Dondog and the Post-Exotic After All

Abstract

Dondog and the Post-Exotic After All Églantine Colon (bio) Nearly twenty years after SubStance devoted a special issue to the contemporary French writer (and translator) we know as Antoine Volodine, we are thoroughly pleased to be publishing in this issue the opening of Dondog, a novel that Ben Streeter has translated with inspired exactitude and brilliant tonal precision. In English or in French, entering Dondog is not unlike entering any other "post-exotic" text (I will come back to this label shortly). One has to learn how to orient oneself to the ruination of Modernity, within the dysfunctional memories of post-traumatic subjects, between dark humor and luminous despair, in the liminal space between life and death, between humanity and animality, and, in the odd beauty of a language that gives transmissible form to the experience of our contemporary hellscape. Post-Exoticism has a soft spot for odd numbers, especially palindromes, and it was fitting that, in 2003, SubStance devoted its Issue 101 to Volodine. At the time, his highly singular literature was barely known in the United States. In France, the "happy few" who had discovered Volodine through his early Science Fictional trilogy in the mid-1980s had grown into a solid general readership. Volodine had theorized his fictional literary movement in 1998 and he started publishing post-exotic texts in the name of his three heteronyms, Ellie Kronaeur, Manuela Draeger, and Lutz Bassman, becoming the object of significant, albeit dispersed, academic curiosity. In 1999 and 2000, Post-Exoticism gained clear critical recognition when his Des anges mineurs (later translated as Minor Angels) was awarded a couple of important awards (the Prix Wepler and the Prix du livre Inter). In the U.S., though, the post-exotic readership was limited to a few Francophones in the know, and to the lucky readers who had stumbled upon Volodine's Naming the Jungle, the only post-exotic novel [End Page 90] then translated into English. With its Issue 101, SubStance was therefore introducing Volodine's literature to an American, if not an international, academic audience, thus increasing the need for the translation into English of this massively compelling literary project. To some extent, this special issue also participated in constituting Post-Exoticism as an academic object—not that no one had written on Volodine before, but an edited volume had yet to take shape in a major academic journal, including in France. Since then, twenty-seven texts have been added to the post-exotic archive, winning a few more awards—the prestigious Medicis Prize for Terminus Radieux and the Prix Albertine for Bardo or not Bardo, among others—and a dozen books signed Volodine, Draeger, and Bassman are now available in English.1 According to Volodine, Post-Exoticism will find its point of achievement when the magical number 49 is reached: 49, seven squared, is symbolic of rebirth in the Buddhist tradition, putting a twist to the very idea of an ending. Within an ultimate opus titled, Retour au goudron (literally, "back to the tar"), the very last sentence of Post-Exoticism will be: "Maintenant, je me tais" ("Let me shut up now"). The extreme care with which Volodine is constructing his literary universe makes Post-Exoticism an ideal academic object, even though it has already been theorized by the author himself and contains the critique of its critics. In France, Volodine is one of very few living authors to whom several monographs and edited volumes have been devoted.2 Here in the U.S., giving proof that Post-Exoticism speaks to the archaeologies of our times, there has been much variation in the angles from which it has been academically approached. These variations may correspond to changing trends in the humanities, from theories of the novel and narrativity, to world literature, philosophy, political theory, care studies, new materialisms, and, increasingly, sexual violence and ecocriticism.3 But they all bear witness to the richness of the analysis that goes, book after book, into the composition of Post-Exoticism as an allegorical distortion of our precarious present. The critical traction generated by Post-Exoticism can also be explained by the fact that it presents academic discourse with an uncanny version of...