Raymond Federman — The Voice in the Closet / La Voix Dans Le Cabinet De Debarras [1979]

Perhaps Federman’s most challenging formal experiment, if not his most audacious, this short prose work was published in 1979 in a French/English paperback alongside Maurice Roche’s inscrutable French short Echos. For over four decades, Federman strove to tell and retell, construct and reconstruct, his life, exploring and exploding metafiction in a manner unlike any other writer of the period, resulting in a corpus of nonpareil novels that constitute some of the best of postmodernism (and some of the best novels, period). This opens: “here now again selectricstud makes me speak with its balls all balls foutaise sam says in his closet upstairs but this time it’s going to be serious no more masturbating on the third floor” and continues in one unbroken stream-of-conscious ‘sentence’, incorporating much of the self-conscious matter that perforates his long novels alongside attempts to place himself inside the head of little Federman, locked in a closet by his mother to avoid being taken to the camps in 1942, an incident illumined in more detail in his last novel Shhh: A Story of a Childhood. This short splurge of words can be read as Federman’s sincere attempt to formalise that pivotal moment in the young man and writer’s life: his mother, by choosing to “save” him in this manner, set in motion a re-birth of sorts for Federman, and his extraordinary life, lived in loud colours, is the homage he made to his mother’s sacrifice, and to his sisters (to whom this work is dedicated). The task of attempting to find a formal expression for his life’s experiences has also provided Federman with scope for despair and difficulty, but has yielded pyrotechnical masterpieces like Double or Nothing and Take It or Leave It. The last word(s) from Ray:

I am back again in the actuality of my fragile predicament backtracked into false ambiguities smelling my hands by reflex out of the closet now to affirm the certainty of how it was annul the hypothesis of my excessiveness on which he postulates his babblings his unqualifiable design as I register the final absence of my mother crying softly in the night my father coughing his blood down the staircase they threw sand in their eyes struck their back kicked them to exterminate them his calculations yes explanations yes the whole story crossed out my whole family parenthetically xxxx into typographic symbols while I endure my survival from its implausible beginning to its unthinkable end yes false balls all balls ejaculating on his machine reducing my life to the verbal rehearsals of a little boy half naked trying to extricate himself as he goes on formulating yet another paradox

Editions:

Paperback, Coda Press, 1979.

Paperback, Station Hill Press, 1985.

Paperback, Stacherone Books, 2002.

Bibliography (English works):

Novels:

Double or Nothing, Swallow Press, 1971.

Take It or Leave It, Fiction Collective, 1976.

The Voice in the Closet, Coda Press, 1979.

The Twofold Vibration, Indiana University Press / Harvester Press, 1982.

Smiles on Washington Square, Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1985.

To Whom It May Concern, FC2, 1990.

Aunt Rachel’s Fur, FC2, 2001.

My Body in Nine Parts, Stacherone Books, 2005.

Return to Manure, FC2, 2006.

Shhh: The Story of a Childhood, Stacherone Books, 2010.

Short Fiction:

More Loose Shoes and Smelly Socks, Six Gallery Press, 2005.

The Twilight of the Bums (with George Chambers), Stacherone Books, 2008.

The Carcasses (A Fable), BlazeVox, 2009.