'My mother tongue is a foreign language' : on Edmond Jabès's writing in exile
- This chapter examines Edmond Jabès, who chose to write his oeuvre in French despite his Jewish-Arabic origins and his being conversant in both Hebrew and Arabic. French was never a true 'mother tongue' to him but rather 'a foreign one'. This poetical choice was also instrumental to his creation of a cosmos that is very clearly defined by 'la page blanche', or the 'blank page'. His writing develops this idea, both literally and metaphorically. A blank sheet is the only thing a writer has to work with at the start of every writing act, therefore it represents a kind of material opposition that all writers must overcome. It represents in this context an existential nothingness that precedes and simultaneously escapes both human and divine creation. In Jabès's writings, a blank page has two connotations at once: a condition for writing and nothingness. This ambivalent condition results in the paradoxical assumption that his 'mother tongue is a foreign language', because it cannot offer the same spiritual intimacy as another language, say, the Holy Language, and because the writer's 'mother tongue' - and, by extension, human language - is always impure and infiltrated by foreignness.
Author: | Federico Dal Bo |
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URN: | urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-755114 |
URL: | https://press.ici-berlin.org/doi/10.37050/ci-26/dal_bo_edmond-jabess-writing-in-exile.pdf |
DOI: | https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-26_3 |
ISBN: | 978-3-96558-050-3 |
ISBN: | 978-3-96558-051-0 |
ISBN: | 978-3-96558-049-7 |
ISSN: | 2627-731X |
Parent Title (English): | Untying the mother tongue / ed. by Antonio Castore and Federico Dal Bo ; Cultural Inquiry ; 26 |
Publisher: | ICI Press |
Place of publication: | Berlin |
Document Type: | Part of a Book |
Language: | English |
Date of Publication (online): | 2023/09/08 |
Year of first Publication: | 2023 |
Publishing Institution: | Universitätsbibliothek Johann Christian Senckenberg |
Release Date: | 2023/09/20 |
Tag: | Mother tongue |
GND Keyword: | Jabès, Edmond; Muttersprache; Schreiben; Talmud |
Page Number: | 39 |
First Page: | 45 |
Last Page: | 83 |
HeBIS-PPN: | 512765219 |
Dewey Decimal Classification: | 8 Literatur / 80 Literatur, Rhetorik, Literaturwissenschaft / 800 Literatur und Rhetorik |
8 Literatur / 84 Französische und verwandte Literaturen / 840 Literaturen romanischer Sprachen; Französische Literatur | |
Sammlungen: | CompaRe | Allgemeine und Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft |
CompaRe | Allgemeine und Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft / ICI Berlin | |
Licence (German): | Creative Commons - CC BY-SA - Namensnennung - Weitergabe unter gleichen Bedingungen 4.0 International |