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

FOURTEEN: “IN BLACK INKBLOOD": Agonistic and Cooperative Authorship in the (Re)Writing of History

FOURTEEN “IN BLACK INKBLOOD” Agonistic and Cooperative Authorship in the (Re)Writing of History Marcel Cornis-Pope I’m convinced that we must now move beyond mere fables, beyond the neatly packaged stories which provide a chain of terminal satisfactions from predictable beginnings to foreshadowed endings. We have come so far in the long journey of literature that all the stories whisper the same old thing to us in the same cracked voice. And so we must dig in to see where the raw words and fundamental sounds are buried so that the great silence within can finally be decoded. —Raymond Federman, To Whom It May Concern It’s all there, you schmucks, inside the words, teller and told, survivors and victims unified into a single design, if you read the text carefully then you’ll see appear before you on the shattered white space the people drawn by the black words, flattened and disseminated on the surface of the paper inside the black inkblood, that was the challenge, never to speak the reality of the event but to render it concrete into the blackness of the words. —Raymond Federman, The Twofold Vibration Later in The Twofold Vibration (1982), the “old man”—who as a fictionalized Federman figure increasingly resembles the wise, paradoxical, self229 230 FEDERMAN’S FICTIONS controverting author at the age of eighty—clarifies the overall intention of the “closet” book he is writing, its celebration of freedom in the face of stark limitations: “[I]t’s precisely the fact of the [enclosed] physical text that promises a potential freedom, the closet exists only as a sequence of squares, of doors if you prefer . . .” (18). He also scolds his buddies for missing the vibrant life that pulsates in the language of his “closet” book. The Twofold Vibration explains effectively Federman’s poetics of the vibrant closet-text; but as a novel about the vicissitudes of history it combines the skeptical-deconstructive approach of Federman’s earlier fiction with a politics of narration that both articulates and contests. Federman’s earlier novels—especially Double or Nothing (1971) and Take It or Leave It (1976)—reflected a “bifurcated sense of history” (Dowling 1989, 356) caught between the traumatic void created by World War II and a metamorphic postwar America that appears to the immigrant author-character as another “kind of void” (Federman 1971, 157). This bifurcation has remained largely unsettled, as the antithetic titles of Federman’s narratives (“double or nothing ,” “take it or leave it,” “the twofold vibration,” “amer eldorado”) aptly suggest. Narration itself in the earlier novels was polemical and contradictory, involving a confrontation of voices and positions (tellers/retellers, protagonists, and narratees) and debilitating tensions between history and narration, fact and fiction. While emphasizing the “mutually exclusive positions” it generated , Federman’s earlier fiction also strove to achieve a “cunning . . . balance” between them (Federman 1971, 9). The author’s success at articulating a “real fictitious discourse” depended on his willingness to unwrite/rewrite the already extant stories of his life, blocking their “masturbatory recitation” (Federman 1979, 17; my pagination), while simultaneously releasing new possibilities within them. Described by Federman as stories that “cancel” themselves as they go, his earlier novels shunned both extreme disruption and the “fairy tale” of realism, moving tentatively ahead through trial and error, anxious to make some sense of the writer’s traumatic survival from the Holocaust and transplantation to the New World. In his earlier work, Federman addressed the crisis of history and literature from the perspective of a playful/agonistic authorship, which involved a polemical confrontation between teller and listener, speech and writing. Beginning with Double or Nothing, Federman wanted “the fiction writer to be present in his writing, present as a voice that manipulates, and controls, and sets in motion. . . . Fiction today is more like a rehearsal than a finished performance. [ . . . It’s] being shaped right there on the space of the paper, on the stage of the writing” (Federman and Sukenick 1976, 142-44). The subversive potential of Federman’s fiction relied mostly on rhetorical and linguistic surprise, on the notion of the work as “an enormous joke” (147). Still, despite Federman’s affinity for a “non-pronominal fiction which totally disintegrates character,” as in the case of Beckett and the “New New French 231 “IN BLACK INKBLOOD” Novelists” (143), his work in the seventies remained interested in the “story” level at least in the minimalist sense...