On Tuesday, August 10, at four o’clock in the morning, I left Dresden. An hour before my departure, the kind, gracious Baron Fircks came to see me. He broke away from the embraces of sleep to say goodbye to me one more time. We sat down to have coffee and did not notice how the time flew. An unrestrained conversation about our dear Russia, about our friends and relatives, turned an hour into a minute. But it was time to leave! “It is so fortunate,” I said to him, “that you, gracious baron, are not a woman. God knows what people might have thought about us. We met a week ago and have been almost inseparable since then. Moreover, had this happened in Paris, French journalists certainly would have written, “A certain Mr. G., who had been sent, as is known, on a secret mission, fortunately, fell in love with one young baroness from Courland, and spending all his time with her, he forgot about the purpose of his visit!” He sat with me in the carriage and rode to the Pirna Gate. There, we hugged each other one more time with the soulful emotion of sincere friendship and parted. The turnpike gate went up, the carriage rode at its regular pace, and a sad cloud overshadowed my soul. Another parting with a good friend; another step into a dark distance; another disquieting anticipation of an unknown future.

The road from Dresden to Bohemia runs along the left bank of the Elbe like a beautiful alley surrounded by picturesque views. This region is rich in military history. The southern part of the Saxon Kingdom and the northern part of Bohemia witnessed the heroic deeds of the greatest military leaders of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries—Gustav Adolf, Frederick, and Napoleon. Some countries are destined, it seems, by fate itself to become the sites of great, decisive military events. Such are Upper Italy, the Netherlands, and Saxony. In these countries, every step is commemorated by some heroic military deed or event. A traveler involuntarily recalls the past and makes comparisons. While thinking about Frederick and Napoleon, I opened a book that I happened to have about me and read, “The locations were the same, but their strategies were different.

The claim that there is a different universe, or lack of fundamental laws of physics, in the quantum or in the cosmological is false, popular and a misunderstanding of what most physicists and science understands the quantum as being. It is different place—outside of our perception of time and space—but it is not a mystery or random, as Einstein famously worried (or Feynmann joked). Mystery, rather, in terms of quantum mechanics needs to be understood under the rubric of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle and remains scientifically agnostic. What theory predicts, and evidence suggests, is something different, and certainly hostile to the traditional understanding of God in the Abrahamic traditions. As Sean Carroll writes, the problem is not what we do not know in terms of the quantum but rather that we know enough justifiably to argue that the core theory itself seems unassailable. It is just not that it is “misused and abused by cranks and charlatans—and misunderstood by people struggling in good faith with difficult ideas” but that it is audaciously simple and powerful in its scientific and real value:

• (1) Everything we know says that quantum field theory is the correct framework for describing the physics underlying everyday life.

• (2) The rules of quantum field theory imply that there cannot be any new particles, forces or interactions [including God/souls] that could be relevant to our everyday lives. We have found them all.

It is the second point that is the most important: we have found them all at least in the local universe we live in. Is this a statement of incredible pride or is it true?

What then does this all mean?

It is clear by any account of quantum universe cosmology that the universe is much more complex than predicted by the standard account of physics and that it is likely that the laws of physics are varied not only in terms of other universes but perhaps even within “our” universe (assuming that we are a bubble in a much larger universe as some predict). While classical physics required constants—20 odd in the standard model—that are normative within any given region of space, the possibility is raised in quantum chromodynamics cosmology (or other core theories such as quantum field theory) is that these constants may be varied, depending on the presetting conditions of the creation of that universe.

As a graduate student at the University of Oxford, I often explored medieval churches. Entering these buildings, and the twelfth-and thirteenth-century founded Christ Church Cathedral, I was always struck by how different the minds of that ancient population were to mine. Not so much that I lived in a society that used smartphones and computers, but rather that the very fabric of their universe and self-understanding was vastly different than mine. How they understood themselves with reference to the Divine, the cosmos and each other in strict hierarchy literally manifested on the walls and ceilings of the buildings. One aspect always struck me, making a deep impression on my psyche (as being a little chilling) was the presence of angels and demons or the supernatural in general. The world conceived in the Western medieval mind was that of us (humans), God and then another group of supranatural nonhuman beings. I was, of course, well familiar with these, not merely from popular culture, but more from my studies and readings of ancient Christian and Jewish theologians, whether Augustine, Aquinas or Maimonides right through to Martin Luther (and later). Each in turn had sections of theological reflection that treated the very real to them world of the divine other, not just in terms of God but in terms of another kind of being in contradistinction to human being. As a colleague once related to me of one of his mentors, John McIntyre, the premodern world had “us, Him (God) and them (supernatural beings)” as points of reference for human self-understanding. Humans were not only unique in this anthropology but unique in terms of two divine references. Much of what would describe human uniqueness—even familiar to contemporary minds—such a freedom, finitude and relation to God would be in contradistinction to the angelic and fallen angelic beings that were not free, not finite and in a different kind of relationship to the Creator and creation. In the description of human identity, there was a triangulation of identity. As one sees the process of modernity, this triangulation becomes a binary. By the end of the nineteenth century, the triangulation is binary—there is only humans and the Divine. The Divine is “humanity-plus” as projection or humanity is “God inside.” And now, I maintain, there is only humans.

The question of this chapter is simple: what do we mean when we speak of ourselves? Is to have a mind, be a self and be conscious the same thing as to have a soul? And what of our bodies and particularly of our brains which seem to all moderns evidently the vessel of the soul/mind/self and consciousness? But before we look to this, we need to ask whether when we are doing theology and doing empirical (or even the human) science we are doing in fact the same thing? We start here because if what we are talking about is really two methods, then confusing them is patently unwise. But are we confusing two methods?

Origins, and Models of Science and Theology

While many theologians involved in the science– religion/theology debate work to distinguish and validate the processes of method between the two magisteria and argue for appropriate discourse for each claim on the nature of reality or offer criticism on scientism's overuse of its own heuristic method, most fail to engage in a critical analysis of what is really at stake. What is at stake is the tacit driver of all questions, reactions, rejections, détentes and combinations for the simple and historically obvious reason that the development of science and by extension our modern minds as an offshoot, and its subsequent philosophical assumptions, is only possible in a Judeo-Christian milieu and that its development is symbiotic, or worse, parasitic and supplants the very worldview that permitted its birth. This is, of course, the logoscentrism of the Judeo-Christian world or more succinctly the belief that an ordered, lawful universe exists outside the experiences or minds of human observers and that, in part, our imago dei, is attuned to this greater reality. This logoscentric perspective is the concentration of the four theological bedrock ideas in Chapter 1. But there are two glaring facts that any such consideration on the value of this idea must face.

The first is the historical fact that the modern scientific worldview that permeates our lives from smart phones to combustion engines to pharmaceuticals has indeed altered our self-understanding.

Of the writing of many books in the last decades on the “fate of reason,” “modernity” and theology's insipient contributions to their demise seem to have no end. Equally the bell tolls for the university humanities and there is likewise a surplus of academic work on the transitory and contingent nature of what was once thought of as modernity's invariant principles of rational inquiry, now nakedly exposed as custom, hegemony and other pestilences and therefore openly hostile to any apposite “Other” in terms of economics, politics, race or gender.

The landscape is well-mapped. This is the entire postmodern/postcolonial world in which Western academics, religion and life now live within. Interestingly, both religion and science are problematized but for different reasons.

The standard story is as follows. A nexus of complex interactions—in thought, geo and local politics, economics and religion—contributed to the rise of a way of thinking variously called the Enlightenment or modernity that assumed it possible to have an objective (and therefore impartial) point of critique that, if followed, promised, and has indeed given much, in terms of, human freedom, knowledge and even peaceable lives. This eristic promise ultimately placed the contingent individual self as singular, as a common anthropological reference to the nature of human and non– human beingness. From this new “self as ontological incarnation” of human ideality (and my choice of Louis Dumont's problematic term is intentional), the human person, or a community of knowing selves (primarily as scientists but also as Wissenschaft in general), able to summon, judge and therefore discover the true nature of reality. Finally, we break the old world of the medieval and ancient to rebuild and find authority only in the products of our own hands.

In 1927, at an axial time of European history, Sigmund Freud published his The Future of an Illusion as a completion on his work on the origins of religion, started in 1913 with Totem and Taboo. In the work, Freud argues that religion is a necessary fiction whose illusionary power allowed humankind to become civilized while balancing primal/animal instinct of the self with the needs of living in a collective. In the work, Freud claims to bring psychoanalysis, psychodevelopment, and other disciplines such as archeology and anthropology to understand the origins and prevalence of religion especially that associated with the Judeo-Christian tradition. The themes in the work would persist throughout his later life, including his 1939 Moses and Monotheism. While it may be accurate, as scholars repeatedly argue, that Freud's work is dismissive of uniqueness of monotheism (and perhaps gives too much credit to the simple reduction of psychosexual development as the reason for it), it is also true that his claim that religion is a fiction whose illusion allows human society to make ontological claims on the nature of moral and natural reality rings true with most contemporary sociological theories on religion. Religion, particularly in light of the many historical and present religious candidates of human experience, at its root has a sociofunctional role and that this sociofunctional role can be the reason it is accepted, dismissed or vulnerable to usurpation by another religious identity over time. In short, most sociological analyses of religion find that the wide variety of ontotheological claims—whether Islam or Zoroastrianism—are best understood by the role of social stability that the worldviews grant. This position, on the surface, makes nothing of the underlying “truth” of the divine reality/ities but only that they “work” in granting social utility, both communal and personal. This means, using Freud's language, that they are “fictions” granted power by their utility and as such make no claim on ontology itself. In words, they are made up by humans as they understand themselves, not necessarily a true investigation or understanding of the Real. They are “illusions” that grant social stability (and by extension, social abuse), given ontological power by their usefulness and therefore entirely human—perhaps local but certainly not divine in origin.

Strange days. I sit in my home office, using Zoom to lecture and to communicate, while a global pandemic brings about a second lockdown in most European countries (and some of my province in Canada) while I listen to the national radio broadcast a “science” reporter whose expertise a short 10 months ago was provincial governmental affairs. In the period of the pandemic, he went from being an expert on politics to the public radio voice of the science of the pandemic on the national radio broadcast in my heavily populated region. His position on the national broadcaster, its centrality in terms of Ontario population, means that he really is shaping how many educated or interested Ontario residents think about the pandemic. He is, in the parlance I will repeatedly use in this work, “educating us to reality”—in this case not only on the science of COVID-19 but also the human ethics and social aspects of it as well. Our intrepid reporter cites health experts and various studies, interviews talking heads from various universities with impressive expertise and works tirelessly but gets so much of it wrong (at least, for me)—I checked his biography and as far as I can see, he has no training in science. The talking heads struggle to speak “science” into a void that wants easy reduction and whenever they qualify or modulate what can be said, end up being pressed to an absolute kind of statement on numbers, virulence or infection rates as if they have absolute secret knowledge that is fated to come. And importantly, each morning the political reporter qua science expert tells the audience how that understanding should impact or alter human behavior, social interactions and even economics or politics based on his curious interactions with above experts. But, and this is the point, he confuses the two places on what science is saying and what it means. That is an intractable point of confusion, a place of dialogue between the scientists and the general public for whom public agencies are working.

A widely considered master narrative of the past century is of a steady disenchantment of the Judeo-Christian Platonic world and the rise of a soulless scientism of Aristotelian causality. The story is as follows. When the sacred canopy—the place of God and morals—is eroded by naturalist, positivistic scientism (see Becker on this with respect to quantum mechanics) then what grinds out supranature is extrinsically hostile to humanity and indeed creation. All the villains of social Darwinism, technocratic Prometheanism and scientific reductionism manifest as philosophical naturalism to deny morality, connectivity and certainly conatus or drive for moral reform, let alone connection with one another and the wider planet. Humanity is left to drone mentality, over and above nature and aimless in a cold distant nothingness. Into this story, the enchanted or mystical is preferred, whether Real or not, because it pulls out of mere representation toward imagination, and in doing so, provides ethical will and energy. This repeated and terrible story ends with the “human being [alone],” and our more recent postmodern, postfoundationist, postracial and so forth, history as the humane desiring to hope and a return to the native or naïve, and a re-enchantment of human purpose, connection and destiny. Imagination of a better, unconnected to our historical foibles, future is the remit and there is almost always an appeal to a better nature in humankind. This is, of course, a prehistorical, presocial and completely natural human being uncorrupted by the positivistic history of the Western world and its most beloved child in science. But little attention is paid to this presocial natural human for whom education (both formal and cultural as a kind of ontology) can resurrect for a better future without inequalities of every stripe. For our purposes, this narrative is important. In particular, the thinking on “natural” and “nature” is imperative as both those terms seem to be Edenic or preferential to the context of culture we find ourselves in. While we may be the product of cultures—personal (family and immediate context) and social that corrupt our moral and self-orientations through traumas—there is also the presupposition of a natural self or person untainted by those winds of context. The trick is to live in that nature endorsing connected self to the planet, to life and to each other.

But if we are not quite ready for an age of science, and still are haunted by the ghosts of religion (and the Judeo-Christian world) then there are two places, again suggested by Freud, to work. The first is to recognize that “theological theology” is first and foremost necessary if there is to be any engagement with the scientific world. This has two reasons: (1) It allows for a critical evaluation of the role of socialization within its own traditions and can see whether this is either a resource or a hindrance rather than the reconstruction found in religious studies as a crypto-theological science. (2) It speaks its own language at the table of society as a result, and this, in part, also means that it must learn to NOT speak when its language is no longer fruitful for the conversation. Two weak examples suffice here. Clearly, the Judeo-Christian resource on sexuality in distinction of nature is different than what we scientifically know on sexuality and choice. Punishment or cultural restrictions on sexuality as nature then seem to be absurd as if we are only nature, then we cannot easily limit this behavior as expressed. We must account for (and this is indeed a brave new and terrifying world) behavior as a manifestation of nature at some fundamental level in both our social mores and social laws. Second, consider climate change denial and its relationship—undeniably so—to the Christian worldview of the dispensational mind that treats this present earth as a temporary place while waiting on the rapture. Whatever planet remains, will clearly for the dispensational mind (and this is a powerful voting body in the United States and elsewhere) be left for the sinners needing either chastisement (the Jews) or punishment (everyone else) before the end of the cosmos as we know it. In both the above cases, the reality of social politics facing the global world is decidedly pointed in another direction, and yet, the religious viewpoint remains salient and powerful.

(i) Wordshit

In The Voice in the Closet/La voix dans le cabinet de débarras(1979), a third is added to the teller and told of Take It or Leave It. In the closet together are “teller told creature,” “créature raconteuse racontée.” Translating from English to French, Federman highlights the primacy of the creature through adjectival forms, suggesting that it is he (or it) who is behind both teller and told. Narrated in the first person and in one continuous, unpunctuated stream, Federman's bilingual novella is the creature's cri de coeur. The narrating I rails against the teller/told, against the writer “sam”/“federman,” who tortures him into speech yet at the same time prevents him from speaking in his own voice. The creature, though predating the writer, is ultimately reliant on the writer's activity. When the possibility of sam/federman's departure is invoked, the text itself starts to fragment with blank spaces (61). The master's dominance, “he thinks his words will make me” (53), is made apparent on the page. For all his efforts to assert his own primacy, the creature is written into existence by “he” who is above. Nevertheless, Federman's bilingual novel continues his hopeless attempt at reversing the natural order and taking Beckett's place.

The failure of this attempt brings forth the creature's true passion, his rage and his love. Sam's importance is established from the opening line, as is his placement above: “here now again selectristud makes me speak with its balls all balls foutaise sam says in his closet upstairs” (23). The “balls” are the font balls (rather than bars) specific to Federman's IBM Selectric typewriter, the “selectristud.” The one called sam is making the creature speak with his (federman or his own?) type balls, symbols also of virility. In the corresponding French: “me fait être devenir avec ses boules orgueils foutaise dit sam” (22). Federman has identified “orgueils” as a reference to the French dish of bull's testicles, “orgueils de boeuf.” The word “foutaise” is a frequent interjection in Beckett's Comment C’est, translated by Beckett as “balls” for the corresponding word in How It Is.

(i) A Beckett Creature

When Federman writes he is almost always writing about Beckett. This is very different to writing after Beckett. Indeed, writing after Beckett might not even be possible, since according to Federman he is both the first and the last of postmodern authors. To say that Beckett was an influence, even the main influence, on Federman's writing would be inaccurate. Though I am yet to come across a direct reference to Harold Bloom in my reading of Federman, Bloom's full-hearted adoption of Freudian frameworks in The Anxiety of Influence seems targeted in Federman's 1976 essay “Imagination as Plagiarism,” where the “traditional” critic is equated with the traditional psychoanalyst. It is certainly interesting to note Bloom's insistence on “strong” authors. So often parodied, perhaps this insistence can be useful in thinking about Federman's queering of Freudian frameworks, especially considering his contemporaneity to Bloom. In a much-cited formulation Bloom insists that he is only interested in a “battle of strong equals,” “Oedipus and Laertes at the crossroads.” The strong writer must overcome, must kill the father and assert his originality. Though the strong author writes through reading his forebear, he does so by creatively mis reading. Why then is what Federman does so far removed from Bloom's idea of creative misprision? Is he not also misreading Beckett? Firstly, Federman is by no means a canonical author. But a lack of commercial success and critical recognition do not account for a qualitative difference. Even if Federman were to achieve posthumous fame, Bloom's framework wouldn't fit. Federman does not so much misread Beckett as take him at his word. A postmodern believer, he zealously defends against any pretense of originality. In Freudian terms, he has no intention of letting go of his primal identification with—and homosexual desire for—the father. There is no battle and so there can be no separation, since Federman simply refuses to let Beckett go. His misreading of the master-text, though an act of aggression, is with the hope of soliciting the satisfaction of punishment. Federman identifies more with Beckett's creatures, tormented and exiled, than he does with the author.

This book is about Raymond Federman, postmodern theorist, bilingual novelist, self-translator and scholar of Samuel Beckett. Federman's remarkable devotion to Beckett's works, which he maintained in both his fictional and scholarly writings, forms the focus of this study. His novels, which have been described as autofictions, are full of references to Beckett. Raymond Federman was born in Paris, on 15 May 1928, to a poor Jewish family. His immediate family—mother, father and two sisters—all perished at Auschwitz. He was saved by his mother who, as the police were coming up the stairs, pushed him into a closet. The time he spent there waiting, referred to as the closet episode, is recounted in what is considered to be Federman's most important text, The Voice in the Closet/La voix dans le cabinet de débarras. After waiting in the closet until nightfall, he managed to escape occupied Paris and when the war was over migrate to America. He enlisted in the US army, served in Korea and eventually went to university on the GI bill to study French literature. In 1965, he published a monograph based on his PhD dissertation, Journey to Chaos: Samuel Beckett's Early Fiction. Federman went on to become a professor of Comparative Literature and Creative Writing. A Beckett scholar, Federman is primarily known as co-author of two critical bibliographies. He has written several articles on Beckett and coedited the Cahier de l’Herne: Samuel Beckett with Tom Bishop. Journey to Chaos remains his only scholarly monograph. At the time of Beckett's centenary, Federman released a short memoir of his relationship to Beckett, Le livre de Sam ou des pierres àsucer plein les poches. Outside Beckett scholarship, he is known for his contributions to American postmodern theory. There is a clear divide between Federman's more traditional scholarship in Beckett Studies and his ebullient postmodern writing. This divide is breached via intertextual play in Federman's novels, which borrow indifferently from both bodies of scholarship.

I’ve chosen to focus on the first cycle of Federman's novels, from 1971 to 1982. Since he continued writing until his death in October 2009, with his last novel published in 2010, this might seem an unusual choice.

(i) Quaqua

It might be necessary to point out that in Double or Nothing the young man does “make it” with a woman after all, though it's far from a show of virility. The encounter is with his best friend's mother: “something motherly about her,” “she was really round all over.” She takes full charge of the situation, “literally lifting him up from the floor.” Importantly this woman is, like the woman of the subway, a Black woman, with the “same enormous ass and same strange exotic smell.” In his high school in Detroit all the young man's friends are Black, including his best friend Ernest—a nod, perhaps, to Freud's friend and biographer Ernest Jones. When Ernest finds out he is at first violently angry, but the two quickly make up. Federman mocks Oedipal configurations by having Ernest observe: “You know something, man, that makes us almost brothers […] no, that's not really it, that makes me almost your son.” When Federman first came to America he was living with his uncle in Detroit, finishing school and working in a factory, hanging out with various jazzmen. His involvement in the Black community is described in Take It or Leave It as a fraternity of shared suffering: “me too sad and lonely slob like them I was hurting inside the guts.” But although they are the same inside, their bodies remain irrevocably different: “I had a little complex (complex of inferiority) next to my black buddies because these guys had enorMOUS pricks” (152). As a “mediocre white-skinned” (154), he cannot ever perform to their level, sexually or musically. Federman's eroticized, “exotic” Black bodies are irrevocably othered; the full implications of which remain outside the scope of this study. I do note that Black and queer bodies share the same fate in Federman's fictional progression—encoded in The Twofold Vibration with June Fanon (Frantz Fanon) and excised thereafter. In the five novels of Federman's early cycle, Black bodies are at once eroticized and appropriated, continuing some of the problematic racial dynamics of Finnegans Wake.

In the “Shem the Penman” chapter of Finnegans Wake, as the persecuted Jew writes in black ink/excrement over every spare inch of his body, he morphs into a “namely coon” of “porterblack lowness.”

“There is a beautiful sentence in Waiting for Godot which says: ‘We are all born mad, only a few remain so.’ Meaning, of course, that the state of madness (or irrationality) is preferable to what we call sanity (or rationality).” Could this be the writer Federman leaving us another clue? In the same interview, he goes on to explain that the old man of The Twofold Vibration is always on the edge of madness, obsessed with the idea of madness. That all of Federman's characters “are beings who have been turned loose in the world (the fictional world of course) and who are never sure whether they are going to become rational or if they are going to remain irrational. Like Beckett's creatures, they are all born mad, and some of them will remain so.”

Federman then explains that his early characters are too caught up in this irrationality to develop self-awareness: “My characters do not reflect, they endure. Reflection only begins with The Twofold Vibration.” Only in The Twofold Vibration do they become, temporarily, sane. Yet the state of madness remains preferable, a longed-for state. When Moinous resurrects in Federman's next novel, Smiles on Washington Square, he is almost completely cured. Only a dirty, one-legged pigeon can remind him of his former life: “Any substitution, however unsatisfactory or unfulfilling it may be, of something he once loved, is a form of calmative.” Beckett's novella The Calmative was edited by Federman with Pinget's Journal, in a book destined to students of French, some fifteen years before. The old man in The Calmative asks only for a kiss, but he is not to be trusted.

As this study has demonstrated, there are many clues pointing to the second closet. But the clues themselves are redundant, unnecessary to proving the existence of homoerotic themes. Loulou, the jazzmen, Claude, Sam the dog and a recurring anonymous “fag” who propositions the young protagonist each provide ample evidence. The closet is useless because it isn't hiding anything, except of course the even greater presence of Sam. In the closet space, Sam is not only above but also behind the whole fictional setup.