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FIFTEEN COSMOBABBLE OR, FEDERMAN’S RETURN Christian Moraru Only returning to the native land after a long absence can reveal the substantial strangeness of the world and existence. —Milan Kundera, Testaments Betrayed Perhaps my French and English play in me in order to abolish my own origin. In the totally bilingual book I would like to write, there would be no original language, n[o] original source, no original text—only two languages that would exist, or rather co-exist outside of their origin, in the space of their own playfulness. —Raymond Federman, Critifiction Unlike the classics, the moderns suspect that nóstos—Greek for “return” home, to a native space—is a misleading fiction. Needless to say, we postmoderns are worse, for we insist that nativity, origin, “roots” already mark a point of no return. In other words, there is no place to go back to but a plurality of places, hypothetical and multiple geographies of the mind and soul. Furthermore, it is only in those “other words” that going back can be undertaken—in other images, voices, and representations, in a whole other language or language of otherness that reveals to the nostalgic a surprisingly strange home and more generally the world and workings of strangeness. A “cosmopolitan” à la Witold Gombrowicz, who rose to fame abroad and “refus[ed] to see Poland again,” Milan Kundera discovers, like the characters of his 2000 novel Ignorance, that the return to the homeland is impossible (1995, 95). In fact, he learns that it is usually other people, both inside and outside our countries of birth, who seem dead set on bringing us back 241 242 FEDERMAN’S FICTIONS into the fold of nativity, of native landscapes and idioms, on tying us to the nation, relating us to its turf, blood, and language by seeing and hearing us through them at all costs. It bears noting, such others are not those on whom we otherwise depend for being “understood.” As Kundera provocatively argues in Le rideau (2005), understanding and appreciation often occur “elsewhere,” among “strangers.” The “relating” and “relations” the nation’s good Samaritans enmesh us in, however, the writer is as reluctant to accept as Irene in Ignorance when she realizes that her French friends “send her back” not just to a “little” place but also to a Prague that exists solely in their fancy, and so they make her and the place she came from into what neither she nor the Czech capital has ever been (2000, 6). Kundera’s narrator insightfully observes that others’ bizarrely oblique “longing” for our homelands, this “homesickness” projected onto us speak to their pseudo-nostalgia, an emotional and cultural disposition of sorts, a web of premises and misperceptions that hold us captive and “other” us one more time (5). This vicariously experienced yet “unappeased yearn to return” (5)—again, somebody else’s—returns us not to what or where we have been once upon a time, but to an atopic and achronic place and time, to a strange construction and to the very “strangeness of the world and existence” (Kundera 1995, 95). After all, there is a reason the Spanish word añorar, “to be nostalgic,” comes from the Catalan enyorar, which is itself derived from the Latin ignorare, “to not know,” “not experience,” and therefore “lack or miss” (2000, 6). “Others’ nostalgia” is an ignorant yearning for otherness itself, for the elusive essence of our being, a longing that stems from a miscalculation of what that otherness—ourselves—means and desires. While nostalgia comes in various shapes and forms, representation is invariably at issue—how others picture us, more exactly where they see us, defined by what contexts and backgrounds, figured out by what figures, stories, and histories. For, enigmatic individuals, sociological oddballs as we are, we nevertheless seem “readable,” “given away” in collective configurations and narratives as details and extras in the nation’s historical, supposedly all-clarifying tableau. According to this serial reading of the self, the latter’s “code” lies safely inside the nation and its selfsame “essence.” The self and its private fantasies are putative hypostases of the nation-state; selfhood and nationhood are thought to exist in absolute symmetry, to uphold and “represent” each other. Whenever this representational symbiosis is not conspicuously active—whenever it fails to pin us down as symptoms of a certain nationality—readers such as those described by Kundera in Le rideau scramble to make its case. An expatriate living in France in the...

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