from Lavish Absence: Recalling and Rereading Edmond Jabès by Rosmarie Waldrop

Image description: book cover of “Lavish Absence: Recalling and Rereading Edmond Jabès” Cover includes this title and the author and the foreword author’s names: “Rosmarie Waldrop | Foreword by Richard Stamelman” written in blue within a translucent whitish square. Below this is a blue and white image of curling decorative foliage in the foreground above what appears to be a body of water reflecting sunlight or moonlight. This cover illustration is a detail from “Gilgamesh, the Eleventh Tablet” by June Paris and is a wood engraving made in 1989. Cover design by Dean Bornstein.

from Lavish Absence: Recalling and Rereading Edmond Jabès by Rosmarie Waldrop, foreword by Richard Stamelman (Wesleyan University Press, 2002)

No language from me right now, just this quotation:

Edmond Jabès does not write novels. Nor poems, for that matter. He claims to write in a new genre, “the book.” Not even books. He writes the book that all his books are fragments of. As it in turn is an infinitesimal part of The Book, the totality, the universe that never surrenders: ‘Jamais le livre, dans son actualité, ne se livre.’ At the same time, he tells Paul Auster, ‘The book carries all books within itself, and each fragment is the beginning of the book, the book that is created within the book and which at the same time is taken apart.’ Among the innumerable books that each book carries inside itself, some may come as a surprise:

“What book do you mean?”

“I mean the book within the book.”

“Is there another book hidden in what I read?”

“The book you are writing.”

The metaphor of the book does not seem to have one fixed meaning, but unfolds new aspects from one volume to the next. Most startling perhaps: ‘The invisible form of the book is the legible body of God.’ The two most frequent references for ‘the book’ are writing and Judaism, but as Stéphane Mosès points out, neither is a key to the other. (In spite of the identification of writer and Jew.) And neither writing nor Judaism is a fixed or ready-made reality for Jabès, but one rather to be constantly reinvented.

While the book is a kind of totality Jabès does not see it as a closed system and never sets it, as Derrida does, in opposition to writing and its disruptive, aphoristic energy. Rather the opposite of the book is the novel.

The novel, says Edmond Jabès, goes against the book because author and characters force themselves on the book and drown it in their voices. The ‘writer of the book’ must sacrifice his [sic] voice to the book’s own voice:

Writing a book means joining your voice to the virtual voice of the margins. It means listening to the letters swimming in the ink like twenty-six blind fish before they are born for our eyes, that is to say, before they die fixed in their last cry of love. Then I shall have said what I had to say and what every page already knew. This is why the aphorism is the deepest expression of the book: it lets the margins breathe, it bears inside it the breath of the book and expresses the universe at the same time.