Volodine, etc.: post-exotisme, poétique, politique éd. par Frédérik Detue, Lionel Ruffel (review)

Reviews 217 Detue, Frédérik, et Lionel Ruffel, éd. Volodine, etc.: post-exotisme, poétique, politique. Paris: Garnier, 2013. ISBN 978-2-8124-1085-7. Pp. 433. 38 a. The Cerisy colloquia continue to preserve their high level of rigorous scholarship and relevance, as is evident in this volume. Back in 2003, the journal SubStance dedicated an entire issue to Volodine, with articles by some of the same writers who have contributed to this current edition. The participants in the colloquium are Volodine specialists and thus have invested much attention in his twenty-five-year writing career, despite the difficulties brought about by the author’s self-effacement or self-dispersal through his many heteronyms. The focus of the volume is Volodine’s post-exotic program, with special emphasis placed on problems of (non-) translatability , language, polyvocality, the endless flux of uncanny images in his work, his invention or manipulation of literary genres, and the political implications of his texts, particularly the utopian hope implicit in most of them. The importance of Volodine’s work rests in his will to radicalize literature, to change its form and content, and to extend the boundaries of what literature is allowed to do.Among the most fascinating articles in the collection are Patrick Rebollar’s“Onirologie post-exotique”and Antonin Wiser’s “Un archipel post-exotique: essai de lecture topographique de Des anges mineurs.” In the first, Rebollar proposes a series of ways in which one might conceive of a dream in Volodine’s work. For example, he includes headings such as“The Dream as an Incomprehensible Message,”“The Dream as a Cultural Object,”and“The Dream as Testimony,”and shows how Volodine experiments with each of these conceptualizations in his books. Rebollar’s approach is helpful in providing fresh ways to think through the author’s corpus and is reminiscent in structure and theme of Umberto Eco’s famous essay “Dieci modi di sognare il medioevo” (“Ten Ways to Dream the Middle Ages”). Wiser’s topographical reading of Volodine relies on Deleuze and Guattari’s geopoetic imagination and concepts from thinkers such as Sloterdijk, Nancy, and Derrida to closely read the spatial components of Des anges mineurs. Since, as Wiser makes clear in his introduction, readers of Volodine tend to focus on his strange use of time, a study of his use of space is all the more warranted. All in all, this book, which I highly recommend,is a significant contribution for all scholars of contemporary French literature, not just for Volodine specialists. Since his importance is becoming ever more evident and his impact on literary practice ever greater, the editors’ efforts to assemble this impressive volume will hopefully be rewarded by a large readership and the opening up of an already sizeable scholarly community. Princeton University Christy Wampole ...