Gina M. Stamm: 00:03

What do we actually want? Are we doomed? If doomed, what then? We can be doomed and then have three thousand years before the end. And then what do we do?

Gina M. Stamm: 00:21

Hi. My name is Gina Stamm, and I have translated the novel Mevlito's Dreams by Antoine Voorodin with University of Minnesota Press. And here to talk with me about it today is Joshua Armstrong.

Joshua Armstrong: 00:35

Hi. Yeah. It's really great to be here to talk about this. One of the most fascinating novels I've read, you know, in the recent decades, I would say, or just ever. And I was really excited to hear that, you were translating it and also jealous because I think that'd be really fun to translate.

Joshua Armstrong: 00:51

I'm a professor at University of Wisconsin Madison, and I I'm on working on a book project that, has a chapter devoted to this author, Antoine Bolodin. Gina, I mean, maybe for the listeners out there who haven't read, Antoine Bolodin yet, could you just give us a sense of who he is and, maybe tell us a little bit about the genre of writing that he invented called post exoticism?

Gina M. Stamm: 01:16

K. So Antoine Volodin is the primary pseudonym of an author who prefers to remain otherwise anonymous. He's been writing for about forty years. He started out being published in science fiction collections, but quickly it became apparent that that genre was not enough to hold him. Although there are some elements of science fiction in his novels, it also has elements of the fantastic, of psychological thrillers.

Gina M. Stamm: 01:43

There are some that are much more realistic in tone, and at one point in the 90s, a journalist asked him what genre he was actually writing in, and as a joke he said the post exotic, but it's really become he's really taken that on as a name for his project, and he's also sort of developed a theory of it, which you can see in 10 lessons on post exoticism lesson 11, which has previously been translated into English. Some of the characteristics of it are that there's a confusion of narrative voice between the I, the you, and the we, so there's not so much division between the different characters and between the different narrative voices. It's a resistance to the idea that you can really accuse a narrative voice of appropriation when it's floating between different people. And one of the other things is that many of the novels take place in a far future where the kinds of national boundaries that we're familiar to, that create cultures that we consider to be exotic, Those national boundaries are no longer valid, and so there's kind of a mishmash of different cultural elements, and you really see this in this novel as well, which is not to say that there is no racism or xenophobia because there is quite a bit of inter ethnic violence, but also that many of these cultures have been forced into physical proximity in a way that doesn't allow them to be othered in the same way that we experience it today.

Gina M. Stamm: 03:11

And just to mention that Antoine Volodine is only one of five, I think, now published pseudonyms, the other ones being Manuela Draeger, Elie Kronauer, and Furness Johannes, and I'm forgetting one. But the person who identifies as, Antoine Volodine calls himself their spokesperson rather than saying that they're they're his other pseudonyms. And in doing so, this actually becomes kind of a conceptual art project as well as a literary of and it's supposed to be eventually 49 books long. I think the forty seventh just came out with, which came out this, I think, January. And so when it hits 49, it'll be finished.

Gina M. Stamm: 03:52

Just like in Mavlito, there are seven times seven chapters or 49 as well.

Joshua Armstrong: 03:57

Yeah. That's one thing I also find really impressive about Volodine's project is just how holistically it's been conceived, you know, from the beginning. In my chapter that I was writing about, Volodine, I have a quote from, Warren Motti, who's a specialist of French literature that we know. His summing up in one sentence of post exoticism, he says, quote, a post revolutionary world verging upon the end of history when all but the most quixotic hopes for the future of humankind have revealed their emptiness, and the future undoubtedly belongs to spiders, end quote.

Gina M. Stamm: 04:33

Yeah. I think that quixotic is a pretty good characterization of it.

Joshua Armstrong: 04:38

Yeah. Is it the case then so Antoine Volodine, we should also think of as a pseudonym.

Gina M. Stamm: 04:43

Yes. Although someone keeps sort of doxing him on Wikipedia, he's very much and putting up his birth name, this is very much a character, and he does not like to talk about his private life, and he doesn't really talk about his literary influences. A lot of people attribute literary influences to him. He's much more willing to admit cinematographic and, to some extent, philosophical influences. But a lot of time, people will say, oh, did were you thinking about this or that when you wrote this?

Gina M. Stamm: 05:13

And he will just say, I'm not I'm not gonna talk about my influences. This is very much a character who is and I would like to say he's a very wonderful and warm and generous human being, and all of his translators kind of agree on that point. And he has this community of translators who are dedicated to his work, but he's also someone who is very consciously portraying this spokesperson of the of the literary movement at all times.

Joshua Armstrong: 05:42

Yeah. It's interesting. You know, think of the author biographically. It would be possible to situate him within a generation of, post 1968 French authors who write in the disillusionment of the egalitarianist dream of 1968. So, for example, Olivier Rolland, Jean Rolland, and it's just kind of like a sentiment of the defeat of that kind of dream of changing the world or even a nostalgia for it.

Joshua Armstrong: 06:12

And, obviously, in in Volodine's works, that's one of it's such a huge theme. You know? Like, yes, you know, it's like in a post apocalyptic context, but people are still going to clandestine party meetings. There's people try to, keep the practices, and the ideology of the party alive even though kind of, like, in a zombified form. But, I mean, I don't know personally if Antoine Volidine or whoever the author is was, like, the Roland brothers involved.

Gina M. Stamm: 06:43

So I think he said he was 11.

Joshua Armstrong: 06:45

Oh, okay. So he's he's a little younger then. Okay.

Gina M. Stamm: 06:47

Yeah. So he's I think he's in his seventies now, but he he's said that he was too young to participate in that. But and the world that he's portraying and which is really condensed in Mevlito's dreams, the kind of disappointment with revolutionary ideals both pre- and post dates 1968, because in his references, you see also the immense deception French Communist Party, starting with Khrushchev's secret speech about the wrongs of the Stalinist regime and how that fractured the French Communist Party between people who toed the Stalinist line and Maoists and then Trotskyists, who I think come off a little bit better in general, but also in Volodymyr's work as well, even though he's he kind of makes a mockery of any revolutionary ideal. But then also, he's someone who spent a lot of time in the former Soviet Union when it was the Soviet Union, and he has said that he's not been back since the end of the Soviet Union. In his work, you can tell that he's not an apologist for authoritarian regimes, whatever their ideological backing.

Gina M. Stamm: 07:51

You know, it was the quote unquote end of history. So I think it really represents a watershed moment. And he that's about when he started writing was the the very end years of the Soviet Union as well.

Joshua Armstrong: 08:04

And, do we know the context of, why he was in the Soviet Union? I mean, didn't he translate Russian literature?

Gina M. Stamm: 08:12

Yeah. And he was a Russian teacher in France

Joshua Armstrong: 08:14

for

Gina M. Stamm: 08:14

a while as well. Somebody keeps putting on Wikipedia that he's Franco Slavic, but there's no evidence of that of actual family ties to Russia or any of the former Soviet Republics. So he might be, but there's no actual evidence for that.

Joshua Armstrong: 08:30

Mhmm. I know it's always difficult with, this author, but can you describe, in a nutshell, the plot of Mevlito's dreams?

Gina M. Stamm: 08:38

Okay. So pretty much straight off the bat, we know that Mevlito is a police detective, but he's also a double agent working for revolutionary groups in the slums of some far future city, called Ulaanghulun, which is pretty evidently based on Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia, but where climate change and wars have really reduced the habitable surface of the Earth. So we kind of have everyone in the world either as citizens or as refugees in this one giant city with these sprawling slums. Mevlito has a we quickly learn has a wife who was murdered many years before by child soldiers in the last war, and he's carrying that wound with him. And two things happen that sort of set the plot in motion.

Gina M. Stamm: 09:31

And one of them is that walking along the street, he sees a woman who he believes looks exactly like his dead wife. And immediately after she's this, she is killed, and he's asked to investigate the death. And on the other hand, one of the agents of the revolutionary groups in the slums tells him that she has found one of the child soldiers who killed his wife. And so he goes to get revenge, retribution, justice, and about halfway through the book, he is killed, but sort of killed because he's only mostly dead. And for the rest of the book, he is hanging out in this liminal space between life and death, sort of losing and regaining his consciousness and losing and regaining his motivation.

Gina M. Stamm: 10:23

And at the end, we're presented with three different ways that this could turn out. Also, in the meantime, we learn that he's not just a double agent on Earth, but that he was actually sent from, like, another dimension to help ease sort of the dying pangs of humanity, as they put it. But the transition was so violent that the soul that becomes Mevlito has no memory, that that's why he's here.

Joshua Armstrong: 10:51

With this author, you always have this, blurring of the lines between life and death, and it allows for him to do some really interesting things with scale and time. Is there a passage that, you know, maybe you could, like, describe to us or read to us from Mevlito to kinda give us a glimpse of the look and feel of this book or one that you particularly like?

Gina M. Stamm: 11:13

Yeah. So this is, I think, chapter two, page eight, and this kind of gives you a good idea for the atmosphere. Mevlito rubbed his head, let eight or nine seconds go by, and curled up against the window again. Darkness reigned inside the car. The street lights outside were not enough to illuminate the passengers.

Gina M. Stamm: 11:31

It was a part of the journey that Mevlito disliked. The avenue had been cleared after the war, but the houses lining it remained too damaged to house any tenants. They passed by kilometers of uninhabitable buildings with their black openings and rotten facades that exhaled the stench of mildew. According to some rumors, some child soldiers had found refuge there, former actors of the last of the nth genocide, wandering from ruin to ruin without ever showing themselves. Incapable of growing older normally into adulthood, they hid behind the walls, their obstinate absence of remorse, the cold memory of atrocities they had committed.

Gina M. Stamm: 12:07

Until one day, one of their old victims flushed them out and took their vengeance. It was after midnight. It was very late. As with every summer night for the last fifteen or so decades, the feeling of suffocation had not lessened with the arrival of the evening. They were going to have to wait until dawn and a brief moment of cool air to recover their breath.

Gina M. Stamm: 12:26

In the tram, the passengers had closed their eyes and were being jostled about on their seats. Besides the conductor and Mevlito, there were six of them, all men or at least male or at least mostly not female. Under the influence of miasmas exhaled by the insalubrious houses, each dozed or agonized as far away as possible from his neighbors. I remember the scene very well. I was part of this group, and all the while applying the recommended procedure for living or for sleeping, I was observing from between my nearly closed eyelids.

Gina M. Stamm: 12:59

We were all dressed in the same style, a white dress shirt with a greasy collar or a t shirt smudged with motor oil, pants and military drab, flip flops or tired old shoes. You couldn't expect anything else at this hour from those taking the circle line and going to their homes in the second tier worlds in the havens for refugees and in the ghettos. And I think that that's really good at evoking the atmosphere and the world that he's building in general, as well as the intensely sensory style that he writes in and the intrusion of the first person external narrator that says, I was there, even though that's not the main narrative voice. It's a it's a novel that is almost exclusively in the third person omniscient or third person internally focused. But, occasionally, you'll have an the intrusion of someone called it, like, a super narrator who just happens to be an eye that is existing in the world.

Gina M. Stamm: 13:53

And so there's a lot of debate about the role of that sort of very transitory eye in Volodine's work, but those early passages where it's really setting up the world are very evocative to me.

Joshua Armstrong: 14:05

Yeah. That seems to capture, the essence of everyday life in the post exotic corpus. And it is a very, sensory laden narrative style. And even in an uncomfortable way where there's a lot of things that in a tactile sense are unpleasant smells, odors, The air itself in Volodine is often choked with things, whether it's smells or insects. And so you're just sort of, like, smothered in this miasma that your environment has become.

Joshua Armstrong: 14:36

Right?

Gina M. Stamm: 14:37

Yeah. And there were parts reading it and then rereading it and rereading it while I did the translation where I eat no matter how many times I experienced it, I found myself holding my breath at certain points because the physical experiences that he talks about are so visceral, and you really get a sense of not only the political breakdown, but also that kind of material breakdown as well in terms of pollution, in terms of climate change, in terms of just intense poverty in some of the places.

Joshua Armstrong: 15:12

Yeah. And, you know, I think, when I read this, the one scene that really stuck with me the most really illustrates that whole point. So this is the scene where Mevlito and Malia have met up with a woman named Cornelia Orf, and she is bringing them to a clandestine party meeting. And it's night, and, you know, they're in a dark part of, Hen House 4, and she is kinda trying to show off, like, how well she knows the neighborhood, and she's taking shortcuts. And she says we're gonna take Gateway Street, And Mevlido says, oh, no.

Joshua Armstrong: 15:49

We shouldn't take that because the mutant hens are probably gonna be blocking it. You know? And she kinda blows them off. And as characters in Volodine, a lot of times when one says something, the other just responds with. Right?

Joshua Armstrong: 16:02

And so they proceed along. So this is I'll I'll read a short part of it. As Mevlito had feared and predicted, the mutant chickens had invaded Gateway Street, and they were occupying it completely without leaving the smallest surface open. The flock they formed was grayish, continuous, undifferentiated, and aggressive. By malevolence, but also as an effect of obstinate collective stupidity, the multitude forbade passage.

Joshua Armstrong: 16:28

The bodies clucked at knee height and resisted. It was practically impossible to force a passage through them without a fight. Cornelia Orff entered the quacking masses vehemently and began to kick violently in front of her. She was brandishing the folding chair she had been carrying across her body until that point and was using it confusedly, a little like a beginning fencer defending herself with a scimitar. She provoked movements of panic, hysterical flights, and when the birds surged back toward Mevlito, the majority agitated their stunted wings at chest or face height amid horrible odors of shit and coarse skin.

Joshua Armstrong: 17:05

In a few seconds, Mevlido was drowned in a cloud of hostile feathers and legs. He let go of Malia's hand and began to punch blindly. His fist met flying carcasses with hot and incomprehensible shapes. He struggled not to swallow the dust and lice that had replaced the breathable atmosphere, And I'll just leave it at that. Great job with the, translation of that.

Gina M. Stamm: 17:27

Thank you. Yeah. And there are certain scenes where it, like, passes over from the gross into the grotesque. Volodymyr can be quite funny, and there are certain passages like this one where it becomes this completely hyperbolic, over the top grossness. And then you also have the discussions between the police officers who are, like, bumbling fools, and it's a real kind of who's on first moment where they're all mishearing each other and and they all think they're having different conversations.

Gina M. Stamm: 17:59

Like, Mevlito isn't is not a comic novel, but it definitely has these moments of silliness. And I think that's part of the whole effort. There's, like, intense trauma, but it's also ridiculous, the levels of bureaucracy that you have to go through and just the overwhelming I mean, I think in your work, you've compared him to Beckett, where there can be both the disgust and the sadness and death, and at the same time, this really absurd humor.

Joshua Armstrong: 18:29

Yeah. Absolutely. Absurd humor. The obligation to always continue on, which is also, like, we see in in Beckett without having, you know, much of a clear reason why. And then, of course, even with Volodine, even after death in quotes.

Joshua Armstrong: 18:46

And, yeah, there's even somewhat of a slapstick element as we see here, which, you know, whenever I teach, Waiting for Godot, for example, that's the first thing I tell my students is you have to think of this as funny. And then they can kinda, like, get into it. So, like, this is just slapstick, you know, and then we'll get into the philosophical stuff.

Gina M. Stamm: 19:06

Have you ever seen the movie Swiss Army Man?

Joshua Armstrong: 19:09

I have not seen that. Yeah.

Gina M. Stamm: 19:11

It's known as the, Daniel Radcliffe farting corpse movie, where it's the same kind of mix of absurdity and body horror and, like, real philosophical questioning. But, yeah, where there's that kind of combination of extremes and also the very intimate bodily nature, that comes out in Volodyne as well, where he's often, like, making fun of bodies and specifically, male middle aged bodies on a pretty regular basis as saying, like, isn't this ridiculous? Both of for Meflito and also for some of the other characters as as

Joshua Armstrong: 19:50

well. Yeah. Sometimes too, language, which is, you know, spoken language is a product of the body. Right? And that seems to break down in Volodyn's worlds as well sometimes, and characters end up communicating through grunts or or, like, gurgles.

Joshua Armstrong: 20:06

That's also something, in Samuel Beckett's, trilogy of novels, for example, where the stream of consciousness tends to kind of, like, degenerate as we move progressively towards the death of this speaking instance to the point where at one point, it just says on the page gurgles of outflow. And I was like, that's okay. That's also something we find in. Right?

Gina M. Stamm: 20:30

Yeah. And there's also a lot of, like, echolalia in some of his characters as well, where one person will say something, and especially at the beginning, like, it's just Mallea who she is traumatized to the point of sort of incoherence, or psychic incoherence, from the very beginning. And so she has echolalia where she'll only repeat the end of the sentence that Mevlito says. But then also as Mevlito's consciousness kind of degrades after he dies, he also produces some of this as well.

Joshua Armstrong: 21:01

Yeah. And one of the, quotes from Volodine that I always appreciate is, from this, Oh. It's a metaphysical fly paper. When Beckett says the, gurgles of outflow, that in the French, it's the. And so here you have, like, the metaphysic, so this metaphysical flypaper that characters are sort of, like, trapped in where as a complement to the breakdown of the bodily, you also have the breakdown of the metaphysic the physical.

Joshua Armstrong: 21:33

You also have the breakdown of the metaphysical and where these, like, grand ideas and things just don't really come together as they should. And there's humor in that too as well because they still try, and that's very back at the end as well. One question I had for you is, you know, I just really admire Volodine's, how creative he is and how imaginative his books are. And, you know, it's one of those authors that you read, and it's just like, my my god. How did he come up with that?

Joshua Armstrong: 21:58

You know, like, how did you even think of that? For example, I'm just looking at the page, that I was from where I was just reading with the mutant chickens. And as that passage continues on, the one character, Cornelia Orf, who's a very militant, member of the party, As she's trying to force her way through the chicken, she starts shouting out slogans, political slogans. And, you know, we see these slogans, in all caps in a lot of different Volodyne novels. And I'm a big fan of surrealism where you just have, like, something like Andre Breton.

Joshua Armstrong: 22:30

I just thought of this, sentence. I don't know what if there's a man cut in half by the window. Like, I don't know what it means, but it just came to me, and it's like, that's what you put on the page. I see a lot of that in Volodine too, and it's one thing I love about himself. I'll read these.

Joshua Armstrong: 22:46

These are protest slogans or party slogans. Faint with the daughters of chance, she brayed. Don't give up on the daughters of chance. Even if you are nothing anymore, prepare for victory. Bag yourself until victory.

Joshua Armstrong: 23:00

Bag yourself with the daughters of chance. It's just so random and imaginative. And so I guess my question for you is, I was wondering if you had any insight into Volodine's, like, creative process. For example, I I think of David Lynch, the filmmaker, sometimes when I read, even though their style and tone is very different. But, like, David Lynch really goes to that, like, place where the surrealists would go to find his images and his ideas.

Joshua Armstrong: 23:26

And I know he's into, like, transcendental meditation and stuff, so, like, digging things out of the unfiltered dream part of your brain or something like that. When you read Volodine and as the title of this novel indicates, you're really in between, like, reality and dream as well. So I was just curious if you had any insight into, his creative process.

Gina M. Stamm: 23:44

In terms of the process, no. There are a few things I can kind of venture to re reverse engineer, though. Part of it is that a lot of his stuff comes from Buddhist tradition and specifically Tibetan Buddhist tradition. And there is some of that in the in the rhetoric as well as in the content with references to, like, monks and the bardo and things like that in terms of the rhetoric, invocations, repeated prayer. He also also things that I've noticed in translating this and other texts is that he does a lot of calcs from one language to another, like from Mandarin to French, which renders a lot of, like, otherness as well.

Gina M. Stamm: 24:25

There's also the fact that, like, with these slogans, it's almost like he took political slogans you would see, and he kept the form, and he emptied them out of the meaning and then put meaning back in. So it's that kind of what's Noam Chomsky's thing with the innate grammar where he's like, some dream green dream sleep furiously, where all of the parts of speech are correct, but none of the words make sense together. And it almost seems like that's what's at work here, where there's some grammar of protest that is being kept, but that the words like a political party is swapped out for daughters of chance, or like almost a Mad Lib style thing, like blank yourself with the blank party.

Joshua Armstrong: 25:09

Yeah.

Gina M. Stamm: 25:09

And so fill in verb, fill in party.

Joshua Armstrong: 25:13

Yeah. Beg yourself. Like, what is Yeah.

Gina M. Stamm: 25:18

Yeah. That was what it was.

Joshua Armstrong: 25:19

I mean, that must have been interesting to come upon and have to translate.

Gina M. Stamm: 25:25

Yeah. Like, I started it with put yourself in a sack with or put like, put yourself in the bag with I mean, you might be able to do it as, like, get in the tank with, you know, whatever political party. But in terms of how it scanned, it worked better as bag yourself in English. And that's actually in terms of the rhythm. That was one of the things that I was really trying to keep in English as much as possible.

Gina M. Stamm: 25:51

In terms of translation, I really had to fight to keep the strangeness of the text because there is a tendency and a pressure when translating to make it as readable as possible, when in fact, the branch is weird, and it sits there and makes you think about what he's trying to say. And there's a ton of I mean, I know the technical word is anakaluthon for nonstandard grammar patterns. And in a lot of it, there's meaning that is delayed to the end that would not normally be delayed in English or in French. To me, it reads as maybe a little bit more of a German pattern, maybe Russian. I'm not a Russian speaker at all.

Gina M. Stamm: 26:30

But it's grammatically correct, but it is nonstandard. And so fighting to keep that kind of delay of meaning as well as the repetitions, the rhythm, and in many cases, assonance, which is really big in Mevlito. There are other texts of Volodymyr where he has a lot of what's the word? Where all the words start with the same letter. Alliteration.

Gina M. Stamm: 26:54

That's it. And so keeping that from one language to another is a lot. It's an effort.

Joshua Armstrong: 27:00

Well yeah. And, as he, again, probably, like, poking fun, at the questions of literary critics, he likes to say that he writes in French as a foreign language, I think. So yeah. And then to translate that.

Gina M. Stamm: 27:14

Yeah. And that was always very much a friendly back and forth with the editor about how much of the foreignness I could get away with keeping, which is not to like, I don't think it's a hard text to read, but it does read as nonstandard. It's also nonstandard in the use of vocabulary. Like, a lot of the words that he uses in French are very unusual, and many of them are older or a much more academic register that are used in the the sort of tossed off casually. So it's a very eclectic way of writing as well.

Joshua Armstrong: 27:50

Yeah. I picked up on a few of those sort of, like, eclectic elements maybe in his writings and how you translated them so well. So, for example, he uses this term, which is pretty literary, pretty outdated, and you translate it as advisedly, which I think too you, like, you know, like, a a word that has, like, the id at the end of it, like learned or something. It's kinda, like, capture something of that. Right?

Joshua Armstrong: 28:18

You translate as sham the shambles, which is really interesting because, shambles is only something that in English I the only way I can think of ever saying that word is what a shambles. You know? So it's always figurative and referring to, like, the figurative state of something that's a mess. Your use of shambles in that way is, like, kinda, like, displaced from how we would use it in regular everyday speech just like. So that's yeah.

Gina M. Stamm: 28:47

Yeah. Although the shambles like, it's it's unclear to what extent it really is a real place in the because it's it's also the sort of in between life and death place where you're liable to find a dead person who's still walking around. I really strove to maintain the register of the vocabulary with something like that, where it's like. I mean, it's not an incomprehensible word, but it is one that you would only see in very specific circumstances. And so and the same with shambles in English.

Joshua Armstrong: 29:16

Right. And they both have this very, like, sort of rundown connotation. It's not you know, we're talking about a realm between life and death. So that could be depicted in, like, a much more ethereal, spiritual type of language, you know, but that just wouldn't be post exoticism. It's like, it has to be this, like, rundown, gritty.

Joshua Armstrong: 29:35

And so and without getting into spoilers, Mevlito's adventure through, I guess, you wanna call it the afterlife, the Bardo. It's just so fascinating. It's another part of this book that I think as I was reading it, I was just, like, couldn't believe what was happening, and I was trying also, like, am I understanding this correctly? And I just followed it so intently. One of the interesting aspects of that is, as I mentioned earlier, is what Volodine does with, like, time and scale because he'll take a character dying, I guess, and extend that experience across what is described sometimes as, like, millennia.

Joshua Armstrong: 30:11

There'll be, like, this telescoping of time where maybe it's a day or maybe it's a century. Could I read one more passage where this happens? Chapter 48, black spiders. Once past the intersection, the voyage lasts a long time still. Hours and more.

Joshua Armstrong: 30:28

Hours or millennia? Impossible to know. Time passing gets bogged down. Night is permanent. Infinity coagulates in the somnolence of the travelers.

Joshua Armstrong: 30:39

Love that sentence. The bus continues on its trajectory. It is driving for better or for worse on Park Avenue alongside the factory, but old j 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.

Joshua Armstrong: 30:58

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.

Joshua Armstrong: 31:27

Then in turn, they vanish. During this time, Mevlodaux is camping not far from okay. So I think I'll stop there. But, I mean, just that during this time that innocently begins the next paragraph, you know, it's like, what time? There's so many different scales of time.

Joshua Armstrong: 31:45

There's a collage of them in that first paragraph. And, you know, the way that the bus is, like, simultaneously driving one evening, but also probably for, like, a thousand evenings. And at one point, it starts to fall apart and immediately begins to decompose. I I find that really masterful how he weaves all these different temporalities together.

Gina M. Stamm: 32:08

And you so and you mentioned surrealism before, and I think that that's actually pertinent in terms of the way he talks about many things, but time and space. Because in surrealism, a lot of the time, you're taking what might be a metaphor, like, a, like, purely linguistic relationship or purely cognitive, and you are asking what happens if it's material, if this metaphor is a actually a so it's kind of literalizing metaphor. That's also, like, a main characteristic of speculative fiction. I think it was Samuel Delaney, the science fiction author, who talked about that specificity of speculative fiction. And I think he takes that, like, the time dilation that you might experience, like, when your life flashing before your eyes in the process of dying, or time compression where everything seems to be going too fast, and then he literalizes that and says, what if it at once, is also hours and also millennia?

Gina M. Stamm: 33:09

And because he's really working between different dimensions here, it could be either or both. Like, you could think of it as there being some kind of relativity involved in there as well, like, for whom is this time this long? So I think that there are a lot of things at play here in the way that he says it's this, but it's also this.

Joshua Armstrong: 33:30

Yeah. You know, that's one of the strengths of of this overall corpus too being so unified in terms of, like, the way the world works in all of these books. Because it seems like the more you read Volodine, you kinda it's just like, if you're reading, like, a modernist novel, like a Gertrude Stein or something like that. Like, at first, the the the syntax is so weird, and you're it's, like, rebarbative, and you have to keep rereading. But, like, at one point, it just kinda clicks.

Joshua Armstrong: 33:57

Right? Or, like, a Faulkner or, like, a James Joyce, and it's like you just get into the flow of it. I think that kinda happens here with Volodyne because you have these similar sort of, like, disruptions of time and space, but they operate according to laws that do follow from one text to another. And so he really creates this whole different, almost like a physics and, obviously, like a metaphysics.

Gina M. Stamm: 34:20

And one continuity also is the images of animals. So both the birds that you brought up and the spiders are present throughout the novel, but then really dominate the end of it. It's established pretty early on in his writing in the book Solo Viola, which, Minnesota also published a few years ago, that the birds on some level represent an oppressed or othered people and that the spiders like, the spider insignia in Soloveola is obviously representing a swastika. I really had to ask myself in my video, like, what is going on with the birds and the spiders? Because these are things that come back throughout his corpus.

Gina M. Stamm: 35:01

And here, I think it's interesting that almost all the birds are mutants, and it's maybe when it's too late for those people, like, where there's nothing left, or there's one mynah bird that appears that is not a mutant. And the question of, like, whether the mynah bird song is happy or sad is really important. Like, how do we have access to the interiority of the bird? But the other thing with the spiders and in my turn, I'm going to read a paragraph of that. Yeah, I think this is also chapter 48.

Gina M. Stamm: 35:35

I'm going to read this paragraph where he talks about what happens with the spiders at the end of the world. So this is 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 to explain that they descend from a lineage of hominids. But in reality, the reign of humanity is finished. The organ organs for once successfully have invested their strength and their hope in a more understandable and less barbaric, less suicidal, less unbalanced species.

Gina M. Stamm: 36:08

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 passed, 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.

Gina M. Stamm: 36:38

The dominant species never raises the question of happiness or misfortune, which means that, in a certain way, it's been solved. And I was like, well, he's saying that the spiders are better, but at the same time, that's also sort of the idea of a fascist utopia where no one questions anything and where no one ever raises the question of happiness or misfortune, where there's no possibility for innovation, for anything new. And so I think that that threat of the elimination of conflict but at the price of sort of nothingness coming after is perhaps as much of a message as you can get out of Mevlito's dreams.

Joshua Armstrong: 37:22

I was wondering if Volodine's books are moving. I've taken a lot of literature classes and taught a lot of literature classes, and you'll get the question, why do we read literature? Or, you know, why do we value art in general? And I had one professor once who said, oh, because we wanna be moved. And I've always found that to be a pretty interesting and maybe the most succinct, answer to that question and true in many ways.

Joshua Armstrong: 37:49

And, I was just wondering if despite all that is so grotesque and that is in such a state of shambles, humanity in such a state of shambles, the end of humanity, you know, these ruined environments, by climate change and war. Is there something moving about these novels by Volodine or maybe mevolido in particular?

Gina M. Stamm: 38:11

So I find much of Volodine's writing very moving, but especially this book. The sort of depths of emotion in Melito's interiority, I think, is possibly unique within the post exotic corpus. He has this combination of survivor's guilt with reference to his wife, but also to many other people in his life where he feels like he is somehow leaving destruction in his wake because he has survived all of these other people. And his incredible compassion for someone like Malia Bayarlach, who he's living with, and he this this is not really a companion in the sense of social or intellectual companion because she's so deeply traumatized, but that he really wants to be there for her. No matter what circumstances his characters find themselves in, there is really this struggle to, I really hesitate to say, remain human because that within posthumanism, that's so fraught.

Gina M. Stamm: 39:15

And also the idea that, you know, these spiders have carried on humanity or humanism is a different thing. But just the idea of radical empathy that exists even when you're dying, even when you're dead, even when it's the end of the world. So for me, I find it deeply moving and something that I think about when, like, seeing all of the current and very pertinent news, especially, like, coming out of Gaza, which, like, reading his most recent novel, Viver Don Rufe, was, there was there were some shocking parallels there. But the idea that, you know, humanity persists and that compassion for other people persists even in a state of true destruction.

Joshua Armstrong: 40:01

Yeah. And, you know, his worlds are full of wars and genocides, and it it's almost as though those sort of, like, nightmares of history, to put it in a really Benjaminian, like, vocabulary, they really do just, like, pile up and never go away. So everyday life becomes, like, cluttered with the vestiges of those kind of things, those ravages. So this is, like, the incredibly bleak aspect of his worlds. And yet despite that, as you say, there is a sort of a quixotic, I guess, quality to these characters who try to or do remain true to something, whether it's the vestiges of a political ideal or if it's, the companionship to somebody like Malia in Mevlito.

Joshua Armstrong: 40:45

There's very unique context and something actually quite uniquely moving about it. I I would agree. So to be moving as a novel is one quality. And, you know, we've talked about the way that Volodine's works call to mind some of the most important questions of our own time, you know, refugee crises, genocide, war, climate change. And I was just wondering if, you know, in your mind, reading Volodine can serve as a call to action for his readers, or does it encourage, an indifference?

Joshua Armstrong: 41:20

It's pretty clear in Volodine that any efforts to try to make things better or reverse that course of history is going to be futile. The only thing that you can really do, and, again, I'll come back to Beckett, is to you know, it's a it's a failed human world, and you can still fail better. As Beckett said, you can ever try, ever fail, try again, fail again, fail better. You can always fail better in Volodine. You keep failing, and there's something moving about that.

Joshua Armstrong: 41:47

But at the same time, there's not really this this hope that things will would get better. So I just wonder what what your take would be on that. Can his books be a call to action?

Gina M. Stamm: 41:56

So I would say his books are not quiescent about the end of the world. It is not a capitulation. In many ways, they do show how many off ramps there are before the end. Even though in his books it really you know, the off ramps are missed consistently. Mevlito is someone who's full of despair outside of his affective relationships, but he also shows a lot of admiration for the character of Sonia Woglobhan, who is the last vestige of radical activism in the slums.

Gina M. Stamm: 42:31

And that idea that even though it's all kind of over and we all kind of know that ideology is worthless, it's still admirable to keep fighting. So I I do see the pertinence of the Beckett there. Is it a call to action? I can't see it explicitly as a call to action, and I don't really see him as having any ideology that he espouses beyond anti authoritarianism. And he recently signed on to collective work about it it's like or something like that, which I haven't read, and that might be more illuminating in terms of how he feels about it.

Gina M. Stamm: 43:11

But I think it is engaged and conscious without being a specific call to action.

Joshua Armstrong: 43:16

I like that way of putting it that it signals the different off ramps.

Gina M. Stamm: 43:20

Yeah. And there's I mean, it's a deeply ambivalent writing. What do we actually want? Is it good if humanity continues? Are we doomed?

Gina M. Stamm: 43:29

There are, like, a lot of open ended questions or if doomed, what then? And I think that's one of the beauties of this text and some of the others where we can be doomed and then have three thousand years before the end. And then what do we do? Do we just all lie down?

Joshua Armstrong: 43:44

Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. The last question I had prepared, what was the most rewarding part of translating Folodin?

Gina M. Stamm: 43:54

There were two things, and one has to do with my motivation for translating it. So I had no thought of translating this book, but I really wanted to share it with my best friend at the time that I and this person does not speak any French. And I knew that there was a lot of translation going on, so I emailed Volodine, who I had contact with previously because I've written on him. And he was like, let me check with my agent to see if someone's working on it. No.

Gina M. Stamm: 44:22

No one's working on that one. Do you wanna do it? And and so part of it was how rewarding it is for me to share this work with an Anglophone public. And the other part was just getting to spend the time with his language and to really sort of sit there and be able to like, even more than writing an article, but to just sit there with one sentence for an hour. That sounds like it might be kind of frustrating, but it's actually for me, probably the biggest amount of dopamine that I can get within my academic work is sitting there and being like, okay.

Gina M. Stamm: 44:54

How do I how like, how do I understand every word in this sentence, and how would I communicate that? Understand every word in this sentence, and how would I communicate that? So that kind of minute engagement with the language was, I think, the biggest thing that I got out of it.

Joshua Armstrong: 45:08

Yeah. And I would just say, you know, congratulate you on this translation. You know, I've read quite a bit of Volodine, and, you know, you get very attached to the style and to the mood and to the tone, and you can think, oh, no. How's it gonna sound in the translation? And when I first started reading your translation, I just that's what I just tried to do is, like, let myself soak in the mood of it and the tone and the feel.

Joshua Armstrong: 45:31

And it felt like Volodine. So I think that's a great accomplishment and, obviously, very challenging to achieve.

Gina M. Stamm: 45:38

Thank you so much. I'm so happy. I basically did it all in, like, a two week fugue state. Wow. Which was not per speaking of empathy, was not particularly empathetic for anyone that I was in contact with for that time, but it was it was really a wonderful experience to work with the text.

Narrator: 45:59

This has been a University of Minnesota Press production. The book Mevlito's Dreams, a post exotic novel by Antoine Boladine, translated by Gina M. Stam, is available from University of Minnesota Press. Thank you for listening.