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

will be able to say "I am a writer." I think it was not until I began working on The Voice that I felt I had become a writer, and that now I could make conscious decisions about what I wrote. Before that a great deal of what was happening in my writing was often accidental, I mean some of the experimental and more outrageous aspects of the early books. Q: The voice itself in The Voice in the Closet is seemingly something spontaneously surfacing in a surrealistic fashion. FEDERMAN: It is and it is not. The manuscript of The Voice in the Closet is a very big thing, and in it there is a lot of spontaneous stuff, but as I worked at reducing, deleting, cancelling that text, I shaped, chiseled the spontaneous, one might say, into a very rigid form. The genesis of that text is interesting. In the first draft I worked across the wider side of a regular sheet of paper, and wrote the text in two columns down the page. One column was called THE VOICE the other THE CLOSET. I don't remember which side of the paper each was, but the text of THE VOICE was very abstract, unpunctuated, almost deliberately incoherent, and the text of THE CLOSET was a more or less conventional and even linear punctuated narrative. I worked this way for a while thinking that I could sustain this duality of the text and of the closet. On the one side there was the original closet with the boy in it, and on the other the closet where the writer was writing the boy's story. But gradually the two closets began to overlap, and the two texts merge. It is at this point that I realized that the voices were not separate, but contained in one another, and therefore they had to be abstracted into one another. Very much as a painter goes from a realistic design to total abstraction, I erased, blurred, abstracted the story. What was left then was the essence of that story. That, in fact, is what I wanted to get to: the essential of what had happened in the closet. And so I removed punctuation, capital letters, names, syntax even, any element of the language which moved toward discursiveness and narrativeness. What remained was a sort of non-syntactical delirium locked in the design of the pages, the absolute squareness of the pages, and inside these squares the words 103