Journey to Bethickett Raymond Federman’s Early Fiction Nathalie Camerlynck A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences The University of Sydney 2019 ii This is to certify that to the best of my knowledge, the content of this thesis is my own work. This thesis has not been submitted for any degree or other purposes. Nathalie Camerlynck iii for Chorny iv ABSTRACT Raymond Federman (1928-2009) was known as a Beckett scholar, postmodern theorist and avant-garde fiction writer. Born in Paris, Federman escaped deportation during the Nazi occupation. All members of his immediate family perished at Auschwitz. He immigrated to the United States and in 1965 published one of the first monographs on Samuel Beckett, Journey to Chaos: Samuel Beckett’s Early Fiction. He kept writing on Beckett but turned his focus to postmodern theory, coining the terms ‘critifiction’ and ‘surfiction’ to describe his work and that of his contemporaries. Federman’s novels all repeat variations of his own life story. Scholarship on Federman has acknowledged Beckett’s importance, but the depth of this relationship is yet to be explored. This thesis offers a close reading of both the apparent and encoded intertextuality with Beckett in Federman’s writing. In telling his story Federman merges it with the stories of Beckett’s creations, grafting parts of their identity onto his own. These dynamics are especially significant in the early cycle of Federman’s oeuvre, from the 1971 Double or Nothing to the 1982 The Twofold Vibration. Federman was also, like Beckett, a self-translator. By engaging with Beckett bilingually, he critiques and reveals both his own writing process and his complex relationship to the man he called ‘Sam.’ Behind or beyond Beckett lies James Joyce, his creation and alter ego ‘Shem the Penman.’ Federman arrives at Joyce through Beckett, disrupting the order of literary transmission, to claim the Pen Man as his own. He engages with Beckett and Joyce as novelist and critic simultaneously, leading us to reflect on the complexities of personal identification and scholarly tribute. v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my supervisors, Françoise Grauby and Anthony Cordingley. I am eternally grateful to Françoise for her generous guidance over the years, and for her support in all aspects of my candidature. This project has benefitted immensely from her incisive feedback, and I can only aspire to her grace and integrity. I cannot thank Anthony enough for agreeing to embark on the Federman journey, and for never losing faith despite my many digressions. My thesis would not be the same without his expert contributions. I would also like to thank Eckhard Gerdes and Simone Federman, for their enthusiasm and their willingness to share Federman stories. Finally, I would like to thank Christopher Black, my partner in crime and my guide through the dream-life of the Wake. vi Contents INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER 1: THE NOODLE MAN i) Critical beginnings 8 ii) After Chaos 18 iii) A different class of comedy 26 iv) 0.4 32 v) Nightlessons 38 vi) Loulou 47 vii) “some kind of queer” 55 CHAPTER 2: HOMBRE DELLA PLUMA i) “I believe my two tongues love each other” 62 ii) Quaqua 72 iii) “Il y a ceux qui ont fait le chemin inverse” 81 iv) Bethickett 90 v) C’EST MOI! 99 CHAPTER 3: SAM IN HIS CLOSET i) “here now again” 109 ii) Shem in his closet 118 iii) “the original inflicter of torments” 126 iv) “rebirth into death” 137 vii CHAPTER 4: THE OLD MAN i) “A voice within a voice” 146 ii) June Fanon 152 iii) Moinous 157 iv) DIY Tantalus-kit 162 v) Sam the Dalmatian 168 vi) Temporarily Saved 173 vii) The twofold closet 178 CONCLUSION 182 WORKS CITED 186 Plates Plate 1: On the way to the CAMP 23 Plate 2: Triangle of flesh 41 Plate 3: Black triangle 42 Plate 4: Triangle in Wake typescripts 44 Plate 5: Loulou 51 Plate 6: The toothbrush guy 57 Plate 7: Derrida crucifix 103 Plate 8: Neat little human cross 105 INTRODUCTION Though Federman spent the vast majority of his adult life in the United States, he never lost his impossibly thick French accent, as several of his friends have remarked. Some even accuse him of playing it up or of “laying it on extra thick” in order to seduce.1 Considering that Federman only started to learn English well past childhood, at the age of nineteen, this observation has always struck me as odd. There are countless examples of immigrants who arrived at a similar age and failed to progress in native pronunciation after forty, fifty, sixty years or more. What was it about Federman’s accent that seemed to his friends deliberate, a kind of play? And what was it about Federman that made his friends so suspicious? Perhaps they were only listening to Federman himself, or rather to the suspicious things he had to say about his “self.” His fake-sounding accent might have something to do with his uneasy relationship to autobiography, his refusal to differentiate memory from imagination. To describe this Federman coined the term surfiction, writing which “exposes the fictionality of reality.”2 It might also have something to do with his literary bilingualism, his refusal to stick to one native, authentic language of expression. Both of these avenues, self-translation and autobiography, merit further investigation in Federman’s oeuvre. In her 2015 monograph on bilingual life-writing in French, Sara Kippur concludes that even though Federman insists he makes no difference between memory and imagination, “in repeatedly circling back to the same events of his life, he paradoxically recuperates the idea that there is indeed an autobiographical experience to tell.”3 Kippur includes Federman’s work in the category of life-writing and is reticent to adopt Federman’s own neologism, surfiction: “Surfiction is theoretically viable only up to a certain point: reality is only so fictional, as someone as committed as Federman is to a particular (and very “real”) life-narrative indirectly attests to.”4 This very “real” narrative is the story of Federman’s survival, his escape from deportation, the loss of his parents and two sisters in the Holocaust. The fact is that Federman was a survivor. The fact that he is willing to “play” with this fact makes critics understandably uncomfortable. Federman knew this, even claiming 1 “Federman’s accent was as if on a rheostat, which for seduction he dialled to maximum French.” Steve Katz, “TIOLI” in Verbivoracious Festschrift Volume Five: Raymond Federman, eds. G.M. Forrester and M.J. Nicholls (Singapore: Verbivoracious Press, 2016), 149. 2 Raymond Federman, Critifiction: Postmodern Essays (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 37. 3 Sara Kippur, Writing it Twice: Self-Translation and the Making of a World Literature in French (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2015), 59. 4 Kippur, Writing it Twice, 60. 2 that he was once accused at a conference of making up his entire life story. Rather than becoming angry, he started to question his own memories, wondering whether he hadn’t in fact been lying all along.5 Seemingly innocuous, Federman’s postmodern conceptual frameworks challenge the reader to take him at his word. In a French language context, Federman’s work has been described as autofiction, a term pioneered by author and critic Serge Doubrovsky. A 1993 collected edition (and associated conference) brought together Doubrovsky, Federman, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Maxine Hong Kingston, Ronald Sukenick and Rachid Boudjedra as writers of “avant-garde autobiography,”6 a term broad enough to encompass the entirety of Federman’s oeuvre. The term autofiction is best applied to Federman’s later, less experimental novels such as La fourrure de ma tante Rachel or Shhh: The Story of a Chidhood—in both of these he draws attention to this, responding to the critical reception of his work.7 Arnaud Genon’s 2012 overview dismisses surfiction as a term limited to specialists and classifies Federman’s work as autofiction.8 Philippe Gasparini, in his 2008 Autofiction: Une aventure du langage, wonders whether surfiction isn’t really just the English translation of autofiction. Gasparini concludes that Federman’s work is indeed autofiction, since like Doubrovsky he recounts only strictly factual events.9 Marjorie Worthington, in her 2018 The Story of “Me”: Contemporary American Autofiction, uses the French term to describe American authors, grouping Federman’s writing under “trauma autofiction.”10 Despite critical consensus, it seems Federman’s own attitude towards autofiction (and to Doubrovsky) was conflicted. In a 2005 interview around Holocaust remembrance he explicitly identifies with the term.11 However in the same year, in an interview for Le matricule des anges, he claims not to know what autofiction really means: “C’est un terme malheureux. C’est mon copain Doubrovsky qui a lancé ce mot. Je ne sais pas ce que ça 5 Federman, Critifiction, 99. 6 Alfred Hornung, Ernsteper Ruhe eds., AutobiograPhie & Avant-garde (Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1992). 7 In La fourrure: “c’est normal quand tu fabriques de la fiction, ou de l’autofiction, comme le fait mon copain neurasthénique Serge Doubrovsky.” Raymond Federman, La fourrure de ma tante Rachel (Paris: Éditions Léo Scheer, 2009), 33. In Shhh: “It’s not a novel you’re writing Federman, it’s just plain straightforward autobiographical writing. Or worse, what the French call autofiction.” Raymond Federman, Shhh: The Story of a Childhood (Buffalo: Starcherone Books, 2010), 19. 8 Arnaud Genon, Autofiction: Pratiques et théories (Paris: Mon Petit Éditeur, 2012), 104. 9 Philippe Gasparini, Autofiction: Une aventure du langage (Paris: Seuil, 2008), 153.