Raymond Federman and Samuel Beckett: Voices in the Closet

This book is about Raymond Federman and his incredible textual obsession with Samuel Beckett. Federman was a scholar of Beckett, postmodern theorist, a self-translator and avant-garde novelist. Born in Paris in 1928, all of his immediate family perished in the Holocaust. Federman escaped thanks to his mother, who hid him in a closet. After the war, he migrated to America and devoted his life to scholarship and creative writing. In both, he devoted his life to Beckett. Federman’s creative and theoretical writings contaminate and pervert each other just as, in his novels, French contaminates English and fiction perverts reality. His work is centered on the details of his survival, enacting a perpetual return to the closet, as previous studies have demonstrated. By examining Beckettian (and by extension Joycean) intertextuality in the novels of Raymond Federman, this study traces the contours of a second closet.