Return to Manure Book

~

"You see how I always confuse reality with fiction.
-You don't confuse it. You just turn reality into fiction.
-Same thing. Anyway, I was saying…"

Return to Manure is Federman in his 70's searching out the farm in the south of France where he spent three miserable years, from ages 13-16, as what amounts to a slave laborer, after escaping occupied Paris when his family was taken off to be murdered in Auschwitz, he only surviving by hiding in a closet for 24 hours, sneaking on a train to the south, and being traded from farm to farm as a child laborer, being provided with only bread and board and no prospects of a future to hope for in those years of Europe's darkness. These are facts. This book is fiction. It is a magic comedic sur/metafictional catalog of memories and imaginings in the form of a conversation between three people (-at least, especially if you rightly count the "self" at a minimum as a double and the writerly self always as a trebling or more-) on a road trip through le sud de France- a conversation as digressionary, winding, doubling-back, retracing and effacing as those forested roads, as anyone who has traveled rural France par automobile will attest to. There is endless postponement. Stories breed further stories, memories stoke memory, all orbit about a great absent center- those great mysteries of human life- childhood, sex, and death- but also about the Unforgivable Enormity, of which I need not elaborate. (The central point in the transition "childhood-adolescence-adulthood" might be read as the moment sex and death enter and begin to mystify the child, the adult eventually becoming what the child has made of those enigmas, by what means of subterfuge and cunning he bests or is bested by the Sphinx. But there is a Sphinx beyond the Sphinx, there is a Thing greater than the Sphinx that buries even the questions of the Sphinx.) It's all very funny and sad and unspeakably touching. Like I said, magic.

Anyway, let's talk about that title. Return to Manure. More poetic after a dozen or so repetitions than right off. It might be a mantra. The world is a sewer that runs from mouth to ass and from ass to mouth and back again, as any intelligent person will tell you. Life is shit, let's be honest. A farm runs on manure. Cows and pigs and chickens eat the grass and the grains and spend all day and night shitting them back out onto the field or the barn floor, and the child spends his days forking the manure out of the barn and back onto the fields to feed the earth its steaming fetid feasts. The ground demands to be fed corpses and shit. The delicious things that grow from the shit and corpses in the soil feed the animals and men that shit and become corpses to feed the ground in a never ending cycle of shit-becoming. The animals are slaughtered, and people are slaughtered, or just die, and as time goes on she'll make nothing but ooze and manure and soil of all of us. The stinking excrement that we become makes the beautifully perfumed superterranean world what it is for those lucky enough to be between the two shitty oblivions. But more- what is our past, our memories, our fading and re-emerging sufferings and joys, but the manure of the people we have become? To go searching in our memories is to sift our own excrement, to return to manure is to find in the waste of what we were what we have grown to be. Shit is poetic. Excrement is life itself. Our dead memories are the fictions out of which we make our present and future selves. As we account for and care for our living counterparts, we are in constant conversation with the dead of our past. Dead voices flushed away, dead moments down the drain, settle into the geological layering of our being and fertilize all we are in the here and now and the what-will-come. Return to the manure that never left us, recognize in the excrement of time all that is left of a future for us...

Ah, but let me stop talking all this shit...