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

THIRTEEN: WHEN POSTMODERN PLAY MEETS SURVIVOR TESTIMONY: Federman and Holocaust Literature

THIRTEEN WHEN POSTMODERN PLAY MEETS SURVIVOR TESTIMONY Federman and Holocaust Literature Susan Rubin Suleiman It is that absence, that emptiness, that gap in me that controls my work and gives it its urgency. That’s what the Americans don’t always understand. —Raymond Federman, Aunt Rachel’s Fur It is NOT through content but form, NOT with numbers or statistics but fiction and poetry that we will eventually come to terms with the Holocaust and its consequences. —Raymond Federman, “The Necessity and Impossibility of Being a Jewish Writer” Elie Wiesel and Raymond Federman are almost exactly the same age, born a few months apart in 1928 (Federman in May, Wiesel in November). Both belong to the somewhat loose but increasingly used category of child survivors of the Holocaust, what I have called the “1.5 generation” (Suleiman 2002). Both Wiesel and Federman lost all or almost all of their immediate family to deportation; both settled in the United States after the war; both have spent 215 216 FEDERMAN’S FICTIONS many years in university teaching positions; and most important, both are prolific writers whose work is unimaginable without the historical catastrophe that shattered their adolescence. In addition, both write their literary works in French—Wiesel exclusively, Federman increasingly in recent years. It may seem odd to begin with this comparison, given the obvious differences that separate these two writers. Wiesel, who was deported to Auschwitz with his family of ultra-religious Jews from Hungary at the age of fifteen, is the author of what is probably the single best-known work of testimony about the Nazi death camps. Night (published in French in 1958, in English translation in 1960, and again in 2006) is read by millions of schoolchildren in the United States every year, and by countless readers elsewhere; Wiesel himself represents, for many people all over the world but especially in the United States, the exemplary spokesman for victims of mass persecution as well as the most noble embodiment of a Holocaust survivor. Federman, by comparison, is relatively unknown—at least to the public at large. For many years, his work has interested the select few (mostly literature professors and their students) who concern themselves with American “experimental” or “postmodernist” writing; and it has been admired by many fellow writers in the experimental mode, including Samuel Beckett, the subject of Federman’s PhD dissertation and one of his great inspirations, as well as writers closer to Federman in age, such as Ronald Sukenick, Walter Abish, and the French novelists Serge Doubrovsky and Maurice Roche. At present, Federman is probably best known in Germany, where his work began to receive wide attention in the 1980s; in France, too, he has gained recognition in the past few years, especially after the French translation of his first novel, Double or Nothing (published in 1971), appeared in 2004.1 Until very recently, Federman’s work was never discussed in the context of Holocaust literature, especially in the United States, where studies of Holocaust writing have been most numerous.2 One reason for that absence may be that Federman was not deported (the rest of his family was); but a more plausible reason is doubtless that his works do not enter into the mold of testimonial writing—in other words, they make no claim to factuality and witnessing. The great classics of Holocaust literature, works by Primo Levi, Jean Améry, Tadeusz Borowski, Charlotte Delbo, Jorge Semprun, and of course Wiesel—all owe their power and renown to their testimonial status, in addition to their considerable literary achievement. Wiesel, Levi, and the others speak with the authority of the survivor, who seeks to arrive at the truth of a life-shattering experience; although their works are highly crafted and shaped by aesthetic awareness, they also lay claim to veracity about experiences the author has lived through—this being the minimal requirement for the “autobiographical pact” (Lejeune 1975). A number of other works as well, more removed from the author’s experience, have attained to classic status in the Holocaust canon, perhaps the best known 217 WHEN POSTMODERN PLAY MEETS SURVIVOR TESTIMONY being Art Spiegelman’s Maus, a “comix” narrative by an artist born after the Second World War. But despite its postmodern use of the animal fable and the comix form, the book also lays claim to testimonial status, since it is based on lengthy interviews Spiegelman conducted with his father...