My Body In Nine Parts

If Raymond Federman were reviewing My Body in Nine Parts, the latest book by Raymond Federman, he would begin with this sentence. And end it here. Self-reflection, making-mouths-in-the-glass, all of this showy author-as-subject only lately in mass-market Dave Eggers/Jonathan Safran Foer vogue has been Federman's forte for a while now, nearly half a century spent writing at the most avant of the garde.

Unlike those current media darlings, Federman's ugly-old. He's also a most formidable artist.

Born in France in 1928, Federman barely escaped the Nazi atrocity; his family died in Auschwitz. Arriving in the States in 1947, Federman went on to serve in the US Army, in Korea and Japan, got himself an immigrant's education on the GI Bill and at the age of 35 set to work writing in two almost equally foreign tongues: French, which the War ripped from his mouth, and America's English, which he couldn't pronounce without laughing.

1964's Double or Nothing was the first of his 10 novels to date; some, eager for history's end, said it was already the endgame of the postmodern novel. They were wrong. Federman's first foray into narrative prose, a loose knot of "texts for free," Yiddish-y vaudeville punchlines, Freud-via-Derrida harangues and memories sans nostalgia, was the endgame of modernism itself: As funny as it was, and still is, nothing could take itself so seriously; nothing could be so desperate under the laugh-track of Céline-like ellipses and the carnie-hypnosis of projectivist swirls.

What followed Double was an amazing run, spanning "surfiction" (a fiction that, in the words of Mark Amerika, seeks to expose "the fictionality of reality"), "critifiction" (a merging of essay with fiction) and "playgiarism" (perpetual self-appropriation). These "genres," founded by instinct as opposed to theory, were serious attempts to go beyond Joyce, Beckett and the highest rhetoric of European modernity while simultaneously funning on the Academy and its subsidized canon.

Federman's prose works-from Double through 2001's Aunt Rachel's Fur and the book at hand-are almost invariably plotless, but full of "narrative" or thrust, the characters less inventions than incarnations of voices, the author less Federman than one, or all, of his many, many mouths.

"The voice," Federman says early on in his Body, "is what resists the nothingness that precedes us and the nothingness that confronts us. Or to put it more poetically: The breath whose domestication in the throat of the human animal created the voice that engendered the conscious and moral (or immoral) mystical beast that we are tells the whole human adventure."

My Body in Nine Parts, accompanied by a series of b&w images of the titular entity by photographer Steve Munez, is total exhibitionism, an exercise in the writing-of-the-body that's at once shocking and well within the shock-tradition of Barthes, Kristeva and Pierre Guyotat. Kabbalistically dissecting himself into organs and their attributes, surgically scrutinizing his hair, hands and toes, his voice (as in the passage above), and habits both fussy-hygienic and medically-necessary, Federman's high-mimetic seems focused as never before into something approximating a one, true "I". His Voice here-and for the first time-becomes a distinct naming of the whole ravaged self, this book a defining moment in Federman's taxonomy of unfettered speech.

-Joshua Cohen