Dondog and the Post-Exotic After All

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