Mémoire de l’éléphant post-exotique

The male elephant Wong and the female elephant Marta Ashkarot appear in Nos animaux préférés and Onze rêves de suie by Antoine Volodine. The novelist avoids the exotic and colonial imagery linked to the elephant in the same way that these animalistic micro-fictions escape the generic codes of the fable, short story or novella. The elephant bears witness to the extinction of the human species and becomes the ultimate promoter of an equality which the survivors, trapped in their ideological proclamations, are practically incapable of putting into practice.