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

FEDERMAN: That means, I suppose, that either Robert Scholes is happy with the way things are, or totally missed the point of what I was doing since he reacted in the reverse of what I intended. Or else Scholes does not know how to play. Q: My complaint with unpredictable typography is that it is far from being unpredictable. When a word is suggestive of any typographical possibility, that possibility is bound to be exploited by the typographical game, especially in Double or Nothing. And if something predictable is pursued by all means and at whatever length, it will alienate rather than sustain interest. FEDERMAN: What happened when I sat in front of the typewriter, as I did, day after day, page after page, for more than four years as I was writing Double or Nothing

, is that sometimes I would spend an entire day working on the same page, designing it over and over again, not knowing where it was going or what it would become. It was either pleasure or fatigue which determined the final shape, the outcome of the page

—pleasure in the sense that I felt pleased with the way the page finally looked, aesthetically that is, or fatigue because I couldn't go on any more with that particular page. Some days I did not feel like playing any more. There are pages that may have been pushed too far, and as such locked themselves into a predictable form, and others which I did not push far enough. This was the risk. But the title of the book suggests that much. I was gambling with a mode of writing which could have failed totally. Q: Visualization and typographical play imply the aspect of spatialization. You have just said that for you the page is a space of exploration. Adopting Sharon Spencer's phrase, Ronald Sukenick describes your Double or Nothing as an "architectonic novel." You obviously agree with him regarding the novel as a technological structure with imaginative content, where the technological structure can be improved "to suit the purposes of our imagination" and to alter our perception of the world. 97