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JEROME KLiNKOWITZ
of ordinary fiction: "The novel cannot truly pass for reality, the
theatre is unable to create believable illusion, and the cinema, which
essentially should communicate with the viewer simply through a
series of moving images, must rely on sound or other devices to
achieve its primary goal."
Unlike the French new novelists, who write at least in part
from the philosophical imperative of phenomenology, Federman is
closer to his fellow Americans - Sukenick, Barthelme, and even Rich–
ard Brautigan - who face the concretely social problem of an unreal
reality and the irrelevancy of forms which depict it. Thematically,
his
novel
Double or Nothing
(1972) handles the now familiar story of
adjusting to the incredible presence of contemporary American life.
The solution, however, is in his technique, which foregoes the French
approach of describing a phenomenologically real world in favor of
making a reality more real: that of the book itself. His "real fictitious
discourse" (the subtitle of
Double or Nothing)
is not a sham illusion
of some other life but rather just what it says, so many words on so
many pages, bound together as a book the reader holds. Federman's
bet is a sure thing; of all possibilities, the book is certainly the most
immediately real thing at hand, and from this point reader and author
may together move in the positive direction from degree zero.
The writer who, through fictional persona or third person om–
niscience, makes a representation of the outside world has been de–
graded by the French novelists back to this zero point. To reestab–
lish a fictional voice, Federman divides its role into thirds: a third
person, the protagonist, whose life becomes the accumulation of his–
torical data in the usual sense; but also a second and first - respec–
tively the "inventor" who quite honestly creates these fake historical
events, and the "recorder" who transcribes the inventor inventing.
"Imagine the imagination imagining," as William H. Gass would
say. Or look at these
three
things happening, which according to
Federman together make a real story.
The story: a protagonist, occasionally named Boris, emigrates to
America and is through great labor initiated into a strange new
world, simultaneously with the inventor's creation of these "events"
- a very immediate task, attended by concrete preparations for writ–
ing (so many days alone for work, so many boxes of noodles for
food , so many squeezes of toothpaste ), all watched over by the re-
