Federman's Fictions

Innovation, Theory, and the Holocaust

Jeffrey R. Di Leo

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781438433820, 9781438433813
• eBook ISBN: 9781438433837
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: French Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This collection of essays offers an authoritative examination and appraisal of the French-American novelist Raymond Federman's many contributions to humanities scholarship, including Holocaust studies, Beckett studies, translation studies, experimental fiction, postmodernism, and autobiography. Although known primarily as a novelist, Federman (1928–2009) is also the author of numerous books of poetry, essays, translations, and criticism. After emigrating to the United States in 1942 and receiving a Ph.D. in comparative literature at UCLA in 1957, he held professorships in the University at Buffalo's departments of French and English from 1964 to 1999. Together with Steve Katz and Ronald Sukenick, he was one of the original founders of the Fiction Collective, a nonprofit publishing house dedicated to avant garde, experimental prose. Far too many accounts treat Federman as merely a member of a small group of writers who pioneered "metafictional" or "postmodern" American literature. Federman's Fiction will introduce (or, for some, reintroduce) to the broader scholarly community a creative and daring thinker whose work is significant not just to considerations of the development of innovative fiction, but to a number of other distinct disciplines and emerging critical discourses.

PART I

A LIFE IN THE TEXT

ONE

BECKETT AND BEYOND

Federman the Scholar

Jerome Klinkowitz

Beginning in the 1960s and continuing through the balance of the twentieth century (and reaching into the new one as well), serious American fictionists began coming from a new background. Unlike their predecessors, trained in newsrooms and (before that) in customs houses and at sea, many innovators during this transformative era started out in graduate school, earning PhDs and publishing their first books as contributors to scholarship and criticism. Among this group is Raymond Federman, whose 1963 doctoral dissertation, “Samuel Beckett's Early Novels: From Social Reality to Fictional Absurdity,” concluded his studies in French at the University of California, Los Angeles. From here, Federman went on to publish fiction—startlingly new fiction, disruptive of traditional forms and indicative of a completely different view of what the form should achieve. But at the same time, he continued publishing as a scholar and a critic—first with more work on Beckett, then with books and essays on the nature of fiction itself.

Among his generation of writers, Raymond Federman has found the most useful balance between the vocations of fiction writing and scholarship. Others developed pronounced slants to their careers. Ronald Sukenick, for example, published his doctoral dissertation on Wallace Stevens in 1967 but turned at once to fiction, writing two books of critical essays and one on cultural history (of Greenwich Village in the 1960s) principally to argue aesthetic issues that his novels and short stories were advancing. Conversely, William H. Gass wrote “A Philosophical Investigation of Metaphor” (1954) as his doctoral dissertation in philosophy and continued working on implications of his topic through eight books of literary criticism published between 1970 and 2006, while publishing just two novels, a novella, and a single collection of short stories (all of them, however, central texts in the innovative fiction movement). It is in Federman's canon that fiction and criticism are more naturally allied, and where readers can find the most consistently insightful reinforcements between what the fictionist is doing and why he is doing it. Starting with Journey to Chaos: Samuel Beckett's Early Fiction, published in 1965, and continuing through Critifiction: Postmodern Essays, collected in 1993, his volumes of scholarship and criticism develop contemporaneously with his ever-evolving fiction. For readers, each group of work enriches the other. No mere proselytizing for his own novels, Federman's academic publications raise the same formal issues as do his works of fiction, but do so in a manner that enlarges and advances understanding, just as his own creative works take their place in emerging literary history.

ONE

Although Journey to Chaos shares the same table of contents as does Federman's dissertation, this first book-length publication is fully rewritten. The style is not that of a graduate student, nor even of an assistant professor (as the author had been in his first appointment, at the University of California, Santa Barbara), but reads rather as the work of an associate professor (as Federman had become at the State University of New York at Buffalo, a colleague of such major figures as Leslie Fiedler, John Barth, and Robert Creeley, though this move from the Department of French to English would wait until later in the 1970s). It is, however, important to note that even in its dissertation form, for a doctorate in French, Federman's first work on Beckett was written in English, Federman's adopted language, although Beckett had turned to French as an adopted language himself. One wonders if what was at issue for Beckett was also a concern for Federman, at the time beginning his own experiments in fiction. Beckett's “primary purpose was to reveal the inadequacy of language as a means of artistic communication” (Federman 1965, 14). Although English may have been useful for a conventional work of fiction:

Having, however, committed himself to a creative system that negates not only the validity of the novel form, but that of language as an expressive medium, Beckett could no longer fall prey to a language that forced him to say that which he deliberately avoided. By turning to French, he found a way of renewing his purpose, of liberating his writing from linguistic suggestiveness, thus perpetuating his creativity in the critical vein he had chosen. (1965, 14–15)

For a beginning novelist who would take his own narrative, a story of Holocaust losses and survivals well beyond the scope of easy words, and write it in both French and English, Federman is especially sensitive to the task facing another beginner, thirty years before, whose dismay at words' inability to articulate was more formally based:

It is recognized that the French language, with its demand for clarity and precision, its strict grammatical structure, its words that always relate exactly to the concepts they describe, does not allow a writer to say what he does not want to say. Since Beckett, by choice, was attempting to formulate nothingness into words, to state what cannot be stated, meaninglessness, it was essential for him to rely on a language that could be trusted. Moreover, French was better suited to his intent because it is basically compatible with the expression of abstract ideas, tends explicitly toward the formation of a substratum of meaning (that of essences rather than substances), whereas English is more appropriate to the expression of concrete facts, of common realities. Therefore, the shift from English to French corresponds not only to Beckett's exile from his Irish land and tongue, but marks also a willful rejection of realism as an inherent aspect of his novels in favor of a more abstract and elusive type of fiction. (1965, 15)

Federman's own first novel, Double or Nothing (1971), does some-what the same thing as does Beckett's mature work Comment c'est (1961): that is, instead of accumulating facts and situations toward a discovery of knowledge, the narrative reduces and retracts these norms. Yet a similar motivation yields different results, and what Federman the scholar has said about Beckett's preference for French illuminates Federman the novelist's choice of English, the “expression of concrete facts” that make sense only in the typographical finality of “X-X-X-X,” the figure repeated throughout Double or Nothing and many of Federman's other fictional works as a way of indicating the unspeakable loss of his parents and sisters. “This novel is not a projection of reality, but an experiment in willful artistic failure” (Federman 1965, 7)—what Federman the scholar says about Beckett's work has been said by critics about Federman the novelist's work.

What else does Federman admire in Beckett that becomes helpful in his own fiction? Just about everything, from “how the actions of writing become a metaphor for the novel itself” to the way “The author, narrator, and protagonist … merge into a single anonymous being” (9, 177). Yet where Beckett can be bleak, Federman is vivacious, making self-proclaimed artistic failure into great joy rather than solemn silence. Failure may indeed be the “only possible ‘expressive act’ of the modern artist,” but Federman's failure—as an American, writing in English—seems affectionate and appealing: more like the failures of a Buster Keaton or of a Laurel and Hardy than the figures Beckett drew from these same sources (204). It's the difference between writing as a European at the end of the modern era and an American working in the exuberant context of postmodernism.

With Journey to Chaos, Federman has his book-length say on Beckett. Yet he remains interested, publishing essays and also coediting two important reference works, Samuel Beckett: His Works and His Critics (1970b), with John Fletcher, and Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage (1979), with Lawrence Graver. Although other innovative fictioneers maintained an interest in academic publishing, none of their efforts match the consistency and impact of Federman's presence in the field. Indeed, he not only sustains his own reputation as a scholar, but superintends how Beckett's critical reputation is developed. The first of these volumes establishes the canon, assuring that Beckett's early works (Federman's original subject) will continue to receive their due. By selecting and reprinting over three hundred pages of reviews and essays in the second volume, Federman works against a post-Nobel dissatisfaction among some commentators that the great author is too pessimistic, constrictive, and “false to life's variousness” (Federman and Graver 1979, 37). Younger American innovators were facing these same complaints, among them Kurt Vonnegut, Donald Barthelme, and Federman himself. Shortsighted critics might reduce Beckett's work to a facile nihilism, then dismiss Federman and his colleagues in the same terms. Of course, one could make arguments that the new writers were different from their great predecessor, but that would be to discount what was in fact a strong, positive influence. Far better to show that Beckett's enduring reputation was a much happier affair.

TWO

Raymond Federman, a Frenchman who after emigrating to the United States becomes an American academic. Raymond Federman, a scholar of Samuel Beckett—of Beckett conceived of as a writer in the French tradition, living and working in France—becoming not just a novelist but, again, an American novelist, one of whose major themes is his own transportation from postwar France to the United States. Critics naturally take him for a transitional figure, a writer who spans the Atlantic in his interests and experiences, and whose work may offer clues as to how contemporary American fiction may or may not fit in with what has been done abroad.

These are important questions to ask, and answers are found in another of Federman's academic publications: Cinq Nouvelles Nouvelles (1970). Meant to introduce the work of five key French innovators—Samuel Beckett, Boris Vian, Robert Pinget, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and J. M. G. Le Clézio—to students of French literature in America, Federman's introduction (in English) includes some of his first statements on the nature of new fiction in general, statements that would soon join the growing list of commentaries by Ronald Sukenick, William H. Gass, and others. He begins by making an essential contrast: that whereas the American short story continues to be read (and its techniques taught) with an eye to strict conventions of character, plot, and setting, French fiction is typically “formless and unruly,” experimental less in respect to form than “in its approach to the meaning of fiction, that is to say in its own self-awareness” (Federman 1970a, 1). Robbe-Grillet, as the most outspoken, writes fictive narratives that “no longer refer to definite and absolute significations (psychological, social, or functional)” (3) but are instead “mere verbal contortions” in which characters “are a discourse; they are made of words; they are the movement (often contradictory) of their discourse” (5). At this time, William H. Gass was using almost the same terminology to argue for a similar understanding of all fiction in Fiction and the Figures of Life (1970). But to Gass's understanding, Federman adds, from his French sources, a belief that fiction assumes its own voice, a creature of its own constituent language that ultimately refers to nothing but its own act of creation. “Thus writing is no longer an effort to communicate a preexistent meaning,” he concludes, “but a means of exploring language itself which is viewed as a particular space, ‘le lieu du langage,’ and which has its own spatial and temporal conditions, and dimensions” (Federman 1970a, 6). As more than one commentator would soon be saying, “now the only possible subject for fiction is fiction itself” (7).

In theory, Federman is correct. But his choices from among these French contemporaries (a representative group to be sure) omit a certain flavor lacking in current American work (including Federman's own), as Donald Barthelme had already complained in his essay “After Joyce” from the journal he was editing, Location:

The new French novelists, Butor, Sarraute, Robbe-Grillet, Claude Simon, Philippe Sollers, have … succeeded in making objects of their books without reaping any of the strategic benefits of the maneuver—a triumph of misplaced intelligence. Their work seems leaden, self-conscious in the wrong way. Painfully slow-paced, with no leaps of the imagination, concentrating on the minutiae of consciousness, these novels scrupulously, in deadly earnest, parse out what can safely be said. In an effort to avoid psychologism and unwarranted assumptions, they arrive at inconsequence, carrying on that traditional French war against the bourgeois which ends by flattering him: what a monster! (1964, 16)

Federman, of course, has written his critical statement in a context pertinent to French and not American fiction. Indeed, he has begun by contrasting the essences of the two. But from his own fiction, we can see that he was both seeking to change the form by drawing on certain French principles, yet also maintaining a more typically comic American spirit. Any page from his first novels shows this: the hilarity of computing boxes of noodles and squeezes of toothpaste necessary to hole up for a year's writing, drafting phony French love letters for the hillbillies serving with him in an American paratroop regiment—this and all the rest of his own new fiction delighted Barthelme in particular and American reader...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Introduction
• PART I. A LIFE IN THE TEXT
• PART II. PHILOSOPHY OF LITERATURE
• PART III. LAUGHTER, HISTORY, AND THE HOLOCAUST
• Afterword: Critifictional Reflections …
• About the Contributors