Demeure, Jabès Yasser Elhariry French Forum, Volume 39, Numbers 2-3, Spring/Fall 2014, pp. 129-144 (Article) Published by University of ...

Demeure, Jabès
   Yasser Elhariry

   French Forum, Volume 39, Numbers 2-3, Spring/Fall 2014, pp. 129-144 (Article)

   Published by University of Pennsylvania Press
   DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/frf.2014.0029

       For additional information about this article
       https://muse.jhu.edu/article/565445

[ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ]

To R. S.

   Demeure, Jabès
   Yasser Elhariry

   J’impose ma présence à chaque créature
   Et je pousse partout ma nouvelle demeure
   —Fouad Gabriel Naffah1

   . . . la langue arabe en qui, de toute éternité,
   le vers se dit “bayt,” “maison” ou “demeure” . . .
   —Salah Stétié2

   Je suis de la race des mots avec lesquels on
   bâtit les demeures.
   —Edmond Jabès3

“On relira mieux désormais Je bâtis ma demeure.”4 The first sentence of Der-
rida’s reading of Edmond Jabès (Cairo, 1912–Paris, 1991), referring to the
poetry of his Egyptian period from 1943 to 1957,5 was occasioned by the
publication of Le livre des questions,6 Jabès’s first book written after his exile
from his native Egypt and his move to Paris in 1957. Nearly sixty years later,
this ‘better rereading’ of Jabès’s Egyptian poetry remains slow to emerge,
with Je bâtis ma demeure instead having been eclipsed in the critical imagi-
nary by the texts of the poet’s Parisian period.7 In fact, Derrida’s premonition
that “un certain lierre risquait d’en cacher le sens”8 has been aggravated by
a perception of Je bâtis ma demeure as Jabès’s “seul livre de poésie,”9 and by
continued reference to the texts of this collection as “a poetry based on a
lyric ‘Je.’”10 The “lierre” of lyricism constitutes more than a mere inaccuracy
in terms of Jabès’s poetics, his literary work, and the entirety of his pub-
lishing history. For one, the terms ‘lyric’ and ‘poetry’ appear to be taken
for confused generic synonyms of one another. They remain opaque in the
ascriptions of some of Jabès’s most prominent readers, as ‘lyric’ seems to be
used in the conventional and unproblematized sense of a “tendance poé-

130   French Forum Spring/Fall 2014 Vol. 39, Nos. 2–3

tique . . . privilégiant l’expression plus ou moins vive de la subjectivité.”11
Commentators of Jabès either suggest that it is lyrical, or altogether curtail
the questions of Je bâtis ma demeure in order to engage Jabès’s later work.
Furthermore, there has yet to be a thorough, rigorous study of any of the
poetics of the collection, glossed over as ‘lyric’ and relegated to references in
support of readings of the more celebrated books of middle and late Jabès.
    In this essay, I propose an alternative reading to Jabès’s Je bâtis ma
demeure than the one usually presented by critics. Through a textual medi-
tation circling around the term demeure in the writings first collected in
Je bâtis ma demeure (1959, revised 1975), and then later in Le seuil le sable
(1988, revised 1990), I trace the intertextual literary loci and discern the
poetic place of Jabès’s Cairene work in relation to his œuvre, as well as to
the aesthetic tastes of the Egyptian francophone literary sphere in which
he composed the poems. With Jabès scholarship in mind, I further pursue
this specific idea of “place” through an etymological and bilingual critical
close reading of demeure, briefly considering its common English equivalent
“dwell,” in order to reveal meanings of the terms that have been left undis-
cussed; as Heidegger writes, “with the essential words of language, their true
meaning easily falls into oblivion in favor of foreground meanings,”12 such
that an investigation into the “true meaning[s]” of demeure explains how
Jabès dwelt poetically while in Egypt, and during his years of exile and tran-
sition in France. In the second half of the essay, I place Je bâtis ma demeure
alongside Derrida’s Demeure: Maurice Blanchot13 to underscore the com-
plexities of temporal simultaneity at stake in Jabès’s construction of the
collection and its title. This allows me to conclude by characterizing Jabès’s
Cairene texts as fundamentally placeless and untimely: subject to continu-
ous revising, torn between the poet’s problematized senses of belonging, and
anxious of its own author’s name in the annals of literary history.
    Demeure thus emerges in my reading as having more to do with inter-
textuality, editorial tactics, and Jabès’s attempts to secure a poetic place for
himself within a modern canon of French poetry, rather than with the effu-
sive lyric subjectivity commonly attributed to the collection. Indeed, the
term demeure is repeated from one end to another of Je bâtis ma demeure
and Le seuil le sable, along with a marked penchant for brief forms (for-
mulae, definitions, sententious aphorisms) that stylistically unite these texts
with the “non-lyric” remainder of Jabès’s œuvre. As a pervasive concept in
his work, demeure resonates with contemporaneous poetico-philosophical
inquiry, and furthers an understanding of Jabès’s poetics of place: the poet-
ics of his construction of a place for himself, or how he dwells poetically.

Elhariry: Demeure, Jabès 131

The etymology of demeure provides additional insight into its full semantic
spectrum for early Jabès, whose repetitiveness fails to establish any fixity of
place, either semantic and figurative or concrete and physical. In fact, it has
the exact opposite effect in his poetry. Terms that at first appear as unprob-
lematic in Jabès as a simple notion of “home” (demeure) develop “polysemic
and multivalent density”14 as they move into the formulaic and repetitive.
Over an extended compositional, editorial and reading time, Jabès’s writing
decomposes such a term into the plurality of senses that it holds for him.
For him as much as for his reader, it then becomes necessary to trace and
establish the term’s full spectrum of senses throughout Je bâtis ma demeure
and Le seuil le sable. In this fashion, my goal is to both reestablish and fur-
ther problematize the poetic place these collections occupy within Jabès’s
œuvre, which, I suggest, is much less coherent than it seems. The aporia of
the text—condensed in a term (demeure) that, paradoxically, both holds the
collection together, and is the reason for its dismantling—points to a basic
impasse in its structure: its simultaneous desire and failure to insert itself
into the cogency of a canonical Jabésian œuvre, and to perpetually dwell in
its own stasis of impasse.
    The term demeure recurs as a refrain to Je bâtis ma demeure, its underly-
ing leitmotif (my emphasis throughout):

      Une demeure est une longue insomnie
      sur le chemin encapuchonné des mines.15
      ...
      Avec mes poignards
      volés à l’ange
      je bâtis ma demeure16
      ...
      . . . Je demeure
      ...
      dans le brouillard de ta blessure confuse
      comme les richesses incalculables de la terre
      ...
      Amoureuse retrouvée avec le livre ouvert17
      ...
      Tu as perdu ta demeure
      en fuyant les heures18
      ...
      La demeure du ruisseau se reflète dans chacune de ses fenêtres comme le
            monde aveugle dans nos yeux.
      Une fois conquise, l’image demeure dans nos yeux comme une île au milieu
            de la mer.19

132   French Forum Spring/Fall 2014 Vol. 39, Nos. 2–3

    While some of Jabès’s commentators have briefly touched upon his
“dwelling built of words,”20 one crucial aspect of demeure remains over-
looked. Writing before Jabès, when Apollinaire says, for instance, “Les jours
s’en vont je demeure,” or when Char enigmatically titles his collection Seuls
demeurent, a temporal notion of place (to “last,” to “survive”) is progressively
reintroduced and rediscovered in the term demeure. After all, who or what
is it that, alone, dwells or remains in Apollinaire’s or Char’s formulations? (Je
demeure où, quand, comment? Seuls demeurent qui? Seuls demeurent quoi?)
Similarly, the first occurrence of demeure in Jabès’s ordering of the collection
(“Une demeure est une longue insomnie”) presents an incalculable length of
time, of waking time, of insomniac time, of non-sleep and non-dream time,
lying, eyes wide open, hooded (“encapuchonné”) in bed. Some two-thirds
of the way through Je bâtis ma demeure, the verse “Je demeure / dans le
brouillard” echoes the vague dreaminess of the opening insomnia, though
at this later moment, the state of a wake-in-bed is accompanied by the erot-
ics of an undefined, grammatically feminized beloved’s “blessure confuse,”
the beloved’s “livre ouvert” in which “Je demeure” (one possible translation
of which may be “I dwell” or “I dwells”). Finally, paradoxically for Jabès, “en
fuyant les heures” and in losing time, en demeurant one also loses one’s tem-
poralized demeure: “Tu as perdu ta demeure / en fuyant les heures.”
    What exactly would the loss of a demeure entail? What does the demeure
of “une île au milieu de la mer” have to do with images and poetics? What
were the predominant poetics and aesthetic tastes in Egypt during Jabès’s
time? What were Jabès’s own literary preoccupations? And why does he lose
them? Why does he lose his demeure? What if he had never left Egypt—his
première demeure—in the first place?
    The questions raised by a temporalizing of demeure suggest, for one, that
Jabès’s reading and writing times in Egypt were deferred poetic acts. Jabès’s
physical and temporal distance vis-à-vis the French and the American liter-
ary worlds which he would later frequent (Rosmarie Waldrop’s memories of
Jabès21 are interspersed with the many transatlantic readings to which they
travelled together), his residing in Cairo away from the artistic milieus of Paris
and New York, and a conflicting judeo-francophone identity in predominantly
Islamic and arabophone Egypt, are illustrated in a colorful letter he receives
from Max Jacob. Around 1935, Jabès had informed Jacob of how he was unable
to find what must have then been the 1923 edition of Le cornet à dés in book-
stores anywhere in Egypt.22 At this point in his life, Jabès was still learning
about Jacob and his writings. Having then expedited a handful of books on
himself to Jabès in Cairo, Jacob writes in a letter dated October 19, 1935:

Elhariry: Demeure, Jabès 133

      Mon cher Edmond,
      Voici ce qui m’arrive:
      l’Égypte n’admet pas les remboursements par la poste! On a renvoyé
      les 3 livres à la librairie entremetteuse. La librairie ne sait pas que
      faire de ces livres qu’elle a payés de sa poche et lève les bras au ciel.
      J’ai commencé par la rembourser de ses 59 francs, puis je lui ai dit de
      les envoyer par la poste en paquet recommandé directement à toi.
      Puisque c’est pour ma gloire que tu travailles, je peux bien t’offrir ces
      livres, quoi qu’il m’en coûte. J’espère que ça finira par arriver.23
The temporal deferment evidenced by the Jabès-Jacob exchange is emblem-
atic of the Egyptian literary milieu—its francophone community, “une île
au milieu de la mer”24—and offers a glimpse into the reasons behind the late
blossoming of romanticism and symbolism in Egypt, as well as the relatively
tardy diffusion of surrealism in the 1930s (as spearheaded by Georges Henein
and others). More importantly, however, this écart also explains Jabès’s rela-
tive silence in the 1930s (the earliest poems of Je bâtis ma demeure date from
the early 1940s) and his reserved stance with regard to the enthusiastic—
even overzealous—subscription by some of his compatriots and immediate
contemporaries to aesthetic, philosophical or ideological avant-gardism. It
had made more sense to Jabès to first explore and occupy vaguely roman-
tic and symbolist modes of writing—even if in a reticent fashion and at the
expense of being perceived as a lyric poet—prior to the radical shifting of
gears called for by the avant-gardists.
    The literary différance between France and Egypt brings me to the notion
of a philosophical demeure that constitutes the idea of a singular anachro-
nism, “l’anachronisme singulier du temps dont nous parlons.”25 The shift
from physical place (Egypt, France), or the place of heritage or glory (one’s
place in a literary tradition), towards a temporalized, poeticized notion of
place adds a nuanced dimension to Jabès’s texts. No less than the first three
entries for “demeure” in Littré’s dictionary deal with the term’s temporal
qualities (“retard, délai,” “retardement, le temps qui court au-delà du terme
où l’on est tenu de faire quelque chose,” “durée de la résidence”). However,
Jabès criticism in English tends to render “demeure” as physical “dwelling,”
and at best allows for a figurative or metaphorical understanding of the
term. This unproblematic translation of “demeure”—in many senses a phil-
osophical untranslatable—quickly glosses over the density and the temporal
richness of the term as it reads throughout Jabès’s texts.

134   French Forum Spring/Fall 2014 Vol. 39, Nos. 2–3

    Crucially for Jabès, to dwell poetically is to dwell temporally, although
the semantic field in English is complicated by the obsolescence of some
important senses of the term “dwell” (which continue to be present in the
French “demeurer”).26 The impossible double senses of demeure/dwell
(brevity and eternity, delaying and remaining, the temporal and the physi-
cal) constitute a first way of understanding Jabès’s use of the term. In this
sense, his creation of a poetic place and existence for himself was both rapid
and slow. Under the initial influence of Apollinaire, Char and Jacob, Jabès
quickly creates a poetic place for himself through the theme of the demeure.
At the same time, the long history of Je bâtis ma demeure and Le seuil le
sable ends up producing a unique series of texts in the entirety of Jabès’s
corpus for two interrelated reasons: 1) the texts collected in 1959 in Je bâtis
ma demeure span a period of some fifteen years (1943–1957); and 2) as col-
lections of collections, Je bâtis ma demeure and Le seuil le sable are Jabès’s
only texts that he continually revisits and restructures, beginning with the
first publication of the earliest collection from 1947 (Chansons pour le repas
de l’ogre, written 1943–1945), and ending with the final edition of Le seuil le
sable in 1990. Unlike his Parisian book-poems (Le livre des questions, Le livre
des ressemblances, Le livre de l’hospitalité . . .)—neither revised nor reed-
ited once published, even attaining a degree of repetition and resemblance
which has Didier Cahen clamoring that “ces ouvrages . . . laisseront penser
aux lecteurs trop pressés qu’Edmond Jabès écrit toujours le ‘même livre’”27—
the texts of Je bâtis ma demeure and Le seuil le sable stand singularly apart
in the entirety of Jabès’s œuvre, rendering it less coherent than the canonical
readings of Jabès’s allegorized Judaism would seem to suggest. Constantly
morphing, they are texts in which Jabès, even over a total period of more
than half a century and despite the titular demeure, never comfortably suc-
ceeds at inhabiting or dwelling.
    Prior to an in-depth analysis of the compositional and publishing his-
tory of the texts of Je bâtis ma demeure, and of the temporal and spatial
impossibility of textual dwelling facing Jabès, a detour via Derrida’s com-
mentary of the French term in Demeure: Maurice Blanchot will highlight
the complexities of temporal simultaneity at stake in Jabès’s construction
of the collection. Derrida’s long essay on Blanchot’s L’instant de ma mort28
discusses, on the one hand, the place that witness and testimony occupy in
relation to the self ’s complex, paradoxical rapport with its own death; on the
other, it goes into an in-depth analysis of each single occurrence of the term
demeure and its variants in Blanchot’s text, five in total. In either case, the
temporalization of demeure remains a constant throughout.

Elhariry: Demeure, Jabès 135

    Blanchot’s short text narrates a moment of encounter with what should
have been the main character’s certain death. Set during the Second World
War in the French countryside, the events happen to recount Blanchot’s own
experience of almost being executed by the Nazis. Fortuitously, he manages
to escape from the fusillade and the certainty of his own death. Appearing
some fifty years after the event, L’instant de ma mort is narrated from the
deferred perspective of a problematized relationship between the first- and
third-persons.
    As with Jabès, the very first occurrence of demeure in L’instant de ma
mort depicts the image of an eternity of suspended time. It immediately
precedes the narrator’s moment of evasion: “Les Allemands restaient en
ordre, prêts à demeurer ainsi dans une immobilité qui arrêtait le temps.”29
The “anachronisme singulier” of Blanchot’s “demeurer” first of all involves
stopping time (“arrêtait le temps”). This stoppage of the conventional, linear
progression of time acts as a dense focal point within the spatio-temporality
of the narrative. But instead of altogether eliminating the future, the narra-
tive brings the future into the chronology and logic of its own present. The
narrative presences the future in “une immobilité qui arrêtait le temps”: the
future shall be as this moment, the future shall remain as this moment. Put
differently, and with the double sense of the term in mind (pausing and con-
tinuing), the future will “dwell” as the impossibility of the image depicted.
    The future, as it is brought into the present-time of Blanchot’s narra-
tive logic, is further complicated by the composition of the phrase in the
past imperfective. The narrator is recounting a precise moment in the
past that should have had no other future, save for the physical death of a
troubled narrative subject. But there he is writing and telling it, not even
shortly before or shortly thereafter, but a full half-century later. The two
past imperfective verbs, “restaient” and “arrêtait,” couch the timeless infini-
tive “demeurer.” Near synonyms of one another, but not quite, the various
meanings of the three terms can be summed up in the contradictory senses
of demeure/dwell. At base, the three verbs remain, in terms of Blanchot’s
narrative, incommensurable: the impossible eternity of the brief moment
of almost-death, the complexities of the narrative-time’s present and future,
and the author-narrator’s deferred writing of a half-century later.
    The Blanchotian temporal incommensurability recasts in a curious light
Jabès’s title, Je bâtis ma demeure. “Je bâtis,” as both the simple present and
past tenses of “bâtir,” brings us closer to a nuanced layer of simultaneous
time ingrained into the poetic demeure of Jabès’s Cairene collection. At first,
it appears that Jabès “builds” in the objective indicative mood of the present

136   French Forum Spring/Fall 2014 Vol. 39, Nos. 2–3

tense (Je bâtis): he creates his place, he builds his “dwelling” (ma demeure,
in which one also reads and hears the vocable à demeure and demeure’s rich
temporal, idiomatic inflections in French that remain untranslatable by
the English “dwelling”). Therein an eternity is already present, but one that
necessitates the presentness of the verb, of the action, of the building, of “je
bâtis,” while the verbal and architectural doubling (“bâtir”/“demeurer”) redu-
plicates the atemporality of the substantive forms (“bâtiment”/“demeure”);
as Derrida puts it, “Ni synchronie ni diachronie, une anachronie de tous les
instants . . . Ce temps de demourance est incommensurable.”30
   As temporalized presencing, bringing, and placing into the world, the
singular anachronism of demeure and the title of Jabès’s collection echo
Heidegger’s declaration that “building is really dwelling.”31 Expanding on
Heidegger’s view that language retracts and retraces the meanings of words
over time (the old English “dwele” and the contradictory specialized usages
of “dwell” being a case in point), I am claiming that Jabès’s usages of bâtir
and demeure offer him an alternative to the aporia of his Franco-Egyptian
existence: they provide him with the possibility of a poetic, word-based
process of ontological thinking and presencing. As Jabès’s language builds,
constructs and structures meanings over the extended time of poetic
composition and compilation, words come to delineate temporal bound-
aries, thresholds, limits, liminal spaces. To what Heidegger calls “a double
space-making”32 in which one may in all fullness truly dwell, Jabès coins a
temporal equivalent with the double tenses of “je bâtis” and the temporal-
ization of demeure.
   Yet, like Blanchot, nothing is as simple as it seems for Jabès. In addi-
tion to the unique status of the texts within Jabès’s œuvre, the paradoxical
combination of impossible time, and a Heideggerian fullness of truly dwell-
ing (“je bâtis ma demeure”), Jabès’s building and his dwelling, so carefully
constructed out of words, are at once present, of his world and its time,
and temporally elsewhere. Jabès’s Franco-Egyptian publishing history and
the ordering of texts in Je bâtis ma demeure best illustrate this simultane-
ous anachronism. In this respect, it is important to bear in mind that Je
bâtis ma demeure, taken as a whole, is a retrospective creation, both in its
structure and, especially, in its title—despite the fact that the verse itself was
composed at least a full decade earlier. “L’auberge du sommeil,” the poem
containing the verse that gives Je bâtis ma demeure its title, forms a part
of the 1949 collection La voix d’encre.33 Whereas the moments of exile and
transition between his past Egyptian writings and his future French pub-

Elhariry: Demeure, Jabès 137

lications are quite troubled, Jabès’s publication history in Egypt is itself
uncomplicated. La voix d’encre was originally published by Edmond Jabès
and Georges Henein’s editorial project, the Cairo-based publishing house
and small magazine La part du sable. For Jabès, the 1940s were his most
fecund period of poetic production while in Cairo. Between 1943 and 1945,
he composes Chansons pour le repas de l’ogre (dedicated to the memory of
the death of Max Jacob in Drancy). His Le fond de l’eau (1946) copies almost
exactly (adding only the initial definite article) the title of a collection of
Christian lyric poems by Jacob (Fond de l’eau, 1927), and initially appears
in the pages of the first issue of the magazine La part du sable (February 15,
1947). These texts are followed next by Trois filles de mon quartier (1947–
1948), and then in 1949 by La voix d’encre and La clef de voûte (the latter
consisting of a cycle of six heteroclite poems, one of which appears along-
side Henri Michaux, Georges Henein and René Char in the second and last
issue of La part du sable in April 1950).34 Les mots tracent, Jabès’s hybrid
tome of aphorisms and prose poems from 1943–1951, appears in Paris in 1951
under the L’âge d’or imprint.
    These works are then deferred to the retrospectively assembled and titled
collection of collections, Je bâtis ma demeure. Quietly occluding his juve-
nilia from the 1920s and 1930s,35 it is only in Paris that Jabès would select
some of his poems composed in Cairo for inclusion in this collection. In
1959, with the aid of Gabriel Bounoure and Jean Paulhan, he manages to
have it published by Gallimard.36 Reading “L’auberge du sommeil” in the
order presented in Je bâtis ma demeure, the word “sommeil” comes to bear a
thematic and architectural atavism, as a throwback to the opening pages of
the collection and the liminary encounter of “demeure” with (lack of) sleep
(“Une demeure est une longue insomnie / sur le chemin encapuchonné
des mines”).37 As a strong and deliberate architectural work, the collections
grouped in Je bâtis ma demeure do not follow any chronological arrange-
ment. The particular order conferred upon them by the poet instead reflects
back onto the beginnings and the ends of his literary itinerary. Indeed, the
couplet “Une demeure est une longue insomnie . . .” appears in the 1956
L’absence de lieu. Placed near the beginning of the book, it enacts the anach-
ronistic demeure poetics of early Jabès. Placed at the beginning and at the
end of the collection, the later, terser texts frame the earlier, more limpid
Cairo poems. Or, even better, the later texts may be considered to be not
properly Cairene, but rather as Jabès’s first poems of detachment, movement
and exile, major themes of the Le livre des questions cycle: 1956–1957 were,

138   French Forum Spring/Fall 2014 Vol. 39, Nos. 2–3

after all, the years of Jabès’s flight from Egypt, his slow and painful transition
into French life, and his first major encounter with anti-Semitism.38 The in-
between texts placed at the opening of the collection are L’eau du puits (1956)
and L’absence de lieu (1956); Du blanc des mots et du noir des signes (1953–
1956), Petites incursions dans le monde des masques et des mots (1956) and Le
pacte du printemps (1957) are placed at its closing.39
   The editorial history and architectural structure of the collection rein-
force the antithetical untimeliness of a simultaneous reading of “je bâtis”
as “I build” and “I built.” The verbal ambiguity of the title is a concise
poetic summary of Jabès’s poetic place, his demeure: an “objectivist” poet
of the moment and of the present (“I build”), but one whose moment has
also passed (“I did build”). Written in the past tense, this latter reading is
symptomatic of the poet’s conflicted relationship with his Egyptian literary
trajectory: an uprooting from a native land whose landscape (if not the geo-
graphical place itself) had thoroughly nourished his later poetics; having
a home country where he was never a national; being an atheist marked
racially, culturally and politically as Jewish, and consequently forced into
exile. By naming his collected poems both in the present and the past, Jabès
never quite succeeds at separating the past (the Cairene poetry) from the
present (the uncertainty of being in France), choosing instead to continue
dwelling in a poetic place characterized by an anachronistic demeure time.

   Ma mort est-elle possible?
   —Jacques Derrida40
I will complicate matters further in guise of a conclusion. Three more col-
lections from Jabès’s later Parisian period are appended after Je bâtis ma
demeure in Le seuil le sable. While Je bâtis ma demeure comprises the section
entitled Le seuil, in a second section, Le sable, one finds collected the experi-
mental grammars and typographies of Récit (1980), La mémoire et la main
(1974–1980), and L’appel (1985–1988), presented in that order in the volume.
These later texts were written within the context of a more mature poetic
place: at this point in Jabès’s career, the question of his place as an impor-
tant modern poet was moot, as by then he had been canonized by a series of
important critical readings, a Cerisy-la-Salle conference, a long list of prizes.
But in these later texts, the familiar poetic locus proffered by the first-person
je appears exactly four times, and only to be profoundly troubled. For exam-
ple, in the second part of La mémoire et la main, one reads at the end of the
poem “L’eau” (which echoes the title of L’eau du puits, the first poem of Je
bâtis ma demeure):

Elhariry: Demeure, Jabès 139

      J’écris le désert
      Si forte est la lumière
      que la pluie s’est volatilisée.

      Il n’y a plus que le sable
      où je passe.41

The final near-effacement of the self ’s place in the world could be read as a
late commentary by Jabès on Jabès, on his own place and on the place of his
earlier texts. Without quite rejecting them, he appears to modify or even to
erase the reader’s understanding of the place of his earlier writings (“Il n’y a
plus que le sable / où je passe”). In relation to this couplet, and as had been
briefly noted above, just as “Je demeure” can be read as either “I dwell” or “I
dwells” in one possible translation, the grammatical resemblance to “Je est
un autre” is similarly present in the final verse of “L’eau.” In this sense, “où je
passe” can be doubly read as “where [or when] I pass” and “where [or when]
(the) I passes.”
    Whereas the ambiguity of “je bâtis” is verbal, the ambiguity of “où je
passe” is first of all spatio-temporal (the double sense of “où,” with preceding
verses developing a sustained metaphor of time). But it is also pronominal
(the “je” that is simultaneously a first- and a third-person) and existential;
while the richness of the poetic place of “je bâtis” lies in its anachronistic
demeure, the verbal preciseness of “où je passe” underscores a tension inher-
ent in Jabès’s construction of poetic place: a full assumption of impasse, and
the impossibility of an easy dwelling of any sort, whether in the world, or
even in the words forged by the poet himself.
    Through the perspective afforded by the term demeure, the poet’s solid
“dwelling built of words” now seems to be no more than shifting sand, which
would rather emphasize the pastness of “je bâtis,” as well as this first-person
je that is no more than “un il douloureusement proche, douloureusement
étranger.”42 Where Jabès’s hand may have once left a durable mark in ink, it
now appears like traces on sand passed over with a stick, his poetry always
susceptible to the force of the elements of nature: “Si forte est la lumière /
que la pluie s’est volatilisée.”
    Further on, in the short text L’appel, on the very last page of Le seuil le
sable, Jabès composes the collection’s ultimate strophe, which is both poetic
dwelling in its verbal repetitiveness of negations, the imperative and the
future tense, and erasure in its final, dialogical question and answer:

140    French Forum Spring/Fall 2014 Vol. 39, Nos. 2–3

        Cherche mon nom dans les anthologies.
        Tu le trouveras et ne le trouveras pas.
        Cherche mon nom dans les dictionnaires.
        Tu le trouveras et ne le trouveras pas.
        Cherche mon nom dans les encyclopédies.
        Tu le trouveras et ne le trouveras pas.
        Qu’importe. Ai-je jamais eu un nom?
        Aussi, quand je mourrai, ne cherche pas
        mon nom dans les cimetières
        ni ailleurs.43

   Explicitly distinguished and separated from the places of his je and his
name by the question (“Ai-je jamais eu un nom?”), and then distinctly
attached to the future tense of the ever-problematic verb mourir (“quand
je mourrai”), the poet’s name—his legacy and his glory, supreme poetic
place—is effaced before his death. As with Blanchot and Derrida, the ques-
tion becomes impossible to answer: Can one bear witness to a posterity—or
an absence of a posterity—following one’s own (failed) disappearance from
the world? Whatever the case may be, the poet only commands the tu to not
search for such a posterity.
   For the name of the poet is effaced from all places: not only from all com-
pilations and books (tombs in their own respect), but especially from all
cemeteries, one’s dernière demeure.

   Dartmouth College

Notes
    1. Fouad Gabriel Naffah, La description de l’homme, du cadre et de la lyre, preface by
Salah Stétié (Paris: Mercure de France, 1963), 59.
    2. Salah Stétié, La nuit de la substance (Montpelier: Fata Morgana, 2007), 38.
    3. Edmond Jabès, Le livre des questions I (Paris: Gallimard, 1988), 36.
    4. Jacques Derrida, L’écriture et la différence (Paris: Seuil, 1967), 99.
    5. Edmond Jabès, Je bâtis ma demeure: poèmes 1943–1957 (Paris: Gallimard, 1959).
    6. Edmond Jabès, Le livre des questions (Paris: Gallimard, 1963).
    7. Jabès’s earliest and most important readers were his close friend and mentor Gabriel
Bounoure, in his 1959 preface to Je bâtis ma demeure, later collected with other essays,
notes and some correspondence in Edmond Jabès: la demeure et le livre (Montpellier: Fata
Morgana, 1984); Jacques Derrida, “Edmond Jabès ou la question du livre” and “Ellipse”
(both dedicated to the Le livre des questions cycle), in L’écriture et la différence (Paris: Seuil,
1967); Maurice Blanchot, “Traces,” in L’amitié (Paris: Gallimard, 1971); and Emmanuel
Levinas, “Edmond Jabès aujourd’hui,” in Noms propres (Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1976).

Elhariry: Demeure, Jabès 141

More recent academic inquiry into Jabès’s writings includes Mary Ann Caws’ monograph,
Edmond Jabès (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1988); Richard Stamelman and Mary Ann Caws’s
edited volume of the proceedings of the Cerisy-la-Salle conference on the poet, Écrire le
livre: autour d’Edmond Jabès (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 1989); Richard Stamelman, “The
Nomadic Writing of Exile: Edmond Jabès,” in Lost Beyond Telling: Representations of
Death and Absence in Modern French Poetry (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1990); Daniel Lançon,
Jabès l’Égyptien (Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 1998); Steven Jaron, Edmond Jabès: The Hazard
of Exile (Oxford: Legenda, 2003); Farid Laroussi, Écritures du sujet: Michaux, Jabès, Gracq,
Tournier (Mons: Sils Maria, 2006); and Nathalie Debrauwere-Miller, Envisager Dieu avec
Edmond Jabès (Paris: Cerf, 2007).
    8. Derrida, op. cit., 99.
    9. The editorial paratext of the definitive edition of Jabès’s collected poems, Le seuil le
sable : poésies complètes, 1943–1988 (Paris: Gallimard, 1990), “quotes” him, in a terse bio-
graphical blurb appended to the end of the volume, describing it as “mon seul livre de
poésie” (399). I have been unable to locate this quote in any other source.
    10. Jaron, 136.
    11. “Lyrisme,” Le trésor de la langue française informatisé, accessed November 25,
2012, http://cnrtl.fr/definition/lyrisme. In his edited volume on the figurations and defig-
urations of lyricism’s “dispositifs énonciatifs,” Figures du sujet lyrique (Paris: puf, 1996),
Dominique Rabaté takes a similar point of departure in order to problematize the lyric
as genre. His complementary volume, edited with Joëlle de Semet and Yves Vadé, Le sujet
lyrique en question (Bordeaux: pub, 1996), recasts the problematic through questions of
lyric subjectivity, literary itinerary, and poetic voice, while Gustavo Guerrero’s Poétique et
poésie lyrique (Paris: Seuil, 2000) presents transhistorical analyses of treatises and docu-
mented accounts of “lyricism.”
    12. Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought (New York: Harper Perennial, 2001),
146.
    13. Jacques Derrida, Demeure : Maurice Blanchot (Paris: Galilée, 1998).
    14. Philippe Met, Formules de la poésie : études sur Ponge, Leiris, Char et Du Bouchet
(Paris: puf, 1999), 4; cf. also Stamelman, Lost, 245.
    15. Jabès, Le seuil, 25.
    16. Ibid., 99.
    17. Ibid., 218.
    18. Ibid., 230.
    19. Ibid., 305.
    20. Cf. Jaron, 114.
    21. Rosmarie Waldrop, Lavish Absence: Recalling and Rereading Edmond Jabès
(Hanover: Wesleyan UP, 2002).
    22. Max Jacob, Les lettres de Max Jacob à Edmond Jabès (Pessac: Opales, 2003), 21.
    23. Ibid., 37.
    24. Quite literally, as well: the life of the francophone literary community in Cairo was
centered on Zamalek island, in the heart of Cairo and in the middle of the Nile, where, for
instance, Jabès lived in the same building as Joyce Mansour; cf. Marie-Laure Missir, Joyce
Mansour: une étrange demoiselle (Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 2005), 24 et passim.

142    French Forum Spring/Fall 2014 Vol. 39, Nos. 2–3

     25. Derrida, Demeure, 61.
     26. Cf. the Oxford English Dictionary for the English term’s oldest etymologies, which
suggest notions of confused delaying and tarrying, in both the substantive and the intran-
sitive verbal usages of the archaic “dwele”; likewise, specialized usages of the “dwell”
suggest antinomic “slight pauses” and “brief continuations.”
     27. Didier Cahen, Edmond Jabès (Paris: Seghers, 2007), 87.
     28. Maurice Blanchot, L’instant de ma mort (Paris: Gallimard, 1994).
     29. Ibid., 12 (my emphasis).
     30. Derrida, Demeure, 107.
     31. Heidegger, op. cit., 146.
     32. Ibid., 156.
     33. The metaphor “la voix d’encre” itself is lifted from Char’s Feuillets d’Hypnos (1943–
1944). In note or feuillet number 194, Char writes: “Je me fais violence pour conserver,
malgré mon humeur, ma voix d’encre” (René Char, Œuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard,
1983), 221).
     34. The texts are Henri Michaux, “Tranches de savoir”; Georges Henein, “L’esprit colo-
nial”; Edmond Jabès, “Le rocher de la solitude (poème à plusieurs voix)”; René Char,
“Corail” and “Le tout ensemble.” The W. T. Bandy Center at Vanderbilt University keeps
an original copy of the second issue of La part du sable in its Pascal Pia Collection.
     35. For full details about the circumstances of publication, dissemination and reader-
ship for early Jabès, and about the texts retained and those left behind, cf. Daniel Lançon’s
groundbreaking Jabès l’Égyptien; Steven Jaron’s edited volume, Portrait(s) d’Edmond Jabès
(Paris: BnF, 2000), which presents a careful selection of some of Jabès’s earlier material,
culled from the Bibliothèque nationale’s Jabès archives; and Jaron’s monograph, Edmond
Jabès: The Hazard of Exile. This more recent study is informed by extensive research in
the archives of Egypt’s francophone periodicals that were Jabès’s first publishing venues.
Jaron offers compelling readings of Jabès’s earliest poems that the poet would subse-
quently renounce and leave out of Je bâtis ma demeure, as well as an overview of critical
reception—wide-ranging and mixed—of early Jabès. Some of Jabès’s omitted poems
and collections, which had caused a stir in Cairo, include: Illusions sentimentales (Paris:
Eugène Figuière/Les Anthologies du XXe siècle, 1930); Je t’attends! (Paris: Eugène Figuière,
1931); the essay Apport à la poésie and the experimental “spilling typography” (Jaron 53) of
Extraits, published in the periodical La Semaine égyptienne 35–6 (1932); Les pieds en l’air,
prefaced by Max Jacob (Cairo: La Semaine égyptienne, 1934); and the artistic manifesto
Arrhes poétiques (Cairo: La Semaine égyptienne, 1935). As an example of the criticism
generated by some of these texts, Jaron writes: “With the appearance of Les Pieds en l’air
in the winter of 1934 came a renewed gust of criticism. Adolf Shual wrote sarcastically of
it: ‘Dans une lettre préface qu’il adresse à l’auteur, Max Jacob lui déclare: “Je suis tout à fait
persuadé que vous irez très loin sur le chemin d’Art.” Mon Dieu, s’il doit faire cette longue
route avec Les Pieds en l’air, il faut croire que son talent tient plus de l’équilibriste que
du poète, du moins, dans le sens classique que nous sommes habités à donner à ce mot.’
Another critic, Zeinab, writing in the Semaine égyptienne, confessed: ‘J’ai bien cherché
à comprendre ce poète, et malgré toute ma bonne volonté je ne sais si j’y suis parve-
nue. . . . Jabès veut bien, du temps à autre, nous initier à son univers intime, mais il tient

Elhariry: Demeure, Jabès 143

par-dessus tout à nous ébahir. Et il réussit!’ Writers in Paris also noticed an undue obscu-
rantism. Jabès’s new poetry, then, was a mystery to his readers, and he would have to
account for it” (61).
    36. Edmond Jabès, Du désert au livre : entretiens avec Marcel Cohen (Paris: Belfond,
1980), 60–61.
    37. Jabès, Le seuil, 25.
    38. Upon arrival in Paris, Jabès confronted and assumed a thus-far marginalized Jew-
ish identity, which he newly rediscovered following an encounter with racist graffiti. He
writes this awakening into the very outset of his first Parisian book, Le livre des questions:
“Une ville, la nuit, est une devanture vidée de son contenu. / Il a suffi de quelques graffiti
sur un mur pour que les souvenirs qui sommeillaient dans mes mains s’emparent de ma
plume. Et pour que les doigts commandent la vue” (Le livre des questions I 30). When later
discussing this event, Jabès says: “J’habitais à cette époque—c’était en 1957—le quartier de
l’Odéon. Alors que je rentrais un soir, les phares d’une automobile balayèrent un pan de
mur qui me faisait face. J’eus le temps de lire ‘Mort aux Juifs’ et, à côté, en anglais, ce qui
me paraît encore inexplicable: ‘Jews go Home’” (Jabès, Du désert au livre, 67; cf. also Le
livre des questions I, 56–57).
    39. For a different, but complementary, reading of the modifications made by Jabès to
Je bâtis ma demeure in Paris, and for a brief consideration of the thematic and structural
(dis)unity of the collection, cf. Irène Langlet, “Recueil de recueils: l’exemple d’Edmond
Jabès,” Méthode! 2 (2002): 65–71.
    40. Jacques Derrida, Apories: mourir—s’attendre aux ‘limites de la vérité’ (Paris: Galilée,
1996), 48.
    41. Jabès, Le seuil, 384.
    42. Louis-René Des Forêts, Ostinato (Paris: Mercure de France, 1997), 30.
    43. Edmond Jabès, Le Seuil le sable: poesies completes, 1943–1988 (Paris: Éditions Gal-
limard, 1990).

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