Exhaustion: In Defiance of Homogeneous Empty Time

Yes, I'd have a mother, I'd have a tomb,I wouldn't have come out of here, one doesn't come out of here,here are my tomb and mother, it's all here this evening,I'm dead and getting born, without having ended,helpless to begin, that's my life.

—Samuel Beckett, Textes pour rien

On the edge of his dream, things were less clear.The scattered fragments of his memory weren't enoughto offer a clear image. A cart stuck in a mud puddle,autumn rain falling on him and impeding his vision …Between two downpours, the melancholymirror reflectionof a pale lilac raincoat falling from a window and flying like a bird, interrupted for a brief instant by an electric pole,before continuing its silent descent to the ground.

–Ge Fei, The Idiot's Poems (Shagua de Shipian; 傻瓜的诗篇)

In the epigraphs by Samuel Beckett and Ge Fei, temporal progression turns on its heels in a quick about-face, reversing course in favor of a steady march away from the future. For Beckett's nameless narrator in Textes pour rien (1955), temporal evolution is linked to physical movement (an impossible, foreclosed "out of here"), and the time between birth and death shrink to one coinciding "now," an interminable "here" of stasis and helplessness. For Dr. Du Yu, the central character in Ge Fei's The Idiot's Poems (1992), the backward and downward movement of memory—like the rain that impedes his clear vision, the recollection of his mother's suicide (a melancholy refraction of a "pale lilac raincoat falling from a window")—take the place of any cogent formulation of daily rhythm once spent in the pursuit of so-called scientific truths.

In France during the Trente Glorieuses (1945–75) and in China during the Post–New Era (1989–present), both governments attempted to manipulate (erase, distort, and replace) the public's memory of recent national trauma—the German Occupation and the Tian'anmen Square Massacre, respectively—producing a mishmash of inconsistent discourses. However, this essay presents writers who took an alternative approach in their work during these periods of national trauma and burgeoning globalization. Through readings of French and Chinese literature, I reveal an asynchronous language of trauma, an imaginative reckoning with the past and the present. While the dominant, national discourses privileged the erasure of mourning, the counterdiscourse of exhaustion symptomized its failure. Exhaustion reveals the ineffectiveness of logic to account for national trauma and its aftermath and proposes instead a reversal, a regression of logic back to a foundation of oozing words, the once sensible body indistinguishable from mud and slime.

The exhausted texts I'll discuss in this essay do not just recommend a return to the beginning or blur the line between the living and dead; rather, they propose that there is no substantive difference between the end and the beginning, and instead, collapse the distance between them, eliminating the journey from womb to tomb. I read the form exhaustion takes in these texts as a response to history and an act of protest. In the fiction of Samuel Beckett and Ge Fei discussed in this essay, exhaustion undoes the cartesian narrators and their logic of narration, reversing progression to regression, working like an agent of Freud's death instinct that seeks "to dissolve those [larger] units [of life] and to bring them back to their primaeval, inorganic state" (Freud 2010, 106). Exhaustion chews away at the subject's connection to their self and their story, leaving only a piling up of empty words.

Homogeneous Empty Time

In these texts, exhaustion works as a form of protest in defiance of the orderly, temporal progression of a common national narrative and the flow of capital. Benedict Anderson's famous theorization of the birth of nationalism at the end of the eighteenth century relies on the members of each "imagined community" sharing in a sense of simultaneity, what Walter Benjamin termed homogeneous empty time. According to Anderson, this mutual understanding of national time, measured by dates on the calendar and...