Raymond Federman
The Voice in the Closet/La Voix dans le cabinet de débarras
Buffalo: Starcherone, 2001. Pp. 76. $15.00

Reviewed by Piet Defraeye

Raymond Federman calls his novels "pre-texts," because, in their telling of a story, they always necessarily remain unfinished. They postpone the story they want to tell, often elide it, and, invariably, they continue being made, composed and recomposed in the act of reading. To date, he has published ten novels, in English and in French, of which Double or Nothing (1971) and Take It or Leave It (1976) are the best known, and are often critiqued as examples of postmodern texts. His 1979 The Voice in the Closet is a short coda that has now been republished in a bilingual edition. The original publication was a serendipitous result of the refusal of Indiana University Press to have it included as part of his novel The Twofold Vibration (1982). In Federman's own words, they didn't want "to print twenty unreadable pages in the middle of the book." Meanwhile, the book has been adapted into a radio play, has been produced on the stage, and has inspired a modern ballet choreography. It has since been published as a CD recording.

Imminently readable, though cryptic in its semiotics, the text remains an extraordinary inscription of a dreadful event in the early days of the Holocaust, the July 1942 mass roundup or "Raffle du Vel' d'Hiver." The French version of the story with its twenty-two pages confirms the old idea that language is like a glove, in which the French glove always yields plenty of space, whereas the English glove is a tighter fit; here too, the same text gets told in English in twenty pages. The book has no pagination, and is, in fact, a lengthy apposition of words, without punctuation or capitalization, and numerous neologisms and typographic signage. Instead of a page number, an evolving graphic on each page, with a center that remains open, represents the reader's progress in the labyrinthine structure of the narrative. The story is that of a child who is hidden by his mother in a closet from which, with anguish, but also innocent excitement, he witnesses the arrest of his parents and sisters by the Nazis. He will never see them again. The book is dedicated to their memory.

In the current outflow of Holocaust commemoration in literature, film, and repository, Federman's text stands out. In "The Necessity and Impossibility of being a Jewish Writer," he writes: "As we continue to live the Post-Hitlerian era, it is essential to deal with the Holocaust in an effort to come to terms ... with its incomprehensibility." The problem, then, becomes not so much the anti-Semitism and extermination policy of a regime, but "the erasure ... of that extermination as an event." It is a problem that has emerged in countless films and novels about the Holocaust. Most recently, for instance, Roman Polanski's The Pianist (2002), with its emphatic focus on the story of Holocaust survivor Wladyslaw Spilman, while tremendously moving, has an eliding impact on its own documentary potential of a historical event and its socio-political context.

Gadamer's notion of art as an experience that uniquely blends alienation and authenticity is useful here: "The cognisance of art ... is always a secondary cognisance. It is secondary towards the immediate claim to truth which emanates from the work." In The Voice of the Closet, Federman tries to come to terms with the fact that a historical event, especially one of the enormity of the Holocaust, defies representation. It is, therefore, a text sous rature, in which what is told is the silent witnessing of an unspeakable event. The absence of words to express that event is the most crucial exposure of the narrative. Or, in other words, The Voice in the Closet becomes "the metonymical extension" (Opperman) of a young boy's survival experience in that dreadful cupboard in 1942 into the linguistic event on the page now, a closet of the mind, in which the reader is caught witnessing, "now again at last," a typographical event. The story is, as it were, confronted "from the reverse of farness" with its unrepresentability in the act of writing, and subsequently un-read in the act of reading.

This is the kind of writing that, in Walter Davis's words, "has the power to lead us beyond the narrow range of our self-serving beliefs and our self-protective emotions." Here are "doodling words" "wordshit" that "provides single light" in a terrifying closet, while at the same time circumventing the "threat of becoming just another paradox."