16 - The Book, Inside and Out

Summary

Le livre fut mon choix; plus tard, il devint mon droit.

Edmond Jabes, Aely

From first to last, Edmond Jabes's work is animated by a sustained meditation on the idea of the book. That current in his writing flows in full spate, both powerfully and insistently, and any reasonably attentive reading of Jabes must navigate it, in some way or another. Time and again, Edmond Jabes puts the notion of the book on stage in his work, and causes it to perform for our benefit; yet that performance is typically fraught with ambiguity, and it is always a challenge to interpretation. I would like to examine that phenomenon briefly here, in a manner more interrogative than declarative, in order to suggest some of the principal vectors sketched by Jabes's reflection. In doing so, I shall stay as close as I can to his texts, following the curious paths that they trace.

Most obviously and immediately, Jabes calls our attention to the book in the very titles of his books: Le Livre des questions (1963), Le Livre de Yukel (1964), Le Retour au livre (1965), • (El, ou le dernier livre) (1973), Le Livre des ressemblances (1976), Le Petit Livre de la subversion hors de soupçon (1982), Le Livre du dialogue (1984), Le Livre du partage (1987), Un étranger avec, sous le bras, un livre de petit format (1989), Le Livre de l’hospitalité (1991). On the face of it, his strategy invites a simple reading: this is the book devoted to X, that is the book devoted to Y, this is the book devoted to Z, and so forth. Yet he intimates that such attempts are likely to founder—not upon X, Y, or Z, but rather upon the idea of the book itself. ‘Le livre échappe a toute étiquette,’ he warns us in Yaël. ‘Il n’appartient a aucun clan. Il n’est l’apanage d’aucune classe. Il n’est jamais d’un sillage.’ Thus, the conventional taxonomies upon which we rely will not avail us here; and nor will the principle of literary affiliation. Jabes is even more radical in Aely:

j’ai revé d’une oeuvre qui n’entrerait dans aucune catégorie, qui n’appartiendrait a aucun genre, mais qui les contiendrait tous, une oeuvre que l’on aurait du mal a définir, mais qui se définirait précisément par cette absence de définition; une oeuvre qui ne répondrait a aucun nom, mais qui les aurait endossés tous.