Disarray

“The characters in my stories are not inventions; they are observations. They frighten me because they live, because they persist, because they know more than I do. When I write, I am not the one who arranges things, but the one who listens. What is written is not what I wanted to write. Often, I understand too late what the sentence has decided in my place. At times I recognize in these figures a logic I have never consciously lived, yet which belongs to me more intimately than my everyday thoughts. They act as if they were autonomous, and yet I feel that I gave birth to them without knowing it. This paradox exhausts me. Writing means exposing oneself to being surpassed by what one produces. I cannot say that these figures are ‘me.’ That explanation is too simple and too convenient. But I cannot say either that they are foreign to me. They stand in a zone where I am neither master nor absent.”

Journals of Franz Kafka, translated by Marthe Robert, Gallimard

Igniatius feels that something within him has changed. He is lost in the role-play unfolding inside himself. He no longer understands anything… except that he is no longer merely an author who invents characters. He is the one who discovers that those he considered his characters are not strangers. They are nothing other than parts of himself which, if they know themselves as “invented” characters, do not yet know themselves from within Igniatius. To be clearer: Igniatius, when he is Don Carotte, knows him only as the companion of Sang Chaud (who has himself become Don Carotte), and he knows Anatole only as what Don Carotte has become. He now knows intellectually that each of them is, in his own way, a part of himself… but his body knows nothing of it and yet it acts. This is why he writes to Lucian to share his anxiety and his disarray…

Dear Lucian,
I am writing to you without knowing exactly what I am trying to preserve through this letter, aside from the obscure backstage of my brain—unless it is the very possibility of continuing to recognize myself in what I write. Something has changed, not abruptly, but with that insidious slowness that makes every certainty suspect. Something has crossed a threshold. I am no longer sure that I am playing, and this uncertainty troubles me more than a more definite loss would have done. Everything seems in its place, yet the very evidence of the world no longer coincides with the experience I am living.
For a long time I believed myself to be an author in the most ordinary sense of the term. I invented figures, I made them speak. I thought I kept them at a distance, like observing a mechanism whose spring one understands. Today I discover that this distance was merely a convenience. These characters are not foreign to me. They did not come to me from the outside. They arose from a place I had never taken the trouble to examine.
I know, intellectually, what this means. I could tell you, with the appropriate words, that Don Carotte, Sang Chaud, Anatole are only parts of myself. This formulation reassures me cheaply. It gives the illusion of mastered knowledge. But this knowledge does not reach me where it should. My body, for its part, knows nothing of it. It continues to act as if these figures had their own autonomy, as if I could encounter them without recognizing them.
When I am Don Carotte, I know him only in his relation to Sang Chaud. I do not perceive him as what he is within me, but as a companion, almost a witness. Anatole, for his part, appears to me only as what Don Carotte has become, never as what moves within me under this new name. Everything happens as if these parts knew one another, spoke, analyzed one another, without ever giving me access to their point of origin.
This discrepancy frightens me more than I wish to admit. I discover a discord between what I understand and what occurs. I can name. I can explain. But meanwhile something acts without consulting me. These are not foreign voices, nor autonomous characters in the dramatic sense of the words. It is more troubling. It is me, without being me as I know myself.
I feel caught in a role-play whose rules I have lost. I recognize the masks, I know where they come from, but I can no longer voluntarily put them down. They do not invade me. They move within me according to a logic that escapes me, and it is precisely this absence of manifest violence that disarms me.
I am writing to you because I fear confusing lucidity with resignation. I could accommodate myself to this situation, give it an acceptable form, integrate it into my authorial discourse. But something in me resists this elegance. I feel that if I continue like this without speaking of it, I risk taking refuge in a justification that would mask my real disarray.
I am not asking you to tell me who I am in all this. I am only asking you to help me understand how to live with this discrepancy between what I know and what I do, between what I name and what acts. I have the feeling that these characters know me better than I know myself, and this thought, as you can imagine, does not leave me at peace.
Receive this letter as the sign of an anxiety I can no longer keep at a distance, and as proof that I no longer know very well where the one who writes begins.
With a sincerity that no longer hides itself,
Igniatius