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

Q: The Voice in the Closet, this painful concentrated and condensed text charged with emotion to a suffocating degree, is primarily, in Charles Caramello's view, the erasure of what happened. I would add that if one compares the novels that precede The Voice with those that follow, that book

—even if it is another "disarticulation" as you call it

—turns out to be a dividing line in your oeuvre. It seems to be an erasure of several aspects of your earlier prose style, too. It is not only a debate between the survivor's remade self and the surfaced and reburied voice of the past or of the subconscious, but, I feel, it is also your art negotiating its survival. You realize that your fictions "can no longer match" the reality of the past, "verbal delirium" is not enough, and, I would say, a new novelist emerges from "the primordial closet." Is this a correct assessment? FEDERMAN: I think what you've just said is an amazing analysis not only of my evolution as a writer but of my work too. But let me mention something which in terms of chronology is very important. Take It or Leave It was published in 1976, but you realize that the date of publication never corresponds to the date when a manuscript is finished. It takes a year or more for a book to come out. Soon after I finished Take It or Leave It, I began writing a new novel. No, not The Voice in the Closet, but something which was then called Winner Take All. I worked on this for almost two years, though I was not satisfied with what I was writing and where it was going. But what I had really started was what eventually became The Twofold Vibration. In between I wrote The Voice in the Closet. In 1977, in fact, while I was in France for the year. Perhaps that is the reason why I decided to do the text bilingually. The French and the English were written almost simultaneously. Parts of this twin-text were published in various magazines, and eventually a first version of the entire English text appeared in an issue of the Paris Review, I think it was in 1978. But the book itself, the bilingual book appeared in 1979. By then I was working again on the manuscript I had set aside, and now it was called The Twofold Vibration. I mention this not only to set the chronology of these books straight, but to point out that indeed The Voice in the Closet grew out of an early version of The Twofold Vibration

, but that it is the writing of The Voice in the Closet which made The Twofold 101