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
render some aspects of the page (and of the language too of course) more visual —painterly you might say —in order to have the reader accept language and writing on their own terms as self-referential. In other words, I wanted to make the language visible so that it would not be transparent and vanish after one has read the meaning supposedly hidden in words. I think also that I started playing with typography and visual language simply because deep inside I am a frustrated painter. Even though I cannot draw or paint, I am deeply involved with the plastic arts as a viewer. I suppose that comes to me from my father who was a painter. But the ultimate reason is more interesting for me because it relates not to painting but to music. As you know, I was a jazz musician at one time, and though I don't play anymore, jazz has remained extremely important in my life and my work. Jazz, of course, is improvisation. The designs in my writing are improvisational. When working on the visual aspect of a page in one of my novels, I have no pre-conceived design in mind. It all happens there, in front of me, as I compose, as I type the page. So that writing a story is not just inventing the situation, the characters, but also inventing the writing of that story, that is to say improvising the mechanism of writing. The result of such a process is that the pages (because they are different from one another) become autonomous. It is in this sense also that discontinuity is created. Each page then becomes a space of improvisation and exploration. As you can see, there are many reasons for experimenting the way I did with typography and the topology of the page. Some of these reasons (or justifications) I confronted while doing the work, and others I discovered after the work was finished. Q: Part of it may be what you call "the unpredictable shape of typography" in Take It or Leave It. For some critics, though, the surprise element of the typographical play became a distraction. FEDERMAN: Oh, absolutely, it is always unpredictable. ... Distraction, you know, also means "amusement." Q: Robert Scholes in Fabulation and Metafiction speaks about "intentional boredom" in reference to your kind of experiments. 96
