Traitor to the Cause

TSm BOOK REVIEWS SCATOLOGIKON, OR FEDERMAN'S RETURN Christian Moraru Return to Manure Raymond Federman FC2 http://fc2.org 204 pages; paper, $19.95 Retour au fumier. Récit nostalgique pour mon vieux chien blgleux Traduit de l'anglais (US) par Éric Giraud Editions Al Dante c/o VILO 25 rue Ginoux 75015 Paris, France 224 pages; paper, €20.00 Well, yes, they think there is such thing as an "American language." After all, this is why Gravity 's Rainbow (1973) has been "traduit de l'américain" and Raymond Federman's Return to Manure "de l'anglais (US)," as the French publisher of Retour aufumier (2005) enlightens us. But the broader and perhaps more relevant point that bears raising here apropos of Federman's new and provocative book is our old friend difference, more exactly a certain reinforcement of an actual or perceived difference that is as linguistic as it is cultural, ethnic, and even ethical. Since no linguist worth her salt would argue that there are English and American "languages," what possesses a French press, I wonder, to make such a claim? To rephrase, in terms closer to my discussion here: what other claims and presumptions does this claim imply? "À quoi bon" widen the gap between "American" and "French" by postulating, among other things, the English original's idiolectally twice-removed remoteness? Why make out Return to Manure more foreign to its target language and audience than it really is? Why render the book more distant, more alien, in a translation supposed to "carry over" and bring closer (translate, that is)? Finally, why carve out for Federman's work an outside niche, an outsider's space inside French and Frenchness, in what is presumably a hospitable space—the original's home away from home? The answers lie in various places and formulations , from the "Toubon Law" and the broader chauvinistic mindset behind it to the brief Federman text "Le traître à la cause" translated and printed next to this review (slightly altered, the text is reproduced both in My Body in Nine Parts and in the Manure/Fumier books). But Return to Manure itself provides a compelling clarification, pretty much along the same lines. For in it, Federman embarks on an impossible "retour"— impossible not just because all repetitive attempts of this sort are so, à la S0ren Kierkegaard's (failed) Repetition (1843) and Milan Kundera's counter-nostalgia (Ignorance, 2000), but because the place to go back to already and brutally foreclosed this pseudo-nostalgic project many years ago, and, adding insult to the old injury, it thwarts it again as this Utopian undertaking is unfolding. Following his family's 1942 Nazi roundup and murder at Auschwitz, thirteen-year old Federman shoveled manure ("fumier") on a French farm for three long years. Three more years thereafter, he left "ce fumier de pays" ("lthat] crappy country") for the US. Still, on his way to Cannes sixty years après, he is searching for the place of his wartime ordeal. The nostos is, as I have pointed out, bound to fail for a number of reasons, all of which have to do with language one way or the other. In his 2005 book My Body in Nine Parts, Federman declares one more time: "I speak therefore I am.... Without my voice I'd be nothing." Fundamentally, being is being heard, speaking. Federman's narrative ontology coalesces around voice, which is both tenor and vehicle of life. Yet, for one thing, this voice is not one, as we shall see below. For another, it always borders on voicelessness, on silence, stems from it and risks ending up back in it, to things unspoken or unspeakable. Returning to the manure emporium and its hardships is "risky," a vocal and existential hazard because it equals circling back to the realm of the unspeakable. To be sure, the French camp(agne) and the Nazi camp are hardly the same thing. Nevertheless , "toutes proportions gardées," as the French say, what happens in the former on a lower scale of pain and humiliation does smack of the latter and its fullblown tragedy. They both are places of forced labor where Federman and, hundreds of miles...