The twofold vibration

by Raymond Federman

On New Year's Eve, 1999, our hero awaits deportation to the space colonies. But why? His two devoted friends, Moinous and Namredef, have been urgently and desperately investigating the reason for his imminent exile, and they report their findings, as unreliable as they are, to the author, Raymond Federman. Ribald farce, tragedy, history, philosophy, and science fiction -- THE TWOFOLD VIBRATION touches and transforms many genres as it examines what it means to live as a survivor in the post-Holocaust era.

Genres: Fiction, The United States Of America, Literature

175 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1982

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

[Jonathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

In which Ray visits the Dachau museum. In which Namredef, Moinous and Ray go gambling. In which Survivor's Guilt is confronted. In which we hear again of the closet and the shit wrapped in newspaper and placed on the roof, of the devouring of raw potatoes, of xxxx. In which Ray gets laid by some seriously hot chicks. In which we hear of the Noodles and the Voice in the Closet. In which we hear of Sam the Man and Sam the Dog. In which we are projected into the near future so we can view the present as though it were the past. In which (and is this not enough?) we get to spend more time with Ray the Teller-of-Stories.

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 5 out of 5]

Federman-Moinous-Namredef-Old Man narrate this SF-tinged tale about Federman-Moinous-Namredef-Old Man. This is vintage Federman-Moinous-Namredef-Old Man. One suspects the “Old Man” to be Beckett in places, but this being a Federman-Moinous-Namredef-Old Man novel, the Old Man is probably Federman-Moinous-Namredef-Old Man. At any rate, this is a brilliant yarn, more indebted and riddled with Beckett than his other novels (that are all indebted and riddled with Beckett), exploring his post-holocaust visit at the camps, and reflecting on his writing of The Voice in the Closet, among the usual sexy romps.

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

In which Ray does science fiction.

Here's a space ship, passengers loading :: "this giant cylinder with its tapered nosecone and its two spherical fuel tanks attached on each side looked like a posed prick in erection pulsating in the cloudless black sky, ready to gather within itself those yellowish spermatoid-like bodies and then penetrate the great cunt of space"

Which, random randy quote selection aside, should allow us to consider making (a/the) postmodern triumvirate thusly :: Barth, Coover, Federman ; aka, perhaps -- Jack, Bob and Ray. There's perhaps some other relevant triumvirates to invoke, but this one should have its annual three-day federal holiday.

[Cody · Rating 4 out of 5]

Federman a la Science Fiction (the worst science, per KJV). And...bangs around with Jane Fonda. Dooze you, in the words of JB Smoove, and lose yourself in his papers, found below courtesy of Washington University in St. Louis. Bless you, Federman.

https://library.wustl.edu/the-raymond...

[E. C. Koch · Rating 3 out of 5]

This novel is science fiction in the same way that, say, Beloved is science fiction. There's this one super-tiny gesture toward irrealism that colors the narrative in a curious way but isn't strong enough to surmount the entire rest of the text, which drives toward a far more substantial (literary) end. In Beloved there's a ghost, but the novel is a powerful (literary) statement on slavery, not ghosts (and no one is arguing that Beloved is a sci-fi novel). Here, there's a waiting room at a spaceport, but the novel is a (literary) statement about the guilt consequent to surviving the Shoah and the mental gymnastics demanded of the subject attempting to square such survival with a sense of profound inconsequentiality, not space travel. Which is all to say that The Twofold Vibration really isn't a sci-fi novel. Yet, because this was written by Raymond Federman, court jester of postmodernism and acolyte of Samuel Beckett, and not, say, by Toni Morrison, the narrative games are so pronounced that the novel is more easily read as not-quite-serious and therefore, perhaps, genre-inclined. So what we get here is the story of the Old Man who, waiting at the spaceport on New Year's Eve 1999, is soon to be relocated to the space colonies of the future for reasons unknown. In order to find these unknown reasons out, Namredef and Moinous, friends of the Old Man's, visit him at the spaceport and ask why he's being deported, the answer to which is related to the author who writes a transcript of what he's told. The Old Man, of course, doesn't know why he's been selected, and can therefore only surmise the answer, and along with Namredef, Moinous, and the author, the reader just gets a lot of surmises while the Old Man waits for an event that never really comes (like I say, Federman really loves Beckett). Among these surmises is the story of the Old Man's survival from the Nazis, told from many different vantages and from many different narrators, which gets to the point of this novel. Federman, a French Jew who survived WWII - who is Namredef ("Federman" backwards), Moinous (the French words for "me" and "us" combined), and the Old Man at once - argues here that to survive one's almost assured death (e.g., a Jew surviving the Shoah, Dostoevsky surviving the firing squad) is to be afforded superfluous life. And while this is good inasmuch as it means the individual is still alive, it also comes with a lot of not-so-good baggage (e.g., survivor's guilt, the self-imposed pressure to justify survival by becoming successful, the belief that all excesses are excusable because one is living on bonus time). Federman's pomo shtick largely distracts from this negative stuff, but the very minor science-fictiony part of the novel functions as a metaphor for the psychological displacement of such an experience (just as the ghost in Beloved functions as a reminder of America's not-quite-dead belief in racial inferiority that continues to haunt (and injure) black subjectivity today). I read this, wanting to expand my understanding of the breadth of postmodernism's narrative experimentations, as one of a selection of works from that period that challenge the novel form. The Twofold Vibration does this. In multiplying narrative voices and composing in fragments and not attributing dialogue this almost entirely dissolves the line dividing metafiction and nonfiction. And I'm led to suspect that Federman would really rather have just played with language and form and left it at that, and not offer content so clearly laden with the "real" that poststructuralism was supposed to have voided. But court jesters are sad, and this book is heavy, and while it's cloaked with attributes of postmodern literature, I think, like Beloved too, that The Twofold Vibration isn't a postmodern novel at all, and is instead a highly sophisticated rendering of an impossibly complex experience.

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

This looks like science fiction with a little male id fantasy but it's actually a metafictional story about how novels work and survivor's guilt. Tricky.

[Paul · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve read his other 2 most famous books (TIOLI and Double or Nothing). This one started a little slower but before the halfway mark I was captivated. All three are intertwined. Ray definitely has a style, it’s so interesting and fun despite the incredibly heavy allegory (at its heart this is a story about the Holocaust, maybe the best experimental book every about the Holocaust?). I’m not sure this would have made sense or been enjoyable had I not been familiar with Ray already. I also didn’t realize the extent to which this is semi autobiographical, makes it that much more sad but profound and meaningful.

[Wendy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic