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: I would leave the word "technological" out of my work. I am not a technological person. I have no sense of mechanics. I barely know how a typewriter functions, except that I type very fast. I am not mechanical at all, therefore there is no technological intention in my work. Q: He means that the novel is also a technological structure. FEDERMAN: Yes, I know, but still it is purely accidental. What interests me, fascinates me about writing a novel (unlike the short story or poetry, which I have almost completely abandoned), is that when you begin you have no idea where you're going. It's like exploring an unknown region. Ahead of the writer lies a huge empty space which must be filled with words and designs and shapes and geometries. And, of course, time is part of all that. I don't mean the time it takes to write the book, but temporality. In other words, writing fiction is always dealing with time and space, and if along the way the work gains a technological structure, so much the better. My primary concern is to render time and space visible —concrete. That does not mean that even in my more recent novels, which have no typographical or visual designs, there is no concern for time and space. Smiles on Washington Square is all about time and space. Q: Your work is not all technique. Those first two novels handle concrete social problems too, and the centrality of a hinted but repressed private apocalypse during the Holocaust —the extermination of your parents and sisters in Auschwitz —does not escape the reader's attention. And in The Voice in the Closet, one begins to grasp fully what you mean by the "unreality of reality" and the "unself" of the self. What you talk about is something that really happened to you and is still happening to the survivor in you. I wonder if the Federmanstory is or is not there behind the statement that can otherwise be read as an expression of a deconstructionist aesthetic: "I want to tell a story that cancels itself as it goes"? FEDERMAN: I suppose my entire existence —surexistence I should say —as a so-called "survivor," but also as a writer (but then writers 98
