Coming of Age in Yak Country

Moraru continuedfrom previous page Kierkegaard—pace Friedrich Nietzsche), but genuine "production," originating performance. It is a brisk linguistic dance—ultimately a story woven—around the untellable and the unnamable. This is the charged silence of the silenced, of absented presences and otherwise maimed, obliterated life, not the peaceful quiet of pastoral scenery, and it is quite telling (in all senses) that Federman brings it back to life with raucous vocality. This accusing glossolalia just cannot sound—cannot be—other than what it is: a capacious signifier of life, the index of a thorough autobiographic reanimation. It is the voice or the voices rather that speak the "gamin" Federman back into life, a linguistic cosmopolitanism flagging a cosmopolitan identity as exemplary as contested by its environs. "The somewhat incoherent cadence of my voice," Federman also discloses in My Body in Nine Parts, "certainly corresponds to the cadence of my life, since my voice speaks my life. And to make it worse, I often speak myself in two languages at the same time without making any distinction between the two." Retrieving the unspeakable past is then this exceedingly vociferous proposition. The present in which "Federman" and "Erica" — the real couple and the copula between the fictional and real realms no less— is thus step by step, kilometer after kilometer, and "péage" after "péage" sucked into a past of complications, complexities, and perplexities. This past, Federman's, speaks in tongues. It bears witness to a richness of being the brutal farm treatment threatened to pare down to an "abrutie" machine. The journey does not lead back to an idyllic "dolce far niente" in postcard-perfect French countryside but to its absolute opposite: hard labor dehumanizing the young boy and by the same token pushing him closer and closer to the other "brutes" (animals) and into their scatological world. The Lauzy farm is a fecal inferno. Its story is (what else?) "une histoire de merde" in more senses than one. Rejected by the outside world, brutally "refused" by it, the Jewish boy is here further assaulted by refuse and dejection. "Ui ferine" is quite literally steeped in refuse. The beasts, the cows in particular, overproduce it. Nature mimics them when "¡il] pleut comme une vache qui pisse." as the farm owner waxes lyrical. The field, too. feels like a ubiquitous outhouse with plowing and janitorial work irreversibly mixed up. And the politics of the time is full of it too. "The Retain fascist propaganda was founded on this sordid condition that stank ofcow shit." Federman concludes. The farmer even cogitates that "Manure is the essence of life, ...and each time he would hurl a pitchfork full of manure in my face." The philosophy of refuse and the literal refusal-cumhumiliation of the other converge eloquently in this conspicuously political gesture, a moment, in fact, as political as any on the farm, where, Federman recalls. "Everything made mc angry. Everything that was free, or that had the freedom to do nothing but eat and shit all day." Remembrance ofthings past mounts then a serious olfactory challenge, for this abject Proustianism brings back a whole phenomenology of excretion, as well as a "manural" politics, suffused as it is with the stench of decay, decrepitude, and servitude. It must happen in writing, of course, and, with another paradox, if this writing is effective, it must capture that which it is about even if it combines fiction and recollection, or perhaps especially if it does that. After all, good writing emulates its subject matter, is like it formally, and the manure story is no exception because "the journey in search of the farm" and the "journey in search of the book" turn out to be one. Past travail and its present writing are analogous ifnot equivalent. The former is fecal by condition, which the latter must willy-nilly assume. Both are hard work in their own ways; both require getting your hands dirty, messing with dirt and soiling yourself in the process. And both can end up a mess. There is no point butpoints, no meaning but meanings, no story but stories. As far as writing goes, this mess may consist in a different sort of...