Raymond Federman and Samuel Beckett: Voices in the Closet

By Nathalie Camerlynck

This book is about Raymond Federman and his incredible textual obsession with Samuel Beckett. Federman was a scholar of Beckett, postmodern theorist, a self-translator and avant-garde novelist. Born in Paris in 1928, all of his immediate family perished in the Holocaust. Federman escaped thanks to his mother, who hid him in a closet. After the war, he migrated to America and devoted his life to scholarship and creative writing. In both, he devoted his life to Beckett. Federman’s creative and theoretical writings contaminate and pervert each other just as, in his novels, French contaminates English and fiction perverts reality. His work is centered on the details of his survival, enacting a perpetual return to the closet, as previous studies have demonstrated. By examining Beckettian (and by extension Joycean) intertextuality in the novels of Raymond Federman, this study traces the contours of a second closet. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Jul 13, 2021
• ISBN: 9781785277979

Book preview

Raymond Federman and Samuel Beckett

Raymond Federman and Samuel Beckett

Voices in the Closet

Nathalie Camerlynck

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2021

by ANTHEM PRESS

75–76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK

or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK

and

244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA

Copyright © Nathalie Camerlynck 2021

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021940186

ISBN-13: 978-1-78527-795-5 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-78527-795-2 (Hbk)

This title is also available as an e-book.

CONTENTS

List of Figures

Introduction

1.The Noodle Man

  (i)A Beckett Creature

 (ii)A Very Pronounced Castration Complex

(iii)Loulou

(iv)His Unheavenly Body

2.Hombre de la Pluma

  (i)Quaqua

 (ii)Moinous

(iii)Crap, Lie or Die

(iv)Bethickett

3.Sam in His Closet

  (i)Wordshit

 (ii)From the Mud

(iii)Crouched Like a Sphinx

(iv)Birth into Death

4.The Old Man

  (i)A Closet within a Closet

 (ii)DIY Tantalus Kit

(iii)Extension and Inversion

(iv)Temporarily Sane

Conclusion

Notes

References

Index

Figures

1Federman in Drag, Bruce Jackson (1996). Copyright permission from Bruce Jackson

2Raymond Federman, Double or Nothing (Chicago: Swallow Press, 1971), 144

3Raymond Federman, Double or Nothing (Chicago: Swallow Press, 1971), 90

INTRODUCTION

This book is about Raymond Federman, postmodern theorist, bilingual novelist, self-translator and scholar of Samuel Beckett. Federman’s remarkable devotion to Beckett’s works, which he maintained in both his fictional and scholarly writings, forms the focus of this study. His novels, which have been described as autofictions,¹ are full of references to Beckett. Raymond Federman was born in Paris, on 15 May 1928, to a poor Jewish family. His immediate family—mother, father and two sisters—all perished at Auschwitz. He was saved by his mother who, as the police were coming up the stairs, pushed him into a closet. The time he spent there waiting, referred to as the closet episode, is recounted in what is considered to be Federman’s most important text, The Voice in the Closet/La voix dans le cabinet de débarras.² After waiting in the closet until nightfall, he managed to escape occupied Paris and when the war was over migrate to America. He enlisted in the US army, served in Korea and eventually went to university on the GI bill to study French literature. In 1965, he published a monograph based on his PhD dissertation, Journey to Chaos: Samuel Beckett’s Early Fiction.³ Federman went on to become a professor of Comparative Literature and Creative Writing. A Beckett scholar, Federman is primarily known as co-author of two critical bibliographies.⁴ He has written several articles on Beckett and coedited the Cahier de l’Herne: Samuel Beckett with Tom Bishop.⁵ Journey to Chaos remains his only scholarly monograph. At the time of Beckett’s centenary, Federman released a short memoir of his relationship to Beckett, Le livre de Sam ou des pierres àsucer plein les poches.⁶ Outside Beckett scholarship, he is known for his contributions to American postmodern theory.⁷ There is a clear divide between Federman’s more traditional scholarship in Beckett Studies and his ebullient postmodern writing. This divide is breached via intertextual play in Federman’s novels, which borrow indifferently from both bodies of scholarship.

I’ve chosen to focus on the first cycle of Federman’s novels, from 1971 to 1982. Since he continued writing until his death in October 2009, with his last novel published in 2010, this might seem an unusual choice. With relatively little written about Federman, it could have been useful to offer an overview of his oeuvre. My main reason is that although Federman’s obsession with Beckett was lifelong, his early work is especially thick with intertextual references to Sam. The first five novels form a cohesive whole, ending with a final symbolic return to the closet, offering a rich opportunity for close reading. I note that previous scholarship on Federman also tends to focus on his seventies novels and on his contribution to shaping American postmodernism.⁸ My choice is, finally, motivated by personal taste. I find that Federman’s first five novels—Double or Nothing (1971), Amer Eldorado (1974), Take It or Leave It (1976), The Voice in the Closet/La voix dans le cabinet de débarras (1979) and The Twofold Vibration (1982)—are by far the most enjoyable. There is a raw energy, an originality in these works less apparent in his later output. What’s so interesting about the early work is that it combines raw energy with complex metafictional and intertextual strategies. Chiefly Beckett and, by extension, James Joyce are enlisted in retelling variations of Federman’s life story. At times, he refers to this indiscriminate intertextuality as plagiarism, to himself as both plagiarizer and self-plagiarizer.⁹

Arguably a postmodern extremist, Federman provokes the reader’s outrage by his literal application of postmodernism’s basic tenets, denying the possibility of truth, originality and a stable authorial self. His own tragic family story, even the tragedy of the Holocaust, is not exempt from such a treatment.¹⁰ Federman also engages directly with various French poststructuralists, taking a decidedly ironic Freudian bent. His position is both playful and antagonistic, as he (mis)interprets his own life experience in light of their fashionable ideas. Federman’s early protagonists, impoverished and uneducated survivors, comically fail at grasping even the most basic theoretical concepts. Throughout his novels and other postmodern writings, he maintains resentment toward intellectual orthodoxy. Federman’s early work is essentially subversive. In his overzealous and literal adoption of theoretical ideas, he betrays their ultimate failure to either shape or describe reality. His novels also take scholarly devotion to Beckett to its logical extreme, as he retells his own life from the perspective of Beckett’s fictions. In either case, Federman’s early novels, which were only made possible thanks to institutional support, are very much against any form of intellectual establishment.¹¹ They are designed to provoke, not least those very scholars and acquaintances making up his reading audience.

Federman himself saw his first five novels as belonging to a separate category, to a time before the maturation of his own intellect and his adoption of a (bourgeois) form of self-control. In a 1988 interview he claims that "reflection only begins with The Twofold Vibration. He explains that, in his early work, his characters do not reflect, they endure."¹² This is accompanied by a doubling and redoubling of characters into multiple protagonists and narrators. But despite employing elaborate metanarrative strategies, both the author-characters and their creations fail to truly reflect on themselves. Looking at the titles in Federman’s first cycle, we see themes of duality, doubleness and opposition. His debut novel, Double or Nothing, refers to a gambling bet and sounds like an antagonistic offer to the reader to engage. This is echoed in the 1976 Take It or Leave It, and the two titles might be read together as double or nothing, take it or leave it! Take It or Leave It is the translation, or rather adaptation, of Federman’s 1974 French novel Amer Eldorado. In the French title, the promise of an American Eldorado is juxtaposed with bitterness, amer. In Federman’s 1979 bilingual novella, The Voice in the Closet/La voix dans le cabinet de débarras, there are two voices in English and French. As mentioned above, The Twofold Vibration—a title taken from Samuel Beckett’s The Lost Ones—begins to reflect on what has come before. The phrase the twofold vibration merely describes, rather than performs, the oppositional movement contained within the previous titles.

After 1982, Federman’s writing becomes increasingly realist. This progression toward more conventional fiction is particularly interesting since, in his 1965 monograph, he traced Beckett’s journey toward abstraction and away from realist conventions. Brian McHale calls Journey to Chaos pre-theoretical, noting the absence of any post-structuralist influence.¹³ Based on his PhD dissertation, Federman’s monograph on Beckett engages in more traditional literary analysis, in line with other scholars known as the first wave of Becketteers. In Journey to Chaos, Federman explains how, in Beckett’s early works, his characters are mired in social reality and that his later French creations achieve a greater fictional absurdity by abandoning realist conventions.¹⁴ Though Journey to Chaos is indeed pre-theoretical, we can nevertheless discern the unusual passion and spiritual impulse that would lead Federman to make both a God and a dog of Sam Beckett. Paradoxically it is by taking things literally, interpreting on both a personal and a superficial level that Federman develops his own brand of postmodern theory, one which, as McHale observes, can be understood as a resistance to theory.¹⁵

In Le livre de Sam, Federman’s daughter Simone writes: There was a God in our house, at least that’s what my father, Federman told me and his name was Sam.¹⁶ Raymond Federman himself describes how, after Beckett’s death in 1989, he started to imagine he was writing under Sam’s watchful gaze.¹⁷ He had an extensive library dedicated to Beckett complete with a shrine of pictures and photographs. He also had a beloved dog, a Dalmatian called Sam. Though never dwelling on the Beckettian dog/God inversion in his scholarly writing, Federman expands on it at length in his early fiction. In his creative engagement with Beckett’s work, Federman delights in taking things too far. Sam the Dalmatian plays an important role in The Twofold Vibration, where the protagonist and he are described as platonic lovers.¹⁸ Federman’s understanding of the human and the animal, of the animal in the human, is articulated through reference to the queer openings in Beckett’s text. In his fictional, some say autofictional, texts, Federman consistently brings out the homoerotic elements present in his master’s work. These elements are never addressed in his academic writing. In his scholarly output on Beckett, Federman participates in what Peter Boxall described, as late as 2004, as an extraordinary demonstration of mass denial.¹⁹ As a Beckett scholar, Federman did not push much further than Journey to Chaos, hardly cutting edge in McHale’s words.²⁰

Nevertheless, Federman was considered something of a heretic by his fellow Becketteers. This is evident in John Fletcher’s rather bizarre obituary in The Journal of Beckett Studies.²¹ Fletcher, who coedited with Federman the first critical bibliography on Beckett,²² writes with thinly veiled resentment, going so far as to discredit Federman’s story of survival.²³ According to Fletcher, the closet episode wasn’t invented by Federman until well after the publication of his first novel.²⁴ To support his claim, Fletcher calls upon none other than Beckett himself. Whatever Federman’s own story of survival may be, it is what Sam said (or rather Fletcher’s version of what Sam said) that saved his life.²⁵ In his introduction to the 1999 Beckett and Postructuralism, Anthony Uhlmann touches on the problematic notion of first-wave scholars as friends of Beckett, of those who knew him as Sam.²⁶ Uhlmann wonders if the notion of fidelity in friendship hasn’t determined (and limited) Beckett Studies. The tensions and jealousies Uhlmann mentions are apparent in Fletcher’s obituary. Yet the source of such tensions cannot be found by examining Federman’s Beckett scholarship, which remains decidedly orthodox.

Fletcher’s obituary for Federman, though certainly unusual, is not as openly hostile as his 1976 review of Surfiction: Fiction Now and Tomorrow, a collection of essays edited by Federman bringing together figures such as John Barth, Italo Calvino, Philippe Sollers, Jean Ricardou and Jacques Ehrmann. He describes Surfiction as a back-scratching exercise,²⁷ an estimation I’m inclined to agree with, though not with the same censure. Fletcher takes issue with the breathless and assertive air of Federman’s introduction and with the jargon-laden modishly unreadable prose of writers such as Sollers and Ricardou. According to Fletcher’s review, there are only two essays in the collection with anything valuable to contribute. One by Robert Pynsant, offering an overview of contemporary German writers who are hardly known outside Germany, and on this showing scarcely deserve to be;²⁸ the other by Neal Oxenhandler, who uses Freudian theory to show that William Burroughs could never be a great artist like Kafka or Beckett. Fletcher argues that detachment and objectivity, hallmarks of valuable criticism, are sorely missing from the other essays collected in Surfiction.²⁹ It seems, then, that the source of Fletcher’s resentment toward Federman lies outside the realm of Beckett scholarship per se. Rather, he takes issue with Federman’s use of Beckett to create his own unorthodox model of criticism. Fletcher is especially keen to discredit Federman’s own very Beckettian life story. He insists that the closet was an afterthought, inspired by Federman’s reading of Beckett’s texts. The original story must always and already be conceived of by Sam. On a more immediate level, Fletcher, perhaps understandably, takes issue with Federman’s shameless self-aggrandizing.³⁰

As Fletcher remarked, Federman’s tone in Surfiction is indeed exalted; his introduction to the collection of essays reads like a manifesto. Federman expands on the concept of fictional absurdity, applied to Beckett’s later works in Journey to Chaos, to describe a new kind of fiction he calls surfiction or fiction that exposes the fictionality of reality. Surfiction is based on the revelation that reality as such does not exist, or rather exists only in its fictionalised version.³¹ The shape of this new fiction will reflect the true nature of time: life is chaos because it is never experienced in a straight, chronological line. In Federman’s vision of the future, the novel will be "an endless denunciation of its own fraudulence, of what it really is: an illusion (a fiction) just as life is an illusion (a fiction)."³² Surfiction is organized according to questions in Beckett’s Unnamable (Where now? Who now? When now?) and Beckett is referred to throughout Federman’s introduction. Federman’s view of time and reality as illusive, though based on his reading of Beckettian ontology, is as much a reflection of his seventies milieu: all forms of duality will be negated.³³ Through a more oblique allusion to Beckett, he describes the character or creature of the new fiction he calls surfiction: That creature will be, in a sense, present to his own making, present to his own absence.³⁴ This paradox can be found in Beckett’s Proust, where Beckett describes Marcel walking into his grandmother’s room, watching her before she realizes he’s there: he is present at his own absence.³⁵ In Surfiction, Federman slightly rephrases the Beckettian formulation with "present to his own absence." In The Voice in the Closet/La voix dans le cabinet de débarras, the voice of the little boy decries the writer pretending to set me free at last in the absence of my own presence.³⁶ This reversal is just one example of Federman’s queer intertextual poetics, which often involves, as he explains in The Twofold Vibration, a crucial inversion of the terms.³⁷

In his tendency to invert and reverse fragments of Beckettian text, Federman plays out his masochistic devotion to the master. His translations appear to serve yet ultimately subvert Beckett’s authority. Federman’s complex use of Beckett’s own self-translations is especially apparent in The Voice in the Closet/La voix dans le cabinet de débarras. This bilingual text, which Federman described as late as 2006 as le coeur de mon oeuvre,³⁸ reenacts the torturous, erotically charged scenario of Beckett’s Comment c’est/How It Is by adding a fourth part to Beckett’s three. I am indebted to the work of Anthony Cordingley, whose analysis of Comment c’est and How It Is highlights the masochistic aspects of Beckettian self-translation.³⁹ Cordingley emphasizes the interchangeability of literary critic and translator, drawing on Paul Mann’s neologism, masocriticism. For Mann, critics constitute a primal horde whose desire to serve the master (text) is nothing other than aggressive identification, a desire to subsume.⁴⁰ The author in question is posited as progenitor and father, another displacement in the masochistic scene.⁴¹ As Cordingley has shown, masocriticism can be useful in thinking about translation, self-translation and Beckett’s practice in particular. I have found masocriticism especially useful in thinking about Federman’s translations in response to Beckett. Federman’s use of Beckett’s texts to tell his own life story literalizes the critic’s aggressive identifications. His devotion to the master is avowed, exaggerated, as is his treatment of the psychoanalytic themes (the body of the father) Mann invokes.

Traces of Federman’s masochistic devotion can be discerned, under the surface of academic prose, as early as his PhD research (which forms the basis of Journey to Chaos). In his understanding of Beckett’s oeuvre, Federman sees fictional abstraction as the highest goal, as a way of transcending social reality. Beckett, like Sam in Watt, is a sadistic author-God who tortures his creations into being, denying them full independence (complete abstraction or non-being) yet forever edging them closer to their goal, which is to occupy the privileged place of their (completely abstracted) creator. Federman sees Beckett’s early English characters, or rather creatures, as mired in realism, social reality, and his later French characters (particularly the crawling creature of Comment c’est) as edging closer to the creator’s own transcendent state of fictional absurdity, what Federman later came to call in Surfiction the fictionality of reality. The more the Beckett creature probes his inner self the greater the meaninglessness of his discovery, and though he can achieve a quasi-mystical experience, he forever falls short of transcendental revelation.⁴² Greater meaninglessness is the higher fictional goal as it is the highest goal of Beckett’s fiction; Federman traces this move from social reality to fictional absurdity (the subtitle of his 1963 PhD thesis). Looking over Federman’s own oeuvre, one can see that he took Beckett’s journey in reverse—a direction he was fond of—moving toward social reality in both his novels and his life, becoming more realist as he increasingly integrated into bourgeois society.

The reasons for this progression are no doubt multiple, but there is a clear break in style after The Twofold Vibration of 1982. The subsequent 1985 Smiles on Washington Square: A Love Story of Sorts is a departure from the formal experimentation and relentless intertextual play of Federman’s earlier novels. Though its premise is metafictional (a sliding doors kind of love story), it is certainly more conventional and less indebted to Beckett, as Melvin J. Friedman noted at the time of the book’s release.⁴³ It is also significant that there is no suggestion of doubleness in the title. Smiles on Washington Square comes after Federman’s final return to the closet staged by The Twofold Vibration of 1982, the final novel of Federman’s early cycle. The Twofold Vibration is set in the future (at the dawn of the year 2000) and features the protagonist as an old man with two sidekicks, Namredef (Federman backward) and Moinous (me-us in French). In what is now the United States of Planet Earth, a number of people are deported to the space colonies (or to their deaths) every year on New Year’s Eve. The reader learns that the old man’s name is on the list of deportees, but we never learn what that name is, since for reasons unknown his name is never called and he once again survives, left behind in the final closet of his earthly life.⁴⁴ The Twofold Vibration marks the end of queer themes and explicit homoeroticism.

In Federman’s early novels there are definitely two closets, and both of the protagonist’s identities (Jewish and queer) are by turns exposed and encoded. Federman shifts between a faux-philistine statement of the facts—Maybe I fucked him up the ass, but in the end it is me who is fucked up!⁴⁵ or And a Jew on top of that. Imagine!⁴⁶—and elaborate symbolic designs demanding scholarly erudition. The nature of the author-God’s relationship to his creations is, like Sam and his pseudo-couples described in Journey to Chaos, tainted by sadistic pleasures. The author(s) delight in humiliating their creations, exposing their ignorance and forever deferring their satisfaction. The relationship between author and creature is itself highly eroticized, with Beckett or Sam often switching places with the meta-fictionalized writer. By exploring the double meaning of the closet, I do not wish to make claims regarding Raymond Federman’s sexuality. By all accounts, he presented to friends and colleagues as something of a Gallic lady-killer. Nevertheless, a short survey of his early works demonstrates that there is ample material for a queer reading. In Double or Nothing, the protagonist shares a room (and a hot dog) with a young man called Loulou.⁴⁷ In Take It or Leave It, Federman’s most pornographic text, he has anal sex with the beautiful blond Claude, a young man though more than a bit effeminate.⁴⁸ He also participates in a "whild [sic] collective jerking off session" with a group of jazzmen.⁴⁹ These are the more glaring examples. In The Voice in the Closet, the density and abstraction of the prose, his words scattered nakedly,⁵⁰ make it difficult for me to point out homoerotic aspects in a summary fashion. In The Twofold Vibration queerness is more encoded. The main love interest June Fanon/Jane Fonda is happily mistaken for a man,⁵¹ and the protagonist’s sidekick/alter ego Moinous is stabbed to death by another beautiful young blond (man).⁵² One could point out that Federman’s early personas are enthusiastic about sex in general, and that there are also decidedly female love interests. Yet I would maintain that Federman’s approach to women consistently undermines and parodies Oedipal normality.

With so much activity outside of the metaphorical