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

FIVE: RE-DOUBLE OR NOTHING: Federman, Autobiography, and Creative Literary Criticism

FIVE RE-DOUBLE OR NOTHING Federman, Autobiography, and Creative Literary Criticism Larry McCaffery For Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Rather than serving as a mirror or redoubling on itself, [criti]fiction adds itself to the world, creating a meaningful “reality” that did not previously exist. [Criti]Fiction is artifice but not artificial. It seems as pointless to call the creative powers of the mind “fraudulent” as it would to call the procreative powers of the body as such. What we [critifictionists] bring into the world is per se beyond language and at that point language is of course left behind—but it is the function of creative [critical] language to be left behind, to leave itself behind, in just that way. The word is unnecessary once it is spoken, but it has to be spoken. [Critical] Meaning does not pre-exist creation, and afterwards it may be superfluous. —Letter from Ronald Sukenick to Federman, 1972, that was used as the epigraph to Federman’s Surfiction There are many more languages than one imagines. And [the critic] reveals himself much more often than he wishes. So many things that speak! But there are always so few listeners, so that [the critic], so to speak, only chatters in a void when he engages in confessions. He 77 78 FEDERMAN’S FICTIONS wastes his truths just as the sun wastes its light. Isn’t it too bad that the void has no ears? —Friedrich Nietzsche (with my bracketed insertions), used as an epigraph to Federman’s Take It or Leave It Since the topic of the role that autobiography has played in Federman’s fiction has already been extensively discussed by critics and by Federman himself, my goal in this essay is to examine a related but largely neglected topic. That is, I will explore the topic of Federman and autobiography by examining the ways that the critifictional elements present in all of Federman ’s fiction, but especially in his early novels, Double or Nothing (1971) and Take It or Leave It (1976), provided a new creative model of literary criticism—one that encouraged critics to openly acknowledge the role that their own autobiographies and other subjective factors played in writing the particular kind of fiction that is referred to as literary criticism. During the 1960s’ first wave of postmodern literary experimentalism, two metafictional works—Nabokov’s Pale Fire and Borges’s Ficciones (both published in 1962)—were particularly influential in providing postmodern authors not merely with a more open-ended approach to the fiction-making process generally, but also with a particular strategy that freed fiction writers from the obligation of disguising their inventions via the illusionary conventions of realism. Pale Fire and many of the selections in Ficciones introduced complex series of framed narratives in which imaginary authors and imaginary critics interacted with imaginary texts-within-the-text; these intricately developed, recursive formal structures became central features of the reflexive, metafictive model of storytelling that was so evidenced in the work of Vonnegut, Barth, Calvino, Barthelme, Gass, Márquez, Coover, Sukenick, Katz, and many other authors who would later be associated with postmodern fiction. These authors continued to tell stories in their metafictive works, but frame-breaking and various metafictional strategies allowed them to tell them in a more honest manner by openly breaking through the illusion of autonomy between writer and work that had been a hallmark of modernist aesthetics.1 In this context, Raymond Federman’s entire output—the one long book he has been writing for nearly fifty years now—can be seen as the culmination of this particular metafictive strategy. This sense of culmination is most obvious in his two early novels, Double or Nothing and Take It or Leave It, where Federman expanded and extended these metafictive subversions in various ways. Although both works proclaimed themselves to be variations of classic American narratives (the immigrant-arriving-in America novel [Double or Nothing] and the initiation/open road novel [Take It or Leave 79 RE-DOUBLE OR NOTHING It]), in fact both of these alleged “central narrative strands” turned out to serve mainly as pretexts that allowed the “main portions” of the novel to be told. Both novels thus unfold as a bewildering array of narrative fragments, autobiography, annotated lists, plagiarized passages (including extended “auto-plagiarized” passages freely “downloaded” from Federman’s own poetry, criticism, and fiction), extended digressions on politics, jazz, sex, American culture, a questionnaire...