How Pitiful and Pleasurable
Antoine Volodine, trans. Alyson Waters, The Monroe Girls
Archipelago, 278pp, £19.99, ISBN 9781962770552
reviewed by Katherine Williams
Antoine Volodine’s The Monroe Girls begins on two streets. One is avenue Chouïgo, easily located on a map, and which one can see from the windows of a psychiatric institution where the initial portion of the novel unravels. The other is rue Dellwo, Chouïgo’s negative of sorts — invisible on all standard maps, manifest only with the assistance of rarefied telepathic vision and, if necessary, an outfit of advanced optical equipment.
Volodine’s schizophrenic narrator, who oscillates between identities as ‘Breton’ and the narrating ‘I’, is the only one equipped with such vision, having spent several decades peering from psychiatric imprisonment onto this ‘black space’ of the concealed. Breton has spent the weeks prior to the novel’s outset peering onto rue Dellwo, where a series of armed young women emerge from a window, jump onto the asphalt, and disappear around corners. Despite the absence of actual rain being registered by Breton, the street is always pictured as riddled with small puddles, the historical event of weather just having passed, right there in the rearview.
In Volodine’s latest novel, first published in 2021 and translated this year into English by Alyson Waters, a vague and totalising political system run by the Party, which retains a diffuse yet unchallenged grip on the remaining world left after a future apocalypse, wrings their hands about these paramilitaries. The girls have allegedly been trained by a revolutionary messiah named Monroe, a former rising star in the Party whose (mostly undetailed) dissidence got him exiled and subsequently mythologised. Fearing this ‘task force’ might slip undetected into the psychiatric camps, inspiring dissent based on Monroe’s rumored plan to enact mutiny and reorient the Party ‘toward something other than . . . disappearance,’ the Party leaders go searching for routes to eliminate the girls. Monroe has in fact already been executed, but execution is more a symbolic event in the book; the lines between life and death, like sane and insane, have long ago been thrown out with the rest of our civilisational axioms.
Some of the more sincerely ominous passages of The Monroe Girls, not least in the rain-soaked rhythms of darkened alleys, draw on the noir mood with which Volodine has played since earlier novels like Mevlido's Dreams. Militiamen decked out in ‘KGB-style’ trenches and over-inquiring threats shimmer with comically inflated stakes. Enter the policeman: ‘You’re typical of the kind that comes to a bad end,’ he warns Breton, trying to ensure his cooperation with the Party’s search expedition. Enter Party middleman Kaytel, a hard-boiled detective having traded youth and political ideals for an indifferent mind jaded by the end of history. Dame Patmos, the Party executive and ‘bureaucratic cow’, waxes nostalgic for her affair with Kaytel in the thick waft of lust and cigarette smoke. These are rare passages of fragile relief for both Breton and the reader, performances of an old and familiar plot in the midst of a book that insists on its characters’ real absence of trajectory.
How pitiful and pleasurable it is, if just briefly, to see these individuals rehearse the long-gone comforts of emotional turmoil and material threats — to be seduced, as a reader, into believing in the plot’s reality outside of Breton’s schizophrenic delusions. Soon enough the ouroboros of historical non-progress will nauseate them, and us.
The Party eventually brings on Breton as an ad-hoc forced contractor, demanding notes on his visions of rue Dellwo. Not that he is much help to them. The dialogue between Breton and the police is flawed by the Janus-faced reticence displayed by all parties, the refusal to admit findings and intentions. Even Dame Patmos knows that survival in the Party means never saying aloud “what one [is] truly thinking.” In this The Monroe Girls invokes a more generative thesis of most noir: surveillance cannot reach the source of anything not seen, and banal subterfuge extends to everyone. All the voyeuristic equipment available to the Party falls short in reaching the girls, and falls short, too, in capturing the distress felt by each character at their own role in a decaying world.
Breton’s schizophrenia allows the novel to unravel with ‘murky narrators . . . guided by exterior and manipulative voices’ — what Volodine himself has described as a hallmark of his ‘post-exotic’ style. It’s a fitting disorientation for a world in which the only categories of lifestyle left after the apocalypse are imprisoned patient or Party official. When Breton eventually does leave the schizophrenia ward, landing first in a different building in which intelligence-gathering operations take place and eventually in different sectors altogether after his escape, the streets are completely empty. Nobody is left except those in power and those they hold hostage. Breton’s other half, as the narrating ‘I’, becomes a kind of refuge: ‘I remained quiet’ while Breton was ‘under the close surveillance’ of policemen.
After Breton escapes imprisonment, locating a Monroe girl named Rebecca in a similar psychiatric institution, the pair embark on Rebecca’s plan to find the other girls and initiate a coup, only to find themselves walking in a circle and returning to the Malakassian dorm where Rebecca was held hostage. Temporal looping is a familiar refrain of Volodine’s oeuvre, one amongst many which appear in The Monroe Girls: interventions into dreams for political ends, imprisoned revolutionaries, forced confessions, irrelevant distinctions between names, shamanism. In fact the book often takes place within a kind of bardo, the intermediate state between life and death described in The Tibetan Book of the Dead. The enlightenment promised on the other side of limbo never arrives, though, and the novel’s cast spend their time mulling over the details of a political project that ends up feeling more like purgatory than revolution.
All of this ennui is tough luck for the Monroe girls, who have been left with little guidance from their fabled leader in their mission to establish worker-farmer commissions and ‘resume the course of interrupted world revolution.’ By the novel’s end, Rebecca comes to suspect the girls ‘had wandered down the wrong road since the beginning,’ entering a side street off rue Dellwo by mistake and perhaps entering a parallel universe ‘in a dense dream, with no Party and no way out.’ Their bardo is not just a purgatory of deferred individual enlightenment, but a politics rendered circuitous.
Having written several novels — some of them under pseudonyms but in service of a collective authorial project — addressing the activities and inertia of politics after defeat, Volodine’s most recent novel is hardly a turn toward happy or straightforward endings. That the novel begins and ends with Breton peering, immobile, onto rue Dellwo, invites suspicion that little has taken place at all — that perhaps the strength of the Party’s authoritarian grip has made Breton’s forced picaresque, through revolutionary struggles and rogue outposts, possible only in the fantasy of his delusions. But Volodine’s decoupling of the high narrative stakes and the suspicion that they might be fiction within the fiction allows him to hedge his bets: are voices ‘sustained’ in honour, or in an exhausted receipt of burden? One might think, Breton, why not use your extremely politicised telepathic vision for more than voyeuristic lounging? How about going rogue into the black space and avoiding the detour rather than lying in reverent repose in the abandoned halls of power?
The hapless whimper of these questions makes The Monroe Girls a slyly totalising book, one with no escape route. Politics cannot seem to begin (again?) amidst such disorientation, in a world where things resemble nothing and nobody is ever really at fault. Even the danger-tinged paranoia of noir is deflated, the stakes both narratively artificial and politically stubborn. There’s not much hope in The Monroe Girls, but who wants didacticism from the times of desertion and post-history?
The pleasure of Volodine’s restrained refusal of realism is more than enough, if not for the left than for articulating the narrative cage passed onto Breton: a cage both psychological and political. To borrow a cynicism from Maxim Gorky, ‘it is the usual Russian bread-cider brewery, a show-booth in which tricks gone out of fashion are shown.’ And Breton, still the fool, will remain as a mere caretaker of the museum of inhuman history.
Volodine’s schizophrenic narrator, who oscillates between identities as ‘Breton’ and the narrating ‘I’, is the only one equipped with such vision, having spent several decades peering from psychiatric imprisonment onto this ‘black space’ of the concealed. Breton has spent the weeks prior to the novel’s outset peering onto rue Dellwo, where a series of armed young women emerge from a window, jump onto the asphalt, and disappear around corners. Despite the absence of actual rain being registered by Breton, the street is always pictured as riddled with small puddles, the historical event of weather just having passed, right there in the rearview.
In Volodine’s latest novel, first published in 2021 and translated this year into English by Alyson Waters, a vague and totalising political system run by the Party, which retains a diffuse yet unchallenged grip on the remaining world left after a future apocalypse, wrings their hands about these paramilitaries. The girls have allegedly been trained by a revolutionary messiah named Monroe, a former rising star in the Party whose (mostly undetailed) dissidence got him exiled and subsequently mythologised. Fearing this ‘task force’ might slip undetected into the psychiatric camps, inspiring dissent based on Monroe’s rumored plan to enact mutiny and reorient the Party ‘toward something other than . . . disappearance,’ the Party leaders go searching for routes to eliminate the girls. Monroe has in fact already been executed, but execution is more a symbolic event in the book; the lines between life and death, like sane and insane, have long ago been thrown out with the rest of our civilisational axioms.
Some of the more sincerely ominous passages of The Monroe Girls, not least in the rain-soaked rhythms of darkened alleys, draw on the noir mood with which Volodine has played since earlier novels like Mevlido's Dreams. Militiamen decked out in ‘KGB-style’ trenches and over-inquiring threats shimmer with comically inflated stakes. Enter the policeman: ‘You’re typical of the kind that comes to a bad end,’ he warns Breton, trying to ensure his cooperation with the Party’s search expedition. Enter Party middleman Kaytel, a hard-boiled detective having traded youth and political ideals for an indifferent mind jaded by the end of history. Dame Patmos, the Party executive and ‘bureaucratic cow’, waxes nostalgic for her affair with Kaytel in the thick waft of lust and cigarette smoke. These are rare passages of fragile relief for both Breton and the reader, performances of an old and familiar plot in the midst of a book that insists on its characters’ real absence of trajectory.
How pitiful and pleasurable it is, if just briefly, to see these individuals rehearse the long-gone comforts of emotional turmoil and material threats — to be seduced, as a reader, into believing in the plot’s reality outside of Breton’s schizophrenic delusions. Soon enough the ouroboros of historical non-progress will nauseate them, and us.
The Party eventually brings on Breton as an ad-hoc forced contractor, demanding notes on his visions of rue Dellwo. Not that he is much help to them. The dialogue between Breton and the police is flawed by the Janus-faced reticence displayed by all parties, the refusal to admit findings and intentions. Even Dame Patmos knows that survival in the Party means never saying aloud “what one [is] truly thinking.” In this The Monroe Girls invokes a more generative thesis of most noir: surveillance cannot reach the source of anything not seen, and banal subterfuge extends to everyone. All the voyeuristic equipment available to the Party falls short in reaching the girls, and falls short, too, in capturing the distress felt by each character at their own role in a decaying world.
Breton’s schizophrenia allows the novel to unravel with ‘murky narrators . . . guided by exterior and manipulative voices’ — what Volodine himself has described as a hallmark of his ‘post-exotic’ style. It’s a fitting disorientation for a world in which the only categories of lifestyle left after the apocalypse are imprisoned patient or Party official. When Breton eventually does leave the schizophrenia ward, landing first in a different building in which intelligence-gathering operations take place and eventually in different sectors altogether after his escape, the streets are completely empty. Nobody is left except those in power and those they hold hostage. Breton’s other half, as the narrating ‘I’, becomes a kind of refuge: ‘I remained quiet’ while Breton was ‘under the close surveillance’ of policemen.
After Breton escapes imprisonment, locating a Monroe girl named Rebecca in a similar psychiatric institution, the pair embark on Rebecca’s plan to find the other girls and initiate a coup, only to find themselves walking in a circle and returning to the Malakassian dorm where Rebecca was held hostage. Temporal looping is a familiar refrain of Volodine’s oeuvre, one amongst many which appear in The Monroe Girls: interventions into dreams for political ends, imprisoned revolutionaries, forced confessions, irrelevant distinctions between names, shamanism. In fact the book often takes place within a kind of bardo, the intermediate state between life and death described in The Tibetan Book of the Dead. The enlightenment promised on the other side of limbo never arrives, though, and the novel’s cast spend their time mulling over the details of a political project that ends up feeling more like purgatory than revolution.
All of this ennui is tough luck for the Monroe girls, who have been left with little guidance from their fabled leader in their mission to establish worker-farmer commissions and ‘resume the course of interrupted world revolution.’ By the novel’s end, Rebecca comes to suspect the girls ‘had wandered down the wrong road since the beginning,’ entering a side street off rue Dellwo by mistake and perhaps entering a parallel universe ‘in a dense dream, with no Party and no way out.’ Their bardo is not just a purgatory of deferred individual enlightenment, but a politics rendered circuitous.
Having written several novels — some of them under pseudonyms but in service of a collective authorial project — addressing the activities and inertia of politics after defeat, Volodine’s most recent novel is hardly a turn toward happy or straightforward endings. That the novel begins and ends with Breton peering, immobile, onto rue Dellwo, invites suspicion that little has taken place at all — that perhaps the strength of the Party’s authoritarian grip has made Breton’s forced picaresque, through revolutionary struggles and rogue outposts, possible only in the fantasy of his delusions. But Volodine’s decoupling of the high narrative stakes and the suspicion that they might be fiction within the fiction allows him to hedge his bets: are voices ‘sustained’ in honour, or in an exhausted receipt of burden? One might think, Breton, why not use your extremely politicised telepathic vision for more than voyeuristic lounging? How about going rogue into the black space and avoiding the detour rather than lying in reverent repose in the abandoned halls of power?
The hapless whimper of these questions makes The Monroe Girls a slyly totalising book, one with no escape route. Politics cannot seem to begin (again?) amidst such disorientation, in a world where things resemble nothing and nobody is ever really at fault. Even the danger-tinged paranoia of noir is deflated, the stakes both narratively artificial and politically stubborn. There’s not much hope in The Monroe Girls, but who wants didacticism from the times of desertion and post-history?
The pleasure of Volodine’s restrained refusal of realism is more than enough, if not for the left than for articulating the narrative cage passed onto Breton: a cage both psychological and political. To borrow a cynicism from Maxim Gorky, ‘it is the usual Russian bread-cider brewery, a show-booth in which tricks gone out of fashion are shown.’ And Breton, still the fool, will remain as a mere caretaker of the museum of inhuman history.