Edmond Jabès by Mary Ann Caws, and: Questioning Edmond Jabès by Warren T. Motte, Jr (review)

Book Reviews Mary A nn Caws. E d m o n d Jabès. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1988. Pp. 49. 20 Dutch Florins. Warren T. M otte, Jr. Q u e s t io n in g E d m o n d J a b è s . Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990. Pp. 180. $23.95. Edmond Jabès died in Paris in January of 1991. Since his work has been on the margins of contemporary consciousness it is not likely that it will enter the purgatory that often greets a writer’s work upon his or her death. This is to say that Jabès’ work has not yet received the attention it deserves; he remains a writer to be discovered; and these critical studies can only be welcomed. Born in Egypt, Jabès wrote a fair number of poems before coming to France. These poems are collected together now as L e Seuil, le sable (though most appeared as Je bâtis ma demeure in 1959). These early poems are marked by surrealism and are products of a period of grace before Jabès was forced into exile for being a Jew. Becoming a French citizen Jabès found himself paradoxically a Jew wandering in the desert exile—after being exiled from the desert. His exile led to a series of works that cannot be classified, except as works that question the possibility of questioning, of writing, of finding the Book that would be the book of writing and questions: Le livre des questions (seven volumes), Le Livre des ressemblances (three volumes), Le livre des limites (four volumes), and, 1 think, a few others. All of these are dedicated to pursuing the paradoxes and anguish of our state in which, as he put it in 1989 in Un Etranger avec, sous le bras, un livre de petit form at, “ L’absence de Dieu est le vide qui soutient le monde” (p. 35). Caws’ study is a short monograph that attempts to create a kind of textual collage in which her comments, quotations of texts, and quotations from an interview offer an intro­ duction to this work. A beginner will probably have some trouble sorting it all out, but Caws does highlight some of the major themes of this quest for the book in which all these books, as Caws puts it, are only a preparation for what the book might be. Or the Book, but not the one that Mallarmé dreamed about, the Orphic explanation of the earth. According to Caws, Jabès’ book is the contrary of Mallarmé’s in that it would be a pro­ liferation of books that cancel each other. Caws’ reading of Jabès might be inscribed under the sign of Borges’ library in which the world is a library or a collection of infinitely expandable texts. In his study Motte uses a postmodern critical vocabulary, but this vocabulary—which doubles the postmodern concerns o f the Jabesian text—is in the service of an honest con­ cern with involving the reader in the quest that is involved in reading the works. Yet, as Motte says, the legibility of the writing is bound up in a tissue of paradox and contradiction (p. 12). And I would add that after Kafka no reader should be afraid of the paradoxes of the legibility of the illegible; and that after Auschwitz we must all learn to read the unsayable. Motte proceeds in a non-paradoxical manner to organize his study in terms of the hierarchy of levels that organize discourse, with chapters on the letter, the word, the story, the book, and finally on figures. These units of discourse analysis are also the dominant themes of Jabès’ work and draw upon the most traditional Jewish concerns with writing and the book. From this perspective we see that Jabès is perhaps the most traditional of postmodernists who confront the impossibility of finding a discourse that is adequate to an era of concentration camps. Motte begins with the letter, the written letter that is privileged by Jewish tradition, though he finds that in playing with the letter Jabès did not give up a surrealist belief...