Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2002. Vol. 8. Eger Journal of American Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 28)
Studies - Zoltán Abádi-Nagy: Conversations with Raymod Federman: Take It or Leave It and The Voice in the Closet
trembled like leaves. That kind of work does not happen by accident, I assure you, it is carefully crafted. Q: It seems that up to the point when your art could finally handle what happened —however evasively —you were grappling with a paradox. You had to speak the unspeakable. The imaginative content of your work was to be something that happened in what Ihab Hassan calls the Age of the Unimaginable. FEDERMAN: I think too much emphasis has been put —not only in my case but in the case of those who have written about that experience of the Holocaust —on the impossibility of writing about it. I could easily write the story of what happened to me and to my family. That story, or a story very much like it, has been told a thousand times. What is more important is why I am refusing to write it in a normal, conventional manner, let's say the way Elie Wiesel writes about the Holocaust? Why have I been reluctant to do this —to give away that story just as it happened, loaded with emotion and sentimentality, and melodrama? The reason I cannot write like that, like Elie Wiesel, is because between the original event and my sitting down to write the story of what happened back in 1942 there is Samuel Beckett, the work of Samuel Beckett. It is impossible for a writer who is serious about what he is doing not to confront the work of Beckett before he begins himself. For me the experience of having >"ead and reread Beckett, and of having spent many years writing about his work, is as crucial in my life as the experience of having somehow escaped the Holocaust. Beckett changed me, deeply affected my way of thinking and of writing. When the day came for me to write what I had to write, I knew that I could not do it like Elie Wiesel, even though we shared part of the same experience. That would be too simple. It would mean cheating myself. Beckett showed me that one cannot simply write the story, but one must also write the impossibility of writing the story, that is to say one must also write the anguish and even the unavoidable failure implicit in all writing. That does not mean that I write like Beckett, or that Beckett had a direct influence on my work, but that Beckett taught me how to think about writing. Reading such novels as Molloy, The Unnamahle, or How It Is 104
