FICTION

Two Books of Questions, One Opera and a Composition That Can Never Be Repeated (from Libraries of Sand)

3AM Magazine, October 17, 2021

In early 1963, the prestigious French publisher Gallimard brought out Edmond Jabès’s Le Livre des Questions, a hybrid volume of aphorisms, poetry, dialogue and fiction — its author described it as a “récit éclaté” or “exploded story” — that would develop into a multi-volume series and have an enormous impact on contemporary thought and literature. As Paul Auster, himself a huge Jabès fan, observed in 1977, “During the past few years, no French poet has received more serious critical attention and praise than Edmond Jabès. Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida, Jean Starobinski, and others have written extensively and enthusiastically about his work, and as time goes on the list continues to grow.” It was in the wake of dispossession and exile that Jabès forged the unconventional form of Le Livre des Questions, which drew so many enthusiastic responses: in 1957, after 44 years in Egypt, the land of his birth, he was driven out of the country along with vast numbers of other residents whose Jewish or “European” identity branded them as non-Egyptian.

Once in France he found himself grappling with the legacy of the Shoah and confronting his Jewish identity, a subject that had been absent from his poetry. In the Livre des Questions and its sequels, the chief emissaries of Jewishness is a cohort of fictive rabbis, who ceaselessly query one another and the reader and give the book its name. For Jabès, the act of posing questions, of communicating through questions, was quintessentially Jewish.

As it happens, Jabès wasn’t the only person in France to be preoccupied with the subject of the question, and not the only author to emblazon the word on the cover of a book. In 1958, a year before Jabès began working on Le Livre des Questions, a volume titled La Question appeared, telling how its author, Henri Alleg, director of the anti-colonialist Alger Républicain newspaper, had been arrested in June 1957 by the French Army in Algeria and subjected to torture by electric shock, burning, waterboarding, and being hung from various devices. He was also injected with barbiturate sodium pentothal, thought to be a truth serum. Alleg’s description of waterboarding is particularly horrific:

They picked up the plank to which I was still attached and carried me into the kitchen. … fixed a rubber tube to the metal tap which shone just above my face. He wrapped my head in a rag… When everything was ready, he said to me: ‘When you want to talk, all you have to do is move your fingers.’ And he turned on the tap. The rag was soaked rapidly. Water flowed everywhere: in my mouth, in my nose, all over my face. But for a while I could still breathe in some small gulps of air. I tried, by contracting my throat, to take in as little water as possible and to resist suffocation by keeping air in my lungs for as long as I could. But I couldn’t hold on for more than a few moments. I had the impression of drowning, and a terrible agony, that of death itself, took possession of me. In spite of myself, all the muscles of my body struggled uselessly to save me from suffocation. In spite of myself, the fingers of both my hands shook uncontrollably. “That’s it! He’s going to talk,” said a voice.

Despite this brutal treatment Alleg, who had been underground since November 1956 after the Army raided the offices of Alger Républicain and arrested many of its employees, refused to tell his torturers what they wanted to know: the names of the people who had hid him. In July 1957, concluding that Alleg wouldn’t break, and worried by the growing outcry in France over his disappearance, his captors transferred him to a prison camp near Algiers. From there he smuggled out the account of his ordeal that became La Question. Denied access to stationery, Alleg had to write his manuscript on toilet paper, which he slipped out of the prison page by page. (If it seems hard to imagine someone writing an entire book on sheets of toilet paper, one should remember that toilet paper in 1950s French Algeria, as in Metropolitan France, would have come not in rolls of soft, pliable tissue but in stacks of relatively sturdy sheets, perfectly suitable for writing on.)

Alleg’s life was even more exilic than Jabès’s. Born Harry Salem in London in 1921 to Jewish parents (an English father and a Polish mother) who later settled in France, Alleg moved on his own to Algeria in 1940 and managed to scrape by under the Vichy regime. So great was his love for his adopted homeland that he adopted a Berber name, Alleg.

In the case of Alleg’s book, the word “question” had multiple meanings. The most obvious one concerns the political situation that had landed him in prison (“the Algerian Question”) but he was also cognizant of the historical use of the term as a legal euphemism for torturing a prisoner to extract a confession (see, for instance, the entry “Torture ou Question” in Diderot’s Encylopédie), and, of course, Alleg’s torturers were asking him “the question” of who had aided him. Alleg’s La Question was also a livre des questions.

Banned by the government soon after it was published by Editions de Minuit, but too late to prevent 60,000 copies from being distributed, La Question was quickly reprinted by La Cité Éditeur in Lausanne, Switzerland. At the end of 1958, more than 160,000 copies of the book were in circulation. The irony was not lost on readers that the target of this censorship, Editions de Minuit, the publisher of Samuel Beckett and many Nouveau Roman writers, had begun as a clandestine press during the German Occupation. (An English edition was brought out the same year by controversy-loving publisher John Calder, who did the translation himself; it was one of his first bestsellers.)

On January 1, 1963, a little over a month before Le Livre des Questions was published (February 12), Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Petit Soldat, a film about torture and the Algerian war, was finally released after being banned by the French government. Shot in April and May 1960 (in Geneva) it is actually set two years earlier, in the spring of 1958. In one scene we see an FLN agent (in Godard’s film the torturers are Algerian rebels rather than French soldiers) reading aloud a passage from La Question to a man being tortured, and commenting “les Français torturent aussi” (the French also torture).

It was in the summer of 1959 that Jabès had begun writing Le Livre des Questions, after the publication in June of Je bâtis ma demeure (I build my dwelling), a collection of poems he wrote in the 1940s and 1950s. The first complete manuscript of Le Livre des Questions dates to December 1960. Another book relating to events in North Africa was also in the news in 1960. Early that year, the Swiss publisher of Alleg’s La Question, Nils Anderson, brought out a second controversial volume about the French actions in Algeria, Hafid Keramane’s La Pacification, livre noir de 6 années de guerre en Algérie (The Pacification, a black book of 6 years of war in Algeria), which chronicled the atrocities inflicted on Algerians and FLN supporters by the French government. Immediately banned from being imported into France, Keramane’s book played a somewhat bizarre role in one of the most notorious incidents in the dirty war waged in Europe against supporters of the Algerian independence movement. On March 25, 1960 two professors at the University of Liège known for their opposition to the French occupation of Algeria received letter-bombs. One of them, Georges Laperche, was killed. The bombs were hidden in copies of La Pacification. The bomb-makers had gone to elaborate lengths to conceal the source of the packages. They also altered the appearance of the books themselves. The original publicity band reading “Nuit et brouillard sur l’Algérie” (“Night and Fog over Algeria,” an allusion to Alain Resnais’s 1956 documentary about the Holocaust) was replaced with one saying “Qui ne sait rien, ne peut rien montrer” (“Whoever knows nothing can reveal nothing.”). This false band also carried the information “Tirage limité, edition numerotée” (Limited printing, numbered edition), which was totally spurious, there having been no limited edition of the book. We only know about these weird subterfuges because two of the rigged books failed to explode. Investigations determined that the books had been purchased from a Geneva bookstore and then hollowed out and filled with plastic explosives set to explode when the book was opened. The attacks are generally thought to be the work of La Main Rouge, a shadowy group of French Secret Service agents who engaged in terrorist acts throughout the 1950s.

In his introduction to the clandestine/Swiss edition of La Question, Jean-Paul Sartre takes up the point that torture is rarely, if ever, productive. “Arrests are made at random. Every Arab can be ‘questioned’ at will. The majority of the tortured say nothing because they have nothing to say unless, to avoid torture, they agree to bear false witness or confess to a crime they have not committed.” And, Sartre continues, as we “know very well” those who do “have something to say” (i.e., secrets to reveal) do not talk. “Tortures” he says whether inflicted by Germans in 1944 or French Paras in 1957, “bring a poor return.” He also connects the decision to torture with the elusive nature of the enemy, and the silence of the population, in wars of insurgency: “Everybody, everywhere, is hiding something. They must be made to talk.”

In the end, after being subject to a gruesome array of torture techniques, Alleg remained silent. Subsequently sentenced by a military tribunal to 10 years of hard labour, he was transferred to a prison in Brittany, from which he escaped in 1961, fleeing to Communist Czechoslovakia. Within a few years he was back in France, pardoned and working as a journalist. He returned to Algeria to reassume directorship of Alger Républicain, only to be expelled to France when Houari Boumédiène came to power in 1965. After decades working for the French Communist newspaper L’Humanité, Alleg died in 2013 at the age of 91.

Alleg and Jabès, two men whose lives were disrupted by postwar colonial conflicts, two Jews who were shaped by their time in Muslim-majority countries, two beneficiaries of the francophone cultures that once could be found throughout North Africa and the Middle East, two writers who placed the word “question” at the center of their books. While Jabès was obviously far more concerned with the literary implications of his récit éclaté, Alleg wasn’t entirely indifferent to the writerly qualities of his text. As French historian Jean-Pierre Rioux noted upon Alleg’s death: “Alleg’s récit was perceived as emblematic because of its very brevity, its naked style, its police-report dryness that denounced the torturers under initials that didn’t fool anyone. Its internal tension of a controlled scream made it even more unbearable: the horror was expressed in the tone of classical literature.”

It wasn’t only activists who responded to events in Algeria. In 1960, a year that witnessed an uprising among right-wing French Army officers and the publication of “Manifesto of 121” in which 121 prominent intellectuals and artists called for a halt to torture and for Algerian independence, Italian composer Luigi Nono drew on Alleg’s book for passages in the libretto of his one-act opera L’Intolleranza (additional text came from Sartre’s introduction and from poems by Eluard, Mayakovsky and Brecht). Italo Calvino recounts in a 1984 letter to Matthias Theodor Vogt that Nono asked him to write a libretto for L’Intolleranza. “I remember that it occurred to him to ask me for a libretto derived from a book on torture in Algeria that had just been published: La Question by Alleg. With great regret I told him that I was incapable of dealing with such a dreadful and bleak subject.” Nono, who had previously used texts by Cesare Pavese and Giuseppe Ungaretti, had been trying to coax a libretto out of Calvino for several years. When the opera premiered at La Fenice in Venice in 1961 it drew protests from Italian neo-fascists, who showered polemical flyers down on the audience from the balconies and objected in particular to a torture scene, shouting “Viva la Polizia.”

While Nono, who had a passion for incorporating modern literary texts into his compositions, never drew on Jabès’s Livre des Questions for any of his works, he did toward the end of his life create a piece in tribute to Jabès: a 30-minute work inspired by Jabès’s 1982 publication Le petit livre de subversion hors de soupçon (Little Book of Unexpected Subversion) for contralto, recitative voice, flute, tuba coronet and live electronics. It is entitled Découvrir la subversion. Hommage à Edmond Jabès. Highly aphoristic, The Little Book of Unexpected Subversion excited Nono because of its, in his words, “continuous interrogation, continuous questions, continuous doubts, continuous research.” The piece premiered on October 5, 1987 at the Thèâtre National de Chaillot in Paris as part of that year’s Festival d’Automne. The performance was directed by Nono himself. On the Fondazione Archivio Luigi Nono website one finds the following statement (I translate from the Italian): “The Committee has noted that the Paris performance was an improvisation guided by Nono on a catalogue of sounds previously prepared with the interpreters and organized during the performance by the composer himself, according to his own compositional idea, not yet defined by a score. In the drafting of a score it was customary for Nono to intervene and modify as the performance developed (among many historic examples, one recalls in particular that of Omaggio a Kurtág). It would be therefore completely arbitrary to present a score reconstructed from the performance itself. This results in it being impossible to authorize new performances.” Nono died in 1990. Jabès passed away the following year. Since its premiere, Découvrir la subversion. Hommage à Edmond Jabès has never again been performed in public.