Raymond Federman

Loose shoes : concerning the novel everyone wants to write

découvrez le site de l'écrivain américain, traducteur (voir ses hommages à Beckett), et en particulier cet extrait lié à son enseignement du creative writing

la page de titre de son roman en ligne Loose shoes, roman bilingue

Everybody is writing a novel these days nobody knows why but still everybody is writing a novel anyway there are those who write for money and those who write for glory and those who write for peanuts and those who write for fun and those who write for business and those who write for nothing and those who write for themselves and those who don't give a shit if anybody ever reads the novel they are writing and those who don't write at all and those who are thinking of writing a novel but never write it and those who once upon a time thought of writing a novel but now don't give a damn if they ever write it and those who think that someday they will write a novel and those who have given up writing the novel they were writing and those who are starting all over again the novel they gave up writing long ago and there are those who write poetry instead of writing a novel or who write essays cookbooks telephone books grammars tickets checks dirty jokes graffiti in shit-houses and naturally there are those who never think of writing a novel and those who gave up disgusted even before starting and those who stopped in the middle of writing a novel and those who will never try to write a novel and yet continue to pretend that they will and those who have already written one or two or three or four or five or six or even seven unpublished novels and now write poems or essays or telephone books or cookbooks or reviews of novels and those who decided to quit everything job wife kids cars security to write a novel and naturally those who have never thought they were capable of writing a novel and yet attempted nonetheless to write one and those who knew they could not write a novel but wrote the piece of shit anyway and those who did not try to write a novel because they knew they could not write a novel and those who gave up trying to write a novel out of despair and those who never gave up and continued to write a fucking novel which they could not finish and those who went at it again after they stopped and those who failed miserably and those who failed at first but succeeded later then failed again and those who burned the novel they had written and others who went on writing another novel after they burned the first novel they had written and others who wrote novels and kept them in a garbage can and even though they were no good kept taking them out of the garbage can to send them to publishers who threw them into other garbage cans and others who threw themselves into the garbage can with the novel they had written and others who after years of sweating and bitching and waiting and writing decided to give up everything and committed suicide and others who discovered that the novel they had written was not bad after all and sent it to a publisher who made a best-seller out of it and then it was adapted into a bad movie and the poor writers were criticized for allowing their work to be exploited and others who keep taking out the novel they threw into the garbage can in order to throw it back into the garbage can and others who convinced themselves that they had written a masterpiece and went around trying to convince others of this fact and others who never thought anything and others who thought they thought they had written a good novel but nobody else thought so and others who were not really sure if they had written a good novel and therefore could not bring themselves to show it to others for an opinion and others who could not admit to themselves that they had written a piece of shit and others who gave up thinking that the novel they had written was good and so on until finally one day [I believe it was July 16, 1999] the novel was declared dead and so everybody gave up writing novels ...

... but

CONCERNING THE POEM EVERYONE HAS WRITTEN everybody has written a poem at one time or another but nobody knows why still everybody has written a least one poem during one's lifetime and so on and so on blah blah blah blah blah blah ...

[not to be continued]