Collected Prose

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