“Often,” he has said to me when speaking of his studies, “often have I made the most delightful voyage, floating on a word down the abyss of the past, like an insect embarked on a blade of grass […] What a fine book might be written of the life and adventures of a word!”
Honoré de Balzac1
This line from Balzac’s Louis Lambert is, for me, one of literature’s most beautiful gifts because it invites us on the simplest and most invigorating journey a person can make, even in the midst of the greatest confinements2. Proust must have experienced the same, ensconced in bed in his sealed room where, riding on the backs of words, he let himself be swept off to Venice and a thousand other charming places. As Novarina said, “An entire book can derive from a single shattered word.” 3
You might ask me, then, where it was that I wished to travel during my period of confinement, or after it; I’d tell you the question didn’t come up because I never truly was confined. I needed only to decide which word to choose from among my dictionaries, and I could take flight on its back. Each time, I recalled Levinas’ observation: “In each word there is a bird with folded wings, awaiting the reader’s breath.” 4 I’ve always thought Levinas might have added, “… and when the bird spreads its wings, don’t forget to jump on its back and soar off with it.” No doubt a vestige of my primary school days when I studied Prévert’s poems: “On leaving the school, we came upon a great railway which took us all around the earth in a golden wagon,” and, “First paint a cage with an open door, then paint something pretty, something simple, something beautiful, something useful for the bird, then set the canvas against a tree, in a garden, in a wood or in a forest, and hide behind the tree, without speaking, without moving … ”5
Even without moving, the journey continues, because the journey is often within the word itself, where each letter plays with the others at hide-and-seek, or leapfrog, or ring-around-the-rosy.
Very early on, I realized letters and words are impish creatures, young schoolchildren just waiting to be let out to play.
I followed them under the plane trees in their schoolyard to learn the rules of the game and join the play. At first, I just watched; I soon learned that in Hebrew, words are composed of three letters that together form a root. But the most astonishing part came when I noticed that the letters, which had been playing ring-around-the-rosy in an orderly fashion, had moved on to musical chairs instead and begun switching order. Each root liberated itself from its initial order to seek all other possible combinations. ABC became ACB, BAC, BCA, CAB, CBA—each three-letter word multiplied into six other possible words. What joy, what a explosion of freedom … but what mayhem! I had discovered the marvellous world of anagrams, a land where the hidden meaning of words is revealed, as Alain Roussel demonstrated in French: image resides within magie, religion within originel, monde within démon, rêver within verre, ministre within intérims. 6
Roussel adds that often “the link between the two referents is more tenuous, the connection less obvious. […] Crasse (grime) and ressac (surf); entité (entity) and tétine (teat); limace (slug) and malice (mischief); lumière (light) and meulier (miller); hérésies (heresies) and hérissée (bristly) […] This relative distance between two words with the same letters spurs me to set free my imagination, to invent bridges, and enrich my own collection. Sea foam is what we call the grime that rises in the ocean’s surf. The insatiable mystic suckles at the teat of his entity to a state of ecstasy. The poet-miller sharpens the light of his words on his millstone. Slipping on a slug, I catch a gleam of mischief in its eye. All religions are bristled with heresies. […] Furthermore, it is noteworthy that ‘anagram’ itself has no anagram.”7
His final remark echoes to some extent the wholly astounding fact that the Hebrew root נסע, “journey,” has no anagram! The roots נעס ,סנע ,ענס ,סען and עסן do not exist in any dictionary. I meditate on this fact and can make no sense of it unless this paradox tells us that there can be no journey without paradox, without question; that the question itself is already one of the greatest journeys, carrying us towards other places, other horizons, other illuminations.
*
These anagrams, tsérouf in Hebrew, or tséroufim in plural, are child’s play that lingers into adulthood, fuelling both astonishing creativity and fertile mental agility. And this is accessible not only to the scholar but to any and every person, to all readers, as Rabbi Nachman of Breslov writes in a famous passage of the Likutei Moharan:
“Even an ordinary person, if he sits himself in front of a holy book and looks at the letters of Torah, he will be able to perceive new insights and wonders. That is, by his concentrating well on the letters of Torah, the letters begin to shine and come together […]8 Then, one can see wonders [in the] new combinations. It is possible to perceive in the book something the author did not think of at all. A great person can perceive this without any effort, yet even a totally ordinary person can comprehend and perceive new insights […]. Nevertheless, a person should not put this to the test, for it could be that just then he will perceive nothing at all. But even so, even an ordinary person can achieve this.” 9
*
One day, in front of a painting by Gérard Garouste entitled Le lièvre et la tortue à l’envers, without any effort on my part, the hare—lièvre, in French—began to run, and in a flash lièvre became livre, which means “book”; became lèvre, which means “lip”; became rève, which means “dream”; and then I saw that Ève, the first lady, was playing too, curled up there in the roots of the word, and at the root of hébreu, which is éver, and now our bird’s wings have enough breath to reach to the far bank—rive—of the word!
You’re getting dizzy now, you say? But then, doesn’t delirium—ivre!—rustle at the very heart of this “burning bush?”
Journeying within a word transforms it into a “sign,” as Barthes uses the term in relation to Proust and his proper nouns; words “avail themselves to exploration, to deciphering they are at once a milieu into which one must plunge and bathe indefinitely in all the reveries they carry; and precious objects, compressed and embalmed, which must be opened like a flower. In other words, these images are a sign, a voluminous sign, invariably large and thickly tufted with meaning, whose breadth no usage can reduce or flatten.” 10 Yes! Barthes has it right, each word is indeed “a precious object, compressed and embalmed, which must be opened like a flower…” as in this game that Proust describes: “Just as the Japanese amuse themselves by filling a porcelain bowl with water and steeping in it little crumbs of paper which until then are without character or form, but, the moment they become wet, stretch themselves and bend, take on colour and distinctive shape, become flowers or houses or people, permanent and recognisable, so in that moment all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann’s park, and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray and of its surroundings, taking their proper shapes and growing solid, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea.” 11
I like the midrashim of Étienne Klein and Jacques Perry-Salkow who, in Anagrammes renversantes, ou la face cachée du monde,12 offer a jubilant exercise in anagramming in an authentically midrashic manner. Since we have just quoted Proust, let us remain with the young Marcel at his aunt’s house in Combray, as Klein and Perry-Salkow write that “Proust’s madeleine, which calls to mind certain aromas and flavours that live within us, delicate but vivid, waiting and hoping to be rekindled by that mouthful of tea mixed with cake-crumbs, becomes, by the magic of the inner journey, the winged wheel of time.”
But let us be clear on one important final point. If within the word lièvre I find livre, ivre, rêve, Ève, lèvre and rive, I am merely playing a game; but if I manage to weave connections between all these words in such a way as to tell the story of a book-drunk hare who dreams of Eve, of her lips and the banks of her body—then voila, it’s a midrash!13 And that is, indeed, the most beautiful journey of all.14
Translated by Emma Roy
1 Honoré de Balzac, Louis Lambert, translated by Clara Bell and James Waring, Project Gutenberg, 2010.
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2 A gift of literature and also a gift from Françoise-Anne Ménager, who introduced me to this magnificent text.
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3 Valère Novarina, “The Debate with Space,” translated by Allen S. Weiss, in The Drama Review, Vol. 45, No. 1, Spring, 2001.
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4 Levinas often returns to this image of folded wings. Cf., for example, The Levinas Reader, Wiley, 1989, p. 194. “These scribes and doctors known as slaves to the letter, would try to extort from the letters all the meanings they can carry or can bring to our attention, just as if the letters were the folded wings of the Holy Spirit, and could be unfurled to show all the horizons, which the flight of the Spirit can embrace.” The formulation I propose here is closer to the statements in his “Open Letter” dedicated to Rashi and published in Rencontre no. 51, 1977, an address given at the inauguration of the Centre Rashi in Paris, reproduced in Cahiers de l’Herne, Biblio essais, p. 410-411: “But Rashi remains faithful to the other method, which is superior inasmuch as inspired texts never become exhausted in the Saying; inasmuch as the signifier, and the means of expression seemingly weighing it down, harbours innumerable lives; inasmuch as its letters, in their unfolding—in their composition—retain the seminal reasons for its Saying and, like the folded wings of future flight, for renewed significance with each generation.”
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5 Unless otherwise noted, all quotations have been translated from French by Emma Roy for the purposes of this article.
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6 The English translation for these anagram pairs: image/magic, religion/original, world/demon, dream/glass, minister/interims.
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7 Alain Roussel, La vie privée des mots, La différence, 2008, p. 59, 60.
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8 Cf. Talmudic tractate Yoma, 73b.
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9 Likutei Moharan, I, 281. The question of permutation is central to the meditations of the Book of Creation, the Sefer Yetzirah, one of the first books of Hebrew Kabbalah: “Two stones build two houses, three stones build six houses, four build twenty-four houses, five build one hundred and twenty houses, six build seven hundred and twenty houses and seven build five thousand and forty houses. From thence further go and reckon what the mouth cannot express and the ear cannot hear.” Visit Sefira.org for the English and Hebrew, or see Sefer Yesirah ou le Livre de la Création : Exposé de cosmogonie hébraïque ancienne, edited, translated into French and annotated by Paul Fenton, Payot Rivages, 2002
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10 Roland Barthes, “Nouveaux essais critiques,” Le degré zéro de l’écriture, Point/Seuil, 1972, p. 125.
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11 Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff, Dover Thrift Editions, 2002.
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12 Étienne Klein et Jacques Perry-Salkow, Anagrammes renversantes ou La face cachée du monde, Flammarion, 2011.
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13 I had this revelation while reading Barthes’ text on proper names in Proust’s work. It is a true gem! “The semiotics of Balbec include two words once said to the narrator, one by Legrandin (Balbec is a stormy place at the edge of land), the other by Swann (the church is Norman Gothic and half Romanesque), so that the name always carries two simultaneous meanings: “gothic architecture” and “storm on the sea.” Each name thus has its own semiotic range, which varies through time depending on the chronology of its reader, who adds or subtracts certain elements, in exactly the way that diachrony works in language. The Name is effectively catalysable; it can be filled, dilated, the interstices of its semiotic framework packed in with infinite additions. This semiotic dilation of names can be defined another way: each name contains several “scenes” which arise at first in a discontinuous, erratic manner but seek only to be united and so to form a little narrative, for relating is only ever the act of binding together, through processes of metonymy, a reduced number of whole units: thus Balbec contains not only multiple scenes within it but also the movement by which they are gathered into a single narrative syntagm, for the incongruous syllables were doubtless born of old-fashioned pronunciation, “which I never doubted that I should find spoken there at once, even by the inn-keeper who would pour me out coffee and milk on my arrival, taking me down to watch the turbulent sea, unchained, before the church; to whom I lent the aspect, disputatious, solemn and mediaeval, of some character in one of the old romances.” This is because the Name opens itself up to catalysis of infinite richness, and because it is possible to say, poetically, that the whole of the Search emerges from a few names.” Roland Barthes, ibid.
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14 I developed this theme in Kafka in a short essay entitled La petite boîte à épices en argent, Éditions Templon, 2021, published on the occasion of Gérard Garouste’s exhibition Correspondances, Gérard Garouste – Marc-Alain Ouaknin, at Galerie Templon until the end of June 2021.
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