Récit: les cinq états du manuscrit (review)

Edmond Jabès's Récit, consisting of eighty numbered sections and a four-part 'Lettre à M. C.', in all twenty pages of text, was first published by Fata Morgana in 1982, with illustrations by Jean Degottex. Like a number of Jabès's 'marginal' works, Récit has never attracted the same critical attention as his major cycles of Livres, yet Jabès himself often spoke of his particular attachment to it. As with many of his drafts, Jabès scrupulously kept the manuscripts and typescripts of Récit, in this case later offering them to his friend Marcel Cohen. Between 2001 and 2003, these 'five states of the manuscript' were the subject of a workshop of textual genesis at the Institut des Textes et Manuscrits Modernes, at the CNRS. The present publication is the fruit of that collaborative project. A beautifully presented diptych following the inverse order of creation – imposed by Jabès himself – the right-hand book (II) contains reproductions of the three manuscripts and two typescripts, while the left-hand book (I) has the diplomatic transcriptions followed by three short essays by Cohen, Crasson and Fenoglio. The working assumption of the editors is that textual genetics is based on the hypothesis that 'toute œuvre s'inscrit dans le temps. Sa pratique consiste à conduire parallèlement deux séries d'observations, celle liée au dépliement des différentes strates d'écriture et celle liée à la découverte desétapes chronologiques d'écriture' (I, vii). So it is not a question of textual interpretation (of the finished product) but of close analysis of the minutest changes from one manuscript to the next of words and phrases, right down to the typographical elements of ellipses, parentheses, italics, spacing, exclamation, question and quotation marks. Jabès claimed to have written Récit during one night of insomnia, but if the original manuscript shows the essential idea to be present from the inception ('Il et son féminin Ile'), with the beginning and end undergoing little substantial change, comparison of the subsequent manuscripts and hand-corrected typescripts reveals a meticulously attentive author to the subtleties and sounds of his words. So, if the general direction of Récit appears strident and confident from the first draft, the working-out of the text's linguistic drama required considerable reflection and hesitation on Jabès's part. As for the readings here, Cohen foregoes the genetic approach and places the generic status of Jabès's text in the context of Blanchot's La Folie du jour and the problematization of the possibility and impossibility of recounting what is beyond language. Crasson, on the other hand, offers a fascinating if difficult deconstruction of the mobilization of space, suspension points, double parentheses, fragments, the whole 'scriptography' of the evolution of Jabès's manuscripts, relating the distribution of textual breathing to the author's own asthmatic respiration. Fenoglio likewise moves from one manuscript to the other in her well-executed demonstration of the de-muted 'e', the language-word 'île' and the word-fiction 'Ile', arguing that Récit posits from its incipit the metonymy and sublimated eroticism of the masculine-feminine relationship (Il/Il-e), and concluding that the 'heroes' of the text are purely linguistic: 'La seule fiction réelle a lieu dans l'imaginaire de la langue. Le Verbe est souverain' (I, xxxvi). While this admirable publication will undoubtedly appeal principally to Jabès specialists, it should also be profitably consulted by all readers interested in the now established field of genetic criticism and the dramas of the process of literary creation.