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TWELVE SURVIVING IN THE CORRIDORS OF HISTORY OR, HISTORY AS DOUBLE OR NOTHING Dan Stone History is a joke whose punch line is always messed up in advance. —Raymond Federman Every man invents a history that one day he takes for history. —After Moinous In Smiles on Washington Square, we are told that Moinous, the protagonist, “makes no distinction, in his mind as well as in his life, between memory and imagination. That is perhaps why he has so little interest in facts” (Federman 1995, 12). In To Whom It May Concern, the letter-writing narrator claims that “historical facts are not important, you know that. Besides, they always fade into banality. What matters is the account and not the reality of events” (1990, 38). There appears to be an unbridgeable chasm here between Moinous and the approach historians take to writing, so much so that even to mention the lack of a connection seems absurdly contrived. Yet, quite apart from the fact that the protagonist who derides facts on one page refers a few pages later to 7 December 1941 as the date both of the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the start of mass extermination at Chelmno (79),1 in a 2004 article Federman derided the fiction writer of 203 204 FEDERMAN’S FICTIONS today who “has deserted his post as witness of history to seek other rewards” (167).2 Clearly, though formally and with respect to ideas, Federman’s fiction appears to be opposed to historical method, he nevertheless regards himself as someone who has not deserted his post as witness to history. With no regard for facts, though, how can he justify this claim? In his criticism and his novels, Federman and his characters rail against chronology, facts, realism, linear narrative, the format of the printed page; that is to say, all the things that historians hold dear. His scoffing, scatological , iconoclastic, joyous, and thoroughly life-affirming fiction is on the face of it the opposite of scholarly seriousness; indeed, Moinous claims that “Seriousness is a quality for those who have no other qualities” (1995, 95). So why should a historian (ohne Eigenschaften) be interested in Federman’s writings (other than as interesting novels to read on holiday)? What, if anything, does Federman have to say to historians? In terms of Holocaust literature, one might argue that Federman speaks about it by not speaking about it; or rather, by making not speaking about it the condition of possibility for a productive reflection. History, on the other hand, does not speak about it by speaking about it so much, that’s to say, submerges what is really significant—the horror—in a welter of “stuff.” As every historian of the Holocaust knows, “words are both what help us get where we want to go and prevent us from getting there” (2000, 129). But most historians are unwilling to devote their time to such theoretical concerns; the problem of how to turn the cliché of “unspeakability” into either a revision of form or a redescription of existing practice is not, they feel, their problem. Here I will argue that this is an unfortunate state of affairs, not because I disagree with Federman that it is fiction and poetry that will help us come to terms with the Holocaust rather than “numbers or statistics,” but because history is in any case about far more than numbers and statistics; rather, it is loaded with emotional and moral freight and does far more than just provide information about the past, and can do so by using silence, digression, and evasion to as great effects as any work of fiction. Furthermore, I will argue that many of Federman’s desiderata for literature are, de facto, always already part and parcel of historical practice—whether most historians (or novelists or literary critics) know it or not. Finally, with respect to Federman’s novels themselves, I will claim that, like Jean-François Lyotard’s insistence on the need for feeling rather than knowledge, it is precisely the absence of “facts” that generates the profound sense of rootedness in history that one feels there. This chapter will not be a discourse on historical method, nor will it try and convince readers that Raymond Federman is a historian, though he continually rewrites the past and does so by rigorous attention to certain kinds of sources. Rather, I want to consider the proposition that writing history can be designated with the phrase “double or nothing.” Historiography...

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