The novel [Jabès] explains […] is the very opposite of the book. While the novelist exercises control over the writing, while he or she turns the space of the text into the space of the story to be retold, the writer of the book allows the writing to dominate. The book ‘recounts’ or, more precisely, activates not a story but the movement of writing.

The novelist masters his or her writing in order to put it at the service of the characters. By imposing on the novel a word that is manifestly exterior to the writing, the novelist assassinates the book. Ignorant of the rhythm and respiration puncturing the book’s circular and enigmatic writing, the novelist is word-deaf. He or she does not know, as does the writer of the book, how to listen to the page and to the reverberations of its whiteness and silence.

The true writer, who is not a creator but a listener, is sensitive to the book’s orality, to its freedom as uninterrupted language, to the void and silence that hide within it, to its rejection of closure, and, above all, to the invisible, forgotten, absent, always virtual book it shelters.

Richard Stamelman