Literary Nostradamus

It will be tempting for the menagerie of readers—assorted Federmaniacs and more-casual enthusiasts—to read Raymond Federman's penultimate new book, minor in his canon, but not unimportant, as a meditation of the author's own untimely passing on October 6, 2009 (although he was working on it long before the cancer that eventually claimed his life).

After all, THE CARCASSES is a tale that is tailor-made for all versions of the literary Nostradamus. Yet instead of the story of black or white pigs or the names of the antichrist, the short book explores a different sort of zone between prophecy and interpretation. The former, here, manifests in a sandbox of eternal transmutation: the zone of the Carcasses. In this zone, this abode, the dead exist in a sort of proto-socialist limbo and wait their turn to be transmuted, transformed, and reincarnated at the behest of the "authorities":

-- the place where the carcasses are piled is a separate zone in the great void of the universe – nobody knows where it is – but it's like a huge department store -- a bit like Walmart [sic] – and there carcasses of all sizes and types all shapes all forms all colors -- .… -- wait for the authorities to tel [sic] them they are going to be transmuted -- …. – you have to accept their decision – and so your turn comes and you are told that you are going back as an insect -- yes – as a fly – imagine yourself now living the life of a fly -- ok it's a short life ….

Yes, the zone is quite the wheel of death and rebirth, where bodies are then sent to live again not only as flies but also flowers, lions, the "sensuous body of a Hollywood starlet," or by mistake, a dinosaur set in the period of Greek antiquity. Friedrich Nietzsche tells us that for the ancient Greeks, "even the goddess Athena herself is suddenly seen in the company of Peisistratus driving through the market place of Athens with a beautiful team of horses." Federman, ever the prankster, adds T-Rex to the Agora.

The text delights in detailing this dino-Greco absurdity along with that of carcass revolts toward a modicum of decision-making placement power; further joco-serious horrors involve and the possibility of homofaunic offspring from bodies participating in cross-species Carcass zone congress. The potential results—half human, half animal—might lead to a real-world production of new species that could cure death, and so, bring the Carcass zone to obsolescence; such possibilities lead Federman on a typically indirect assault on the "authorities" and thus, authorship, à la Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes.

The recursive cosmogony eventually takes on the cacophonous timbre of Hassan's Rumpus Room from William S. Burroughs's Naked Lunch (1959), with piles of writhing carcasses producing new genes through orgiastic sexual contact only to transmit those genes upon the next earthly reincarnation. The zone becomes both generative and interpretative in its wind-down moments, closing with an eleven page list of famous transmutations that might have been ripped from a surrealist parlor game, as per the following (selected from the entire excerpt):

Rabelais – as King Kong in his 46th transmutation –

Marie-Antoinette – as a chocolate donut in her 3rd transmutation –

Ulysses – as a pimp on planet Venus in his 4th transmutation –

Molloy – as China ink in his first transmutation.

The astute reader will be unsurprised to find Molloy (Molloy [1955]) toward the close, along with transformations of Gogo and Didi (Waiting for Godot [1953]), and separately, Pozzo and Lucky; only two persons get two listing each in this corpus of the resuscitated: Federman (once as alter-ego Moinous) and Samuel Beckett.

The second time finds Federman immediately preceding his mentor: "Federman – as a box of macaroni in his first transmutation – / Samuel Beckett – as a French Poodle after he returned from eternity." Even so, it's not so much Beckett the real-life mentor for Federman as it is Beckett-the-word-on-the-page, at perhaps his most cruel, which hovers above THE CARCASSES...