A LOOK AT AUTHOR RAYMOND FEDERMAN
I tell stories all the time, every day of my life. My friends call them lies, I call them stories. The author Raymond Federman told me last week that I have to lie, I have to weave fiction into my life each day. And I could not agree more.
There is a great mass of students, even among my fellow English majors, who do not know who Raymond Federman is. I have come across many sad things in my time, but this is one of the saddest. To not know of an author who took part in changing the face of fiction is to not know a large part of fiction itself. So, when I was told by my creative writing professor that Federman was visiting the University at Buffalo last week, I was more than excited to see an author that I had respected for a long time.
Raymond Federman has published over 40 books on various topics, from translations to poetry, plays to fiction. He has 13 novels under his belt, written in both English and French, depending on who his target audience is. Federman was born in France in 1928, and immigrated to the United States in 1947. He studied at Columbia University and U.C.L.A., where he wrote his doctoral thesis on Samuel Beckett. His career teaching began at UB in 1964 in the French Department, and expanded in 1974 to being a fiction writer, critic and scholar in the English Department and the comparative literature program. While teaching here, he worked with another prolific experimental writer, John Barth. Federman was promoted to being a SUNY Distinguished Professor in 1990, and in 1994, was appointed to the Melodia E. Jones Chair of Literature. He retired in 1999 to San Diego, California, where he still lives today.
On Wednesday, September 29, Federman read from his new novel, The Farm: A Nostalgic Tale, at the Poetry and Rare Books Library in Capen Hall. The author took to the podium, where he told us, in his French accent, that he would be reading from The Farm and that the reading would be long. It ended up being a little over an hour, but felt no longer than a few minutes. Federman brought life to his work from the first sentence. “We did wonder, Federman, since you’re driving and going to Cannes, if you would stop by the farm on the way.” He spoke with his hands and went into various digressions about the piece and about his life. The next day, in my creative writing class, he said, “to write today is to digress.” He made a point of it while reading from his work, and the digressions added to the reading all the more. It reminded me of commentary on a DVD: the creator explaining why he has created. Federman is a jovial reader, looking perpetually happy that he is able to share his work with an audience, especially a young one that is being introduced to his work for the first time.
To read Federman’s work is to plunge into the meaning of language, to go past points of plot and to learn how language shapes fiction itself. He quoted Beckett on the subject, saying, “Language is what gets you where you want to go and prevents you from getting there.” Language is something we all use every day yet we don’t analyze. Federman wrote in his book Loose Shoes: “A novel is less the writing of an adventure than the adventure of writing.” Federman’s work is an adventure too, even his critical essays on topics from Beckett to Surfiction to Critifiction (both terms he created) to the very meaning of fiction today.
“No one has been able to write a perfect piece of fiction,” Federman told me. “Why go on if you have written the perfect work? You must accept imperfection. To be a writer requires patience, determination and stubbornness.”
In response to his work, which often has a character of Federman, his alter-ego of Moinous, or various forms of himself, the author said; “My work appears to be autobiographical, but anyone who asks the question must learn my life. There is a great sentence by Stephan Mallarme: ‘All that is written is fictive.’ As soon as you write something, it is fiction.”
Since Federman left UB in 1999, there have been few fiction writers at UB teaching creative writing. Christina Milletti, assistant professor of English at UB and the coordinator of the Exhibit X reading series at Halwalls, filled the post of resident fiction author when she came to UB in the fall of 2003. A fan of Federman, Milletti said of the author, “Raymond Federman, the consummate story-teller, reminds us that the novel is still alive and kicking; that it’s full of stories that can take us anywhere: inside the dusty coffers of a box of noodles, or around the lavish trappings of a hotel room, with the same inexhaustible energy. To read Federman is to also have a conversation with him.”
Raymond Federman is a brilliant writer. To see him read two fictions last week (the one at the Poetry and Rare Books Library and one on Friday at Medaille College’s second annual Buffalo Indie Lit Luau), to hear him speak on fiction in my writing class and to talk to him briefly alone was to understand the nature of writing today, during a time where the lines of reality and fiction become more blurred every day, a subject which he has written essays about. Such essays can be found on his website www.federman.com as well as two e-books and numerous fictions and other essays.
While finishing my talk with Federman, he told me he had the last paragraph of my article for me. He reached into his portfolio and pulled out his book Loose Shoes, which has yet to find a publisher in America. What he said to me summed up his work, in my eyes, and the work of every writer of fiction or any other text, and I am honored to use his choice for the final paragraph. What Federman said was this:
“He constantly tortures himself to know who he is, he wants to know, wants to understand himself, but perhaps it is this ignorance of his self that is his strength, his destiny, never to understand himself and to remain always misunderstood…”
