Abstract
When Richard Pearce notes that [Raymond] Federman takes joy in fact that he cannot separate himself from his fiction, is flushed by need to go on, to invent, improvise, extend himself into unknown through language,' he is accurately describing surface of Federman's novels and substance of his surfictional polemics. Yet we must also attend to considerable edginess in these works, to uneasy tone that subtends their play, to Federman's suggestion that his game involves serious stakes and that it cannot be won. In Take It or Leave It, Federmanjokes about his past: [I don't want to insist too much on Jewish side of this story but one cannot avoid it altogether I just hope you guys don't make too much out of it]; he denies its reality: after all let's be honlest a biography of a guy's past experiences it's always something one invents afterwards in fact life is always a kind of fictional discourse a lot of bullshitting!; but he also speaks of gamble that motivates his constant digressions and of the central primal loss (X-X-X-X): / HURTS to lose all time / Hurts like hell near heart / near guts too.2 This primal loss-the death of his family at Auschwitz-is evaded, denied, doubled, and inscribed in his fiction.
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