again. It is in the sky, high above the horizon, and not moving anymore.
On the zoological level, the world has changed its foundations. During the long parenthesis when the moon was hiding who knows where, the status of humanity did not stop deteriorating. One can still today dig up here and there individuals who still possess enough language to explain that they descend from a lineage of hominids, but, in reality, the reign of humanity is finished. The Organs, for once successfully, have invested their strength and their hope in a more understandable and less barbaric, less suicidal, less unbalanced species. The spiders are currently administering the ruins of the planet. They also claim a kind of humanism, and, even if it’s true that they eat their sexual partners as soon as their eggs have been fertilized, there can’t be found among them, as the millennia pass, the least theorist of genocide, of preventative war or social inequality. On Earth, at present, slavery, refugee camps, chaos, mass murder, and humiliation no longer occur. The hominids and their murderous practices, the hominids and their cynical discourses, are no longer anything but a memory. The dominant species never raises the question of happiness or misfortune, which means that, in a certain way, it’s been solved.
The moon came back, and it’s not a bad thing. Its disk shines constantly above the landscape, in the same place, which guarantees pale light and faces no matter the circumstances and the hour of day or night. The landscape is as it already was in memory, rich in a great variety of tones of gray, black, and white. The faces are ours. The street knows a permanent warmth. On one side are crumbled, indistinct buildings and, on the other, the wall that designates the factory’s perimeter. The spirals of barbed wire that used to top it are broken in places, hanging to the ground, forming confused bunches in which are slowly rotting rags or very old canvas that no one has bothered to reconstruct.
Near the gate or elsewhere the spaces corresponding to missing bricks are inhabited by spiders, representatives of a giant and rotund species. Now that the wind no longer blows, they remove the soot that swallowed or even blocked up their dens, and, that task accomplished, they put out some of their feet and remain motionless, observing the street below. They have the same attitude as the idlers and dreamers we used to know, and, if the question had been asked, they would surely have answered that they descend from an interminable lineage of hominids and that proletarian morality consists, precisely and fundamentally, of taking the air at their window when their work has been done and the weather conditions permit it. On this subject the Organs made sure that the ideological rupture between the two species was not unfathomable. It’s even possible that, in certain breaches in the wall, one or two heroines are cleaning dust off themselves while thinking of their flawless fidelity to a Party of which they neither know nor reveal the objectives, the secrets, the importance, the structures, the methods, the founding date, the probable allies, the medium- and long-term strategies, the immediate program of action, or the name.
Here we are.
And here, Mevlido opens an eye.
[1] Trans. by Gina Stamm (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2023).
Afterword (Gina Stamm): In Mevlido’s Dreams, the world is ending, not in fire or ice (or nuclear disaster), but in a heavy, humid heat, within the shrinking boundaries of the livable surface area of the planet, under torrential rains that instead of relief bring a more oppressive atmosphere. This universe may not seem as far from our own in the global North as it did when the book was first published in 2007; I write this following the hottest week ever recorded on earth, a record that will surely not take long to be broken. I first read Mevlido in 2018 when looking for material for a class I was teaching on contemporary francophone science fiction, and found it to be much more than that. While it is a dystopia, set a number of centuries in the future, it is also a detective story with tones of film noir, a revenge thriller, and a tragedy of love and attempted redemption. But only when I returned to the book a few years later did I understand that, without realizing it, Mevlido’s world had taken up permanent residence in my own dream world, with its nocturnal urban landscape glistening under constant rain and sticky with humidity. It’s appropriate that the novel lives rent-free in my dreams, as the narration itself passes back and forth between dreams and a waking life scarcely less strange; dreams are also the medium that characters use to communicate with each other across space and time. This oneiric atmosphere is not unusual for the work of Antoine Volodine, for those readers who may have read other books by the prolific author and his other pseudonyms (Elli Kronauer, Lutz Bassmann, Manuela Draeger, etc.). Mevlido, however, is unique in the intensity of its atmosphere and the psychological and emotional depth of its protagonist, perhaps matched only by the Medici-prizewinning Radiant Terminus.
Civilization in Mevlido’s world is gasping its way to an end in the petty corruption of a government both authoritarian and incompetent, in a theater of politics that carries only distant echoes of the ideological convictions of a bygone era. As the character Deeplane observes, humans are deeply alienated: “They no longer believe in themselves, nor in society. They inherited political systems to which they’ve lost the keys; for them ideology is a prayer devoid of meaning. The ruling classes have become criminalized, the poor obey them. Both classes act as if they were already dead. And as if, on top of that, they don’t even care.” Often compared to the bizarre yet compelling plots of Samuel Beckett or Franz Kafka, Volodine is unique in his ability to depict the physical and cultural environment inhabited by his characters with great specificity. Sometimes he is in the Siberian Taiga, the Central Asian plains, the South American Jungle, Lisbon, Macau—this time a decaying city somewhere in East Asia, a capital called Oulang-Oulane, surrounded by sprawling slums crowded with refugees: Koreans, Chinese, “Ybur.” This is not our world, even if climate and political crises make it seem nearer than ever. But it is a world that we can recognize from popular media: Kowloon Walled City or Bangkok from action movies, the retrofuturism of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner or an anime like Cowboy Bebop without the technological advances. A hot, wet world of people making do by any means necessary. A city’s grimy and ramshackle underbelly populated by mutant birds and junkies. The character of Mevlido self-consciously references the “golden age” of cinema and its Hong Kong action movies.
This situation presents a unique set of challenges to a reader and translator. It requires not only a knowledge of French, but a familiarity with the media universe from which the imagery is can be recognized, as well as an understanding of how that media is received by anglophone audiences. How is the content of anime or Hong Kong action movies presented to a Western audience (anglophone or francophone), and how would it change if that were the original language, not calqued on another language’s structure? This connects to one of the more unusual characteristics of Volodine’s overall project, which he has dubbed “the post-exotic.” Although the name was originally a joke in response to a journalist’s question, this genre (of which Volodine claims to be the “spokesperson”) posits a post-national literature that would be “a foreign literature written in French.” The stylized prose verges on a staccato poetic rhythm, characterized by frequent use of hypotyposis, anaphora, and parataxis, especially when reporting speech or thought or when free indirect discourse is being employed. While these are “French,” they also indicate a distance from the French spoken in our own time. How can this distance be rendered into yet another language without sounding too strange? In addition to these stylistic differences, the post-exotic also allows different perspectives, human and non-human, to be occupied by a narrator who may or may not correspond to a character in the book or to the putative author, who is always also a character inside the post-exotic universe. In Mevlido, an unidentified “I” will occasionally intrude into the otherwise third-person narration, bringing into question the status of the narrative as a whole.
Gina Stamm is Associate Professor of French at The University of Alabama, with research concentrated on the environmental humanities and speculative literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries from Surrealism to contemporary science fiction and feminist utopias in Metropolitan France and the francophone Caribbean.
JOURNAL OF THE FIRST OUTERNATIONAL 