The Sin of the Book: Edmond Jabès by Eric Gould (review)

Book Reviews285 once we recognize their pastoral mode, we gain greater insight into the work. Various writers' abilities to use pastoral allusively and modally have preserved the genre and allowed it to be used in new forms for analyzing experience. From the modal form of pastoral, Etin moves to the pastoral inset, that is, the existence of pastoral within a non-pastoral universe, or as an inset within a larger frame of reference. There are, according to Etin, two types of insets: one explicit, where pastoral as a setting is set within a non-pastoral context, such as in Wagner's opera Tannhaüser; and the other implicit, with a more vague, suggestive employment ofpastoral in a non-pastoral world, such as found in Eduard Mörike's WaideIdylle . Etin's purpose is not to insist on clear-cut distinctions between the two types, nor is it to champion his own categories as the only ones appropriate for analyzing pastoral. In short, he is not dazzled by vocabulary, but instead uses it undogmatically to illuminate meaning. For example, in analyzing Calidore's encounter with the shepherds in The Faerie Queene (VI, ix and x) as a pastoral inset, Etin understands that episode as an interruptive counterforce to the main movement ofthe book. Although Calidore finds virtue in the pastoral world, his sojourn there does not directly cause virtue. Ironically, it is only by failing that the pastoral world will improve Calidore. Etin opens his discussion of pastoral irony by comparing Vergil, Sidney, and Spenser, with the purpose of providing a sensitive reading of Vergil's pastoral mode. Acknowledging that every pastoral text is not ironic, Etin examines some of the various ironies that do appear in the pastoral. Again, Etin is sensitive to individual authors and their conventions as well as their reliance on the tradition. The same strategy is applied in subsequent chapters on death in Arcady, the concepts of place and time in the pastoral, and the depiction of society and ethics in pastoral. What finally emerges in this book is not another study of pastoral in a traditional sense, but instead a series of sensitive, often acute, readings, interpretations, and observations of how individual authors from the ancients to the moderns employ pastoral modes. Individual observations and interpretations may not be acceptable to all readers, but overall, Etin's study forces the reader to re-examine the pastoral mode and its many manifestations in both pastoral and non-pastoral works. In this sense, Etin's study provides excellent illumination of those "shady borders" around and within pastoral. EUGENE R. CUNNAR New Mexico State University ERIC GOULD, ed. The Sin of the Book: Edmond Jabès. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985. 252 p. The name of Edmond Jabès is probably unfamiliar to much of the English and American audience, and even serious French-speaking readers have their uncertainties about this Egyptian-born Jewish exile who has chosen France and the French language. Eric Gould's attractively presented and excellent work, with its provocative title taken from the massive and major Book of Questions by Jabès, represents the first full-length study ofa difficult, elusive, and fascinating author, an author who cannot be treated lightly, since critics like Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida, and Jean Starobinski have testified to his importance in the "espace littéraire" of today's France. 286Rocky Mountain Review Exile, silence, solitude, the absence of God in a God-haunted world, the void to be filled, the book to be written, and maybe foremost the fact of being Jewish and being Jewish after the Holocaust, these are the themes of Jabès. His only landscape is the desert, and as he said in a recent article for Le Nouvel Observateur, he has little taste for pictures. There are no descriptions, any more than there is any recognizable narrative in The Book of Questions (seven volumes), or any of his other, untranslated works. For all the printed words, his voice rather dwells in a realm of sound, it evokes almost irresistibly the cry, the prayer to be said aloud, the poem to be read aloud, and his lengthy prose is as rich and musical...