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One day in the mid-1980s, Raymond Federman and I were having lunch at the university, as we often did. I don't remember how we got on the topic of Africa -- maybe we were talking about African music or maybe we were talking about Walter Abish -- but that was when he told me: "You know, after the war, I almost went to Africa instead of coming to America." "Like Rimbaud," I said. "Yeah, but no smuggling and gun-running for me. I would have been rich. My aunt, my mother's sister, owned a fancy hotel in Dakar. Oh, she was really something! She asked me to come to Africa and live with her, but I came here instead." He went on to tell me more about his Aunt Rachel, and then we drifted to other things. That evening at home, I told my wife what Federman had said, that he had almost decided to go to Africa to live with his wealthy Aunt Rachel after the war. "Really?" she said. Her question stopped me cold. * * * * You have to understand, when I tell my stories I don't have to respect the lies and truths I'm weaving together, I can modify, amplify, corrupt, alter, distort, falsify that canvas as much as I want, and of course digress and even regress when I feel like it, in other words I am free, yes free, even if sometimes it makes me come within an inch of catastrophe... Like Federman's earlier works, Aunt Rachel's Fur provides for its own reading, its own critique, leaving little for the critic to do, it would seem. The novel unfolds according to its own rules and, in the process of unfolding, explains exactly what those rules are -- like a perfect sonnet that explains how one goes about writing a sonnet. But, of course, there is more. Federman's narrator claims: "...what I'm telling you now is new stuff, stuff I've never told before..." [p. 161], and this is so, to a point. Aunt Rachel's Fur fills in a lot of gaps in the Federman saga -- though, of course, we do not get the whole story. The novel proceeds something like this. Over a period of some days or weeks in the late 1950s, two guys sit together in a number of cafes and restaurants in Paris, and one tells the other a story. The teller is a French-born writer named Remond Namredef who has returned to France from America where he has spent the past ten years. The receiver of the story is a professional listener who never speaks, though his implied comments and questions are often repeated by the teller for the benefit of the reader. The story the teller tells is the story of a young Jewish boy, Namredef himself, who lived in Paris with his family before the war, who was orphaned, spent three years working on a farm in the south of France, hiding from the Germans, returned to Paris after the war to be reunited with the remaining members of his mother's family, and who, after meeting his legendary Aunt Rachel who also returned to postwar Paris from some twenty-five years of globe hopping, decided not to follow her to her hotels in Dakar but instead to go to America where he has been ever since. Anyone who has read Federman's fictions over the years -- and certainly anyone who has known Federman himself -- has picked up bits and pieces of this story, but Aunt Rachel's Fur provides the details, lots of them. This is not to suggest that what we get here is true -- what, in some sense, really happened. In fact, there are too many details for this tale to be anything but a fiction, too much obvious exaggeration for many of these scenes to seem even vaguely realistic. Besides, as we know, Federman works hard to undercut any reading of the text that might suggest some kind of fidelity between words and events -- "it was during the winter of 1919 ... it makes the story more dramatic if it's winter" [p. 146]. The narrator admits that he is a bad liar -- though a "bad liar" might be either one who is morally bad because he tells lies or one who lacks competence in lying. Namredef seems to fall into the latter category, because he claims that "even when I tell the truth it sounds like a lie..." [p. 43] Of course, no lie is perfect, just as no truth is perfect, and Namredef would argue that it is this very lack of perfection that allows him to tell his story, to "modify, amplify, corrupt, alter, distort, falsify." Storytelling passes the time, if nothing else, for teller and listener, at least until the teller can get down to the real story, the one we've all been waiting for -- the teller most of all. And the real story? Isn't that an oxymoron? I'll risk ruining Aunt Rachel's' Fur for you by telling you right now that the real story is not told in these pages, so, if that is what you are looking for here, forget it. But there is always hope. Who knows? The real story, the one he wants to tell, the one we want to hear, might be told in Federman's very next book. And what might that real story be? * * * * How did I escape, oh that's another story I've told many times, too bad you weren't around then, I'm not going to repeat it just for you, it's not my fault that you arrived too late in my stories, besides I'm tired of telling the same old thing over and over again... [p. 162] This is another exaggeration, of course -- a big one. It isn't true that the boy's survival is simply "another story I've told many times." In fact, Federman has never told this story, never gotten it right, despite the many attempts. This is the moment of the closet, the moment that always refuses to submit to the shape of a story, that refuses to make sense. This is the moment that Federman always fails to articulate -- the text of The Voice in the Closet, indeed, is and is only that very failure -- and the author has returned to "the same old thing over and over again," never getting it into words. If this story were possible, if it could be told fully and completely, then there would be no need for all the rest -- the farm in rural France and the farmer's wife, Susan from Boston, the British girl-friend, the noodles, the double entendre of Aunt Rachel's fur. The teller could fall silent, having said that which demands saying. * * * * I myself am a fervent reader of Mister Beckett's fiction which has greatly influenced my own work. He's an important writer. In my opinion, the most important writer of our time. [p. 107] Namredef knows his Beckett, and so he knows that the goal of speaking -- the impossible goal of speaking -- is to be able to stop. But how? The Catholic who seeks atonement confesses his sins to a priest who in turn assigns a penance -- say so many Hail Marys, so many Our Fathers -- almost invariably something to be said. The penitent says that which he has been instructed to say, and then he can simply fall silent. He is forgiven. Beckett, born Protestant in Catholic Ireland, understood the value of the penance, that which is the last to-be-said, but had no priest to assign one to him. Namredef, born Jewish in Catholic France, also knows that, if he could only say that which is to be said, he too could fall silent, but, like Beckett, he finds no one who can assign him his penance. And so, like Beckett, Namredef must speak on and on, to exhaustion and beyond, trying to tell the story, trying to get it right, hoping to stumble upon just that perfect combination of words -- the real story -- that will fulfill the penance and put an end to it. * * * * What does the narrator have in mind when he says that telling his stories "sometimes ... makes me come within an inch of catastrophe..." [p. 126] What is the catastrophe here, or what might it be? What is the relationship between telling/writing and catastrophe? Catastrophe -- or, for Blanchot, disaster -- "is what escapes the very possibility of experience -- it is the limit of writing." Blanchot adds, however, that this does not mean that the disaster cannot be written, although he notes that "the disaster de-scribes," [p. 7] which suggests that it dismantles the effort to bring it to writing, perhaps by dismantling writing itself. In coming "within an inch of catastrophe," does Namredef come within an inch of de-scribing, of dismantling his own stories, his own effort at storytelling? Does he come within an inch of transcending "the limit of writing" into something else, something disastrous, something catastrophic, something profoundly silent but silent on the far side of speaking/writing? For Blanchot: "Silence is impossible. That is why we desire it." [p. 11] Is the catastrophe impossible? And, if it is, might the impossible still be described by de-scribing it, by writing and erasing in the same gesture? Federman's writing -- in Aunt Rachel's Fur and elsewhere -- is exactly this kind of writing/erasing, a writing that erases itself by reading itself even before the reader can get to the text. In Aunt Rachel's Fur, Namredef does not write -- he speaks, and speaking is a kind of writing that disappears in the very moment in which it appears, like writing with invisible ink but leaving behind no traces, no secret for making the writing visible. Speaking, then, not only leads to silence but has silence unavoidably embedded in it, moment to moment. But this is only a temporary silence, the silence between words, the moment in which the speaker takes a breath before continuing. The silence of the catastrophic limit would only be possible once everything had been said -- or once one had managed to say the thing, tell the real story, that would put an end to the need for saying, for stories. Again, for Blanchot, this kind of silence is not available to the speaker, only to the writer -- "there is no silence if not written" [p. 8] But, of course, Aunt Rachel's Fur is written. Namredef's marathon oral storytelling is only a fiction, indeed a double fiction, a written fiction that pretends to be an oral fiction, a fictive staging of a fiction, resulting in "un roman en abime." [p. 96] And, in this case, the fiction does not end -- it simply stops when the narrator decides to return to America. It's too bad you won't get to hear the end of my story, or maybe it's better this way because, to tell you the truth, I really don't know what the end would have been... [p. 254] There is no silence at the end of the novel, only a more or less extended breath before Federman's narrator starts up again in some other circumstance, with some other story. By leaving for America, Namredef steps away from the brink of catastrophe, and what else could he do? Step into the nothingness beyond words, the nothingness that de-scribes? And yet, isn't this exactly where the Federman text tends? Always? * * * * In a letter written originally in German in 1937, Samuel Beckett says: As we cannot eliminate language all at once, we should at least leave nothing undone that might contribute to its falling into disrepute. To bore one hole after another in it, until what lurks behind it -- be it something or nothing -- begins to seep through; I cannot imagine a higher goal for a writer today. * * * * Like Beckett, Federman seems to believe that language is a kind of veil between us and whatever lies beyond words -- and, here, he seems to believe that the "whatever" is nothing. it's in the nothing that great stories take place, the truth hides in the nothing, behind the words, in the depth of words, in the white space between the words, in the vanishing point where trivial details become irrelevant, in the silences inside the story... [p. 243] But what is the nothing in this case? What is the gap that remains even in this story that promises to fill in the gaps left over from earlier pieces? What I call the Unforgivable Enormity that occurred during the war and caused a chasm in me by the erasure of those I loved and who loved me. It is that absence, that emptiness, that gap in me that controls my work and gives it its urgency. [pp. 98-99] The Holocaust is the black hole at the center of this text -- or, more specifically, the Holocaust as it applies to Namredef and his family. The text circles this hole, this emptiness, again and again, coming closer, moving away, approaching, retreating. There are references throughout to the time "when my mother and father were dispatched... [p. 40] There are promises that go unfulfilled -- "I suppose I'll have to go into that sad story too, how I became an orphan..." [p. 40]. The text courts disaster then rejects it. my mother is the only one who was exterminated during the war together with my father and my two sisters, but that's another story I've already told too many times, so I won't bother you with that Unforgivable Enormity... [p. 67] But, again, this is not "another story I've already told too many times." It is the story that has never been told, could not be told. It is the story that would be both story and gap, tale and black hole, the nothingness into which every other story would tumble. It would be the catastrophic story, the disastrous story, the story of the catastrophe. One of the oddest reference in this regard says: My parents? No ... you see, I lost my parents when I was very young. Both my father and mother, and also my two sisters. They disappeared during the war. An accident... An unfortunate accident of war. [p. 97] An accident? And yet what else would you call an utterly incomprehensible and unnecessary event that happened in any case? * * * * "OH YOU WANT TO KNOW WHY..." [p. 16] * * * * Why do we use the expression "courting disaster?" Is the disaster seductive in some way, so that courting it becomes prelude to intimacy? But courting is always only prelude. The object of courtship -- during the process of courtship itself -- is always at a distance, approachable to a point but no further. By the time it is permissible to truly approach the object of a courtship in a way that is no longer hesitant or tentative, the courtship is over. Courtship is a kind of trial, the verdict of which is indefinitely postponed. During courtship, court is in session and in recess at the same time. The disaster is that which demands to be courted. It is perhaps seductive in its ambiguity. We would like to have the disaster resolved, sentenced, confined, and available for study. We would like the courtship to end in marriage, in possession, in the taming of the disaster, in its transformation from disaster to companion. But in response to the approach of courtship, disaster withdraws. Courtship might bring us "within an inch of...," but no closer. And, as such, even at the moment in Federman's text that most closely approaches it, that most eagerly courts it, the disaster is always infinitely distant. * * * * In Aunt Rachel's Fur, as in Federman's other works, there is virtually nothing of the truth -- a virtual nothing. And, as we know, Federman willfully dismisses any effort to read the account as true -- and for good reason. He knows that truth in this regard is too much to ask for, because, in the wake of catastrophe, after the disaster, the true story could only be told by the victims, not by the survivors who, having survived, do not know what they are talking about. The very fact of their survival is the proof of that. The survivor is called upon to remember that which, without his or her particular memory, would be forgotten in the eternal absence of those whose memory it would and should have been. But the survivor remembers nothing of the disaster, for it is not his to recall. * * * * The survivor has nothing to remember, and yet he cannot afford to forget. * * * * The survivor, having survived, has already forgotten the disaster he never could have recalled. Perhaps this is why Namredef insists that "writing is not what you remember but what you have forgotten..." [p. 240] * * * * What is Namredef's story, then? Is it perhaps an attempt to come to terms with himself, to find for himself some identity, some sense of selfhood in the wake of so many other identities erased, so many other selves dissolved? But, for Federman as for Beckett, the end of writing is necessary precisely because it is never therapeutic in this way, never a solution but only another kind of dissolution. no matter how hard one tries, the subject who writes will never be able to seize himself in what he writes, he will seize only the writing itself, which by definition excludes him... [p. 240] * * * * What is Namredef's story, then? It is perhaps "the unstory, that which escapes quotation and which memory does not recall -- forgetfulness as thought. That which, in other words, cannot be forgotten because it has always already fallen outside memory." [Blanchot, p. 28] * * * * The survivor who talks about having survived misses the point, and yet he cannot talk about anything else. Certainly, he cannot speak the memories of those who have not survived. He cannot tell the stories of those who have no stories, whose stories have been erased. And yet the talking itself is worth something, is worth everything, even if it never goes to the end, even if it takes us nowhere at all, even if -- and perhaps especially if -- it erases itself and results in nothing. "it's the telling that counts, not what you tell..." [pp. 55-56], and this is so because the telling is the proof that "as you can see, I survived, I'm still alive..." [p. 154] * * * * "It is not you who will speak; let the disaster speak in you, even if it be by your forgetfulness or silence." [Blanchot, p. 4] _____________________________________ Welch Everman is Professor of English at the University of Maine. He is the author of Orion, a novel, The Harry and Sylvia Stories, two books of literary criticism (Who Says This? and Jerzy Kosinski: The Literature of Violation), and two books on bad movies (Cult Horror Films and Cult Science Fiction Films from Citadel Press). He is currently is at work on a book about Raymond Federman entitled Re: Ray. |
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