“But wishing to share his astonishment with him was pointless, he realized it at the very instant he opened his mouth, for despite a brief moment of confusion (whether in his companion or in himself, he did not know) it was very easy for him to guess, judging by Valuska’s radiant expression (as he was reaching the end of his monologue about his early morning reveries), that his mind was entirely elsewhere, and in reality, thought Eszter, since this new décor was already familiar to him, for what reason would he today see anything unusual in this nightmarish vision, the radiant expression of his friend indeed attesting that he was living their funereal walk as though this — keeping one’s balance upon this monstrous terrain — were some great solemn event, and that only an optical illusion, linked to his weakness and astonishment, could explain that he, Eszter, later recognizing his error, had found a ghost town in place of the old one. Since leaving the house, he had devoted all his energy to studying minutely and assessing the situation without paying the slightest attention to Valuska’s words, and no doubt he would even have forgotten his friend’s presence had he not been holding him by the arm, but suddenly, and he would understand much later why, all his attention turned toward a single object: toward Valuska himself, toward that gigantic postman’s coat, that cap, that mess tin swinging joyfully.”
László Krasznahorkai, The Melancholy of Resistance
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Where Félix, little by little, tirelessly tries to understand what Igniatius and his drawings mean… which Lucian keeps sending him.
Félix’s Notebook
Each day, when I return to the drawings, they appear slightly different to me. Today it is the parrots, a fundamental dissymmetry, that draw my attention. They belong to the image while occupying a position that exceeds the image. They are inside it as visible figures, yet also outside it as instances of reading. They demand their place and inhabit precisely that strange frontier where a narrative begins to become conscious of itself.
The Moon Child ignores their presence. This is essential, because if he knew of their presence, the scene would become theatrical in the classical sense: a character speaking before identified spectators. But here it is not that.
The Moon Child projects his interiority without precisely knowing who receives it.
And yet that projection already seems structured by a possible reception.
It is here that the principle of the observer becomes very powerful within the universe of this image. The parrots do not merely observe an already constituted scene. Their observation participates in its very formation. But reciprocally, the image itself seems already to “await” their gaze. As though it obscurely knew that it would be perceived. This creates a very subtle loop… the Moon Child projects… the parrots receive… their reception produces an interpretation… that interpretation modifies the scene… and this modified scene becomes the one the Moon Child continues unconsciously to project.
Thus the parrots resemble almost functions of the collapse of vision. Before their gaze, the luminous projection remains proliferating, indeterminate, multiple, almost quantum in your poetic sense of the term… face, tree, sun, network, fire, memory, thought… All these possibilities coexist.
The parrots’ gaze begins to stabilize certain forms. Their speech creates lines of meaning. They reduce certain ambiguities while opening others. In other words, they transform perceptual proliferation into a narratable world. But what fascinates me is that they do not dominate this transformation. They themselves are caught within it. For the parrots speak of the scene without truly understanding that they themselves are part of it. Exactly like the reader. Exactly like Lucian or myself when we interpret drawings that already secretly include us.
In these images, in my opinion, there never exists any absolutely stable exterior position. I myself, as supervisor, am included within the structure I am supposed to supervise.
The reader is included within the book he reads. The spectator is included within the image he observes. Commentary acts upon what it comments upon. The parrots thus become almost figures of reflexive consciousness itself. They speak from an apparent “outside.” But, at the risk of repeating myself… that outside already belongs to the inside. This also explains why they are perched upon ruins. The columns perhaps represent the ancient dream of a stable separation:
subject/object,
spectator/scene,
reality/representation,
inside/outside.
Yet those structures are already in ruins within this universe. The parrots continue to lean upon them, certainly, but the great luminous proliferation already reveals something else… a world where everything communicates with everything else, where perceptions circulate, and project themselves… while mutually transforming one another.
The Moon Child therefore ignores the parrots on the conscious level… yet his projection already seems to tend toward them as though every perception secretly sought a witness.
And inversely, the parrots resemble observers produced by the projection itself. As though the image had engendered its own readers in order to return toward itself in the form of speech.
At that moment, the image almost ceases to be an illustration.
It becomes a device for the circulation of the gaze.
A gaze that passes… from the Moon Child toward the projection… from the projection toward the parrots… from the parrots toward the words… from the words toward the reader… from the reader back again toward the image.
And within this circulation, silently, each transforms the others.
