In suspense

 

“It is not necessary to write directly what one thinks, but only what one can sustain at a distance. Everything that is too close is immediately distorted, becoming either a lie or complacency. Truth appears only through detours, and one reaches it only by accepting not to aim at it head-on.”

 

Franz Kafka, Letters to Felice

 

 

 

 

Félix’s notebook

 

Above all… let things happen. Before rereading… let them speak. Before bringing things together… leave them as they are. Before understanding… or pretending to do so… leave them in suspension…

The last line of the letter Lucian has just sent me stopped me more firmly than anything else: “with an attention that still seeks to be lucid.”
That still detached itself from the text like a fragment that does not fall. It does not qualify the attention; it places it under suspension. Without affirming anything, it warns. It says less what is than what might cease to be.
I note this immediately, because if I am not careful, I will turn this word into just another symptom, absorb it into an analysis that neutralizes it. Yet this still does not ask to be explained. It asks to be heard.

To say still is not to say always. Nor is it to say not much longer. It is to place oneself in an unstable interval, a time that has not yet tipped over but knows that it could. Lucian does not write that he is lucid. He writes that he is striving to be so. This nuance is crucial. It involves a silent, almost elegant struggle between vigilance and something that insists.
I wonder what Lucian already perceives, without yet wanting to name it. Perhaps he senses that the distance he constantly invokes is no longer given, that it now has to be produced sentence by sentence. Perhaps that lucidity he claims is no longer a state, but a defensive posture. The word still says this without saying it: lucidity is no longer given; it is maintained.

I also note this: to write still to someone is to transmit a burden. It is to entrust them, without admitting it, with the possibility of an after. As if Lucian were telling me: for now I am holding, but this could shift. That still includes me despite myself. It makes me an advanced witness, almost a relay.

I will not go further for the moment. Everything else will wait. The hypotheses, the cross-checks, the figures that change names, the suspicions that circulate, all of that will come, and will come too quickly. This word alone deserves to be noted and respected.

Still is not a promise…

Nor is it a threat… It might be a threshold.

I stop here. The rest is not a remainder. No doubt it will know how to return without my calling it.

F.

Félix decides to send a reply to Lucian.

 

Dear Lucian,

I am writing to you after letting your last letter rest, not out of indifference but out of prudence. It required this delay. Some texts benefit from being reread; yours demanded first to be endured. The formula with which you conclude, the one you know, has not stopped accompanying me, not as a confidence, but as a discreet indication of what is already beginning to unfold.

You put forward the idea that Igniatius presents himself as an author while in reality he would be a place of passage for figures he no longer governs. This hypothesis, as you know, is far from trivial. It involves less a theory of writing than a conception of responsibility. To be an author, even of fiction, implies a form of sovereignty. To be possessed, even by characters, implies a progressive dispossession that language then attempts to cover over.

What strikes me in your analysis is the way Igniatius always seems to arrive after the fact. You show him attentive to what occurs, quick to explain it, but rarely to initiate it. The transformations he attributes to an internal necessity of the narrative then take on a different tone. They look more like attempts at recovery than decisions. He speaks in order to catch up. He justifies in order to maintain a coherence he feels is threatened.

The disappearance of Don Carotte, followed by his reappearance under the name Anatole, seems to me significant in this respect. It is not so much the change of name that matters as the fact that it occurs without Igniatius being able to claim its source. He notes its effects, he organizes its consequences, but he does not control its impulse. The character does not transform; he shifts. And this shift directly affects the one who claimed to have created him.

As for Sang Chaud, his move toward a central position seems to confirm your reading. This figure does not wait to be summoned. He occupies the available space with an assurance that does not proceed from any permission granted. Igniatius, far from directing him, accompanies him as one follows a movement already under way. There is no conscious strategy here, but a continuous adaptation to what imposes itself.

I thus understand your use of the term possession, which you handle with a restraint that keeps it away from any unnecessary dramatization. You do not describe a spectacular invasion, but a lasting porosity. Igniatius seems traversed by his own figures, affected by them, compelled to give them meaning after they have acted. This inversion of the usual relationship between author and creation is enough to explain the feeling of revolt he attributes to his characters.

I do not believe this hypothesis should be taken as a verdict. It does, however, illuminate an essential point: what we call the insurrection of figures may well be the direct consequence of an authority already weakened. The characters do not rise up against a power that is too firm, but take advantage of a center that now maintains itself only through discourse.

Your letter, by its very precision, bears witness to the attention you pay to this slippage. You write with a lucidity you know to be exposed, and this awareness of risk seems to me, for the moment, your best guarantee. It places you in a delicate position, but one that is still legible.

I send you these remarks not to contest your reading, but to acknowledge its scope. It seems to me that you are touching something that is right, and perhaps uncomfortable, for each of us. If Igniatius is less an author than a being traversed, then those who observe him are not entirely sheltered from this movement.

I therefore write to you with this shared vigilance, and with the conviction that what is at stake here already exceeds the categories we use to speak of it.

Please accept the expression of my attentive regard,

Félix