I will speak first of the dialogue between the one who has lived through a difficult situation and the one who offers, or who agrees, to be his interlocutor. I will illustrate these reflections with a reading of Edmond Jabès’s last book, Le Livre de l’hospitalité (The Book of Hospitality).
Dialogue
Beyond our embodied interlocutor, we are always in dialogue, without being aware of it, with a stranger, real or imaginary — ourselves, or the one we have known well and for a long time. It would be regrettable for our interlocutor to consider himself the sole and the true one, when he is only the occasion — precious, however — given to our speech to formulate itself and to hope to arrive safely in port. It depends on our ways of speaking (the said and the saying), but also on the ways of hearing of our interlocutor, whether this goal is sufficiently approached.
We speak to him in order to try to make the event that troubled or wounded us lose its excessive and traumatic charge, so that it does not remain exceptional in our life and in that of others — solitary, incomprehensible, unintegratable into our psyche and into the sense we have of our identity.
The risk is permanent — of doubt, of misunderstanding, of misinterpretation — which is what makes its value. The cry of pain, which alone does not deceive, does not belong to dialogue, unlike “I am in pain” or “I was in pain.”
The account of what was lived through, whether clear or confused, ordered, in fragments or in tatters, controlled or overflowing every frame, bears witness to the event as much as to the narrator — such as he was then, such as he is now — but also to the interlocutor, his availability, his interest, his acceptance of the place he occupies, of the role he plays. Conflict can arise at any moment. For the one may have the feeling of having dispossessed himself of a precious good (the lived experience that belonged to him alone, and that he paid for so dearly in suffering) for a meager benefit (“I asked you only to listen to me and to accept me, and you used me for your morbid curiosity, your guilt, without thinking that your questions might reopen my poorly healed wounds, that your interest might place me, toward you, in a debt I could never repay, etc.”). And the other, the feeling of having been deceived in his expectation when his empathic availability toward his interlocutor is so poorly repaid in return, accused of bad intentions, when he expected precise information and received only a confused account, or again when he feels caught in the trap of a relationship he thought brief and superficial, irresponsible, and out of which he no longer knows how to extract himself.
Even when they speak the same language, the words and the meaning that one gives them are never exactly those of the other; each one, each trade has its own jargon. To avoid the laborious work of decryption, some employ from the outset the words of the other, naively thinking they have thereby reduced the risks of incomprehension or conflict, whereas others, clinging to their particularities, obstinately use only those known solely to their community or, on the contrary, the most common ones, become signs recognized by all without ambiguity, in the illusion of a pure objectivity, beyond all emotion.
The ways of preventing dialogue from advancing, from unfolding
They are numerous: to impose on it an impersonal, anecdotal, dramatic, stereotyped mode, infiltrated with ready-made images and expressions, with common discourses drawn from the media or television series; to address everyone and no one, or the one supposed least able to make good use of it; to place the interlocutor in the position of a passive listener-reader, stunning or fascinating him with an excess of frightening dramatization, freezing him in admiration or pity. Provoking his dread serves to test his solidity, his naivety, his attachment or his empathy, his knowledge of the situation, the trust to be granted him, or so as not to suffer alone, so that he too may have his share; or again to make him feel and understand from within the intensity of the ordeal undergone, etc. Speech that is closed, impenetrable, indisputable by its apparent self-evidence or its authority, leaving room for no doubt, no ambiguity, no questioning, signifies: “it is thus and not otherwise; here is what I show you, but you will know (and have) no more of it.” The one may also, in a willful manner, seek to convince the interlocutor, or himself, that the event did indeed take place, when he doubts it, so unimaginable was it, even to the point of provoking a major disarray or periods of diminished consciousness. Some, wary of the surprises that speech freely pursuing its course would bring them, seek to control it (unaware that they speak as much as they are spoken) so as to freeze what they lived through, or so as not to risk betraying it through forgetting or the transformations of memory; or they embark on an interminable monologue as though each detail had a crucial importance. Others let a voice of circumstance be heard, borrowed from another, from a role to play. The refusal of dialogue may be the refusal to share with others one’s unique experience. The interlocutor too may speak in a voice in which he is not present, that of a role, professional or private.
The speech that has by far the best chance of authentically transmitting lived experience is the one issuing from trouble and from the pure necessity of saying it, without aim or interlocutor defined a priori — they will eventually reveal themselves in the aftermath — and that has found its just voice. Before being able to address everyone, it must first engage in dialogue with one other, for no one can address one and all in the same way, and it is only through the success of this dialogue that speech has a chance of being heard by others.
Each of the interlocutors must ask himself who the other is for him, what he wants of him, what he expects of him (beyond the first idea that comes to him, beyond the first explanation that the one who initiated the dialogue gives), but also why he found himself, willingly or by chance (trapped, by himself?), in this position, beyond his possible professional or familial function. He must also ask himself what interests him in his interlocutor and in his speech, what he expects of it, what points of sensitivity these touch in him.
Effects of dialogue
Dialogue contributes to the subject’s reappropriating the excessive event so that it is not a parenthesis, a black page, an object encysted within him, inaccessible (but which produces its ravaging effects no less for that), so that it does not create a barrier between the period that preceded it and the one that will follow it. Then, reinscribed in the continuity of his life and his identitarian permanence, he will be able to say to himself: “yes, it happened to me, it took place, this account that constitutes itself in the dialogue suits me.” Successful dialogue also reinscribes him among others, and his interlocutor, who has agreed to be its recipient, takes on the responsibility of transmitting it in turn, not believing himself its sole and unique depositary even if his responsibility is unique and unshareable. It is up to him to receive this speech, this account, without excessive defenses, without expecting anything from it, and to transmit it with his own voice — not as an object of curiosity, of fears or fantasies, nor as an anecdotal, clinical, psychological, sociological, or literary document, but as traces left within him by the dialogue. Inscribing himself thus in the chain of the witnesses of the event, he contributes to the elaboration of a just collective gaze and welcome upon all those who are or have been caught in a similar event.
The speech and the account that constitutes itself within it are as much documents as autofiction
They must be taken seriously, but not at face value, nor must one be mistaken about the criteria for appraising their value as testimony. They teach as much about the event as about the narrator and about his interlocutor, who must be attentive to his ways of situating himself before him, for he is not exterior, an expert or a voyeur, leaving the narrator in his solitude, but is from the outset implicated in the dialogue and co-responsible for its progress. He has not to ask himself whether he speaks the truth (about what, moreover?), but whether he speaks justly.
The account is just if the one who speaks is truly in his own voice and his voice is truly his own. The dialogue evolves if the interlocutor too is in his. To be in one’s voice, for the one and the other, does not happen at the outset and may require a long progression.
Some accounts concentrate on a detail — pleasant or terrifying, banal or exceptional, easily comprehensible or enigmatic; or they disperse, remain at the surface of the event, speak of it in a metaphorical, allusive manner. These ways have their reasons for being, their value and their necessity, even if they maintain the narrator within the trauma. The latter may also exacerbate the showing of his suffering, present himself as hero or as victim, prepare the pieces of a trial, call for help, seduce, question, without necessarily expecting a reply. The account may construct itself from the outset and freeze, or never manage to find its center of gravity and its guiding line, advance in a linear or erratic fashion. There are innumerable ways of describing an event, and the demand for precision can be without limits, and this is why the account can only ever be an imperfect and unsatisfying document. The one who speaks may sometimes expose himself in it totally, lay himself bare in it, yet he remains ungraspable in his totality. The value of the account is other than documentary. Silence, which is not refusal, bears witness to the inhibition or the dread before so many possibilities, to the fear of erring in one’s choices of this or that detail, of this or that sequence (and ceaselessly new choices present themselves), of not telling the right account, of deceiving the interlocutor or leading him into error, with negative consequences in return.
The divided narrator
Dialogue takes place in the aftermath of the event, and the narrator is no longer the same as the one who underwent it. He is split between the one he is, the one he was during the event, and the one he was before, and all three are strangers to one another. The event was sometimes so violent that it could not be integrated into psychic functioning, or that it shut itself away there, inaccessible. The stake of dialogue, which may be brief or long, is to make of it a psychic object among all the others, and that the subject be no longer divided by its effects, that he recognize himself sufficiently in those he is, and also that he be recognized by at least one other, beyond his appearances, his behaviors, his discourses. He may then find the words to share and transmit his experience with others without too many misunderstandings, illusions, masks, and screens.
The void is at the heart of dialogue
It is provoked by the present traumatic event, which, very often, has awakened others, older ones. This excessive event has provoked this void of the unimaginable and the unthinkable in the psyche. Dialogue is an attempt to fill it, to clothe it in words, images, meaning, but it can succeed only on condition of first accepting this void and the horror before humanizing them, rendering them habitable, coexisting with them, accepting them within oneself. The possibility and the will to address another — not as a victim or a hero, but in one’s nakedness, stripped of oneself, not covered over with one’s identitarian signs and the garments of the trauma — are the points of departure of this process. It is necessary that the other feel the demand to occupy this place of interlocutor, outside any curiosity, any project, and first of all the project of helping. Only afterward will words and images, which the one and the other can share — and beyond them their fellow citizens — be able to humanize this void. Then the account and the trauma will no longer belong to the one alone, but to the two of them, and beyond them to all.
The approach to the account and to the narrator
Even when the narrator and the interlocutor know each other, it is necessary that they become strangers to one another again. And that they let go, as far as is possible for them, of all knowing about the other, as well as of the ready-made images and caricatures put forward to hide oneself or to prevent oneself from seeing and hearing the troubling, the unknown, the unbearable. They have also to let go of any objective of the dialogue so that it be gratuitous, disinterested, apart from the desire and the demand to say and to hear. It is in the approach — prudent and audacious, always ethical — of the one toward the other through dialogue that the space of their encounter progressively constitutes itself, and that they recognize and rediscover each other, authentic, alive.
The time of this approach may be brief, almost immediate, or take weeks and months. But one must trust in this approach, in sincerity and audacity, not force it through artificial maneuvers (telling oneself quickly “it’s fine, I know, I understood, no need to go any further,” or “it is unimaginable,” and listening no longer), whose effects are often catastrophic — a collapse of the trust placed in the other and in oneself. Dialogue is also a confrontation in which each one defends himself against the intrusion, the influence, the ascendancy of the other over himself, as well as against the risk of awakening the traumas.
This approach combines the desire to know the other and the respect for his necessary opacity, the resistance to the temptation of knowing everything, understanding everything. Dialogue is then an act of courage and, like the event that gave it birth and pushes it forward, a living object that belongs neither to the one nor to the other, but to their encounter, which exists only in the time and the field of this encounter. Later, the living and precious memory, accepted and fertile, is as much that of the traumatic event as of this encounter.
Edmond Jabès, throughout his entire body of work, from Le livre des questions (The Book of Questions) to his last book, Le Livre de l’hospitalité (The Book of Hospitality), never ceased interrogating the place of the space of dialogue in the relation between human beings. I will lean on this last book — that of dialogue with the stranger — to show the force and the rigor of his thought and of his writing.
The welcoming of the stranger
It is not a one-way relation, between the one who helps and the one who is helped, but a relation of approach between them, in an equality of responsibility and sometimes of risk. The encounter takes place in a common space, which must be constructed, and which belongs neither to the one nor to the other, but to itself alone, and which exists only for the time of its duration. The work of Edmond Jabès shows its rigorous and logical itinerary, as these few milestones bear witness: Je bâtis ma demeure (I Build My Dwelling), first stone of the space that will be inhabited; Le Livre des questions (The Book of Questions): “Who am I?”, a question, always anxious and unsatisfied, prior to “What do I want from the other, for him, and why?”; Le Livre des ressemblances (The Book of Resemblances): “What do we have in common, and in difference?”; Le Livre des limites (The Book of Limits): the tension between the feeling of our omnipotence and that of our limits, between reality and the ideal; finally, the confrontation with the stranger, with his book, with hospitality.
It is not necessary to have undergone the same terrible ordeals that the stranger has sometimes undergone in order to welcome him. But it is necessary to let go, as far as possible, of all our identitarian references, of our knowledge, of our feeling of security, as well as of the images we have of him. And to be sufficiently conscious of what pushes us toward him.
Let us follow step by step the itinerary of Le Livre de l’hospitalité1.
The construction of the space of hospitality has its demands
One must be without expectation, without project, but keep one’s absolute trust in the word and the book, and in their capacity to transmit any experience, even the most terrible: “Useless is the book when the word is without hope.”2
One must accept the extreme contradictions in order then to let go of them: “To die of nothing after having lived on everything […] To celebrate the rose and perish of a thorn’s prick. […] Death is, perhaps, of God, the coldest thought.”3
One must accept the possibility of one’s own death: “To confirm that I ceased to exist the day the bird of prey occupied alone the space of my life and of the book.”4
Hospitality has its privileged place, which is twofold: the desert and the book. In the desert — a place stripped of all superficial, anecdotal seduction, defined by the essential of what constitutes it, the handful of sand, a place where each grain is similar to the others and yet unique on condition of discovering its irreducible identity — hospitality is a vital necessity. The book is the place of extreme contradiction, between its materiality as an object and its welcome of all words: “God lied. He never bequeathed us the book. He bequeathed us, only, the taste for it.”5 Thus: “The desert is my place […] And this place is a handful of sand.”6 “The desolate land of the sands, where hospitality is the pledge of survival […] This land is the book.”7 “The book belongs to no one […] It belongs only to the words from which it delivers itself, as it goes along.”8 The book is the place of hospitality on the condition that the words inhabit it in the quick of their invention (“If something exists, there is no creation.”9), a quick that does not forget their origin — not in their use as frozen objects, employed for communication or for orders: “God speaks at the level of the verb. Roots.”10
To find this place, it matters to respect an order in speech and in listening, and not to go too fast: “Decipher the word before the enigma.”11 In his previous book, Jabès gave this counsel: “May you find your place. — Where is my place? — In the middle of your soul. — How would I reach it? To discover it, it seems to me, an entire life would not suffice. […] — You have rejoined it […] — Cut in two, I stand, upright, before you. On one side there is me; on the other side, there is me. In the middle, there is nothing. And the master said: — There is your place.”12 The desert and the book are outside commonplaces, elsewhere, gratuitous, without practical utility, situated between other places, other objects that have one. They are the places of the break, of the rupture caused by the traumatic event. But they are also those of desire, different from will, from project, from the necessity of satisfying a need: “He who has no place […] makes, of his desire to have one, his true place.”13 This place is not frozen in the trauma. It carries hope despite all evidence to the contrary. Traversed by death, come and to come, it lets go of its hold, sets its effects back into play, defuses its evil danger: “Variable space of hospitality. Mourning and then, suddenly, rebirth.”14
The approach to the stranger
The one who engages in it must be conscious of his responsibility: “Solitude of the one who calls and of the one who, not being in the condition to respond to that unidentifiable voice, strains his ear, indefinitely; hears it distinctly hammering out its immense distress and succumbs to the innumerable blows dealt.”15 It is a responsibility not of act, but of presence: “My responsibility toward you […] is comparable to that of the sky toward the birds and to that of the ocean toward its fauna and its flora.”16 It pre-exists the encounter, which constitutes itself within it (“Responsibility is the daughter of dialogue.”17), in the development of reciprocal knowledge and trust, when the defenses, the fantasies, the a prioris, the fears, and the dangerous pity fall away. Then words are no longer necessary; the two interlocutors are both within the space of dialogue and of hospitality. “Hospitality is a silent accord.”18
The one who is welcomed is unique, but is recognized only among all the others, from whom nothing a priori distinguishes him, not outside them, by the recognition of whom one must first pass. “To have, for example, an image of the grain of sand, you must first, leaning over all the other grains from which it can no longer be distinguished, take on the whole — a handful — to try, in vain, to isolate it.”19 To recognize him, it matters to be wary of seduction, of fascination, of idealization, and of the feeling of one’s own omnipotence: “Do not make, of the star […] a common pebble. You would lose, a priori, in the exchange. […] The star, for you, will always remain inaccessible; whereas, with a single gesture, you can, by bending down, pick up a pebble.”20 One must not mix the categories: the stranger is a human being, but he is also the presence within us and outside us of the heterogeneous, whose ultimate form is death.
Likewise it matters, for the one as for the other, to preserve one’s capacity to doubt, to resist the temptation of certainty, of constituted knowledge, of a prioris, which give the illusion of knowing the other before he has even made himself known: “Do not ask your way of the one who knows it, but of the one who, like you, seeks it.”21 They reassure, but they freeze the course. Nonetheless, doubt must not be a perpetual flight forward, in order to avoid the encounter. “If he speaks to you of truth, speak to him of the water of the river. If he speaks to you of the water of the river, ask him where he bathed […] He lived on certainty, and you will understand why doubt has always gnawed at your life.”22 And: “What makes the worth of a word is not the certainty that, in imposing itself, it marks, but on the contrary, the word, the abyss, the uncertainty against which it struggles.”23
The certainty of one’s identity is one of those that most obstruct and screen dialogue and the encounter. The temptation to cling to it bears witness to the legitimate fear that it might be overturned by the encounter. One must likewise forget the traumatic events that took place — not in order to deny their reality or their importance, but so that they do not constitute the sole moment of the life of the one who underwent them, so that his identity is not reduced — for both interlocutors — to that of victim or of the traumatized, so that they do not raise, in the one who wishes to welcome the stranger, the wall — or the void — of the unbearable and the unimaginable: “Forget who you are, for, to that initial forgetting you will owe being my guest.”24
The encounter
The stranger frightens us, not because he might assault us, but because he refers us back to what is most strange within us: the thought of our own death. Such is no doubt the essential, overwhelming discovery of the encounter. “In my mind, my question: ‘Are you death?’ addressed itself to an absent one, so close to myself that I often take myself for him.”25 This death is not of the order of the visible, which explains all our efforts to imagine it, to represent it, to make of it fictions, individual and collective, since the most ancient times, so as not to remain alone before it. But, in truth, no one can confront it in our place: “I have seen death, as I see you. I see, through your eyes, the death that you see […] Do not succumb to the temptation to steal my gaze from me. Keep your eyelids closed.”26
Such is the stake of dialogue: to make of each two strangers, who have experienced in their body and their psyche, in a different way, the presence of death — the death that comes toward us and the death that is within us — and who, from this shared course, have recognized each other in their being and in their humanity, in their unique and irreducible identity. “Every dialogue — he said — is in three voices; the voice of the one who speaks; the voice of the one who answers; and the voice of death that makes them both speak.”27 To dialogue not in order to forget death or flee it, but to give it its true place within us, between us.
The effect of the encounter, the after-encounter
The encounter has no vocation to be lasting, to open a relationship. Very often, we can say nothing of it, apart from the certainty that it took place. “One thing is sure: this instant.”28 As very often after a major event, we feel the distress of its completion and its loss, like the exile from the promised land reached for an instant. “What becomes of [the words] once returned to their wandering? Our destitution, like theirs, is infinite.”29 For we do not recover what we had to lose in order to construct the space of hospitality and to make ourselves available there for the encounter; we do not find ourselves such as we were before it, we have become other. It remains to transmit the experience of this encounter, so as not to remain shut up in the unforgettable memory of this unique moment (“Man, without knowing it, will have lived the infinite presence of God in the infinite absence of things”30) or in the suffering of its loss, so that life may resume its course: “Life writes what death has read. (…and even dictated).”31 For this transmission, the role of the writer is essential, and different from that of the witness, who strives to say the event as close as possible to what he thinks is the truth not to be betrayed. The writer does not seek to master its description — quite the contrary, he does not oppose himself to forgetting (“I write forgetting and, as I go along, I forget what I write. Who will read what is not to be read?”32), which erases its anecdotal elements, and, in the greatest passivity, he lets the experience that has traversed him express itself in the words that come to him, his just and unique voice: “What does a writer have, primordially, to say, if not that thing which is all he tries to say, but without applying himself to it, no doubt so as to let it, indirectly, say itself. And as if this saying would protect it from itself by redoubling, within it, the approaches; for this thing, in the depths of silence, is the secret of the last word.”33 He does so as far as possible, at the risk of the exhaustion, provisional or definitive, of writing, so intimately bound to his life: “He told himself that he had, probably, reached the end of himself and that his writing, so much had he lived on it and it on him, was going to precede him by little in death.”34
Is the success of the encounter and that of the text linked to the proximity of death, in relations of reciprocal causality? Edmond Jabès seems to think so: “You will manage, only once, to express it, in the course of your existence, and it will be during your final face-to-face with death.”35 We may not agree with him. The death set into play in the welcoming of the stranger is that of the radical strangeness that inhabits us. Edmond Jabès, throughout this book, advanced in the subtle back-and-forth between it and biological and eventful death, of whose proximity he seems to have had the intuition. But the death of the writer does not prevent the text from pursuing its life in its subterranean course and its transmission, evident or secret. “Write, under my dictation […] then closed his eyes and dozed off. From that complicit silence was born the book of the originary night that engendered, later, the book of days.”36
This article takes up and develops reflections addressed in two older texts: Daniel Oppenheim, Edmond Jabès. Le Livre de l’hospitalité. Construire l’espace de l’hospitalité et de la rencontre (Edmond Jabès. The Book of Hospitality. Building the Space of Hospitality and of the Encounter), in Aurèle Crasson (ed.), Edmond Jabès, l’exil en partage, Paris, Hermann, 2013, pp. 71–77. Daniel Oppenheim, “Trouver sa voix, avec l’autre” (“Finding One’s Voice, with the Other”), in Cancer(s) & psy(s), no. 1, Érès, 2015, pp. 100–108.
Notes
Edmond Jabès, Le Livre de l’hospitalité, Paris, Gallimard, 1991.↩︎
Ibid., p. 9.↩︎
Ibid., p. 11.↩︎
Ibid., p. 9.↩︎
Ibid., p. 20.↩︎
Ibid., p. 13.↩︎
Ibid., p. 90.↩︎
Ibid., p. 20.↩︎
Ibid., p. 57.↩︎
Ibid., p. 23.↩︎
Ibid., p. 19.↩︎
Edmond Jabès, Un étranger avec, sous le bras, un livre de petit format (A Foreigner Carrying, Under His Arm, a Book of Small Format), Paris, Gallimard, 1989, p. 148.↩︎
Le Livre de l’Hospitalité, op. cit., p. 22.↩︎
Ibid., p. 13.↩︎
Ibid., p. 23.↩︎
Ibid., p. 18.↩︎
Ibid., p. 21.↩︎
Ibid., p. 21.↩︎
Ibid., p. 45.↩︎
Ibid., p. 16.↩︎
Ibid., p. 57.↩︎
Ibid., p. 46.↩︎
Ibid., p. 59.↩︎
Ibid., p. 56.↩︎
Ibid., p. 60.↩︎
Ibid., p. 61.↩︎
Ibid., p. 76.↩︎
Ibid., p. 57.↩︎
Ibid., p. 20.↩︎
Ibid., p. 89.↩︎
Ibid., p. 31.↩︎
Ibid., p. 95.↩︎
Ibid., p. 89.↩︎
Ibid., p. 91.↩︎
Ibid., p. 76.↩︎
Ibid., p. 101.↩︎