by Paul Auster
In his later work, beginning with the second major collection, Sentimento del tempo (Sentiment of Time) (1919–35), the distance between the present and the past grows, in the end becoming a chasm that is almost impossible to cross, either by an act of will or an act of grace. As with Pascal, as with Leopardi, the perception of the void translates itself into the central metaphor of an unappeasable agony in the face of an indifferent universe, and if Ungaretti’s conversion to Catholicism in the late twenties is to be understood, it must be seen in the light of this “horrid consciousness.” “La Pietà” (1928), the long poem that most clearly marks Ungaretti’s conversion, is also one of his bleakest works, and it contains these lines, which can be read as a gloss on the particular nature of Ungaretti’s anguish:
You have banished me from life.
And will you banish me from death?
Perhaps man is unworthy even of hope.
Dry, too, the fountain of remorse?
What matters sin
If it no longer leads to purity?
The flesh can scarcely remember
That once it was strong.
Worn out and wild—the soul.
God, look upon our weakness.
We want a certainty.
Not satisfied to remain on safe ground, without the comfort of a “certainty,” he continually goads himself to the edge of the abyss, threatening himself with the image of his own extinction. But rather than inducing him to succumb to despair, these acts of metaphysical risk seem to be the source of an enduring strength. In poems such as “The Premeditated Death,” a sequence that serves as the hub to the whole of Sentimento del tempo, and nearly all the poems in his following collection, Il dolore (The Grief) (1936–47)—most notably the powerful poem written on the death of his young son, “You Shattered”—Ungaretti’s determination to situate himself at the extremes of his own consciousness is paradoxically what allows him to cure himself of the fear of these limits.
By the force and precision of his meditative insight, Ungaretti manages to transcend what in a lesser poet would amount to little more than an inventory of private griefs and fears: the poems stand as objects beyond the self for the very reason that the self within them is not treated as an example of all selves or the self in general. At all times one feels the presence of the man himself in the work. As Allen Mandelbaum notes in the preface to his translations: “Ungaretti’s I is grave and slow, intensive rather than far-ranging; and his longing gains its drama precisely because that I is not a random center of desperations, but a soma bound by weight, by earthly measure, a hard, resisting, substantial object, not wished but willed, not dreamt-upon but ‘excavated’.”
In the poems of his later years, Ungaretti’s work comes to an astonishing culmination in the single image of the promised land. It is the promised land of both Aeneas and the Bible, of both Rome and the desert, and the personal and historical overtones of these final major poems—“Canzone,” “Choruses Describing the States of Mind of Dido,” “Recitative of Palinurus,” and “Final Choruses for the Promised Land”—refer back to all of Ungaretti’s previous work, as if to give it its final meaning. The return to a Virgilian setting represents a kind of poetic homecoming for him at the end of his career, just as the desert revives the landscape of his youth, only to leave him in a last and permanent exile:
We cross the desert with remnants
Of some earlier image in mind,
That is all a living man
Knows of the promised land.
Written between 1952 and 1960, the “Final Choruses” were published in Il taccuino del vecchio (The Old Man’s Notebook), and they reformulate all the essential themes of his work. Ungaretti’s universe remains the same, and in a language that differs very little from that of his earliest poems, he prepares himself for his death—his real death, the last death possible for him:
The kite hawk grips me in his azure talons
And, at the apex of the sun,
Lets me fall on the sand
As food for ravens.
I shall no longer bear mud on my shoulders,
The fire will find me clean,
The cackling beaks
The stinking jaws of jackals.
Then as he searches with his stick
Through the sand, the bedouin
Will point out
A white, white bone.
1976
Book of the Dead
During the past few years, no French writer has received more serious critical attention and praise than Edmond Jabès. Maurice Blanchot, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jean Starobinski have all written extensively and enthusiastically about his work, and Jacques Derrida has remarked, flatly and without self-consciousness, that “in the last ten years nothing has been written in France that does not have its precedent somewhere in the texts of Jab“ès.” Beginning with the first volume of Le Livre des questions, which was published in 1963, and continuing on through the other volumes in the series,1 Jabès has created a new and mysterious kind of literary work—as dazzling as it is difficult to define. Neither novel nor poem, neither essay nor play, The Book of Questions is a combination of all these forms, a mosaic of fragments, aphorisms, dialogues, songs, and commentaries that endlessly move around the central question of the book: how to speak what cannot be spoken. The question is the Jewish Holocaust, but it is also the question of literature itself. By a startling leap of the imagination, Jabès treats them as one and the same:
I talked to you about the difficulty of being Jewish, which is the same as the difficulty of writing. For Judaism and writing are but the same waiting, the same hope, the same wearing out.
The son of wealthy Egyptian Jews, Jabès was born in 1912 and grew up in the French-speaking community of Cairo. His earliest literary friendships were with Max Jacob, Paul Eluard, and René Char, and in the forties and fifties he published several small books of poetry that were later collected in Je bâtis ma demeure (1959). Up to that point, his reputation as a poet was solid, but because he lived outside France, he was not very well known.
The Suez Crisis of 1956 changed everything for Jabès, both in his life and in his work. Forced by Nasser’s regime to leave Egypt and resettle in France—consequently losing his home and all his possessions—he experienced for the first time the burden of being Jewish. Until then, his Jewishness had been nothing more than a cultural fact, a contingent element of his life. But now that he had been made to suffer for no other reason than that he was a Jew, he had become the Other, and this sudden sense of exile was transformed into a basic, metaphysical self-description.
Difficult years followed. Jabès took a job in Paris and was forced to do most of his writing on the Métro to and from work. When, not long after his arrival, his collected poems were published by Gallimard, the book was not so much an announcement of things to come as a way of marking the boundaries between his new life and what was now an irretrievable past. Jabès began studying Jewish texts—the Talmud, the Kabbala—and though this reading did not initiate a return to the religious precepts of Judaism, it did provide a way for Jabès to affirm his ties with Jewish history and thought. More than the primary source of the Torah, it was the writings and rabbinical commentaries of the Diaspora that moved Jabès, and he began to see in these books a strength particular to the Jews, one that translated itself, almost literally, into a mode of survival. In the long interval between exile and the coming of the Messiah, the people of God had become the people of the Book. For Jabès, this meant that the Book had taken on all the weight and importance of a homeland.
The Jewish world is based on written law, on a logic of words one cannot deny. So the country of the Jews is on the scale of their world, because it is a book … The Jew’s fatherland is a sacred text amid the commentaries it has given rise to …
At the core of The Book of Questions there is a story—the separation of two young lovers, Sarah and Yukel, during the time of the Nazi deportations. Yukel is a writer—described as
the “witness”—who serves as Jabès’s alter ego and whose words are often indistinguishable from his; Sarah is a young woman who is shipped to a concentration camp and who returns insane. But the story is never really told, and it in no way resembles a traditional narrative. Rather, it is alluded to, commented on, and now and then allowed to burst forth in the passionate and obsessive love letters exchanged between Sarah and Yukel—which seem to come from nowhere, like disembodied voices, articulating what Jabès calls “the collective scream … the everlasting scream.”
Sarah: I wrote you. I write you. I wrote you. I write you. I take refuge in my words, the words my pen weeps. As long as I am speaking, as long as I am writing, my pain is less keen. I join with each syllable to the point of being but a body of consonants, a soul of vowels. Is it magic? I write his name, and it becomes the man I love …
And Yukel, toward the end of the book:
And I read in you, through your dress and your skin, through your flesh and your blood. I read, Sarah, that you were mine through every word of our language, through all the wounds of our race. I read, as one reads the Bible, our history and the story which could only be yours and mine.
This story, which is the “central text” of the book, is submitted to extensive and elusive commentaries in Talmudic fashion. One of Jabès’s most original strokes is the invention of the imaginary rabbis who engage in those conversations and interpret the text with their sayings and poems. Their remarks, which most often refer to the problem of writing the book and the nature of the Word, are elliptical, metaphorical, and set in motion a beautiful and elaborate counterpoint with the rest of the work.
“He is a Jew,” said Reb Tolba. “He is leaning against a wall, watching the clouds go by.”
“The Jew has no use for clouds,” replied Reb Jale. “He is counting the steps between him and his life.”
Because the story of Sarah and Yukel is not fully told, because, as Jabès implies, it cannot be told, the commentaries are in some sense an investigation of a text that has not been written. Like the hidden God of classic Jewish theology, the text exists only by virtue of its absence.
“I know you, Lord, in the measure that I do not know you. For you are He who comes.”
Reb Lod
What happens in The Book of Questions, then, is the writing of The Book of Questions—or rather, the attempt to write it, a process that the reader is allowed to witness in all its gropings and hesitations. Like the narrator in Beckett’s The Unnamable, who is cursed by “the inability to speak [and] the inability to be silent,” Jabès’s narrative goes nowhere but around and around itself. As Maurice Blanchot has observed in his excellent essay on Jabès: “The writing … must be accomplished in the act of interrupting itself.” A typical page in The Book of Questions mirrors this sense of difficulty: isolated statements and paragraphs are separated by white spaces, then broken by parenthetical remarks, by italicized passages and italics within parentheses, so that the reader’s eye can never grow accustomed to a single, unbroken visual field. One reads the book by fits and starts—just as it was written.
At the same time, the book is highly structured, almost architectural in its design. Carefully divided into four parts, “At the Threshold of the Book,” “And You Shall Be in the Book,” “The Book of the Absent,” and “The Book of the Living,” it is treated by Jabès as if it were a physical place, and once we cross its threshold we pass into a kind of enchanted realm, an imaginary world that has been held in suspended animation. As Sarah writes at one point: “I no longer know where I am. I know. I am nowhere. Here.” Mythical in its dimensions, the book for Jabès is a place where the past and the present meet and dissolve into each other. There seems nothing strange about the fact that ancient rabbis can converse with a contemporary writer, that images of stunning beauty can stand beside descriptions of the greatest devastation, or that the visionary and the commonplace can coexist on the same page. From the very beginning, when the reader encounters the writer at the threshold of the book, we know that we are entering a space unlike any other.
“What is going on behind this door?”
“A book is shedding its leaves.”
“What is the story of the book?”
“Becoming aware of a scream.”
“I saw rabbis go in.”
“They are privileged readers. They come in small groups to give us their comments.”
“Have they read the book?”
“They are reading it.”
“Did they happen by for the fun of it?”
“They foresaw the book. They are prepared to encounter it.”
“Do they know the characters?”
“They know our martyrs.”
“Where is the book set?”
“In the book.”
“What are you?”
“I am the keeper of the house.”
“Where do you come from?”
“I have wandered…”
The book “begins with difficulty—the difficulty of being and writing—and ends with difficulty.” It gives no answers. Nor can any answers ever be given—for the precise reason that the “Jew,” as one of the imaginary rabbis states, “answers every question with another question.” Jabès conveys these ideas with a wit and eloquence that often evoke the logical hairsplitting—pilpul—of the Talmud. But he never deludes himself into believing that his words are anything more than “grains of sand” thrown to the wind. At the heart of the book there is nothingness.
“Our hope is for knowledge,” said Reb Mendel. But not all his disciples were of his opinion.
“We have first to agree on the sense you give to the word ‘knowledge’,” said the oldest of them.
“Knowledge means questioning,” answered Reb Mendel.
“What will we get out of these questions? What will we get out of all the answers which only lead to more questions, since questions are born of unsatisfactory answers?” asked the second disciple.
“The promise of a new question,” replied Reb Mendel.
“There will be a moment,” the oldest disciple continued, “when we will have to stop interrogating. Either because there will be no answer possible, or because we will not be able to formulate any further questions. So why should we begin?”
“You see,” said Reb Mendel, “at the end of an argument, there is always a decisive question unsettled.”
“Questioning means taking the road to despair,” continued the second disciple. “We will never know what we are trying to learn.”
Although Jabès’s imagery and sources are for the most part derived from Judaism, The Book of Questions is not a Jewish work in the same way that one can speak of Paradise Lost as a Christian work. While Jabès is, to my knowledge, the first modern poet consciously to assimilate the forms and idiosyncrasies of Jewish thought, his relationship to Jewish teaching is emotional and metaphorical rather than one of strict adherence. The Book is his central image—but it is not only the Book of the Jews (the spirals of commentary around commentary in the Midrash), but an allusion to Mallarmé’s ideal Book as well (the Book that contains the world, endlessly folding in upon itself). Finally, Jabès’s work must be considered as part of the ongoing French poetic tradition that began in the late nineteenth century. What Jabès has done is to fuse this tradition with a certain type of Jewish discourse, and he has done so with such conviction that the marriage between the two is almost imperceptible. The Book of Questions came into being because Jabès found himself as a writer in the act of discovering himself as a Jew. Similar in spirit to an idea expressed by Marina Tsvetaeva—“In this most Christian of worlds / all poets are Jews”—this equation is located at the exact center of Jabès’s work, is the kernel from which everything else springs. To Jabès, nothing can be written about the Holocaust unless writing itself is first put into question. If language is to be pushed to the limit, then the writer must condemn himself to an exile of doubt, to a desert of uncertainty. What he must do, in effect, is cr
eate a poetics of absence. The dead cannot be brought back to life. But they can be heard, and their voices live in the Book.
1976
Kafka’s Letters
Little by little, we are beginning to know Kafka. Of all modern writers he has been the most private, the most difficult of access, and his life and art have frequently been misunderstood. It is well known that he published little during his lifetime; if it had not been for the devotion of his friend Max Brod, who ignored Kafka’s request to destroy all his unpublished writings after his death, it is probable that Kafka’s name would have died with him in 1924. The very appearance of his work, then, was surrounded by mystery and ambiguity. Why had the novels remained unfinished? And why, given their obvious brilliance and originality, had their author wanted to suppress them? An image grew up of Kafka as a cringing bureaucrat, a classic victim of the depersonalizing forces of modern society, a kind of neurotic shadow-man. In the public mind he was Gregor Samsa of The Metamorphosis.
Over the years, as more biographical facts have become available, this image has changed. Publication of The Diaries, the meditations and aphorisms, the passionate letters to Milena and Felice, as well as biographies and memoirs by Brod, Gustav Janouch, and others, have revealed a Kafka infinitely more complex, sophisticated, and appealing than would have been thought possible. As Milena Pollak succinctly put it in a letter to Brod soon after her affair with Kafka had ended: “His books are amazing. He himself is far more amazing…”
Kafka’s character was one of intense contradiction. To his friends and acquaintances he was a man of remarkable wit and charm, uncommonly generous, trenchant in conversation, unflagging in spirit. Reading the accounts of him one is struck above all by his ability to give of himself to others, by his purity and integrity, by his unforgettable presence. He was, quite simply, like no one else—to such an extent that in Janouch’s Conversations with Kafka, for example, he is portrayed as a saint. On the other hand, the Kafka of The Diaries, the Kafka in confrontation with himself, was tortured with self-doubts, almost pathologically aware of his slightest shortcoming. Torn between the ideal of marriage-family-community and the demands of his writing (which led to his two disastrous engagements), unable to break away from his own family and the suffocating influence of his overbearing father, obsessed by his efforts at self-improvement (gardening, vegetarianism, carpentry, Hebrew lessons), knowing his talent as a writer and yet unable to believe deeply in anything he had written (in spite of the enthusiasm of his publisher, reviewers, and friends), Kafka did not achieve any measure of happiness until the final years of his life when he fell in love with young Dora Dymant and moved with her to Berlin. He set such impossibly high standards for himself that in the end he was bound to fail. But it is precisely this striving, this insatiable hunger to surpass himself, that makes his work so important. Like the hunger artist in one of his finest stories, Kafka’s life and art were inseparable; to succeed in his art meant to consume himself as a man. He wrote, not for recognition, but because he had to write, because his very life depended on it. As he told himself in one of his best-known diary entries: “Writing is a form of prayer.”
