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

second narrative level was introduced in the novel. Amer Eldorado is basically told in the first person, whereas Take It or Leave It moves back and forth from a third person to a first person narrative. Therefore there is more interplay between the narrator (the secondhand teller, as he is called) and the protagonist. Also, the English text has much more elaborated typographical designs than the French. Perhaps the way to understand the relation between these two books is to say that Amer Eldorado is contained in Take It or Leave It in a loosely adapted English version

—not as a translation, but as a free adaptation. Incidentally, the pages of Amer Eldorado are numbered. I don't know if this kind of work, this kind of literary elaboration and duplication of a text in two languages has ever been done before, but for me it was a most revealing experience. Q: In Take It or Leave It you call your book a "battle against the linearity of syntax," where "the pages become the syntax." Is this another way of putting the shuffle-novel idea or is it something else? FEDERMAN: No, it has nothing to do with the idea of the shufflenovel. Remember when I said earlier that in Double or Nothing I was looking at language and designing it in order to explore all its possibilities? By the time I finished that book I think I knew what the English language could do for me and what I could do with it. It had been over twenty years since I started to learn English, but it was not until I finished Double or Nothing that I became aware that I had appropriated that language, and that now I could use it and even abuse it in my work. I could now write sentences which would be my own. So what I did in Take It or Leave It was to explore the possibilities of syntax, or rather syntactical topology. Yes, in a way I engaged in a "battle" with and against traditional syntax, and especially against the linearity of syntax. I wanted to see if it were possible to write sentences without shape, sentences which would go on and on and would digress from their grammatically predetermined course. In this sense the book is more a syntactical experiment (even though it remains visual in places) than a typographical experiment. 94