Federman's Fictions: Innovation, Theory, and the Holocaust

SEVEN: SURFICTION, NOT SURE FICTION: Raymond Federman’s Second-Degree Textual Manipulations

SEVEN SURFICTION, NOT SURE FICTION Raymond Federman’s Second-Degree Textual Manipulations Davis Schneiderman And now what do I do? I start inventing a few things. Things should come quickly at first. It’s the rewriting that’s difficult. It’s always the rewriting that eats up time. —Raymond Federman, Double or Nothing There are two degrees we may identify in the so-called new fiction. The first degree—spatial manipulations on the page—prove more theoretical than effective. And yet the second degree—the deliberately manipulated auto-biographical impulse, fragmented retellings that make the fictional world fictional—may well prove the more pervasive. —Henri d’Mescan, “Fiction in the Year 4000” YES, WE HAVE NO BANANAS (OR NOODLES . . . ) It remains simple enough to read Raymond Federman’s My Body in Nine Parts (2005a) as a humorous physical rearticulation in the now-familiar postmodern-postructuralist and, of course, Federmanian tradition. Yet, it is perhaps even more enticing to consider the neobiological implications of this seemingly nontechnological text, as Steve Tomasula (2007) does in 109 110 FEDERMAN’S FICTIONS his Review of Contemporary Fiction appraisal: “A classic Federman theme emerges: a world where a life and the life of the imagination are a psychosomatic whole. When seen as critifictions—Federman’s hybrid of criticism and fiction—the pieces here might also be termed bio-fictions, bio being both biology and biography.” In an age of inchoate cloning and base-level genetic manipulation, Tomasula (inspired no doubt by the work of Green Fluorescent Protein [GFP] Bunny–artist Eduardo Kac), suggests that the biological and the aesthetic trace their historical lineages within the various admixture produced by their meeting (“he felt himself squirm, thinking of his own protonucleus semi-fused with hers under the light of the microinjector” [Tomasula 2006, 294]). This is not so much the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella, as per the Comte de Lautréamont, as it is the socially prescribed union of two holograms in a space vacuum. Tomasula, in the Federmanian tradition of what we will call first-degree postmodern spatial manipulation—the formal (re)arrangements of the page—organizes his astounding visual novel, VAS: An Opera in Flatland, on computer-generated leaves constructed in the same first-degree tradition of Federman’s early typographical manipulations (especially in the classic “noodle novel,” Double or Nothing [1998]). Yet, compared to such fantastic genetic remixes of this first-degree tendency in works such as VAS or the mainstream-released House of Leaves (2000) by Mark Danielewski (and, in 2006, Danielewski’s Only Revolutions), Federman’s thirty-plus years of critifictional and “real fictitious” interventions stand, in light of their charming linguistic come-ons, as Beckettian wordson -the-page, ready, with their best verbal contortions, to seduce readers via a now-old-fashioned, full-contact method: “When I speak, whether I say something true or false, or something intelligent or stupid, I am telling myself” (Federman 2005b, 68). Such directly indirect proclamations litter Federman’s work like hermit crabs washed along a beach—even within the first-degree arabesques—modified in typical style by this passage between the narrator and his wife, Erica, in a recent Federman novel, Return to Manure (2006). The Erica character, certainly not Federman’s actual wife Erica, takes issue with the idea of even mildly dependable representational narration. The character of Erica: “You are incapable of monologue. With you it’s always a dialogue. . . . You always need someone to listen to you. And if nobody is there, you invent someone. Shall I make a list of all the fictitious listeners you have invented in your stories?” (87). As with all of the questions offered by the host of diegetic listeners both passive and aggressive in his works (“HIM on one side and THEM on the other . . . 5 or 6 of them [and more to come inevitably] / yapping like a bunch of old ladies: / YAPYAPYAP! [1976, 0, “suppositions & prelibations ”]1 ), these questions are, merely, as in the similarly metatextual fiction 111 SURFICTION, NOT SURE FICTION of Jean Genet, rhetorical. Yet, as in Genet, they are not meant to be left unanswered, but intended, in fact, to be sounded—pronounced in each individual letter as in Old English spelling—through the self-reflexive rhetoric of the Federman text. If Genet offers his warnings with evocative classical flourishes and Proustian come-ons (“In order to understand me, the...