returning to
the closet
by Douglas Messerli
Raymond
Federman Smiles on Washington Square
(Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1995)
Raymond Federman The
Twofold Vibration (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2000)
Raymond Federman "Reflections
on Ways to Improve Death"
On Tuesday, October 6, 2009, Raymond Federman died in his
San Diego home at the age of 81.
I published—or
more correctly, I republished—two
books by Ray, The Twofold Vibration
in 2000, a fiction first published in 1982 by Indiana University Press, and,
six years earlier on Sun & Moon, Smiles
of Washington Square, first published by Thunder's Mouth Press in 1985.
I seem to have
known Ray (who preferred to be called Raymond, but who I knew as Ray) forever.
Long before I met him, I had read his criticism, Surfiction: Fiction Now and Tomorrow, and referred to it
extensively in my PhD dissertation of 1979. Ray seemed to me one of the few
critics of the time who had attempted to do what I myself was trying to
accomplish, to define the differences between modernist and non-modernist
(narrowly referred as postmodern) fiction. Like Ray, I saw its roots from the
beginning of the 20th century, from Gertrude Stein on, and I wanted to create a
kind of handbook which would help people see its different approaches to voice,
character, place, theme, and, most of all, form.
I think I must
have first met him in the flesh—and the words "in the flesh" are
important when describing Ray because he is so very much larger than life—in
the early 1980s, when I began distributing Fiction Collective and other small
presses along with my own Sun & Moon Press. I had found a small band of
independent sales representatives to sell these and my own books across the
country, and each season I would meet with them, describing the new titles, in
New York.
Ray, whose
important fiction Take It or Leave It
was published by the Fiction Collective, was a member of that group, and he and
others wanted to meet with my representatives to sell their own titles. The art
of describing new works to sales people who have hundreds of books to represent
each season is a difficult one, which I felt I had mastered. Accordingly, I
tried to dissuade the Fiction Collective authors from coming to speak with my
representatives, but they were insistent. Ray, along with Russell Banks and
Jonathan Baumbach (yes, the father of Noah Baumbach played by Jeff Daniels in
the film The Squid and the Whale)—all
sublime egoists, each capable of dominating any conversation—showed up late to
the meeting and took so much time describing their three new titles that my
reps insisted that they would never see them again! I was, accordingly, put in
the difficult position of scolding the three, but two of them, at least, Ray
and Russell remained lifetime friends.
That is not to
say that I wasn't a bit taken back by Ray's dynamic personality. Indeed, in his
unpredictable enthusiasms, directed mostly toward his own writing projects and,
later, his understandable delight with the French and German attention to his
writing, along with his winking sexual innuendos about women, sometimes
irritated me and even, on occasion, scared me a little. I liked him enormously,
but on occasional he was not where you thought he was. As one of his own
characters describes "the old man" in The Twofold Vibration (clearly a mirror image of the narrator,
Federman):
yes,
that's how our old man was, so unpredictable, so changeable,
and so
careless with his own life, despondent one day, hopeful the
next,
always more interested in the process than finalities....not an
easy
man to deal with
And then there
was his voice, with a French accent, of course, but seemingly also from another
time and place. As French fiction writer Jean Frémon once told me, "When I
met Raymond Federman I could not believe what I was hearing. It was a voice
from another time. Only a small neighborhood in Paris spoke French that way,
the way Maurice Chevalier had spoken and sung, and it has long disappeared. I
asked him, my God, where did you get that accent? He told me his story, how as
young boy he was hidden away from the Nazis in a closet. And when he finally
came out, that was the way he would remain the rest of his life, since by the
end of the War he had escaped to the US, joining the Army."
Federman's
family, his mother, father and, sisters were sent to Auschwitz, where they
died.
When I visited
SUNY-Buffalo several years later, on tour with fellow poet Rae Armantrout, we
dined with Susan Howe, Charles Bernstein, and the Federmans, Ray and his wife
Erica, at a very pleasant Italian restaurant. On our way home, after having
left the Federmans and Susan, the two of us chuckled to ourselves about Ray's
grandiose manner, I adding my reservations about the man. Charles quickly
interrupted, "How else might you expect him to be, given the life he has
led, his childhood, the condition of creating several new beings? He had no
choice but to become a series of alternating voices."
I was
embarrassed, and realized the truth of what Charles had said. To be fair,
moroever, Ray has never denied the forcefulness and energy of his own being. In
fact, he celebrates it, just as he celebrates a world in which all the action
is placed on something in process without ever coming to fruition. He writes
what he calls "pre-texts," texts that exist before any happening;
and, in that respect, his work is about potentiality more than plotted events,
the writing existing as a potential for changes not only in the future but the
past.
Smiles on Washington Square, for
example, is the story of a chance meeting between a poor, immigrant American
Moinous (one of Federman's regular stand-ins for himself) and a New England
born, slightly order sophisticate, Sucette (who shares some of Erica's
qualities). The two meet, but say nothing, only smiling at one another. The
rest of the tale is a series of possibilities for their future encounter(s) and
relationship, all of which entail a great deal of patient waiting and outright
frustration for Moinous. Their relationship, in this non-existent reality
(which is, at its heart, what all fiction is about), is a touching, even
romantic tale, as these two opposites gradually reveal themselves before the
inevitable breakup.
This work is
perhaps Federman's closest in tone to his friend Samuel Beckett. For here, the
major character, like many of Beckett's tragic clowns, is an insecure, lonely,
and despairing figure who bluffs his way through life. Like Federman, he has
lived in the protective closet before sneaking out to enter—barefoot, armored
only by an outsized overcoat—a world of excitement and danger, a tyrannical
innocent ("A typical bull with his feet on the ground and his head in the
clouds who struggles constantly to conquer vanity and indolence") in a
world he can never completely comprehend.
In Federman's
futurist fiction, The Twofold Vibration,
his friends Moinous and Namredef (Federman spelled backwards) attempt to
uncover what "the old man" has done to be sent to the space colonies
along with other undesirables on the eve of the new Millennium. To Federman,
the writer, they tell the story of their friendship and as much as they know
about "the old man's life," but have no clue, in this comic
Kafkaesque tale, what his criminal acts have consisted of.
Like Ray,
"the old man" was been hidden in a closet, and to this part of his
own story, he adds other tales, how he was later arrested and sent to the
camps, escaping from his railway car at the stop to eat potatoes in another
train car that had paused alongside them. More stories emerge, an brief
involvement in radical politics, a short affair with a Jane Fonda-like movie
star, and travels across the US and Europe, including a visit to a concentration
camp, encompassing excesses and suffering, boisterous outbursts of
philosophical thoughts and deep retreats into fear and doubt. His famed
"Voice in the Closet" screed was to have been at the center of this
work, but was rejected by Indiana University Press' editors.
The search for
his unknown crime is played out almost like a mystery tale, but, as usual in
Federman's works, no ending seems appropriate. As the thousands of soon-to-be
expelled individuals are gathered in a large room, Moinous and Namredef are
there to see their friend off. "The old man" appears reposed, even
resigned, finally ready for his fate. One by one the names are called, the
prisoners taken on board and their families sent off, until only "the old
man" remains. The shuttle is about to be sent into space without him! What
has happened? his colleagues wonder. "BUT WHAT ABOUT ME, WHAT ABOUT
ME," the old man cries out, striking his chest with his hand. He has been
put back into the closet a second time. The snake has swallowed its own tail;
the past has become the future, a twofold vibration. The survivor without a
clue how to survive is left to start his struggle all over again.
Now, finally, Ray
has been removed from that closet, that coffin-like precursor of death,
forever. He has joined the dead by giving up his voice. For us still here,
still trapped in each of our personal closets, so to speak, we can only, like
"the old man," become lonely and forlorn. We miss that larger than
life wise fool so very desperately. And, gathering today, we need to speak of
our great emptiness, to share it with others. As Ray himself wrote some time
before his death, however, in the humorous and profound short essay,
"Reflections on Ways to Improve Death":
The
fact that Federman cannot say I am dead. The fact of being unable to speak
one's
death is the supreme category which abolishes all the others. It is the
ultimate
category, the category of the unspeakability of death. Whether one dies
in bed, dies
in
one's books, dies with one's boots on, dies on the vine, dies in harness, dies
prematurely or in one's sleep, dies in a gas chamber, dies while making
love to
one's
lover, when all is done and said, that is the category of death that has
reached
total improvement because it can no longer be spoken.
Language vanishes into death, and death vanishes into silence. Or is it,
death
vanishes into language, and language into silence?
Los Angeles,
January 9, 2010
Reprinted from Sibila [Brazil]
(February 2010)
