Critifiction: Postmodern Essays

by Raymond Federman

Examines how, beginning in the 1960s up to the present, a new type of fiction was created in America, but also in Europe and Latin America, in response to the cultural, social, and political turmoil of the time.

Genres: Essays, Theory, Criticism, Writing, Literature, Nonfiction

133 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 1993

About the author

Raymond Federman was a French–American novelist and academic, known also for poetry, essays, translations, and criticism. He held positions at the University at Buffalo from 1973 to 1999, when he was appointed Distinguished Emeritus Professor. Federman was a writer in the experimental style, one that sought to deconstruct traditional prose. This type of writing is quite prevalent in his book Double or Nothing, in which the linear narrative of the story has been broken down and restructured so as to be nearly incoherent. Words are also often arranged on pages to resemble images or to suggest repetitious themes.

Reviews

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

Required Reading. Goes without saying. I said.


_________
I’ve read all of Federman’s fiction. Pretty much. Haven’t gotten to his essays yet. He came up with these two words :: ‘critifiction’ and ‘surfiction.’

Now, I’m just observing here that there are still lots of folks who speak of something like The Normal Novel. An oxymoron, clearly. The following are truly normal novels, in so far as they go toward the essence of The Novel. There are also other ways to write novels that are truly novels, but this short sampling of The TrÜ Novel Novel should keep you entertained and provide a certain degree of aesthetic bliss.*


The list begins with The Story without a Name, the first (ostensibly) critifiction.**
“Oscar Wilde’s Portrait of Mr. W. H. may be the most famous example of this rarefied genre,
“to which we can add Ki no Tsurayuki’s Tosa Diary,
“Joseph ben Zabara’s Book of Delight,
“George Gascoigne’s Adventures of Master F. J.,
“Clara Reeve’s Progress of Romance--”
“--William Carlos Williams’ Spring and All,
“Arno Schmidt’s radio dialogs,
“Julian Barnes’ Flaubert’s Parrot,
“A. S. Byatt’s Possession,
“Lee Siegel’s City of Dreadful Night,
“Lance Olsen’s Girl Imagined by Chance,
“the bookmad novels of Roberto Bolaño and Enrique Vila-Matas,
“Nicholson Baker’s Anthologist,
“Fowler’s novel mentioned above,
and perhaps David Markson’s later, unclassifiable novels.”

At this point we encounter a footnote. And so Moore’s study borrows some of the techniques of the types of novels he enjoys ; not only The List as aesthetic device, but also the footnote.

Footnote :: “Critifiction could also include works of fiction that display formal elements of criticism and pedagogy, such as the analyses of chivalric novels in Cervantes’ Don Quixote, of pastoral and mythology in Sorel’s Extravagant Shepherd, and of baroque sermons in Isla’s Friar Gerund;

“the essays in literary criticism that preface each book of Fielding’s Tom Jones;

“the Qing-era scholarly novels of Xia Jingqu, Li Ruzhen, Tu Shen, and Chen Qiu;

“the footnoted essays on architecture in Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris and cetalogy in Melville’s Moby-Dick;

“the 40-page essay on history at the end of Tolstoy’s War and Peace;

“the ‘night studies’ chapter of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake;

“the critical-edition format of Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire, Herbert Lindenburger’s Saul’s Fall, Milorad Pavić’s Dictionary of the Khazars, David Mamet’s Wilson and Samuel Delany’s Phallos;

“the scholarly apparatus attached to some of the novels of Julián Ríos and William T. Vollmann;

“the endnotes in the novels of Lawrence Durrell and Alasdair Gray, in Carol Maso’s AVA, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, Ciaran Carson’s Shamrock Tea, Albert Goldbarth’s Pieces of Payne and Paul Anderson’s Hunger’s Brides;

“the comically erudite index to Lewis Carroll’s Sylvie and Bruno, and the more functional ones at the ends of Harry Mathews’ Sinking of Odradek Stadium and Jeremy M. Davies’s Rose Alley;

“the footnotes in Thomas Nashe’s Pierce Penniless, Jonathan Swift’s Tale of a Tub, Eliza Haywoods’ Adventures of Eovaai, Thomas Amory’s John Buncle, Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley, Joseph Perl’s Revealer of Secrets, in Thomas Love Peacock’s novels, Jack London’s Iron Heel, Flann O’Brien’s Third Policeman, Samuel Beckett’s Watt, John Fowles’s French Lieutenant’s Woman, Ignácio de Loyola Brandão’s Zero, Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman, Robert Grudin’s Book;

“John Barth’s Sabbatical, Augusto Roa Bastos’s I, the Supreme, Nicholson Baker’s Mezzanine, Rikki Ducornet’s Phosphor in Dreamland, Geoff Ryman’s 253, in Roger Boylan’s novels, Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norell, Shiro Masamune’s Ghost in the Shell: Man-Machine Interface, Michael Cox’s Meaning of Night, Stephen Graham Jones’s Demon Theory, E. Lockhart’s Boyfriend List, Michele Jaffe’s Bad Kitty, Junot Díaz’s Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao, Andrew Foster Altshul’s Lady Lazarus, Lawrence Shainberg’sCrust, Josh Bazell’s Beat the Reaper, Matthew Flaming’s Kingdom of Ohio and many other novels by authors seduced by the ‘aesthetic evil of a footnote,’ as J. D. Salinger demonized it in Franny and Zooey (in a footnote)***;

“the appendices to John Sladek’s The Müller Fokker Effect, Borislav Pekić’s How to Quiet a Vampire, Greg Boyd’s Nambuli Papers, Scarlett Thomas’s PopCo, and Zach Plague’s boring boring boring boring boring boring boring;

“the formal lectures and essays in the Marquis de Sade’s fictions, Herman Broch’s Sleepwalkers, J. M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello, and Alexander Theroux’s schoolmasterly novels;

“the mock Paris Review interview and Nabokovian afterword in Donald Harington’s Ekaterina;

“the imitations of academic writing in the fictions of Harry Mathews, Gilbert Sorrentino, Umberto Eco, and Steven Milhauser;

“Lee Siegel’s scholarly translation-cum-commentary-cum-confession Love in a Dead Language;

“Benjamin Zucker’s Talmudic novels;

“the intra-chapter supplementary materials in Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s Watchmen;

“the Japanese flash cards and job guidelines provided in the front of Hilary Raphael’s I [heart] Lord Buddha;

“the test questions at the end of Jacques Roubaud’s Princess Hoppy and Marisha Pessl’s Special Topics in Calamity Physics;

“the advice columns and heuristic quizzes in How to Meet Cute Boys by Deanna Kizis;

“novels in the form of historical studies (Washington Irving’s history of New York), academic biographies (Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus, Milhauser’s Edwin Mullhouse, Wolfgang Hildesheimer’s Marbot), scholarly editions of letters (Ingo Schulze’s new Lives), literary interviews (Bohumil Hrabal’s Pirouettes on a Postage Stamp), Ph.D. theses (R. M. Koster’s Dissertation), college quarterlies (Jerome Charyn’s Tar Baby), literary anthologies (Stephen Marche’s Shining at the Bottom of the Sea), mathematical treatises (Suri and Bal’s A Certain Ambiguity), travel guides (Jean Ricardou’s Place Names, Chandler Brossard’s Postcards, Karen Bordon’s Paris Out of Hand, Michael Martone’s Blue Guide to Indiana, Aravind Adiga’s Between the Assassinations), foreign-language phrasebooks (Norah Labiner’s German for Travelers), appendices (A. M. Homes’s Appendix A, pedagogical handbooks (Jean-Jacques Rouseau’s Emile, Stanley Crawford’s Some Instructions to My Wife concerning the Upkeep of the House and Marriage and to My Son and Daughter Concerning the Conduct of Their Childhood), and dictionaries and encyclopedias (see chap. 2, n69), not to mention the maps, glossaries, marginal notes (see chap. 3, n96), and genealogies some novelists provide.”****


Before you say, “The problem with lists like these....”, let me just add that “There is no problem with lists like these. They are pure aesthetic bliss.” Unless of course there is something wrong with pure unadulterated aesthetic bliss. But if there is, you’re probably too old=fashiony Puritan for me to attend to much. Be on your gentle way, dear soul.




* Taken from The Novel: An Alternative History: Beginnings to 1600, page 580f.

** I’ll make sure I use standard devises to indicate Moore’s own words and stuff ; but I’ll be paraphrasing and reformatting and things of this nature.

*** My apologies ; I know you don’t need another reason to dismiss some more Mr Salinger.

**** All mis=types and things of this nature, pretty much every copy-edit error you discover, is solely the responsibility of me, Your Transcriber.

[Scribble Orca · Rating 5 out of 5]

Along with Christine Brooke-Rose (Stories, Theories and Things and A Rhetoric of the Unreal: Studies in Narrative and Structure, Especially of the Fantastic and Invisible Author: Last Essays) indispensable reading - in fact, quit the MFA program and just study, at the least, the critical work of these two genii. Federman makes the case for, and describes how to make, a new literature, a new fiction, in the ueber(uebel)modern age post the greats of the last century (how can we ever/yes we can escape those shadows).

[Stephanie · Rating 4 out of 5]

mostly good, but from its pages you'd think gertrude stein was the only woman who ever wrote anything

[Δημήτρης Μαύρος · Rating 5 out of 5]

90%

Reading this book, considering or debating (in my head) the ideas herein, and now rating them, is difficult for me because more often than not, while reading these essays, I was forced to evaluate my own ideas as there were identical to Federman's. And it's not simply that I agreed with what I read. No, I had already thought of a fair portion of what I encountered here (although without the same degree of clarity). It's the second time I've experienced this; the first time being when I read Anxiety of Influence. But now the feeling was even stronger. Anyway, point is, I had to (try to) exit my self, my conceptions of literature in order to process these essays; I had to become the devil's advocate. I'm not going to present the contents of this book. I'm only going to share some very brief and preliminary thoughts regarding my relationship to his theory and practice. So this is not an actual review. However, since you're here, on Critifiction's page, chances are you'll enjoy this book thoroughly.

Of course, I did not agree on everything—Federman's more extreme than I in some regards. That is more evident in his novel Double or Nothing which I read before beginning Critifiction. So, while agreeing with the ideas expressed, I disagree (somewhat) with the way they're applied. By disagreeing, I do not mean that I didn't enjoy his work (to the contrary). What I mean is, I'm not planning on applying some very similar ideas and writing principles the way he does. I'm very fond of experimentation, and my fondness has grown heavily over the past couple of years—and by the looks of it will continue to do so (afterall I'm 24, is there a better age for all that?). However, Federman's closed language circuits of constant repetition, his almost complete plot disruption, and the fact that Double or Nothing doesn't have a single typographically "standard" page (all of the above for good reasons) mean that his method is —for a lack of a better term at the moment— too much for me. Again, that goes for my writing. Reading Double or Nothing, or Waiting for Godot for that matter, was enjoyble (albeit Federman's novel could've been slightly shorter without sacrificing much). Since Federman believes that Postmodernism began and ended with Beckett, and since I've only read Waiting for Godot, I will be looking for Beckett's novels soon in order to see how he applies his also very similar ideas in a longer medium. I want to see if novels of such methods are in general different to what I want to write or if Federman is the extreme I want to avoid—or if perhaps there is another extreme that suits me more. My knowledge of experimental fiction is limited, especially from the 60's to the 80's, and so I'll need a much bigger sample size and months of reading before reaching any sort of conclusion about such literature, and consequently my place in it. Also, Double or Nothing is his first novel. I need to see his later work and how he evolved, if he did, before claiming anything definitive about his work.

[E. C. Koch · Rating 5 out of 5]

Postmodernism, as has often been said (by me), gets (got) a bad rap in the academe because it signified too little by signifying too much. Toasters and books and music videos and candy bars and shoes and wars are postmodern, so, surely, that signifier no longer signifies anything meaningful. This condition – and rationale – is so pervasive that some critics aren’t even bothering now with whether postmodernism is over and question instead whether it ever even happened (ahem, Jameson). But, as I’ve also said, to contend that postmodernism was either meaningless or an illusion is to solve the problem by cutting the baby in half. It takes serious critical attention and judicious analysis to untie the postmodern knot and make sense of the forces at work driving less-than-serious pundits to call, like, hamburgers postmodern. And here Federman – with the intuition and explicatory capacity of Solomon – is one such serious critic. In eight essay-narrative-documents Federman addresses postmodern literature’s (which he refers to as surfiction) initiation, motivation, and demise, meaningfully separating postmodernism into its constituent forces while maintaining the clarity requisite to contending with those who would dismiss postmodernism altogether as just so much linguistic legerdemain. Which latter constitutes much of what he has to say about surfiction: it is fiction that has turned inward, become self-reflexive, enthralled with its own medium. Again and again, Federman returns to first principles, iterating and reiterating how everything is language, how everything is fiction, how everything is story, how language is everything. Without descending into the chaos of poststructuralism he shows how the literature produced and housed under the sign of postmodernism is about itself because it’s about language. And in the same year that DFW published “E Unibus Plurum,” Federman declares the end of postmodernism, an avant-garde movement undone by its insistent difference that ultimately differed from itself. And so what this panegyric is driving to is this: Federman shows that postmodernism can still signify if one is willing to engage with it honestly. The cover is hideous, he's overreliant on Beckett, he neglects women authors, and the pages still crackle.

[Roger Green · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rare to catch a glimpse of a great writer able to decode his or her own art in a broader cultural context.

[Danielle]

still reading....