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Foreword

by

BRIAN EVENSON

Radiant Terminus, which received the 2014 Prix Médicis, is Antoine Volodine’s most recently published novel. At least under that name. In 2015, he published a book under the heteronym Manuela Draeger, who also appears as a character in some of the books published under the name Volodine. And the name Volodine itself is a heteronym for an author who prefers not to have his real name revealed.

I use “heteronym” instead of “pseudonym” because “Draeger,” or “Volodine,” or “Lutz Bassmann,” or “Elli Kronauer” (two more of the names he’s used) function as much more than pseudonyms (someone named Kronauer, who may or may not be the same as the heteronym, is in fact the central character in Radiant Terminus). As with Fernando Pessoa’s heteronyms, they each take on a life of their own, with distinct interests and concerns, and together they make up a collective of authors who write “post-exotic” literature.

Volodine’s post-exotic writing often has the emphasis on world-building of fantastic fiction, science fiction in particular, though it brings a series of very different generic and literary elements to the table along with this. Volodine’s innovation comes in going about this world-building more intensively and more eccentrically than most fantastic fiction, over multiple books and multiple authors, inventing new and different genres—imagining not only a fantastical world, but also envisioning many different generic representations of such a world, and even overlapping, slightly different worlds. Volodine’s books present worlds in which various struggles have failed, in which a good percentage of the world’s population seems to exist in camps, and in which radiation has infected large chunks of the planet. His worlds are rife with incarceration and interrogation, but are also ones in which dream and reality meld, in which the fantastic and the real shade into one another, and in which the line between life and death is so thin that you don’t always know when you’ve passed from one to the other. More than any other writer I know, Volodine manages to create worlds that feel at once palpable, multivalent and real, and yet discontinuous and constantly shifting, as if threatening to fade from existence. His work, like Gerald Murnane’s, demands we move beyond the logic that we tend to rely on to understand fictional worlds. Not only can Volodine be simultaneously read as oneiric and palpable, as pre- and post-death, as real and unreal; he erases the distinctions between these categories, ultimately demanding that we simultaneously manage the impossible task of simultaneously seeing a both/and and a neither/nor.

The “Radiant Terminus” of the title is the name of a kohlkoz, a failing collective farm in a part of Siberia so sickened with radiation that even the spiders have died. The novel is full of soldiers and citizens who seem to be occupying a phantasmic state, or who maybe persist after their deaths, or who perhaps have been dreamed or reanimated by the kolkhoz president, Solovyei, who seems also capable of strolling around inside people’s heads, peering into all their nooks and crannies, violating them. Violation is one of several of the major thematics of Radiant Terminus, as is the relation of art to reality, and an examination of the remnants of failed political struggle.

Volodine’s title also seems at least partly a response to the notion of l’avenir radieux, a dream of a glorious and radiant future that allows one to maintain faith in communist or Marxist ideology and see one’s immediate sacrifices as enabling one’s fellows to continue to march arm in arm toward a better place.

The characters in Volodine’s novels seem to have acknowledged the impossibility of this radiant future, something which turns their adherence to ideology into a sort of paradoxical ritual behavior, with affinities on the one hand to mysticism and Tibetan Buddhism and on the other to Beckett’s “You must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” These are people who continue the struggle despite knowing that the struggle has failed. They persist not only in the face of the political futility, but in the face of death. Indeed, in many of Volodine’s works the characters may be dead, existing in the space of the bardo, caught between nothingness and reincarnation. Or they may be experiencing a kind of oneiric state. Or maybe what they think is happening is not real after all. Or maybe some combination of all the above. They themselves are not certain. In the balance that Volodine strikes between these possibilities—the suspension of the states of his characters and his worlds, the sudden feeling that you (and they) might not have understood their “true” state after all—the most wonderfully startling moments of his work can be found. Various of Volodine’s (and his heteronyms’s) works touch on this in different ways: someone we thought to be human suddenly appears to be a rampaging giant insect, animals speak with a human voice, a train journey goes on for days and we still haven’t left the city. Are we really on a train at all? we might ask ourselves. Did that woman suddenly sprout feathers? Is she a woman or in fact a bird? Is that narrator exorcising a family of ghosts or is it in fact he who is the ghost?

Volodine’s worlds are vertiginous and strange, sometimes absurd, sometimes funny, often disturbing. But nothing is arbitrary in them—and this for me is what makes Volodine’s work so much more resonant than that of many absurd or surreal writers. Even if the situation is absurd, you get the sense that Volodine is playing for keeps, that the philosophical and political investigations he is engaged in are real and that he cares deeply about the people who populate his fiction. Zuckerman’s very fine translation captures not only this aspect of Volodine’s work, but also that of Volodine’s musicality.

The more Volodine you read, the more you appreciate the intricacy of what he is doing. One of the key features of Volodine’s work comes in the echoes that operate both within individual books and between books. The more you read, the more you come to understand, and even reconsider, what you have already read. Each book transforms slightly the books read before it.

There is no other writer I know of so able to conjoin non-realist fiction with such honest revelation of the political unconscious of our time. There is no other writer who destabilizes narrative in a way that seems so absolute and so firmly connected to his project. And, in addition, there is no other writer whose project seems at once so consistent from book to book and yet so unique from book to book. Indeed, Volodine’s work gives the impression of being a living, breathing thing, a constantly developing and changing creature. His is a major, necessary work, and Radiant Terminus is a wonderful and powerful entry into it, a perfect place to start.