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Chapter 3 Dramas of Signification: Edmond Jabes, S. Y. Agnon, Franz Kafka I turn now to a reading of S. Y. Agnon in relation to Edmond Jabes and Franz Kafka. Each of these three writers elicits the reader 's participation in structures of communication that are thrown into question, subjecting the reader to a dislocation in language. The texts we shall consider show processes of communication to be thwarted, questionable or incomplete, so that struggles to produce an utterance or to receive a message acquire dramatic intensity. Agnon, Jabes, and Kafka use language not simply to represent action in the world, but to enact or bring into play the sense of drama in language -the play of significations in a word or phrase, in the relation of the subject to language, in the release of voices in the text that destabilizes character and plot. While my focus is on images of texts and processes of signification, I shall also compare and contrast the uses each writer makes ofJewish themes, topics, and sources. Agnon is the pivot for my discussion that begins with JaMs, moves to Agnon 's "Pat shlemah" ("A Whole Loaf'), and concludes with Kafka's "Ein Hungerkiinstler" ("A Hunger Artist"). Edmond Jabes: Dialogue in the Text In a journey that has taken him through the seven books of Le Livre des questions (The Book ofQuestions) and the three books ofLe Livre des ressemblances (The Book of Resemblances), JaMs has arrived at a mode of literary production that is neither fiction nor autobiography, although it contains elements of each; nor is it narrative in that it does not sustain a single level of character, setting, and plot. JaMs invents rabbinic voices that engage in distorted imitations of talmudic dialogue, however remote from it they may be. These voices interact with what appear to be fragments of autobiog41 42 Between Exile and Return raphical personae to produce a text that is a fabric composed of black letters and white spaces, voices and silences. Characters appear more as transient fib'Urations in the language , "moments charnels" ("moments offlesh"), to use Jabes' phrase [1980a, 142] than as persons.1 The word does' not remain flesh for JaMs, however; the language of the text engages in an enticing alternation between the solidity of apparent configuration that brings the promise of meaning and dissolution into a play of signifiers . "The book reflects us, double mirror; reflects the mirror," observes JaMs [1980b, 42]; the statement mimics the form ofa palimpsest and suggests that the relationship of reader, text, and writer resembles a set ofmirrored reflections in which it becomes impossible to determine point of origin. The texts ofJaMs open self-consciously out toward the reader and push onto us representations or distorting reflections of our own engagement with the text: "Tu lis. Tu te lies a ce que se delie-a ce que delie dans ton lien" [1976a, 17]. {''You read [lis]. You tie [lie] yourself to that which unravels [delie]-to that which unravels [delie] in your relation [lien]." Play with sound, spelling , and word roots carries out the move of the writing to draw the reader into the space of the text. What we have in JaMs is a writer who releases the power of multiple voices in the text.2 Unconstrained by an overriding authorial voice, the voices in the text resist the reader's efforts to establish the monologic consistency of a single narrative line: ''You build walls, I the space between." -Reb Arim "My God, I am nothing but a word. I approach You and retreat." -Reb Zaradel "The word rocks me as a wet nurse the child of her milk." -Reb Baran [Jabes 1977, 61; 1964, 66] If there is drama here, it comes close to the very notion of utterance . This short piece of dialogue contains images that suggest a kind of birth and nurturing of the speaker in the word. The effect is to indicate a subjectivity that derives from, but is not sustained by participation in language. The origin of language in God is both posited and negated. Dialogue in JaMs is subjected to disruptions ofform on all levels. The "rabbis" who speak in the passage just quoted-Reb Arim, Reb Zaradel, Reb Baran-are forms of wordplay themselves. Each is des- Dramas of Signification 43 ignated with the title "Reb," indicating their role as teachers. But their names suggest varieties ofanagrammatic wordplay rather than indicating proper nouns attached to persons. The effect is to make...

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