Signs and Wonderings

Abstract

READERS WHO KNOW the work of Franz Mon, Helmut Heissenbiittel, Philippe Sollers, and Edmond Jabes will think of concrete poetry and systematic experiments in the case of the two Germans, of novels in which not much happens, or of an effort to connect literary and social revolutions in the case of Sollers, and of rabbis speaking in strange images, the holocaust, the problems of writing in the case of Jabes. They will wonder what these four writers have in common beyond a reputation for being avant-garde. But for all their differences they share a premise and a preoccupation: the premise that the world partakes of the nature of language and the preoccupation with the double nature of the linguistic sign. Their different responses are nearly four paradigms of sign-conscious writing. When Franz Mon says that only the formulated is real ... the real world is invented by us, artificial through and through1 or when Sollers speaks of the coded function which sensations take on2 we realize that we are far from the old topos of the world as book. Only Edmond Jabes can use this metaphor of the book as well as that of its implied author, God, though he complicates their relationship. Just consider the stunning last sentence of Le Retour au livre: L'homme n'existe pas. Dieu n'existe pas. Seul existe le monde a travers Dieu et I'homme dans le livre ouvert. But even Jabes sees the world as a scattering of potential signs rather than a closed system, closer to Derrida's aphoristic energy, his 'criture, than to the book.3 Any language is a grid which activates certain of these potential signs. Using a language means reading the world. Mon is explicit about this: Reading is a more encompassing process than the deciphering of