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Raymond Federman dies at 81
Raymond Federman was a pioneer of the enormously influential metafictional form—he coined the term “surfiction.” Photo: BRUCE JACKSON
Novelist, poet, translator, essayist and literary critic Raymond Federman, SUNY Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English at UB, died Oct. 4 at his home in San Diego after a long battle with cancer. He was 81.
Federman was a French–American writer known for his experimental, deconstructive literary style, in which he often broke the linear narrative and restructured until it was often nearly incoherent. As he did in his novel Double or Nothing, he also sometimes arranged words on the page to resemble images or to suggest repetitious themes.
He was a pioneer of the enormously influential metafictional form (he coined the term “surfiction”), which describes narratives that self‐consciously advertise their own fictional status. Among his notable works in this realm are the novels Twofold Vibration, Smiles on Washington Square and Take It or Leave It.
Federman was a member of the UB faculty from 1964 to 1999, during which time he helped found the Poetics Program in the Department of English. From 1994 to 1999, he held the endowed Melodia Jones Chair in French at UB, previously held by André Maurois, Gilles Deleuze, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Michel Serres.
The Department of English is planning a lecture or symposium in the spring in Federman’s honor. In addition, the organizers of the department’s “&Now: A Conference of Innovative Writing & the Literary Arts” being held today through Saturday have dedicated the conference to Federman.
Federman was born in Montrouge, France, in 1928 and emigrated to the U.S. in 1947 after his family was wiped out in the Holocaust, a fact that defined his life as much as anything else in his experience and was the subject of a good deal of his writing. He said his life began at age 13, the day his mother pushed him into a closet with a few cubes of sugar as the rest of his family was rounded up and taken to Auschwitz, where they died. He escaped the pursuit of the Germans, although he was nearly caught several times.
He came to the U.S. as a refugee and lived with his uncle in Detroit, where he attended an all-black high school, had the opportunity to study jazz saxophone and was associated with many jazz greats in the New York music world. He was a U.S. Army paratrooper and studied at Columbia University on the G.I. Bill and later earned a doctorate in comparative literature at UCLA with a dissertation on Samuel Beckett, who became a lifelong friend. He also was a co-founder of the Fiction Collective, a publishing house dedicated to experimental fiction and its writers.
Federman was honored by the Buffalo literary community and by UB several times in the past few years, most recently with “Federman at 80” a symposium held last year on the occasion of his birthday. The symposium resulted in a book of the same name published by SUNY Press, a collection of some 25 essays about Federman's work by different scholars and writers.
Up to the time of his death, he held forth on Federman’s Blog (the laugh that laughs at the laugh..). Many of his comments and observations reflected on his impending death, as did this one, published on July 29: how will it happen/the final exitus/will it be violent/will it hurt/or will it be quiet/full of silence…and he admitted in June to rereading Beckett’s Malone Dies “…just to mock death a little and to boost my cancerous spirit. I shall soon be quite dead at last Malone tells us at the beginning of his story. What a superb opening what a fabulous sentence.”
His face and form will continue to grace the atrium of the Center for the Arts and other venues at UB in the drawings and prints of his longtime friend and UB colleague, artist Harvey Breverman, professor emeritus of visual studies at UB.
Breverman called Federman, “Bigger than life. Bigger than life. He could do it all.”
Breverman documented collegial life in the College of Arts and Sciences during Federman’s tenure here. He also paid tribute to Federman’s life as a whole in several drawing series, including “The Federman Cycle (A Portion Thereof) or Debris & Design of the Holocaust,” “Carcasses,” “Federman in Jerusulem,” “Federman in Tangier” and recently, “Federman in Fez.” Federman often wrote the catalogues when the works were exhibited.
“They were strange, strange,” says Breverman, “but wonderful. That was Ray. He had a wonderful life. Even when he knew he was terminally ill, he kept the things that mattered in the forefront. I loved him dearly.”
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