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PARTISAN REVIEW
RAYMOND FEDERMAN'S UNWRITING
THE TWOFOLD VIBRATION. By Raymond Federman.
Indiana University Press. $10.95.
At the first words we are sloshed over with a style of spoken
language, a shoving, buttonholing, irrepressible flux of speech, a
"throwaway" manner, loose and verbose, a style mocking style, really
an antistyle. The utterly labile language sets the stage for the in–
stability of the fiction: what is spoken with such volubility and
splurge might as easily be unspoken; what is written unwritten .
Elasticity of voice leaves room and more for self-contradiction of the
text; identity of character may be doubled and tripled; unfolding of
event may be folded again in half or in thirds or discarded.
Such is the telling; there is also a told: the story of the "old
man," rollicking and lusty, with somber recollections however of a
distant childhood of Nazi persecution and deportation . The adven–
tures include his romance with June Fanon (a transparent Jane Fonda)
after a university demonstration against the Vietnam war in Buffalo
(where Federman teaches) and their trip to the Riviera, the casinos;
his multiple "sexual debauchery" in Monte Carlo, Wagner in
Koblenz, barroom brawl in Paris; a visit to Dachau with Movie
Director and his Grace Kelley starlet (yes, he makes it with her too) ;
and, inevitably, the drunken bout, seven months in the bohemian
Paris flat, to produce a work of genius, the Voice in the Closet (also
by Federman) .. . all told as a long digression while the "old man"
waits in a cell at the end to be deported (again) to the space colonies
in 1999.
The surge of speech is carried in a double register: one tone is
chatty, garrulous, confidential, slangy; the other is intellectual, "dif–
ficult," high-crit, academic; both belong at once to the narrator and
the narrated subject, the "old man ." The racy tone produces the
vitalistic energy, the fictive action of the story; the intellectual tone
gives it its theoretical frame and philosophical underpinnings .
Mutually subversive, the "theoretical" voice undercuts the fictions by
exposing their compositional tactics, analyzing the process of nar–
rative; the slangy voice deflates the obiter dicta of the former. ("It's
amazing," says June Fonda/Fanon, "how you can go on and on with
these naive profundities.") So far so good, you say, these are the
