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Return to Manure
In 1942, after hiding to escape the Nazis, our narrator (named, simply, Federman) finds his way to Vichy France. Unwanted by his relatives, he is forced to spend the remainder of the war as an unpaid laborer. For three wordless years on the farm, this thirteen-year-old is assailed by suffering, death, sex, and the back-breaking labor of shoveling manure.
Sixty years later, in the United States, Federman—the author? the narrator? both?—wrestles with nostalgia and bitterness. He finally returns to the farm with his wife, but once the journey is complete he no longer knows why he has made it, nor what he expected to find. Through the merger of fact and fiction, storytelling and reality, memoir and imagination, Return to Manure extends and enhances Raymond Federman’s brilliant ability to side-step narration’s limits and impossibilities.
Sixty years later, in the United States, Federman—the author? the narrator? both?—wrestles with nostalgia and bitterness. He finally returns to the farm with his wife, but once the journey is complete he no longer knows why he has made it, nor what he expected to find. Through the merger of fact and fiction, storytelling and reality, memoir and imagination, Return to Manure extends and enhances Raymond Federman’s brilliant ability to side-step narration’s limits and impossibilities.
208 pages, Paperback
First published August 17, 2005
61 people want to read
About the author
Raymond Federman
57 books32 followersRaymond 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.
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May 20, 2017That Federman’s books are BURIED is not so much a loss for readers of innovative fiction, although it is that, but rather much more it is a loss for those interested in the literature of the Holocaust and its survivors. “After Auschwitz no poetry can be written,” is the frequently cited dictum of Adorno.* Federman’s novels answer this aporia by not going at the thing directly, but by writing, rewriting, not arriving.
Federman himself did not see the camps. He survived when his mother placed him in a closet just before the Nazis carried away her, his father, and his two sisters to the camps. Federman remained in that closet for 24 hours and shortly headed to the free zone in southern France where he spent three years slaving on three farms. Return to Manure is the recounting of his time spent there.
This is an old man’s book. Sixty years after his sentencing to the farm he returns to France from the United States, where he had spent most of his adult life, to revisit and remember and (re)write a book. The story is a story about telling the story, the story of his memories and this inventions, fictions, fabrications, filling of gaps, resorting to fairy tales and a survivor’s fantasies. Here’s the surfictional structure of Manure: A friend, Ace, asks him whether he will visit the farm on his drive to Cannes with his wife. This dialogue with Ace continues throughout the novel, indicated by boxed text. In the car on route to the farm, Federman begins to piece together a book he will write about visiting the farm. He considers questions of structure, he considers his memories and the gaps in his memories, forgotten and remembered names. He converses with his wife in the car. At various locations he and his wife have conversations with the locals. This is all dialogue. Federman writes no monologue, but always seeks someone with whom to speak, to write, to address, to tell his story; because we are fictions and we are the stories we tell and our stories need to be heard even if our listener is always a fiction. Federman playgiarizes his life. A simple story.
An old man’s book. A book of memories and revisitings. A book distant from its own story. The story is new, but what it is about is being retrieved, not through the faulty facilities of memory and story and fiction, but is being brought to life in the first place as the invention and fiction it has always been. True? Yes, it is a true story, just as all of our stories are true.
How does one write about an Unforgivable Enormity? Federman is working on it. Over and over again, circling the same story, the same experience, finding his way to the way it really was. His books are all the same and should be read; all of them.
*Adorno eventually retracted this claim in the face of evidence. It is a question of How. Like all quotes, though, it’s scrambled. For more, see:
http://www.marcuse.org/herbert/people...
And
http://www.forumjournal.org/site/issu...
But this review is not about Adorno.
Federman himself did not see the camps. He survived when his mother placed him in a closet just before the Nazis carried away her, his father, and his two sisters to the camps. Federman remained in that closet for 24 hours and shortly headed to the free zone in southern France where he spent three years slaving on three farms. Return to Manure is the recounting of his time spent there.
This is an old man’s book. Sixty years after his sentencing to the farm he returns to France from the United States, where he had spent most of his adult life, to revisit and remember and (re)write a book. The story is a story about telling the story, the story of his memories and this inventions, fictions, fabrications, filling of gaps, resorting to fairy tales and a survivor’s fantasies. Here’s the surfictional structure of Manure: A friend, Ace, asks him whether he will visit the farm on his drive to Cannes with his wife. This dialogue with Ace continues throughout the novel, indicated by boxed text. In the car on route to the farm, Federman begins to piece together a book he will write about visiting the farm. He considers questions of structure, he considers his memories and the gaps in his memories, forgotten and remembered names. He converses with his wife in the car. At various locations he and his wife have conversations with the locals. This is all dialogue. Federman writes no monologue, but always seeks someone with whom to speak, to write, to address, to tell his story; because we are fictions and we are the stories we tell and our stories need to be heard even if our listener is always a fiction. Federman playgiarizes his life. A simple story.
An old man’s book. A book of memories and revisitings. A book distant from its own story. The story is new, but what it is about is being retrieved, not through the faulty facilities of memory and story and fiction, but is being brought to life in the first place as the invention and fiction it has always been. True? Yes, it is a true story, just as all of our stories are true.
How does one write about an Unforgivable Enormity? Federman is working on it. Over and over again, circling the same story, the same experience, finding his way to the way it really was. His books are all the same and should be read; all of them.
*Adorno eventually retracted this claim in the face of evidence. It is a question of How. Like all quotes, though, it’s scrambled. For more, see:
http://www.marcuse.org/herbert/people...
And
http://www.forumjournal.org/site/issu...
But this review is not about Adorno.
February 10, 2014
~
”You see how I always confuse reality with fiction.
-You don’t confuse it. You just turn reality into fiction.
-Same thing. Anyway, I was saying…”
Return to Manure is Federman in his 70’s searching out the farm in the south of France where he spent three miserable years, from ages 13-16, as what amounts to a slave laborer, after escaping occupied Paris when his family was taken off to be murdered in Auschwitz, he only surviving by hiding in a closet for 24 hours, sneaking on a train to the south, and being traded from farm to farm as a child laborer, being provided with only bread and board and no prospects of a future to hope for in those years of Europe’s darkness. These are facts. This book is fiction. It is a magic comedic sur/metafictional catalog of memories and imaginings in the form of a conversation between three people (-at least, especially if you rightly count the “self” at a minimum as a double and the writerly self always as a trebling or more-) on a road trip through le sud de France- a conversation as digressionary, winding, doubling-back, retracing and effacing as those forested roads, as anyone who has traveled rural France par automobile will attest to. There is endless postponement. Stories breed further stories, memories stoke memory, all orbit about a great absent center- those great mysteries of human life- childhood, sex, and death- but also about the Unforgivable Enormity, of which I need not elaborate. (The central point in the transition “childhood-adolescence-adulthood” might be read as the moment sex and death enter and begin to mystify the child, the adult eventually becoming what the child has made of those enigmas, by what means of subterfuge and cunning he bests or is bested by the Sphinx. But there is a Sphinx beyond the Sphinx, there is a Thing greater than the Sphinx that buries even the questions of the Sphinx.) It's all very funny and sad and unspeakably touching. Like I said, magic.
Anyway, let’s talk about that title. Return to Manure. More poetic after a dozen or so repetitions than right off. It might be a mantra. The world is a sewer that runs from mouth to ass and from ass to mouth and back again, as any intelligent person will tell you. Life is shit, let’s be honest. A farm runs on manure. Cows and pigs and chickens eat the grass and the grains and spend all day and night shitting them back out onto the field or the barn floor, and the child spends his days forking the manure out of the barn and back onto the fields to feed the earth its steaming fetid feasts. The ground demands to be fed corpses and shit. The delicious things that grow from the shit and corpses in the soil feed the animals and men that shit and become corpses to feed the ground in a never ending cycle of shit-becoming. The animals are slaughtered, and people are slaughtered, or just die, and as time goes on she’ll make nothing but ooze and manure and soil of all of us. The stinking excrement that we become makes the beautifully perfumed superterranean world what it is for those lucky enough to be between the two shitty oblivions. But more- what is our past, our memories, our fading and re-emerging sufferings and joys, but the manure of the people we have become? To go searching in our memories is to sift our own excrement, to return to manure is to find in the waste of what we were what we have grown to be. Shit is poetic. Excrement is life itself. Our dead memories are the fictions out of which we make our present and future selves. As we account for and care for our living counterparts, we are in constant conversation with the dead of our past. Dead voices flushed away, dead moments down the drain, settle into the geological layering of our being and fertilize all we are in the here and now and the what-will-come. Return to the manure that never left us, recognize in the excrement of time all that is left of a future for us...
Ah, but let me stop talking all this shit...
March 23, 2013
Almost all Federman is out of print or import-price in my country, except this novel(?) about his imaginative and real-life return to the French farm he worked on as a slave during WWII under the tyrannical hand of Lauzy. Over 190 pages, Federman (as narrator) details life shovelling manure and taking frequent beatings from his perverted boss, and rare moments of respite from the buxom farmer’s daughter (who may be an invention—like anything else in this novel[?]), while travelling with his partner Erica back to the farm to see what emotions it stirs up for use in his book. The ‘surfiction’ deployed in this novel is basically a subset of metafiction—Federman includes interruptions from the “reader” in rectangular boxes, and dialogues with his partner over the accuracy of his narration. The self-consciousness in here is deployed in a tender, bitter and hilarious prose style, with the line between memory and fiction wondrously blurred—clearly the book could be written in no other way for Federman. An excellent introduction to an author I will probably never read again unless those prices come down.
February 6, 2014
This is how it begins:
"We did wonder Federman since
you’re driving to Cannes
if you would stop by the farm on the way.
Yes, of course we are driving. We love the narrow French roads bordered by sweeping arches of tall ancient trees. And yes, we are going to try to find the farm where I slaved when I was a kid during the war.
We love the French cows in the meadows who look at the tourists with dumb eyes while masticating their cuds. They look like they’ve been painted there just for our pleasure.
Here take a look at this photo.
Oh, oh, those are donkeys. Well, same thing, they look just as dumb as the cows. I have the picture of the cows somewhere.
And we love les petits restaurants de campagne where you can stuff yourself with delicious pâtés, fromages, sauces, creme caramel, and le vin du pays.
We are driving a Renault Mégane deluxe silver gray grand comfort that will go up to 200 kilometers an hour, I’m not kidding, my usual speed on the damn autoroutes.
I say damn because every ten kilometers there is a péage – toll, in case the word is not yet in your French dictionary.
The French love to invent new words for every situation so they don't have to use foreign words. Especially not English words. That's how xenophobic they are.
Do you know that at one time it was a crime in France to use an English word? You had to pay a fine if you were caught using un de ces barbarismes Anglo-Saxon.
I think it was De Gaulle, when he was president, who passed that law. Or maybe it was Giscard D’estaing. They both suffered extreme linguistic chauvinism. It was insane.
People were denouncing other people who used English words instead of the official invented French word.
For instance, if you said le parking instead of le stationnement, or the side door instead of la porte latérale to refer to the door that leads to the patio of your house, you would be denounced by your neighbor. I witnessed such a case in 1966 when I was in Paris. Le dénonceur got a reward of 50 francs. Le coupable had to pay 300 francs. The nation made 250 francs profit in the deal. Call that linguistic shrewdness.
But back to the autoroute. Do you know what a traffic jam is called here. Un bouchon. Yes, a cork! And when the traffic is moving normally, they say fluide. There are electric signs all over the roads to tell you if you’re fluid or not.
I tell you, sounds like all the French automobilists either suffer of constipation or diarrhea, depending on the condition de la circulation sur l'autoroute.
This is not going to be
another story about shit, is it?
Depends on how the story goes. You know farm stories have a tendency to be full of manure.
But back to the signs on the autoroute. The best sign is the one you see on main roads that have a little side lane for you to stop in case your car breaks down. They call it voie de détresse. Imagine that. When a Frenchman's car breaks down, the driver suffers a crisis of distress, and he has to stop in la voie de détresse to recover.
Excuse the digressions. I feel incurably digressive these days. I just wanted to give you a sense of how educational it is to drive in France.
But, look, I suppose the French have to protect their linguistic stature in the world. Otherwise they would be swallowed up by the English language as so many other countries have been this past century. Take Japan for instance. Well, you’ve been there. Walking in the streets of Tokyo is like walking into an English dictionary full of typos.
So it’s understandable that the French should at least try to protect their language since, as revealed recently in USA Today, the economy of the State of California is now greater than that of France.
California is in 4th place, France in 5th, in the world economy. America, of course, is 1st, Germany 2nd, Japan 3rd. All this makes no difference to me, but the French really care.
If France had allied itself totally and openly with the Third Reich during World War II, if France had jumped in bed with Hitler, instead of doing it hypocritically under the covers, so to speak, it would not have tumbled into 5th place in the world economy, because after America had wiped out la Belle France, then it would have rebuilt it, as it did Germany and Japan, and certainly France would now be in 2nd place in terms of its economy. Second because we Americans love French things. French fries, French toast, French perfumes, French cheeses, French wines, French lingerie, French kisses, French girls, and especially the French countryside.
When you’re driving in France, your wife, or whoever is sitting next to you, shouts every ten minutes, oh look at that beautiful château lB-haut sur la colline.
I think the French ought to be more accepting of English words. It might help their economy and their position in the world. "
"We did wonder Federman since
you’re driving to Cannes
if you would stop by the farm on the way.
Yes, of course we are driving. We love the narrow French roads bordered by sweeping arches of tall ancient trees. And yes, we are going to try to find the farm where I slaved when I was a kid during the war.
We love the French cows in the meadows who look at the tourists with dumb eyes while masticating their cuds. They look like they’ve been painted there just for our pleasure.
Here take a look at this photo.
Oh, oh, those are donkeys. Well, same thing, they look just as dumb as the cows. I have the picture of the cows somewhere.
And we love les petits restaurants de campagne where you can stuff yourself with delicious pâtés, fromages, sauces, creme caramel, and le vin du pays.
We are driving a Renault Mégane deluxe silver gray grand comfort that will go up to 200 kilometers an hour, I’m not kidding, my usual speed on the damn autoroutes.
I say damn because every ten kilometers there is a péage – toll, in case the word is not yet in your French dictionary.
The French love to invent new words for every situation so they don't have to use foreign words. Especially not English words. That's how xenophobic they are.
Do you know that at one time it was a crime in France to use an English word? You had to pay a fine if you were caught using un de ces barbarismes Anglo-Saxon.
I think it was De Gaulle, when he was president, who passed that law. Or maybe it was Giscard D’estaing. They both suffered extreme linguistic chauvinism. It was insane.
People were denouncing other people who used English words instead of the official invented French word.
For instance, if you said le parking instead of le stationnement, or the side door instead of la porte latérale to refer to the door that leads to the patio of your house, you would be denounced by your neighbor. I witnessed such a case in 1966 when I was in Paris. Le dénonceur got a reward of 50 francs. Le coupable had to pay 300 francs. The nation made 250 francs profit in the deal. Call that linguistic shrewdness.
But back to the autoroute. Do you know what a traffic jam is called here. Un bouchon. Yes, a cork! And when the traffic is moving normally, they say fluide. There are electric signs all over the roads to tell you if you’re fluid or not.
I tell you, sounds like all the French automobilists either suffer of constipation or diarrhea, depending on the condition de la circulation sur l'autoroute.
This is not going to be
another story about shit, is it?
Depends on how the story goes. You know farm stories have a tendency to be full of manure.
But back to the signs on the autoroute. The best sign is the one you see on main roads that have a little side lane for you to stop in case your car breaks down. They call it voie de détresse. Imagine that. When a Frenchman's car breaks down, the driver suffers a crisis of distress, and he has to stop in la voie de détresse to recover.
Excuse the digressions. I feel incurably digressive these days. I just wanted to give you a sense of how educational it is to drive in France.
But, look, I suppose the French have to protect their linguistic stature in the world. Otherwise they would be swallowed up by the English language as so many other countries have been this past century. Take Japan for instance. Well, you’ve been there. Walking in the streets of Tokyo is like walking into an English dictionary full of typos.
So it’s understandable that the French should at least try to protect their language since, as revealed recently in USA Today, the economy of the State of California is now greater than that of France.
California is in 4th place, France in 5th, in the world economy. America, of course, is 1st, Germany 2nd, Japan 3rd. All this makes no difference to me, but the French really care.
If France had allied itself totally and openly with the Third Reich during World War II, if France had jumped in bed with Hitler, instead of doing it hypocritically under the covers, so to speak, it would not have tumbled into 5th place in the world economy, because after America had wiped out la Belle France, then it would have rebuilt it, as it did Germany and Japan, and certainly France would now be in 2nd place in terms of its economy. Second because we Americans love French things. French fries, French toast, French perfumes, French cheeses, French wines, French lingerie, French kisses, French girls, and especially the French countryside.
When you’re driving in France, your wife, or whoever is sitting next to you, shouts every ten minutes, oh look at that beautiful château lB-haut sur la colline.
I think the French ought to be more accepting of English words. It might help their economy and their position in the world. "
November 25, 2024
In which Federman's 'Federman' transubstantiates his earthbound pain through Bigleux's companionship; proof that a dog really is a boy's best friend. Simply lovely.
February 17, 2014
Not much to say about this book other than I liked it, it was rather easy to read, I do like road trips, and I know you can't go home again.
August 14, 2014
Well, let me see. This is both autobiography and fiction at the same time. (Its author at one point says, "I make no distinction between memory and imagination.") And that's not the only thing étrange about ce livre ci. Raymond Federman keeps switching between Anglais et French, quelquefois in the middle of a sentence, si non a paragraph.
Yet there is something likeable about Return to Manure, which purports to be a rambling tale about the author's stay at a farm in Vichy France after he somehow escaped being gassed at Auschwitz along with the rest of his family. He lives with a farmer named Lauzy, who mistreats him and sexually abuses the livestock, and his daughter-in-law Josette, with whom Federman develops a kind of ongoing sexual relationship.
There are several levels of narration. At the innermost level, it is Federman talking about his experiences. Interspersed with that are questions and comments from his wife Erica as they drive through France looking for the farm for old time's sake. On a yet higher level, there are questions and comments from the publisher (centered and boxed) who is bringing Return to Manure to press.
No doubt it is an odd book, but not an unlikeable one. In the three years he works on Lauzy's farm, Federman becomes a decent farmer. But then the war ends, and he returns to Paris looking for any of his family who may have survived.
Yet there is something likeable about Return to Manure, which purports to be a rambling tale about the author's stay at a farm in Vichy France after he somehow escaped being gassed at Auschwitz along with the rest of his family. He lives with a farmer named Lauzy, who mistreats him and sexually abuses the livestock, and his daughter-in-law Josette, with whom Federman develops a kind of ongoing sexual relationship.
There are several levels of narration. At the innermost level, it is Federman talking about his experiences. Interspersed with that are questions and comments from his wife Erica as they drive through France looking for the farm for old time's sake. On a yet higher level, there are questions and comments from the publisher (centered and boxed) who is bringing Return to Manure to press.
No doubt it is an odd book, but not an unlikeable one. In the three years he works on Lauzy's farm, Federman becomes a decent farmer. But then the war ends, and he returns to Paris looking for any of his family who may have survived.
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