PARTISAN REVIEW
443
corder, who gives us the complete, eminently real fiction.
As
we
learn from the preface (or, rather, from the "THIS IS NOT THE
BEGINNING" ) :
this is then how it all started at the beginning just like that once
upon a time two or three weeks ago with the first person record
ing what the second person was doing as he planned the way
he was going to lock himself for one year in a room to write
the story of the third person all of them ready anxious to be
to go to exist to invent to write to record to survive to become
Two hundred and two pages of concrete typescript, the book is its
own becoming, and hence makes a claim to legitimacy. Federman
is
covered: no shoddy tricks or trumped-up illusions of reality, just
so much writing. But as he redeems the method of fiction, he saves
its substance, too. Granted that fiction is not history, but rather
something made up; what then is more real, one phony "thing" the
writer decides has "happened," or rather all the possibilities he
could
contrive, given his situation? 'Vhen you read a conventional
story, says Federman the recorder, "what you are really reading are
the answers to unformulated questions" - the story of the prota–
gonist. But the inventor is as real a part of the action, so the recorder
must note the "questions" as well, "to give the questions as the sub–
stance of
his
fiction rather than give the answers." The bet is double
or nothing, since "if the questions are given first on paper then the
reader can formulate the answers in his mind." The full reality of the
writer's fictional construct is effectively transcribed, and the reader is
given the chance to receive a truly unexpurgated text. Federman
weights the possibilities, shares them with the reader, and occasion–
ally adds extra pages (p. 63, p. 63.0, etc. ) to accommodate varia–
tions as he runs through Boris's life: such a novel can never die;
another two hundred pages can be sustained anytime, if you wish
to refigure on the basis of a dollar more or less a week for the room.
"IMAGINE THAT!"
Phenomenologists, including Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and many
critics of the French structuralists as well have regretted that we
must deal with a second-order language, divorced from the thing
signified but living only insomuch as it points back to that thing. Sys–
tem replaces essence, which can be bad if the latter is what one
