For Gaddis's German reception, including the commissioned radio play Torschlußpanik originally broadcast in February 1999 by the Deutschlandfunk, see Walter van Rossum, " Am Ende war Geschwätz der Anfang: Rudernde Stimme Ohne Auftrag" and " Lange Nacht." I will return to the German fascination with contemporary American writers, and Federman, in particular, later, but note here that this ingenious twisting of literary form and the inveterate experimentation with style and subject matter is also evident in My Body in Nine Parts, the latest installment by the venerable grandmaster of surfiction and critfiction. For detailed summaries of Federman's success in Germany, see Ron Sukenick's "After the Fact" and Mark Amerika's interview with Federman, reprinted in the Federman special edition of the Journal of Experimental Fiction 23 (79-98 and 417-23, respectively). Ray Federman is here speaking about his own success in Germany, of course, that includes numerous radio plays, books in print available nowhere else, a modern ballet based on his writings, and even a jazz/poetry CD, but the observation holds no less true for Bukowski - who has become a cult figure in certain circles - and Gaddis. And all three, while virtually unknown to the larger American reading public, have found an appreciative audience in Germany, the country of Kultur, where readers variously admire their work for "the quality of the writing, the daring of the writing, the blasphemy of the writing, the effrontery of the writing, in other words, the beauty of this laughterature" (Federman, "Word-Being"). In addition to the widely circulating film Barfly (1987), scripted by Bukowski himself and starring Mickey Rourke, the 2006 Sundance feature Factotum portrays Matt-Dillon-cum-Bukowski as a sex-crazed alcoholic suffering from Romantic world weariness. Bukowski, like the late Gaddis, has repeatedly been depicted as the down-and-out drunk defying bourgeois assumptions of earning a livelihood and getting his stimulating highs from hard liquor. All three understood themselves early as challenging prevailing notions of fictional form by proposing counter-models that demand that readers, in Julio Cortázar's well-known phrase, become "co-conspirators": active participants in a narrative interface that removes the musty veil of "see-through" realism in favor of texts that foreground their resistance, materiality, and thickness (less so in the case of Bukowski) and that encourage readers to acknowledge the very fictionality of reality. What do William Gaddis, Charles Bukowski, and Raymond Federman have in common? Leaving aside their masculinity, all three have been pressed to margins of discourse by the literary culture industry because they refuse(d) to fit themselves properly into their assigned slots.
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