Interrogation: A Post-Exotic Device

Reading an interrogation, and to a greater extent analyzing it, puts one in a complex and ambiguous position. At any moment the researcher experiences the interrogation and thus may be ensnared by fiction, projected into the examiner’s position, forcing the meaning of the text, often involuntarily. By choosing this form as an essential element of his poetics, Volodine foregrounds the participatory dimension of reading and analysis, a game of the tenuous distance one strives to maintain with a text. One must then avoid a double pitfall: either to assume the interrogator’s role and risk doing violence to the text, or to accompany the interrogated party unconditionally, trapped by this complex device. Far from being a mere dramatic ploy that exposes the narrative fabric, the pervasiveness of interrogations in Volodine’s work leaves little room for doubt. Beyond the “interrogator novels” (Rituel du mépris, Le Nom des singes, Le Port intérieur), this form governs one of the diptychs in Vue sur l’ossuaire, a part of the eleventh lesson in Post-exotisme en dix leçons, leçon onze, and appears under multiple guises in all his other works. Interrogation is clearly an effective device that definitively binds aesthetics to politics. It associates language and power, the act of speaking with the seizing of power. Fiction is born as a resistance to the interrogator’s exacting demands for meaning. A conflict then arises in which two conceptions of language confront each other. Furthermore, interrogation offers a reflection on writing put to the question, on a literature under constraint, from which fiction attempts to distance itself. It portrays duality as a source for both alterity and separation. On the other hand, the language of fiction constructs the possibility of a community, thereby achieving the egalitarianism to which the texts lay claim. Thus the dimension of conflict in this writing style can be conceived as a product of this essential device.