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

ONE: BECKETT AND BEYOND: Federman the Scholar

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, 29 30 FEDERMAN’S FICTIONS 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) 31 BECKETT AND BEYOND For a beginning novelist who would take his own narrative...