F-virus

The author, Doug Rice (a man [although a man rumored to wear the illicit clothes of his little sister] known to have a writing utensil much like Shem the Penman's), is very sick. In fact, it is with the deepest regrets that said author had to cancel himself; that is, that he could not actually write these letters, this word. For the sake of the institution, Rice had to leave himself out of this, far behind, above, paring fingernails. I am the author's replacement (or parenthetical displacement, depending on your readerly theoretical preference [as if such readerly texts actually exist]). Doug Rice, the original author, you see, has contracted a horrible disease, an odd sort of textual virus. This virus causes mutations, unknown violent forms of excessive pluralizing of the ilk (not ink) that David Cronenberg puts Marilyn Chambers through in Rabid. Once this parasitical virus found a hole in Rice's theory and found traction in Rice's parachutal syntax, it started eating. The virus, then, began making exact copies of itself with what it had eaten. These copies then started eating to make more copies that are currently eating to make more copies. At this very moment, Rice is in deep parasitical shit. Although the medical community cannot agree on every detail of this disease, they claim to have discovered an origin for the flattening out and dispersal of Rice's textuality. In fact, Rice's personal physician, a certain Dr. Benway, in one of his many unfinished theses, calls the virus: Raymond Federman. Even as I write in the place of Doug Rice, this evil Federmaniacal virus is ravaging through Rice's genealogy, threatening to place him under total erasure.

(Parenthetical Digression: A Letter to Ray Federman)

April 7, 1928
Dear Raymond,

I have been writing so much of late that, to quote those authentic cultural heroes, "I've got blisters on my fingers." Caught, trapped, looking through the fence of your narrative, just trying to say, I began eating your words, digesting your very soul. Moving my mouth around the barbed wire of a narrative gone silly, a multilinear narrative flying off the pages, one with no respect for the borders of the page. Wild lines of words crossing the sheets of paper obeying only their own sound and fury. Syntax, Raymond, syntax. One would think that a man of your distinguished stature would have greater respect for the law. Since last we spoke, I have been busy filling that monstrous gap between my mouth and you mouth in the text. You know, writing a dissertation, getting certified, about your work. In Double or Nothing is that your own voice, Raymond? (Do you "own" a voice?) I have been inside the borders of your two-fold, vibrating, twice-told tales trying to utter in the disguises of Doug Rice saying "Now, I am not Ray Federman, nor was meant to be.
Hope all’s hell,
Doug

PS: Will you authorize me to write the script of your life?

((A Parenthetical Digression within the Original Parenthetical Digression.))

June 2, 1910
Dear Doug,

You bloody cannibal. You vibrating tourist. Please be careful writing such letters. No telling who's listening. Such despicable letters may be published after your death. Me? I have been standing inside my shadow. Be careful how you handle this Federman's guy. His books are toxic. Like me, you do not have the right, as you well know, to interfere in all the detours and contours of Federman's stories. As far as Federman's body is concerned it has always been a priori in quotation marks to other worlds. Novels. Like Hamlet, I am also of course not this Federman character. I am only, at best, his autobiography. A most rare accomplishment: a true experimental life. There's nothing to say. Say nothing.
Yours,
Raymond

PS: Always check the expiration date before eating any text.

Dear E.C.,
You are what you eat[.]
JAJ

18 October 1994
Dear Mac,
There's an exaggerating schizo in Pittsburgh, Peoria, Buffalo, Detroit. I think he might be everywhere I am. The guy is going too far. Now he's plagiarizing my life! Get me outta here.
Ray

4-6-57
Dearest Doug,
You must heck now and again to reassure yourself that the crime of separate action has not, is not, cannot occur. Anyone who has looked into a mirror knows what this crime is and what it means in terms of loss of control when the reflection no longer obeys.
Love,
Bill
PS: Hurry to Kansas before the sky falls.

April 6, 1928
Dear Raymond,
I have been writing on you for the past three weeks.
Sincerely,
Caddie

April 8, 1928
Dear Caddie,
I haven't felt a thing.
Love and kisses,
Raymond
PS: I know you are Doug Rice.

Digression Closes

But. If we disintegrate verbal units, that is vaporize the containers of the Federmaniacal virus, then the explosion of the origin could not take place, in effect would never have existed. Ridding the world of Federman would set free the space between the margins. Create a landscape of silence. We,then, would no longer be forced to write marginal discourses. What's the gimmick? Supersonic imitation and playback. Convince Federman that Federman is Federman. Am I simulating. Begone, Baudrillard. Silly Frenchman with your weird-shaped books. All those letters left unsaid. Of course such a language would logically produce a theory of the simulacra. Is it real or is it memorex? It's neither. It's Baudrillard. What? Whom? The incest screams of the insubstantial dead? My father? Or rather: the ideal Federman, the essence, which is to say, the echo and the mirror have struck up a relationship of impossible correspondence and nothing is conceivable as long as there is an effort to make one of the terms (Federman) be an image of the other (Federman): to make what is the same (Federman) be what it is not (Federman?). In order for everything to signify it is necessary that I (Doug Rice?) am not inhabited by duality but by an intensity of simulation that consists in its own end, outside of whatever else it imitates: what is simulated? Simulation.

What is Federmanned?

I am Federman.

If you go back to the collected letters of Rice, volume 2, you will find popping up in the middle of the whole mess, incoherent and discontinuous residue, layers and layers of not-Federman playing beneath a sax solo. These viral traces mark not only the disappearance of origin within the discourse that Federman and I sustain and according to the path that we follow [as if a path is something that either Federman or I would ever be able to or willing to actually follow.

There you go again. Off into another paratroopical mess, as a kind of parenthetical digression for the purpose of italicized diversion.]. The mark of these traces means that the origin (Federman's fiction as a critical lie) did not even disappear, that it was never constituted except reciprocally by nonorigin, the trace, which thus becomes the origin of the origin (i.e. the federman of the Federman). For example, Samuel Beckett's LOST ONES are not so much lost in the federmania of allusion (heigho, heigho, it's off to the library we go to find fear in a handful of lust [Don't you just love typos? I mean dust) and get tenure to boot) as found in a revitalized playground of doubled nothingness.

Origin, too often, is look to as a source, a kind of sacred fount to resolve the albatross of confusion, to provide closure to the unsettling text that spills off the page in all directions, kaleidoscope of vistas, medley of tunes and street noises, farts and riot yipes. Origin, although a thoroughly hysterical category nonetheless has nothing to do with beginnings. The term origin (especially when applied to what might be called Federman's texts) does not mean the process of becoming of that which has emerged, but much more that which emerges out of the process of becoming and disappearing. The origin stands in the flow of becoming as a whirlpool; as rhythm is apparent only to double or nothing insight.

In the illusory babels of language, Federman advances specifically to get lost, and to intoxicate himself in dizzying syntaxes, seeking odd intersections of meaning, strange corridors of history, unexpected echoes, unknown humors, or voids of knowledge. But Federman's quest is risky, full of bottomless fictions and endless architectures and counter-architectures. At the end, if there is an end (and there isn't an end. There is only an unpaginated so long. Finished.), at this monty pythonesque nonsite of an uncertain end, there are perhaps only reverberations, voices echoing in the closet catapulting Doug Rice out to the unfocused fringe where both Federman and Rice lose their boundaries and a sense of the oceanic pervades. In Federman's pla(y)giarism and Rice's inappropriate academic behavior, language is broken up, dispersed, in order to acquire a new and intensified meaning in its fragmentation. This is not an Eliotic shoring up of fragments against the ruins; rather, it is a sort of Benjaminian rescue of images that are threatened with extinction by the noise of linearity.

Federman's narratives on top of narratives against narrative, to spin again, find again, finnegan wake again, yet another narrative is a way for Federman to lose his autobiographical self as he constructs that self in relation to his fictional identity. In this labyrinth of Federmans, syntax must be exploded across the wounded galaxies of traditional storytelling. The reader must start to wander. I must head to the desert, past the tunderdomes of logocentric meaning. Out where there are no postcards. I become nobodaddy, a nomadic warrior wandering through the shifting landscapes of Federman's invisible prose. Federman's play with himself involves a discontinuous state of being, a form of picking a quarrel with where he came from. He transforms the insanity of linearity into a restless interrogation, undoing his very terms of reference as the point of departure is lost along the way. Federman forces his I to drift. Even when his I becomes he or his "he" becomes I as I try to read myself out of the I of Federman doing battle with the he of the reader inside the text trying to tell the story in persons other than the I that is himself becoming he to disguise himself from I.

Federman is, thus, never Federman.

I, on the other hand, I am always Federman. Even though I was not born that way. Federman makes himself a provisional character in his own autobiography. This Federman character (marks left behind on the page), this residue of Federman, oscillates, is put in doubt, disrupted. For federmaning (which is the verb of Federman sitting at the typewriter or wherever the hell he sits prior to publishing these books that I sit reading) ... lost in the space of the sentence ... For federmaning, like a game that defies its own rules, is an ongoing practice that may be said to be concerned, not with inserting "me" into language, but with creating an opening where the me disappears while I endlessly come and go, as the nature of language requires.

Writing becomes a travelogue, a constant journeying across the threshold between event and narration, between authority and dispersal, between repression and representation. Perhaps reading Federman is like being in a Burroughsian Interzone, a swamp of Mugwumping desire. That is, inhabiting a zone that is open, full of gaps: existing in an excess that is irreducible to a single center, origin, or point of view. The I then cannot pre-exist the movement through questioning itself. The I is constantly being formed and reformed in such movements through Federman's narrative. Of all the layers that form the open (never finite) totality of Federman's I's which of these I's is to be filtered out as superfluous, fake, corrupt, pirated, and which is to be called pure, true, real, genuine, original, authentic? That famous old I ain't what it used to be. To put it mildly, Federman has fucked his I. His I then is formed on the run, moving, at the unstable point where the unspeakable stories of subjectivity meet the unspeakable stories of the reader.

Indeed the biographer, the critic, the Federman, has to give up the task of rediscovering what was there in the original. In the beginning the word was made flesh and word is image and image is virus. Or perhaps this whole text is simply a form of obsessional neurosis.

Once upon in a distant galaxy – call it Pittsburgh – under great duress, a nearly unspeakable committee of men called Doug Rice, a symbiotic madman, a genetic disorder in the sanctuary of English Departments all across this land of copyright. Get thee, they said, to a footnote. They accused Rice of being immersed in Federmania; that is, in the confusion between who produces meaning and who consumes meaning.

Mirror, mirror on the wall construct and reassure me with words. For this Federman is ineluctably transformed from being a self-referring monument to becoming an intersection, a moment of rendez-vous, a site of transit, in a wider network.

But remember hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frère, Federman is a virus and we have all been contaminated and are about, like Doug Rice and so many others who have come here before us, to disappear.