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SEVENTEEN FEDERMAN’S LAUGHTERATURE Menachem Feuer One may think that humor has existed for centuries, but Milan Kundera, in an essay entitled “The Day Panurge No Longer Makes People Laugh,” makes the outlandish claim that humor was invented with the modern novel. Citing Octavio Paz, Kundera notes that “there is no humor in Homer or Virgil; Aristo seems to foreshadow it, but not until Cervantes does humor take shape. . . . Humor is the great invention of the modern spirit” (2001, 5). It is “not laughter, not mockery, not satire, but a particular species of the comic, which, as Paz says . . . ‘renders ambiguous everything it touches’ ” (6). And because it creates ambiguity, humor becomes the basis of a modern concept of individuation which runs contrary to other, more Kantian, notions of autonomy. For Kundera, individuation is constituted by the ambiguity created by humor—not in the clear and distinct ideas formed by reason or acted on by the will: “it is precisely in losing the certainty of truth and the unanimous agreement of others that man becomes an individual” (159). But he is not alone, as humor creates a communal space, an “imaginary paradise of individuals,” a “territory where no one possess the truth” (159). But besides creating a space for the individual (and community) in the modern novel, humor initiates temporality, or what Kundera calls the “history of the novel.” This history, however, is not history as we know it: “the history of humanity and the history of the novel are two different things. The former is not man’s to determine, it takes over like an alien force he cannot control, whereas the history of the novel is born of man’s freedom, of his wholly personal creations, of his own choices” (16). In many ways, the work of Raymond Federman belongs to what Kundera calls the “history of the novel.” Federman, like the early modern novelists, conceives of the relationship between the self and the text as 277 278 FEDERMAN’S FICTIONS being based on a form of humor that takes a definitive stance toward history. Indeed, like the modern novels of Cervantes and Rabelais, the humor found throughout Federman’s novels renders all they touch “ambiguous” so as to create an alternate temporality and history—a novelistic and textual history and a “territory” that challenge what Kundera calls the “impersonality of the history of humanity” (2001, 16). To be sure, since this temporality and history constitute the time and space of freedom and individuation, they submit a challenge to the underpinnings of modern autonomy and history. For modern thinkers like Immanuel Kant, Karl Marx, or even Henri Bergson, history is not a laughing matter: it is only through history that one can be autonomous and free. In fact, Bergson argues that humor stands in the way of élan vital and what he calls Creative Evolution (Weeks 2005, 137). For Bergson, the one who laughs “slackens in the attention due to life. He more or less resembles the absentminded. Maybe his will is here even more concerned than his intellect” (1911b, 196). Furthermore, humor stands in the way of the whole of humanity, who, “in space and time is one immense army galloping beside and before each of us in an overwhelming charge able to beat down every resistance, and clear the most formidable obstacles, even death” (Bergson 1911a, 286). And rather than affirm the humorous as such, Bergson sees the only use for humor is as a corrective of mechanical behavior which, ultimately, gets in the way of this gallop (Munro 1963, 112–35). In addition, for Kant, and even for modern post-Kantian thinkers like Jürgen Habermas, it is only through actions, in the space of the public realm, that one can actualize one’s freedom and autonomy. However, the modern novel, as Kundera and Federman understand it, is a challenge to these concepts of autonomy because it is in the history and space of the comic modern novel that autonomy and freedom are created and recreated. And it is in the interruption of history, caused by humor, that the modern novel challenges the worst evils of history against humanity and freedom. Unlike medieval history, the history of chivalry, and the history of the church challenged by Cervantes and Rabelais, Federman addresses countless histories of the twentieth century which have seriously impinged upon humanity and freedom. In his book The Twofold Vibration, Federman makes an exhaustive list of them, which are, as he states, “tragic historical...

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