Remembering Raymond Federman

Mark Amerika

Namredef was a good friend, mentor, and surfictional colleague whose books, as The New York Times obit stated, "aimed at the eye as well as the ear, were typically characterized by their artful typography and self-referential, often playful manipulation of language."

Whether it was Boulder, Buffalo, Lucerne, Fresno, Berlin, Cologne, Paris, or Providence, Federman was always there slowly whispering under his breath so that only I could hear him: "Amerika… it is for zeee birds."

Was he playfully ridiculing me or the country or both?

He was talking about all of us. Moinous, it must be said, was a writer of the human condition.

His co-conspirator, Ronnie, once wrote, "'Double or Nothing' breaks up that solid page of print we are all too ready to expect in fiction, and suggests a new convention more persuasively than any novel I know of."

Together, Ray and Ronnie demolished the literary scene that dotted the rapidly changing postmodern landscape. What they left behind was the architectonic novel as performance. You can read about these revolutionary prophets in numerous scholarly books but also on the Web at sites like Alt-X (http://altx.com).

"Keywords," I once said to him during one of our art+language jam sessions, "the meta-tags forming a fictional cloud that changes as it goes: noodles, toothpaste, saxophones, sex, sperm, surfiction, critifiction, laughterature, Fiction Collective, Beckett, chaos, Amerika Haus, DON TIOLI, two-fold vibrations, the novel as performance, Sukenick, X-X-X-X, money, gambling, women, jazz, war, one-armed push-ups, deconstruction, fame, golf, disease, oblivion."

"Silence," he responded—"Silence, smiles, skin, touch, words, beings, bodies, memories, voices, stories, whispers."

The first time I met Ray was at a dinner in Boulder. I told him how much reading his novel Take It Or Leave It changed my life (he leaned over and whispered: "It's my best book."). I was not exaggerating; the book literally changed the way I viewed writing and eventually helped me look at text from so many different angles that I was soon moving away from print publishing and entering the nether regions of multi-media cyberspace and what soon became net art. Anybody who knows anything about hypertext knows that TIOLI was a leap-frogging, unpaginated, precursor to digital narratives of today.

On his blog, in a July entry entitled "my lovely daughter Simone wrote my obituary," we read:

-True he is bound to get really famous posthumously.-Always happens.-Sad isn't it he always wanted the notoriety, acclaim.-He did pretty well for himself.-Yeah but he wanted to write that one great book the one he would be remembered for.-Oh he will be remembered no question.-He wrote a great story in the form of many books.-Like Proust? Beckett?-No even better he wrote them like Federman.-No one like him, just one Federman.-No one but you.

Jan Baetens

Thanks to Raymond Federman, who taught me a lot on art as well as on life, I've learned how we both can and must become indistinguishable. His The Voice in the Closet, which was for him an opportunity to come back to his mother tongue, is the most overwhelming treatment (for it is much more than a testimony) on the Holocaust that I have ever read, and it is a great lesson of humility and humanity to discover that the author of such a book, and the actor of such an experience, has proven able to invent a work and a life of such a creativity, such an openness to all possible dimensions of life (including those considered less canonical—it would be silly to use here words such as "low" or "trivial," since there is absolutely nothing low or trivial in Raymond's magic recreation of man's full life), as well as such a sensibility for the miracle of language. Raymond did not make any distinction...