Lavish absence: recalling and rereading Edmond Jabes

Judaism, Summer-Fall, 2003 by Rosmarie Waldrop

Elsewhere, dice (de) and desire (desire) are also revealed to be part of Dieu.

         "Do you know that the final period of the book is an eye," he
       said, "and without lid?"
         Dieu, "God," he spelled D'yeux, "of eyes." "The 'D' stands for
       desire," he added. "Desire to see. Desire to be seen."
         God resembles His Name to the letter, and His Name is the Law.
         (YEA 203)

"The name of God is the juxtaposition of all the words in the language," Edmond Jabes reminds Marcel Cohen. "Each word is but a detached fragment of that name" (DB 102).

This Kabbalistic idea means that breaking open words and recombining their letters is neither just fun nor impious. It is not even just the Kabbalistic tradition of "traveling inside the word." (12) For Edmond Jabes, this method "permits a rediscovery, a rereading of the word. One opens a word as one opens a book: it is the same gesture" (DB 95). More, it is creation in the sense of enacting the possible. The motor of this process becomes, as Joseph Guglielmi has realized, the single letter. It at the same time interprets and creates:

      The imperious mobilisation of the letter in the course of its
      conflict with the word ... becomes the cardinal moment of Jabes's
      project. In other terms, the letter is promoted to being the
      motor of the production of meaning and at the same time the
      propagator of what is unknown and exempt of meaning. (La
      Ressemblance impossible) (13)

In From the Desert to the Book, Edmond Jabes comments that the absence of vowel points in the traditional Hebrew texts requires special attention from the reader, who must himself become creator (in the absence of God, who is the point from which everything begins?) (14) and create the words:

      In Hebrew, the point is the vowel. It permits the word to be
      read, heard. When the point is missing, there is risk of gross
      misunderstanding. In fact, there is no such thing as a word.
      There are consonants waiting to become vocables.
      ... the reader must himself recreate the word, which implies more
      than a profound comprehension, a true intuition of the text. At
      this stage, the reader joins the creator. (DB 82)

In an early poem, Edmond Jabes writes: "The sex is always a vowel." (15) If we put these two quotes together, across time, we see two things. First, the word has a physical, sexual reality in addition to its intellectual and spiritual nature. Secondly, it is the reader/creator who reveals the sex of the word as he adds the vowel, who opens the word, not only as one opens a book, but as one opens a vulva. We have intercourse with words. With all the violence inherent in that term.

How much more violent, then, the process of breaking words apart, of playing in the breakage. To Marcel Cohen, Jabes calls it "a rape (viol) ... of the untouchable Name of God" (DB 102). But it is a rape that proves futile, that does not establish any dominance over the words any more than writing does: