The trace on the window. Phenomenic-cognitive categories of the transparent and the opaque in narrative: the case of Antoine Volodine

Abstract

The experience of immersion in the real world and in the textual world are comparable in that both require that the medium which the world unfolds remains hidden from our attention. Phenomenology and cognitive sciences thus speak of a transparent experience, as opposed to the opaque experience implied by awareness of the medium. In this article we study the implications of such processes in relation to the experience of reading the work of the French-Russian writer Antoine Volodine, which the author himself calls "post-exotism". We argue that in post-exotic literature the multiplication of counter-immersive procedures constitues a true aesthetics of opacity, understood as an aesthetics of the access to the textual worlds, and we will analyse what functions this aesthetics plays in his literary project as whole.