{"id":294226,"date":"2013-06-07T14:00:00","date_gmt":"2013-06-07T14:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2013\/06\/07\/les-aigles-puent\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T15:56:38","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T15:56:38","slug":"les-aigles-puent","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2013\/06\/07\/les-aigles-puent\/","title":{"rendered":"Les aigles puent"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you\u2019ve been following any of the recent Antoine Volodine talk going around Three Percent\u2014both on the blog or on the podcasts\u2014and have heard his fans wax obsessive over all his alter author-egos, you\u2019re probably starting to feel some Volodine fatigue setting in. One more mention of what his books do to your dreams, of postexoticism, prison literature, Untermenschen<\/em>, or people with blends of Eastern European, Mongolian, and Middle Asian names, and you\u2019ll start bleeding from your ears, right?<\/p>\n

Sorry, but we\u2019re not done yet.<\/p>\n

Yet unpublished in English, Les aigles puent<\/em>, a novel by Lutz Bassmann (one of Volodine\u2019s many reoccurring faces\/names\/characters), is the tale of a man named Gordon Koum who has just returned from an assassination mission for the Party, only to discover that his home city has been devastated by a (possibly nuclear) bomb. Everything is completely and irreversibly demolished, turned to black ash and soot. Everyone whom Gordon Koum loved\u2014his wife, his children, his comrades\u2014is dead at the hands of these \u201cwitch bombs.\u201d As he picks through the rubble, Gordon quickly realizes that everything is hopeless, that all is lost. Maddened, irradiated, and wracked with sorrow, our protagonist sits on a bit of rock and waits for death, his only companions a dead bird stuck in the tar, and a golliwog that had miraculously survived the blast. He uses his gift for ventriloquism to converse with them, and tells them stories of his lost friends: Benny Magadane, Antar Gudarbak, his wife Maryama Koum, and many others.<\/p>\n

The book is in some ways very similar to Volodine\u2019s Minor Angels<\/em>: a man in pain is reciting strange short stories about others (I would consider the \u201cIn Memory of X\u201d and \u201cTo Make X Laugh\u201d chapters to be narracts), including stories about himself. In the case of Les aigles puent<\/em>, however, the main character is not being punished for some crime, and in fact Gordon Koum could be said to be the antithesis to Will Scheidmann\u2014as a Party member he is working against the dominant forces of (presumably) capitalism, whereas Scheidmann ended up restoring capitalism to its former state in his world.<\/p>\n

Another interesting thing about the novel is the mention of a man named M\u00fcller, whom
\nGordon Koum has killed. In Post-Exoticism in Ten Lessons, Lesson Eleven<\/em>, M\u00fcller is the name of a brutal prison guard who threatens to have the character Tarchalski beaten if he doesn\u2019t return to his seat during his interview with another character, Blotno. Could this be a possible revenge fantasy of Bassmann\u2019s? Post-Exoticism<\/em> mentions that yet another character, Elia Fincke, has compiled a list of all the prison guards who had committed violence against the post-exotic authors between 1975 and 1999, so one might begin to wonder if all the villainous characters in these works get their names from this list.<\/p>\n

Bassmann\u2019s writing here is quite compelling, and the book provides a counterweight for both Minor Angels<\/em>(in Gordon Koum\u2019s similarities and differences to Will Scheidmann) and Post-Exoticism in Ten Lessons, Lesson Eleven<\/em> (as we get to see now the effects of Bassmann\u2019s imprisonment and madness on his writing).<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s an excerpt1<\/a><\/sup> from chapter eight of Les aigles puent<\/em>, “To Make Ay\u00efsch Omonenko Laugh”, in which the narrator prepares to come face-to-face with No\u00eb Balgagul, a ruthless ferry captain who forces his passengers into a humiliating game of charades to ensure their safe travel . . .<\/p>\n

\n

No\u00eb Balgagul was the patron of a ferry that he called his ark. He was an old mercenary who pretended to have given up crimes against humanity to commit to the purifying path of spirituality. In reality, the atrocities he knew or committed had forever scrambled his senses. His vision of the world had blackened, it was inhabited by monsters and phantoms. No\u00eb Balgagul\u2019s religion extolled nothing, advocated no morality, and gave no explanation for the omnipresence of suffering in the fates of living creatures. It brought neither relief nor hope. It was an obscure construction, devoid of divinities and even mystic principles. It came to him while he was kneading maniacally his own private bitumen of cruelty and insanity, and no reassuring flame ever came to this tar. The spiritual principles of No\u00eb Balgagul were reduced to a lugubrious practice, whose teachings he did not try to disseminate, except for in his immediate entourage, a band of deserters and brigands who had pledged allegiance to him.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

I had been warned that No\u00eb Balgagul performed a species of baptism as soon as crossing candidates boarded his craft. First he took their dollar, then he divided the unfortunates into several categories whose criteria were known to him alone. To these categories, all of them degrading, he attributed arbitrary names, names of animals that provoked his crew\u2019s contempt, but which provided the foundation for a wretched role-playing game. This game lasted the entire slow crossing. A few regular clients sometimes escaped this obligation, but no one else. One by one, the passengers stepped foot onto his enormous punt. No\u00eb Balgagul took the coin they paid him all the while examining them from feet to head. He appointed them a seat and, immediately, classified and baptized them. This selection conformed to illegible religious principles and, ultimately, its only point of origin was in No\u00eb Balgagul\u2019s caprices and petty irascibility. According to the title he had received, the traveler had to adopt the behaviors of a pig, a parrot, or a male or female human. He had to act them out with determination and even fervor. His fate depended on it, and in that one could find a religious relation between the totem he had been saddled with and the consequences that poor observation of the ritual could provoke. Those who were too half-hearted in miming their animal were thrown into the water by No\u00eb Balgagul\u2019s assistant, a specialist in fencing who delighted in the idea of then jabbing them with the gaff hook and who never objected to carrying out his employer\u2019s murderous orders. The river was nasty, opaque, punctuated by eddies and treacherous churnings. It was several hundred meters wide and No\u00eb Balgagul never threw out anyone before reaching the halfway point. In numerous places, algae countered the swimmers\u2019 movements. Those from the city, who had left the hell of war to fall into the hell of peace, were powerless. Very few managed to get back to the shore.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

That is what I had been told about No\u00eb Balgagul, biological products, and the river.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

1<\/sup> Trans. by John Thomas Mahany<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If you\u2019ve been following any of the recent Antoine Volodine talk going around Three Percent\u2014both on the blog or on the podcasts\u2014and have heard his fans wax obsessive over all his alter author-egos, you\u2019re probably starting to feel some Volodine fatigue setting in. One more mention of what his books do to your dreams, of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":166,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67486],"tags":[49366,3426,51766,51776,51756],"class_list":["post-294226","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-antoine-volodine","tag-french-literature","tag-john-thomas-mahany","tag-les-aigles-puents","tag-lutz-bassman"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294226","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/166"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=294226"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294226\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":339676,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294226\/revisions\/339676"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=294226"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=294226"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=294226"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}