An ordinary fault

“There comes a moment An ordinary fault. one clearly recognizes that any further explanation would only worsen the situation. One could still speak, still write, but that would already be a concession, an unnecessary weakness.
Then silence is no longer a lack; it becomes a resolution. I know what I am doing by remaining silent. I also know what I am losing. But I prefer this conscious loss to a word that would force me to continue along a path I can no longer follow. Remaining silent is the only way to remain consistent with myself.”

Franz Kafka, Letters to Felice

Félix’s notebook
When, leaving the museum born enchanted by dreams in the monumental silence of the night, the cosmos calls to me and keeps me from sleeping, I reread what I wrote yesterday, and this sentence stops me and pursues me:
“(...) he never quite formulated it, but the allusion was clear, that I would be the author of the drawings he sometimes brings to the sessions”
It does not stop me like an ordinary mistake, but like a deeper displacement. This “I” is not in its place. Or rather: it occupies a place that should not be its own. It is not I whom Igniatius suspects. It can only be Lucian. And yet it is indeed I who wrote this “I” as if the suspicion were aimed directly at me.
I could, with sharp inner tension, correct it and restore the roles. Say that I slipped… that I confused the voices. But that would be too simple, and probably false. For if this confusion occurred, it is because it was ready. It was not merely a writing error. It means something… something that reveals a real difficulty in maintaining clear boundaries between the positions each occupies in this affair.
Let us nonetheless try to lay things out, knowing that this very effort is, more or less, already compromised.
In the foreground: the facts as they should be distributed. Igniatius brings drawings to the sessions. He claims to have found them in a gallery located near Lucian’s building. Lucian, for his part, seems to think that these drawings are the work of Igniatius himself, an indirect, unacknowledged production. In this scheme, I am only an informed third party. I am outside the scene and receive these elements through Lucian’s account and the drawings he shows me. I am unknown to Igniatius.
In the background: the suspicion. Igniatius, according to what Lucian lets be understood, almost openly suspects that Lucian might be the author of these drawings. Not because he has proof… but because he knows the proximity of the place. He knows how the works came to be there… And then, above all, there is Lucian himself, whom he believes he recognizes in the drawings. All of this makes the hypothesis seductive.
Last element, and not the least: Igniatius has seen perfectly similar drawings in Lucian’s notebook. A notebook that Lucian “left lying around before Igniatius’s eyes while stepping away.” Not to mention that, for Igniatius, Lucian seems to understand too well what is at stake in the drawings. What Lucian explains by the fact that he draws in order to understand, through the gesture, the origin of these drawings.
Here again, I should remain offstage.
And yet that is not what happens. At the very moment I try to formulate this chain, I find myself inside it. The suspicion brushes against me… then passes through me. A perpetual wandering of suspicion that I almost assume without noticing it. Why? Because I know this gallery. I know what is shown there. Because my closeness to Lucian is not only professional. Because I recognize myself in this blurred place of the one to whom an unsigned work could be attributed.
Thus the confusion is not merely grammatical. It is structural. The roles do not overlap through negligence, but because each occupies, without knowing it, a zone of passage. Lucian thinks that Igniatius produces. Igniatius thinks that Lucian conceals. And I, in writing, discover that I could be caught in this circulation without having claimed anything.
What makes this even more troubling is that no one is lying. Each speaks from a point of view that seems coherent to him. But these angles do not coincide. They cross, shift, produce zones of shadow where identities cease to be clearly assignable. The author of the drawings may matter less than the need, for each, to designate one.
By letting this “I” slip in where it had no business being, I have made visible what is really at stake: the impossibility of maintaining a strict separation between observer, interpreter, and suspect. This slippage worries me, but I also recognize that it says something true about the situation. Everyone looks at the same objects, but each projects a different origin onto them.
I could correct the sentence. I will not. It marks a point of fracture that I prefer to leave visible. If I recognize myself in it, it is perhaps because this affair no longer allows one to remain entirely outside. And this awareness, whether it pleases me or not, deserves to be noted before it, in turn, is displaced.
F.