Yes, it is very little. But if it did not sting you, there would have been no bees left long ago.”
Jean Paulhan, “The Bee”: text signed “Juste”
published in Les Cahiers de Libération, February 1944.
Where Félix, a stowaway traveller who has slipped aboard the images before him, comes to understand that creation resembles a single source less than a network of passages, infiltrations and resurgences of which the creator himself forms part. It does not necessarily arise from his own decision, but emerges from unforeseen encounters that displace the project already under way. The reader, like the creator, nevertheless continues to act, to revise, refuse or begin again, while discovering possibilities he could not have known in advance. Félix thus comes to redefine the mastery involved in his analysis: no longer obtaining exactly what had been foreseen, but learning to recognise what appears without having been intended, and resisting the temptation to erase it simply because it disturbs the original design.
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Félix’s Notebook
I wanted to follow the river upstream as far as the small thread of clear water where it would begin quietly before my eyes... There are infiltrations, invisible tributaries, underground water tables, waters coming from much farther away than the landscape I am able to imagine. Some streams disappear beneath the ground only to reappear elsewhere, so that the place where I find them again resembles a birth without necessarily being their beginning... I must be careful with this image, which risks becoming a system in its turn... and I have no desire to construct a new one to replace the system I am trying to escape... but it does at least help me understand that a creation may not have a sovereign decision as its point of departure and may instead have, as its origin, if the word still applies, passages. The creator himself, far from remaining above them in order to direct them all, is caught up in them.
This in no way means that he ceases to act or abandons his work to some obscure power... He revises... and sometimes destroys... then begins again... At many moments he knows what he is doing. He must know... But he also acts within a movement that brings him, as he advances, possibilities he cannot know before having produced them... It is then that the very notion of mastery begins to change for me. I once believed that to be master of one’s gesture meant obtaining exactly what one had intended. I now wonder whether a stranger, and more difficult, kind of mastery might consist in recognising what has appeared without having been foreseen. And in not suppressing it simply because it disturbs the project.
A great deal of knowledge is certainly required in order to conceive and correct, but knowledge is also required in order to know when not to correct. Yet not every accident or wandering is a revelation. It would be absurd to turn inattention into a method or powerlessness into a virtue. Certain deviations allow the work to begin becoming what it could not yet be so long as it remained enclosed within what had been decided for it. This is where the real disturbance begins. Whoever makes something must continue to be able to say that he made it. He cannot rid himself of his gesture by claiming that some external power acted in his place. But neither can he any longer affirm with the same confidence that, at every moment, he knew exactly everything he was doing. Between these two positions a region opens that interests me more and more, one in which responsibility for the gesture remains entire while the sovereignty of the person performing it is diminished, not in order to humble him, but at last to account for what actually happens when something begins.
I notice here, not without some uneasiness, that all this no longer concerns only Lucian, Igniatius, or these drawings I am exploring... but is beginning to concern my own reading... I gather them together. I compare handwritings. I search for what came before. I note resemblances. I try to understand how a figure passes from one notebook to another... That, at least, was the task I had set myself... Yet the connections I make produce, in their turn, things that were present in none of the documents separately... Two fragments placed beside one another begin to speak to each other... A drawing alters a letter written years earlier... A sentence suddenly gives an image a depth it did not have when I looked at it the day before... I can no longer claim that I merely discover passively what was already there, since my gaze acts, my juxtapositions act, the order in which I read acts, and even my mistakes must act, although I would rather not insist too much on that.
