Obituary: Raymond Federman, Novelist and Beckett scholar

Published on Sunday 18 October 2009 23:11

Born 15 May, 1928, in Paris. Died: 6 October, 2009, aged 81

THE work of Raymond Federman, a French-born scholar, critic and avant-garde novelist, sought to straddle the boundary between fiction and reality – and in so doing to emphasise the inadequacy of language to capture either one completely.

At his death, Federman was a distinguished professor emeritus of English at the State University at Buffalo, where he had taught for more than three decades.

He wrote most of his books in English, others in French. A friend of the playwright Samuel Beckett, he came to public attention as a Beckett scholar. Federman deployed prose in similarly unorthodox fashion in his own fiction His books, aimed at the eye as well as the ear, were typically characterised by artful typography and self-referential, often playful manipulation of language.

In Federman's first novel, Double or Nothing: A Real Fictitious Discourse (1971), each page is a carefully arranged, self-contained collage of black text on white ground. The net effect – one of fragmentation, displacement and emptiness – suits the subject of the book, the loss of the narrator's parents and siblings in the Holocaust.

Reviewing the novel in the New York Times Book Review, Ronald Sukenick wrote: "Double or Nothing breaks up that solid page of print we are all too ready to expect in fiction, and suggests a new convention more persuasively than any novel I know of." He added: "It is a considerable achievement."

Federman's other work was also concerned with absence, survival and the arbitrary savagery of history. The Voice in the Closet (1979), told in a single unbroken sentence, conjures up the voice of a boy in hiding who hears the Nazis take his family away.

Though he was often described as a writer of postmodern fiction, Federman preferred to call what he did "surfiction," a term he coined in the 1970s to describe the murky borderland between fiction and nonfiction. Shunning most conventional storytelling techniques, his novels often employ multilayered narratives, shifting perspectives, knowing asides and leavening doses of humour.

Among his other novels are Take It or Leave It: An Exaggerated Second-Hand Tale to Be Read Aloud Either Standing or Sitting (1976); The Twofold Vibration (1982); and Smiles on Washington Square: A Love Story of Sorts (1985), which received an American Book Award in 1986.

Some critics found Federman's work rough going. Writing in the Times Book Review in 1985, Tony Tanner said: "If elitism implies works that are read, appreciated and enjoyed by a very few, Federman must be one of the most elitist writers of all time."

But the point of Federman's difficult, sometimes profuse style seemed to be this: however many words a writer might bring to bear on his subject, there are some subjects that language is ultimately powerless to describe.

Raymond Federman was born in Paris on 15 May, 1928, the son of Simon and Marguerite. In 1942, when Raymond was 14, the Gestapo came to the family's door. Telling him not to make a sound, his mother shoved him into a small cupboard. Raymond huddled there, listening, as his parents and sisters, Jacqueline and Sarah, were marched down the stairs. Raymond spent the war in hiding on a farm in the south of France. His parents and sisters died in Auschwitz.

Federman moved to the United States in 1947. He served with the US army in Korea and Japan. He earned a bachelor's degree in French from Columbia in 1957, followed by master's and doctoral degrees from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Before joining the faculty at Buffalo in 1964, Federman taught at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He retired from Buffalo, where he also taught French and comparative literature, in 1999.

In addition to his daughter, Simone, Federman is survived by his wife, the former Erica Hubscher, whom he married in 1960; a stepdaughter, Robin Murez; two stepsons, Steve and James Murez; and four grandchildren.