Back

The Writer in the Closet, or: Three Sketches of a Postmodern Concept of Identity

Michael Oppermann



Thus to cling to a notion of the meaning-making, coherent, unified individual-
both generally and at the center of an autobiography – seems a travesty. The
travesty is especially evident in the midst of a postmodern world – a world
characterized by fragmentations, by multiple and contradictory narratives, by
global struggles of the oppressed, and by a collapse of modern epistomolo –
gies and political systems (Bergland 162).


Coming as a conclusion of a study on „Postmodernism and the Autobiographical Subject,” the quotation implies a major logical flaw which, unfortunately, is very typical of many contributions to the ongoing debate on postmodernism. Throughout her study Bergland successfully demonstrates that postmodernism defies so-called binary oppositions; although no direct reference is being made, the linkage with the entire Derridean and post-Derridean discourse is obvious. In describing postmodernism, however, the critic then reverts to a set of oppositions and thus to the so-called logocentric tradition which postmodernism itself is supposed to subvert. In this manner, the „humanist/essentialized self” which is „powerfully linked to the American traditions of individualism,” (161) gets opposed to a notion of „multiple and contradictory subjectivities as the effect of multiple discourses at a particular historical moment” (161). Accordingly, a vision of a „unified” text based on authorial sovereignty is confronted with an apparently postmodern concept of multiple and contradictory narratives. In this manner Bergland gets doubly entrapped in the „Prison House of Criticism”. First of all, a supposedly challenging and unconventional subject matter becomes subject to an established discourse of binary oppositions that always produces nice and catchy labels for any kind of phenomenon. Secondly and even more important, this conventional type of critical approach creates the illusion of a „Postmodern Movement” which, as will be argued in the concluding section of this study, is an absolutely obsolete notion.
This study will try to subvert and shift the critical focus of the debate on postmodernism. Rather than highlighting certain features of the postmodern and thus continuing a line of criticism launched explicitly in the works of Linda Hutcheon [1] and many others, postmodernism will be presented as a kind of hermeneutic activity. Extending an argument put forward earlier (Oppermann 1997), the study will focus on the act of creating; it will try to reestablish the tie between an artist and his work without reverting to a traditional type of autobiographical criticism. For this reason, three examples (two literary and one from the world of contemporary photography) have been selected which, at first glance, seem to have very little in common. It will be argued, though, that all three of them are based on the same hermeneutic premises concerning the relationship between the self and ´The Other´; for this reason, they will be labelled as essentially postmodern.


1. Christa Wolf: Nachdenken über Christa T.

Christa Wolf´s novel was published in 1968. Departing from a tradition of social realism that was still continued in Der Geteilte Himmel (1961), Christa T. is based on a concept of authorial subjectivity which caused immediate disturbance among party circles of the former GDR. Indeed, the seven years between the two novels mark a time of radical departure for Christa Wolf, a shift towards an essayistic, almost meditative style that was first explored in her story „Juninachmittag" (1965). [2] Subsequent novels such as Kindheitsmuster (Childhood Patterns) , Kein Ort. Nirgends (No Place on Earth) and Kassandra led to Christa Wolf´s canonization as a representative of the „postmodern”, especially across the Atlantic. Strangely enough, though, the critical debate on Christa T. has been largely confined to Germany; as it will be argued here, the novel is based on the same hermeneutic premises as the aforementioned later works.
Two temporal layers are obvious; the first one is constituted by Christa T.´s life ( which spans from 1929 to 1963), the second one by the moment of writing ( the years between Christa T.´s death and the production of the novel in 1963 and between 1965/67). For Hitzinger, the novel´s third temporal layer is constituted in the act of reading (42), a notion that seems to be justified because the narrator regards Christa T. as a kind of ´future personality´ whose strive and quest for authenticity presents an alternative role model. Although having become a victim of leukaemia, the narrator retains a deliberate ambiguity about her death, implying that Christa T. has also died of certain social experiences. Various episodes reveal a prevailing sense of self-denial as a characteristic behavioral pattern in the former GDR. Christa T.´s suicide letter, written in a first moment of fatigue, coincides with the events of the 17 th of June 1953; her growing sense of weariness increases after the (crushed ) revolt in Hungary in 1956 which is referred to as ´the failing of what they called utopia´, „das Scheitern dessen, was sie Utopie nannten” (132). In contrast to a dominant mode of conformism, Christa T. asks the novel´s central question: ”Denk mal nach. Lebst du eigentlich heute, jetzt, in diesem Augenblick? Ganz und gar?”(101) [3] For the narrator Christa T. has retained a vision of herself that was never congruent with her existence: ”Sie, Christa T., hat eine Vision von sich selbst gehabt” (117), a statement which implies a constant change of roles and, for a long time in her life, the repudiation of a number of socially accepted values. She loved movement more than a specific goal – „die Bewegung mehr lieben als das Ziel”(46) – and always retained a sense of curiosity for new experiences. Until her marriage, she would disappear in regular intervals:
Sie hat diesen Vorgang-wegzugehen- später noch öfter wiederholt, dahinter verbirgt
sich ein Muster, schon ablesbar beim erstenmal: hinter sich lassen, was man zu gut
kennt, was keine Herausforderung mehr darstellt. Neugierig bleiben auf die anderen
Erfahrungen (46). [4]
Thus, she turns into a counter-example of the so-called „Tatsachenmenschen” or „Hopp-Hopp-Menschen”(55): „Der Kern der Gesundheit ist Anpassung,” (112) maintains one of Christa T.´s former pupils. The novel can be summarized by the opposite notion: ´Der Kern der Gesundheit ist Nicht-Anpassung´ - the basis of self-fulfillent is non-conformism.
Much has been written about the relationship between the novel´s narrator, Christa T. and Christa Wolf herself. The novel reconstructs Christa T.´s life on the basis of diaries, sketches, observations, stories, lists of titels and letters (39); Christa Wolf has confirmed that these documents are as „real” as Christa T. herself: ”Es gab sie, diese Christa T.,es gab ihr Leben, dessen Fakten und einzelne Stationen ich kannte oder nach ihrem Tod kennenlernte...” (Hitzinger 45) , a fact which is also confirmed in the autobiographical Kindheitsmuster where Christa T. is referred to again. [5] The shift from the autobiographical W. to the fictional T. emphasizes resemblance and differance alike . Both of them have studied in Leipzig, and they both strive for self-fulfillment, ”dem Versuch, man selbst zu sein”(9). Both of them use writing as a specific way of coping with life, a fact which is emphasized by the ithalics presenting the central line in Christa T.´s diaries: ”Daß ich nur schreibend über die Dinge komme!” (39), and they also share a certain distrust in language: ”Wir gebrauchten und mieden die gleichen Wörter” (32). [6] This process of reconstructing the life of a person through a series of documents that compliment and shape the narrator´s memory is presented as „Nachdenken” or „nach-denken”; the hyphenating emphasizes the activity implied in the word by going back to its literal meaning. „Nach-denken”, as Hitzinger points out (43), means an activity of thinking o f Christa T.; of thinking a b o u t her in an attempt to understand her; and of following her in her „endless way to herself”, as the novel´s central road metaphor (a Johannes R.Becher quote) maintains: ”Dieser lange, nicht enden wollende Weg zu sich selbst.” Accordingly, the process of reflecting becomes as important as its partial results so that writing turns into an ongoing process of self-exploration. As it is stated by Christa T as well: ”Ich grab mich aus” (149 ). Thus, the novel´s structure is both linear and non-linear; it retains a biographical account of Chrisrta T.´s life and, simultaneously, follows a mode of association: ”In dem Strom meiner Gedanken schwimmen wie Inselchen die konkreten Episoden- das ist die Struktur der Erzählung” (Wolf 1987, 31). [7] The result is a highly reflexive style which constantly changes its narrative tense and which blurs distinctions between the first, second and third person until, at the time of Christa T.´s death, the different narrative voices unite in the „wir”form: ”Müssen wir also vom Sterben sprechen” (174).
In this manner, writing takes on the form of an ongoing dialogue which aims at a new
understanding of the self. Thus, a discursive mode blurs any borderline between discours and histoire; the Metafictional Paradox, [8] in other words, is not an artistic feature but the necessary outcome of the concept of „nachdenken” as part of a hermeneutical project. It is the narrator´s way of coping with the loss of a friend who, as she becomes more and more aware in the process of reflecting upon her , is inseparably connected to herself. As Christa Wolf maintains in her highly important „Selbstinterview”:”Ein Mensch, der mir nahe war, starb, zu früh. Ich wehre mich gegen diesen Tod. Ich suche nach einem Mittel, mich wirksam wehren zu können. Ich schreibe, suchend” ( 1987, 31) .[9] Whereas Christa T.´s search was ended by her untimely death -„zu früh gestorben” (139) - the quest of the narrator continues. Reflecting is presented as a specific hermeneutic quest which aims at a new understanding of the self: ”Mein Hauptantrieb für Schreiben ist Selbsterforschung” (Wolf 1987, 32). [10] . Reality is always mediated through language; it is an objective fact as well as a process : ”Weil nicht Wirklichkeit wird, was man nicht vorher gedacht hat” (1968, 172). [11] Therefore, writing contains a moment of openness and possibility. In a radical departure from the doctrine of social realism, the basis of change in society is connected with the quest for authenticity; a moment of „utopia” is no longer regarded as inherent in certain social structures but in a specific mode of „being” which combines a vision of life as a quest with an element of „dialogic imagination”. As Gutjahr correctly maintains: „Gedächtnisrekonstruktion und Selbstkonstitution vollzieht sich in der Prosa Wolfs als dialogischer Prozeß” (1985, 55). [12] This process leads to an encounter with the ´Other´ that takes on the form of self: „Später merkte ich, daß das Objekt meiner Erzählung gar nicht so eindeutig sie, Christa T., war oder blieb. Ich stand auf einmal mir selbst gegenüber” (1987, 32). [13] Thus, Wolf´s notion of writing as a kind of movement against the „apparently natural stream of forgetting” (my translation) [14] transforms the past into a shifting ground between the present and the future; into a ground that asks for its constant elaboration.
The dialogic mode of Christa T. is further explored in Wolf´s Kindheitserinnerungen in which the author reconstructs her life in the form of a fictional autobiography; discovering what she labels as „Das Geheimnis der Dritten Person”, she uses an alter ego called Nelly that she addresses from the stance of the present. In this manner, her life is presented as a kind of ongoing conversation that is always aware of the hermeneutic difference separating the established writer Christa Wolf from her childhood self. Kein Ort. Nirgends carries the mode of dialogic imagination even further. Here the voices of German poets Kleist and Günderode converge in the consciousness of the writer to engage in a kind of multi-layered discourse that shatters and subverts all notions of a stable identity: „Ich bin nicht ich. Du bist nicht du. Wer ist wir?” (1981, 109) [15] As a result, the novel´s central question of „Wer spricht?” (9) can either refer to Kleist and Günderode or to the 20 th century narrator (Greiner 1989, 33).[16]


Raymond Federman: The Voice in the Closet[17]

„My life began in a closet,” claims Raymond Federman in a radio portrait recorded in 1993 by Bayerischer Rundfunk in Munich. Federman „was born on July 16 th, 1942” (Hornung and Ruhe 1992, 381); he was born on the day his mother hid him in a closet before his family was taken away to the concentration camps. There seems to be very little Federman remembers from the time before that day: „The first fourtean years of my life are like a blur” (1989, 65), but from the day he emerged out of that closet, he can „tell you every detail day by day” (BR 1993).
In The Twofold Vibration (1982) the protagonist, an old man, utters exactly the same statement: ”My life began in a closet” (49). For Federman his autobiography and its fictional reconstructions alike comprise his biography: ”My novels explain my life. The story of my life becomes my life. I kind of reverse the autobiographical mechanism” (BR 1993). Here Federman paraphrases another line from The Twofold Vibration: „ My life is the story...the story is my life, me there, me here” (150). Federman regards fiction and autobiography as „interchangeable” (1993, 89) because they are both subject to the same creative imagination: ”Yes, everything I write is autobiographical because I have either experienced it or I have imagined that it happened to me. This is the same thing” ( McCaffery 1992, 435). In short, as it is explained in Take it or Leave it (1976): ”A biography is something one invents afterwards”. As a result, Federman found himself plagiarizing his novels when he finally agreed to write his autobiography (BR 1993). For that reason, he called it A Version of my Life (1989), pointing to the fact that it is only o n e version among many others. Fashioning his autobiography after the titles of his novels, Federman points out that „the relationship between life and fiction is extremely close” ( Hornung and Ruhe 1992, 377) so that we can distinguish between more and less elaborate „accounts” ( BR 1993).
The closet experience is the archetypal example of this attempt to find a „more elaborate version” in keeping with the autobiographical nucleus. It is explored and expressed, inscribed and disseminated throughout all his fictions. While the Holocaust itself has remained unrepresentable for him – „I can´t write about it. I wasn´t there” (BR 1993) - and the death of his parents and sisters only representable in the typographical symbols X-X-X-X, as a Derridean „sous rature” (Hornung 1985, 81), Federman´s closet experience emerges as a constitutive act of writing always oriented towards the future of its own elaboration. It develops a discursive nature. In this manner, writing is essentially linked to the question: ”Why me? Why did I survive? Why did my mother push me into this closet? She could have pushed my sister. So I have been trying for many years to understand my mother´s gesture” (BR 1993). Writing, then, equals an unceasing process of coming to terms with this question. It is Federman´s own way of coping with the fact of his survival in terms of language: ”I had to carry the burden for the past forty-five years and it is the only way I can live with it. Otherwise I would be driving myself crazy, probably committing suicide like Primo Levy or Jean Amery” ( Hornung and Ruhe 1992, 379).
It was not until 1958 that Federman could formulate his first „poetic” approach to the closet experience when he wrote his poem „Escape” which became a kind of pre-text [18] to many of his novels, especially to The Voice in the Closet which manages to turn an autobiographical experience into a highly complex and disruptive monologue for multiple voices. It fills the emptiness and darkness of the original closet with the voice of the boy („I”) and the voice of the man the boy speaks of („he”). It engages the boy in a dialogue with the fictionalized versions of the writer („federman”, „feather-man”, „homme de plume” and „hombre della pluma”) that creates the textual voices Moinous („me” and „us”) which constantly rebounds on the other voices in the text (e.g. the voices of the parents minutes before their deportation to Auschwitz). In this manner, writing resembles a constant process of „undoubling or redoubling of personalities,” as it is acknowledged in a „critifictional” [19] note in The Twofold Vibration . Writing, then, resembles a narrative strategy of „multiplying voices within voices” (1979, 6) which anticipates the condition of the writer in To Whom It May Concern (1990): ”That´s how it feels right now inside my skull. Voices within voices entangled in their own fleeting garrulousness” (77). In the last part of The Voice in the Closet , the writer tries to abandon himself, „federman out then,” so that the fictional discourse crumbles into a kind of pastiche of automatic writing. The last lines, however, reinstall authorial subjectivity: ”federman here now again at last” (20), thus pointing to the writer (or his fictionalized alter ego) who has dispersed himself in his text. Dispersal in Federman´s texts is always followed by moments of tentative linguistic unification, as two graphic plays from Double or Nothing underline:

me
myself
I (184) T O
G E
T H
E R (45).

The spacing of the word „together” ironically plays with the notion that spacing, according to Derrida, resembles a movement of dis-placing, dis-locating or setting aside: „Therefore, spacing marks what is set aside from itself, what interrupts every self-identity, every punctual assemblage of the self, every self-homogeneity, self-interiority” (1972, 107). The process of a spatial displacement of words on the page points in fact to Federman´s own notion of being a „Displaced Person,” a nomad or wanderer who is tentatively trying to find a home in language (1984).
The very process of projecting the writer´s self into multiple selves is a specific hermeneutic exploration in language which tries to understand the authentic self in its multiplicity. The original closet experience presents „an enormous gap” in Federman´s memory „a hole,” (1971, 3); as Federman himself explained in an interview: ”Ich litt nicht am Schmerz, ich litt am Nicht-Begreifen” (Milich 1991, 3). [20] Just as the old man in The Twofold Vibration who maintains that he is „suffering toward the consciousness of suffering,” (9) by fictionalizing his life, Federman is tentatively trying to transform the closet experience into an autobiographical fragment. The multiple possibilities of voice, character and author help to position the self in the linguistic choices and verbal variations so that they seem to prevent a stable subject to be dominant in the text. The multiple narratorial subjectivity provides a kind of dialogue between the self and the „Other” which emerges through the dispersal of voices within voices simultaneously withdrawing and eminating from the writer´s own voice. This voice is, paradoxically, both forever inscribed and displaced in Federman´s fictions. It is displaced in the form of an ongoing and potentially infinite dialogue with multiple selves which tries to come to terms with the writer´s past; with a historical experience that can only be approached in the form of holes and gaps in the fictional discourse.
In The Voice in the Closet , the self-reflexive dispersal of the fictitious self and the mode of writing as „dialogic imagination” or a multiple dialogue „from the other side”(1), from the side of the boy, creates a dilemma which is fully acknowledged in another critifictional reference in The Twofold Vibration . Here the old man notes that fiction is „always a betrayal of the original experience, a flagrant falsification” (151). His words echo the Voice´s notion that „his (federman´s) fictions can no longer match the reality of my past” (1979, 11). Eventually the text points back to its own textuality: ”the boy full circle from his fingers into my voice back to him on the machine”(2) – on the keyboard of the typewriter, that is. The duplicitous story of telling is the first and last story the text is able to tell, making us aware that it exists „only in the counterfeit currency of language” (Caramello 1983, 135).
In fact, the concept of language that emerges from the novel is highly paradoxical. Influenced, on the one hand, by the language skepticism eminating both from a post-structuralist discourse and from a Beckettian notion of writing as an activity of linguistic reduction, [21] the novel reaffirms, on the other hand, the role of language as a mediator between the authorial self and experience. This paradox is most obvious in the novel´s typographical outlay. Federman had already experienced with the possibility of a „split text” in the French and English double column pages in Double or Nothing (206-07), a device which is extended in The Voice in the Closet into two parallel twenty-page texts that are bound back to back with the same cover. In order to compare the two texts, the reader must flip the book over and turn it upside down, an arrangement which guarantees the reader´s continuing awareness of the novel „ as physical object” (McHale 1987, 195). Each page of the novel consists of eighteen lines and sixty-eight characters that are arranged as twenty squares (rectangles in the French version) which literally imprison the voices on paper. In this manner, Federman creates verbal icons that make writer and reader alike re-experience the darkness of the original closet in the blackness of the concrete word and the quadrangular page format. In a similar way, the page numbers on the left recall the original closet by forming into box shapes that entrap all the voices in the text, including that of „federman”. By making a potentially unrepresentable experience concrete, Federman undermines his own authorial notions about language. The writer tentatively finds a home in textuality; „but it is a nomad´s home that he must continually make and unmake” (Caramello 1983, 142).


3. Cindy Sherman: Self Portraits

In a very lucid study on „Posing: Autobiography and the Subject of Photography” (1994), Paul Jay has commented upon a retrospective of Cindy Sherman´s self portraits that were gathered together at the Whitney Museum of Art in 1987. Falling into four different series, the first one seems to be inspired by movie stills and fashion shots; they depict Sherman posing in a repertoire of images from popular culture. Obviously, authenticity is over-layered by forms of social and cultural discipline. In the second series, Sherman poses as women who seem profoundly „disoriented” and „defeated” (Jay 194), while in the last one the self is „literally exploded in a series of images in which body parts are strewn like detritus across a microcosmic wasteland” (196). What is important here is that Jay has observed a narrative unfolding between the various images which presents identity as „submitted first to the process of objectification, then to dispersal, and finally to obliteration” (197). Identity turns into a kind of shifting ground that is always culturally layered through images and dominant modes of representation. By laying bare these conventions, Sherman´s photography asks the question of authenticity as dispersed between the object of photography (herself) and the individual self portrait. What Jay refers to as a „narrative” can also be labelled as an ongoing dialogue between the self and its various photographic objectivations. In this manner, Sherman´s quest into „the cultural conditions that fashion identity” (Jay 199) equals a hermeneutic activity which neither leads to the „Death of the Photographer” nor, to allude to another Barthesian notion, to his/her transference into a „specter” who experiences „a microversion of death” (Barth 1981, 13) by turning into an image or object. The postmodern paradox of Sherman´s photography lies in the fact that it simultaneously confirms and subverts an extreme suspicion of photography as a means of capturing the self. It does so by activating an element of „story” between the various shots that turn into fragments of an ongoing dialogue. „Authenticity” is not captured in the various portraits; it is dispersed in them and between them in the gaps of the narrative that is unfolding.

Sherman´s way of scattering traces of her identity reveals a sceptical and highly complex view of the role of images in contemporary society. This is partly due to the mode of „over-exposition” we have been subjected to, partly to a contradictory understanding of the „tool” of the photographer, the camera and its capability of „representing” the self. In a similar manner, both Christa Wolf and Raymond Federman display a certain suspicion of their „tool” (of language) and its representational function which, to a certain extent, is challenged and undermined in their writings. For Christa Wolf an experience of official „Sprachlenkung” in the former GDR might have been more decisive than a familiarity with the post-structuralist discourse (as in Federman´s case). What is important, though, is that all three of them have developed specific modes of expressing themselves that reinstall trust and confidence in language and image respectively. Wolf insists on „subjektive Authentizität” (subjective authenticity), a term which, first and foremost, designates a specific stance of the writing subject, a dedication to truth. Federman, by a metonymical and metaphorical transformation of the original closet into the room of the writer, becomes able to address his past at least tentatively in language. The result is a series of novels that, in their very essence, restore both the writer´s and the reader´s faith in the power of imagination. [22] Imagination also plays a central part in Sherman´s photography because her mode of superimposing the self portrait with a series of more or less iconic images from popular culture exposes the „I” in and to a series of roles which both hide and reveal particles of the photographer´s subjectivity .
Photographer and writer alike engage in a kind of „dialogic imagination”, to refer to Bakhtin´s famous notion (1981). They engage the self in a highly playful dialogue with „The Other”. The effect is a concept of subjectivity that is always mediated through an element of „story”: Self takes on the form of an „intrapersonal dialogue” in which the present „interprets the past to the future” (Madison 1990, 163 ). An element of „emplotment” becomes the common denominator of postmodern activity: As Ricour maintains, it is in „telling our own stories that we give ourselves an identity.” ( Kemp 1985, 214) In the very act of telling, identity turns into a shifting ground that asks for constant exploration. The aim of that activity lies in an expansion of the hermeneutical horizon in the way Gadamer defines it: ”The horizon is ,rather, something into which we move and that moves with us. Horizons change for a person who is moving” (1975, 304). The postmodern concept equals the establishing of the world as a kind of shifting hermeneutical ground into which the autobiographical self is positively constituted in the form of dialogue; therefore, writing and photographing define activities which are essentially infinite.
As a result, postmodernism cannot be defined sufficiently in terms of features. Although the multi-layering and fragmentation of subjectivity does indeed play a dominant part, as Bergland had maintained, postmodernism can be better described in terms of the word „project”. The underlying assumption is that the world and our understanding of ourselves are always mediated in terms of language and images; working w i t h i n these contexts, then, equals a hermeneutic act. It follows that postmodernism defines a specific relationship between the self and the ´Other´; it is, first and foremost, an activity.

WORKS CITED

Bakhtin, M.M (1981).The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist. Transl. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: Texas UP.
Barthes, Roland (1977). „The Death of the Author,”Falling into Theory: Conflicting Views on Reading Literature, ed. David H. Richter (1994). Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martin´s P, 222-26.
--- (1981) Camera Lucinda: Reflections on Photography, transl. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang.
Bayerischer Rundfunk (1990). Ein Interview mit Raymond Federman . Munich (available on tape only).
--- (1993). And What About Me? Ein Porträt des Autors Raymond Federman nach Selbstzeugnissen, Werkzitaten und Gesprächen, erstellt von Herbert Kapfer . Munich (available on tape only).
Bergland, Betty (1994). „Postmodernism and the Autobiographical Subject: Reconstructing the ´Other´,” Autobiography and Postmodernism , ed. Kathleen Ashley, Leigh Gilmore and Gerald Peters. Amherst: Massachusetts UP, 130-66.
Caramello, Charles (1983). Silverless Mirrors: Book, Self and Postmodern American Fiction . Florida: State UP.
Derrida, Jacques (1972). Positions, transl. Alan Bass. Chicago UP.
Federman, Raymond (1971). Double or Nothing: A Real Fictitious Discourse . Boulder and Normal: Fiction Collective Two, 1992.
---, ed. (1975) Surfiction: Fiction Now and Tomorrow . Chicago: Swallow P.
--- (1976). Take it or Leave it: An Exaggerated Second-Hand Tale Read Aloud Either Standing or Sitting . New York: Fiction Collective.
--- (1979). The Voice in the Closet/ La Voix dans le Cabinet de Debarras: A Bilingual Novel . Madison: Coda P.
--- (1982). The Twofold Vibration: An Extemporaneous Novel . Bloomington: Indiana Up.
--- (1984). „Displaced Person: The Jew/ The Wanderer/The Writer,” Denver Quaterly 19.1: 85-100.
--- (1989) „A Version of my Life: The Early Years,” Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series 8, ed. Mark Zadrozny. Detroit: Gale, 63-81.
--- (1993). Critifiction: Postmodern Essays. New York: State Up.
Gadamer, Hans-Georg (1975). Truth and Method , transl. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. New York: Crossroad, 1989.
Gidion, Heidi (1989). „Wer spricht? Beobachtungen zum Zitieren und zum Sprechen mit der eigenen Stimme an Christa Wolfs Günderode-und Kassandra-Projekt,” Christa Wolf: Ein Arbeitsbuch: Studies-Dokumente-Bibliographie , ed. Angelika Drescher. Frankfurt am Main: Luchterhand, 204-15.
Greiner, Bernhard (1989). „Mit der Erzählung geh ich in den Tod: Kontinuität und Wandel des Erzählens im Schaffen von Christa Wolf,” Christa Wolf: Ein Arbeitsbuch. Studies-Dokumente-Bibliographie, ed. Angelika Drescher. Frankfurt am Main: Luchterhand, 331-70.
Gutjahr, Ortrud (1985). „Erinnerte Zukunft. Gedächtnisrekonstruktion und Subjektkonstitution im Werk Christa Wolfs,” Erinnerte Zukunft: 11 Studien zum Werk Christa Wolfs , ed. Wolfram Mauser. Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 53-80.
Hitzinger, Sonja (1986). Christa Wolf. Stuttgart: Metzler.
Hornung, Alfred (1985). „The Autobiograpical Mode in Contemporary American Fiction,” Prose Studies 8.3.: 69-83.
Hornung, Alfred and Ernstpeter Ruhe (1992). Autobiographie & Avant-Garde. Tübingen: Narr.
Hutcheon, Linda (1990). A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction . New York and London: Routledge.
Jay, Paul (1994). „Autobiography and the Subject of Photography,” Autobiography and Postmodernism , ed. Kathleen Ashley, Gilmore Leigh and Gerald Peters. Amherst: Massachusetts UP, 191-211.
Kemp, Paul (1985). „History as Narrative and Practise: An Interview with Paul Ricoeur,” Philosophy Today 3: 69-83.
Madison,G.B. (1990). The Hermeneutics of Postmodernism: Figures and Themes . Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP.
McHale, Brian (1987). Postmodernist Fiction . New York and London: Routledge.
Milich, Klaus (1991). „Die Sprache ist ein Virus, das Leben eine Collage: Interview mit Raymond Federman,” Frankfurter Rundschau Literary Supplement Nov. 2: 3.
Oppermann, Michael and Serpil Oppermann (1997). „Raymond Federman´s Double or Nothing : A Prolegomena to a Postmodern Production Aesthetics,” Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 1: 43-55.
Schöpp, Joseph C. (1990). Ausbruch aus der Mimesis: Der Amerikanische Roman im Zeichen der Postmoderne . München: Fink.
Sherman, Cindy (1987). Cindy Sherman . New York: Whitney Museum of Modern Art.
Wolf, Christa (1968). Nachdenken über Christa T. Frankfurt am Main: Luchterhand, 1991.
---(1976). Kindheitsmuster. Berlin und Weimar: Aufbau.
---(1979). Kein Ort. Nirgends. Darmstadt und Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1981.
---(1984). Kassandra. Darmstadt und Neuwied: Luchterhand.
---(1987). Die Dimension des Autors: Essays und Aufsätze, Reden und Gespräche 1959-1985. Darmstadt und Neuwied: Luchterhand.



[1] Linda Hutcheon´s A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (New York and London: Routledge 1990) is still a prime example of a descriptive type of criticism that totally negates any tie between text and authorial self.
[2 ]„Juninachmittag” was first published in 1967 and is now available in Gesammelte Erzählungen (Frankfurt am Main: Luchterhand).
[3] „Think about it. Are you alive today, now, at this very moment? Really alive?”
[4] „She would continue a habit of disappearing fairly often later on – thus concealing a pattern that was obvious already the first time – leaving behind what you know too well and what does not present a challenge anymore. Retaining curiosity for new experiences.”
[5] The novel presents „Nelly” as the author´s alter ego; Christa T. appears for a short time during Nelly´s school days in the 1940s.
[6] „We used and avoided the same words.”
[7] „The concrete episodes float like islands in my stream of consciousness – that´s the structure of the story.”
[8] The term refers to Linda Hutcheon´s study Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox (New York and London: Methuen, 1980).
[9] „A human being who was close to me has died too early. I am resisting this death. I am searching for a way of resisting effectively. I write, searching.” Wolf´s „Selbstinterview” was originally published in 1968.
[10] „My prime motivation in writing is the exploration of the self.”
[11] „Reality is what has been conceived of as such.”
[12] „In Christa Wolf´s prose the reconstruction of memory and the constitution of the self take on the form of a dialogic process.”
[13] „Later I realized that Christa T. did not remain the object of my story . All of a sudden I was facing myself.”
[14] Christa Wolf´s essay „Lesen und Schreiben” (which was first published in 1972) contains the original quotation: „Sich-Erinnern ist gegen den Strom schwimmen, wie schreiben – gegen den scheinbar natürlichen Strom des Vergessens, anstrengende Bewegung.” (1987, 480)
[15] „I am not myself. You are not yourself. Who are we?”
[16]Apart from Greiner, Gidion offers the best study of the question of identity in the novel (1989).
[17] The Federman part presents a revised and abbreviated version of an article that was co-authored by Serpil Oppermann. „Raymond Federman´s Closet Experience: The Great Divide” was published in The Journal of American Culture: 15 th Anniversary Special Issue (Ankara: Hacettepe UP 1997, 20-35).
[18] The poem presents a pre-text because it contains a number of images that reoccur in The Voice in the Closet as well as in Federman´s other novels, e.g. „the twelfth step”, „the yellow feather” and especially the image of the bird.
[19] The term „critifiction” refers to a specific mode of writing that reflects its inherent aesthetic principles and its relationship with other texts in a self-conscious manner.
[20] „I did not suffer from pain, I suffered from a state of incomprehension.”
[21] Apparently, the twenty pages represent what is left of an original manuscript of 250 pages (BR 1990).
[22] In his 1993 interview for Bayerischer Rundfunk Federman recounts an experience which is highly important for his understanding of writing. He mentions the example of a Holocaust survivor whom he met in Israel in 1983. The man told Federman how he had been transported from one concentration camp to the next. The names were read, the prisoners were pushed into the train. The man´s name was missing, and before he could enquire about it, the train had already left, leaving the man alone on the platform, shouting: ”Hey, what about me? What about me?” He had used the same words as the old man in The Twofold Vibration . In a way he had echoed or rather pre-lived a fictional experience. Federman:”My story had become true!”(BR 1993)
Back