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paint, and if the mime is good he will give a suggestive show, a
transparent enactment, while the audience remains amused by the
deliberate artifice, the formalism of the mime . Federman mimes a
fiction; he does not create one. And as he exposes technique and tac–
tic, he makes an artistic wager-like the many casino and betting
episodes in his novel- that his improvisations, his self-reflections,
will payoff for a moment. A wager against high odds.
Transparency and void are finally his own: that of Federman–
author, narrator and character-the mechanism of the novel is
much like a vacuum-pump: the void of intellectual discourse, of nar–
rative cliches , of the vicious circle of narration, is produced by the
mechanics of talk, as he says somewhere with a very Beckettish com–
ment, ''just to go on talking." This vacuum vacuums even itself,
since finally the air is emptied out, and with no air left to exist,
worse, to speak with, the novel ends, empty .
ALAIN ARIAS·MISSON
