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SIX A NARRATIVE POETICS OF RAYMOND FEDERMAN Brian McHale SYSTEM, TRANSGRESSION As everyone knows, postmodernist narrative practice is indebted to theory; it carries out various theoretical agendas; it illustrates theory. Of course, what “everyone knows” is almost invariably wrong, and so it proves to be in this case. The assumption that theory drives practice in postmodernism depends largely on a dubiously casual conflation of posts. Postmodernism, poststructuralism: they share a prefix, so they must amount to the same thing, right? In fact, American postmodernism (which is what mainly concerns me here) developed its narrative poetics largely independently of European high theory, and contemporaneously with it (if not actually in advance of it). If European high theory and American postmodernist practice are related, it is not as parent to offspring, but as cousins, indebted to the same precursors : the modernist innovators of the earlier twentieth century, including Proust, Joyce, and Kafka, and the great modernist-era avant-gardes—Dada, surrealism, expressionism, existentialism—as well as transitional figures such as Beckett. Raymond Federman, as everyone knows, was an academic before he was a novelist, and moreover a francophone academic, so his narrative practice must be animated by European theory from beginning to end—right? Well, not from the beginning, in any case. If one looks at his early critical monograph on Beckett, Journey to Chaos (1965), one finds that it begins with three epigraphs from Beckett, then one from Wayne Booth’s Rhetoric 93 94 FEDERMAN’S FICTIONS of Fiction (1961), which pretty accurately reflects the nature and extent of Federman’s theoretical commitments at the outset of his career. His analysis of Beckett remains comfortably within the bounds of Anglo-American rhetoric of fiction, as articulated by Booth, with its useful but theoretically unambitious distinctions among real and implied authors and types of narration . Hardly cutting-edge by later standards, this approach to narrative represents “normal science” in American literary criticism, circa 1965; it is in a sense pre-theoretical, and consequently so is Journey to Chaos. When Federman sits down in Paris on, by his own account (Federman 1993, 113–14), October 1, 1966, to begin drafting his first novel, Double or Nothing (DON), he does not bring to his writing practice the findings of the new structuralist narratologie, showcased that year in a special issue of the Parisian journal Communication; the basic categories of Boothian rhetoric of fiction—narrator, protagonist, implied author—still suffice. As late as his influential Surfiction manifesto of 1975, there are still few traces of high theory in Federman’s approach.1 Not until the next year, in his second English-language novel, Take It or Leave It (TIOLI), does the discourse of French high theory—Derrida, Lacan, Foucault, Michel Deguy, and others—begin to figure in his fiction, and even here it figures mainly as the discourse of the narrator’s adversaries, the narratees whose (inferred) interruptions disturb the narration and provoke the narrator’s invective. Theory is what resists Federman’s practice, and what he pushes back against, here and elsewhere. I am suggesting, not that Federman is ignorant of theory, including narrative theory, but that he is largely indifferent to it, early and late. This does not make him any less of a metafictionist—or, to use his own term, any less of a surfictionist; far from it. If surfiction is, according to Federman, “a kind of discourse whose shape will be . . . an endless interrogation of what it is doing while doing it,” then of course Federman’s novels are surfictions if anyone’s are, since they endlessly interrogate the categories and conventions of their own narrative form, making those categories and conventions the very object of the narrative telling (1975, 11). Nevertheless, I see little evidence that Federman arrives at surfictional self-reflection through theory; rather, he seems to me to have arrived at it mainly through reflection on the practice of his precursors—Beckett above all, of course, but also the high-modernists (Proust, Joyce, Kafka), mavericks such as Céline and Le Clézio, contemporaries such as the nouveaux romanciers and his American surfictionist compatriots Sukenick, Katz, Chambers, Major, and Molinaro, and even distant precursors such Rabelais, Sterne, and Diderot. Surfictional self-reflection on narrative categories and conventions takes two general forms in Federman’s practice. First, there is what we might call a strategy of ostension: simply pointing to the categories and conventions of narrative, insisting that we notice them—exhibiting them, making a spectacle of them. This...

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