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PARTISAN REVIEW
techniques of the "postmodern" novel. Federman's
unwriting
however
takes it a step beyond.
Everything is sucked away in its panverbalism, its sheer lo–
quaciousness. The intellectual text is a
rhetoric
of the "intellectual,"
intellectual "discourse" (of course) immediately recognizable by its
tortured syntax, its multisyllables, its philosophical metaphors, in a
word a spoof of English lit . high crit; for example, "the old man's am–
bivalence toward this erasure that charges his life emotionally and
informs its risks" or "what Jews show us with their undying presence
is the relation of difference which the human face brings into revela–
tion ," self-subverting logology whether applauded , "Oh that's well
said, " or put down, "We don't usually speak that eloquently, that
pompously," by characters and narrator. Similarly the vitalistic
mode is built of cliches, cliches of the American left in the Fonda
episode, cliches of the lusty Henry Millerian artist in the sexy
episodes, of the suffering artist in the dedicated-artist episodes, an
ironically nonpersuasive, rug-pulled-out-from-under-the-feet-of–
fiction , narrative . Thought and action are evacuated in the irresisti–
ble logorrhea. The endless circularity of talk is set in motion by the
bizarre trinitarian nature of the narrator: fractured into two ostensi–
ble narrators (Namredef and Moinous) and one discreet "second–
hand" narrator, Federman the "writer," all linguistic splinters of
Federman himself. The narrative circles incestuously between the
three, mostly in the form of anecdotes told in turn by the "old man"
(four), tangential to but always deflected from the "real" Raymond
Federman (putative narrator number five: author looking over
shoulder of narrator looking over shoulder of narrator, etc.), author
(certainly) of the novels by the "old man" subjected to the high criti–
cism and praise. Author, narrator and narrated subject fuse in the
fleeting word; transparency is complete, theorem as plot, plot as
theorem.
With the rediscovery of reflexiveness in fiction in the sixties ,
progress was possible in two directions: one, toward a greater opacity
of invention, keeping the devices and sense of authorial reflection
and intervention but concealing them artfully in the woof of the fic–
tion (Abish, Katz); the other, toward total transparency, exposing
the fictive world as one of arbitrary stabilities flimsily subject to the
whim of author/narrator. Federman has chosen the latter as his
strategy of the novel. His fiction is to the novel what mime is to the
theatre-no
d~sguise,
no props or barely any, a little powder and
