Spurious

Picture by Janet Joy Wilson.

[With reference to Jabès's The Book of Questions] A host of imaginary rabbis. They have names ('names of listening'), but are not individualized, They are not characters. Not even the shadowy kind of character that Yukel is ('you are a shape moving in the fog.... You are the toneless utterance among anecdotal lies'). Most of them do not speak more than once, though a few are allowed to dispute for several pages. Even then they do not really become persons. What they say is not necessarily consistent. They do not represent a position. They are not authorities. Gabriel Bounoure calls them 'candidates for presence, but hesitant to quit their status of shadows'.

Voices, rather. A chorus. Of commentary and interpretation. Of exchange. a chorus that points to the phenomenon of voice as such or, rather, to the phenomenon of changing voice, changing pespective. In a rhythm of voice - absence of voice - voice. This is why, in his later books, the rabbis, privileged interpreters though they are, disappear. They become absorbed into the white space between paragraphs, between aphorisms.

Waldrop, Lavish Absence

Even when his time is his own, later, Edmond Jabès works in snatches, in fragments. No matter where, in cafés, in the métro, while walking, at dinner, on little bits of paper, on matchbooks, napkins, in his mind.

Waldrop, Lavish Absence

Three rhythms layer [Jabès's The Book of Questions]. On the micro-level, there is the rhythm of the individual line or sentence. A rhythm that, in te verse, comes out of the tension between sentence and line, and in the prose, out of the tension between speech and the more formal syntax of writing[....]

On the structural level, there is the rhythm of prose and verse and, more importantly, of question and answer, question and further question, question and commentary, commentary on commentary and, later, aphorism after aphorism.

Rhythm of midrash, of the rabbinical tradition. Not a dialectic aiming for synthesis, but an open-ended spiralling. A large rhythm, come out of the desert, a rhythm of sand shifting as if with time itself.

Then, there is a third rhythm. It is on the level of the book: a rhythm of text and blank space, of presence and absence.

Rosmarie Waldrop,  Lavish Absence

'How can I know if I write in verse or prose', Reb Elati remarked. 'I am rhythm'.

Jabès, The Book of Questions

The meandering word dies by the pen, the writer by the same weapon turned back against him.

'What murder are you accused of?' Reb Achor asked Zillieh, the writer.

'The murder of God', he replied. 'I will, however, add in my defence that I die along with Him'.

Jabès, The Book of Yukel

A young disciple asks his master, 'If you never give me an answer, how shall I know that you are the master and I the disciple?' And the master responds, 'By the order of the questions'.

Jabès, interviewed by Jason Weiss

Even in 'normative' Judaism, the opening of interpretation is extraordinary.... The rabbinical word remains ever open, unfulfilled, in process. Yet there is great risk here; this inner dynamic accounts for both the creativity of Judaism and its own inversions and undoing. Where is the line between interpretation and subversion? I have elsewhere called this a 'heretic hermeneutic', which is a complex of identification with the text and its displacement. Jabès's book is precisely this identification with the Sacred Book and its displacement. The Book is now opened to include even its own inversions.

Susan Handelman, The Sin of the Book

Mallarmé wanted to put all knowledge into a book.... But in my opinion this book would be very ephemeral, since knowledge in itself is ephemeral. The book that would have a chance to survive, I think, is the book that destroys itself, that destroys itself in favour of another book that will prolong it.

Edmond Jabès, interviewed by Paul Auster

I ask Edmund Jabès:

'You say you are an atheist. How can you constantly write of God?'

'It is a word my culture has given me'.

Then he expands:

'It is a metaphor for nothingness, the infinite, for silence, death, for all that calls us into questio. It is the ultimate otherness'. or, as he puts it later, in the conversations with Marcel Cohen: 'For me the words "Jew" and "God" are, it is true, metaphors. "God" is the metaphor for emptiness; "Jew" stands for the torment of God, of emptiness.

Rosmarie Waldrop, Lavish Absence