Slippage

 “Writing means submitting oneself to the demand of a distancing in which the ‘I’ no longer remains as center. The one who writes is already separated from what is written, not by calculation, but because writing establishes a space in which no one can remain present to themselves.
This space is impersonal: not an absence, but an active neutrality, where what is said belongs to no one anymore. Distance there is not a simple interval; it is the very condition by which something can appear without immediately being reclaimed by habit, by mastery, by the power of naming.
What is written in this way does not seek to be grasped. It maintains itself in a relation of withdrawal, and it is in this withdrawal, in this separation that dissociates, that speech becomes readable—not because it explains, but because it lets be what it does not claim to contain.”

Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature

Dear Félix,
Sailing on an ocean of thoughts, struggling against contrary winds and the enchanting power of habit, I am writing to you in a form that may seem unnecessarily elaborate, yet I persist in believing that this indirect manner is now the only one that allows us to think without being immediately overtaken by what we thought we were describing. The distance it establishes is not an ornament; it dissociates and becomes a condition of legibility.
I wish to speak to you about Igniatius, no longer only through his narratives, but from the effect he produces—an effect that repeats itself with troubling consistency. At first I considered what I was observing as one hypothesis among others. Today I realize that it imposes itself with increasing clarity, almost without my noticing.
Igniatius presents himself as an author. He shelters behind this position with a certain elegance. He speaks of his characters as beings he shapes. I would say that he corrects them and resolutely leads them toward a certain form. Yet what I have been perceiving for some time now contradicts this displayed mastery and unsettles me somewhat. The figures he evokes do not behave like docile creations. They arise and transform themselves without asking his consent. He then strives to give these movements an aesthetic justification, as if the framework of writing were sufficient to contain what escapes him.
It is here, in my view, that a more troubling line begins to take shape—quite literally. Igniatius does not so much create his characters as grant them a right of passage. They seem to stem not from a voluntary invention, but from a form of possession that Igniatius then attempts to rationalize after the fact. Under the pretense of being the one who writes, he becomes the one through whom something happens… without truly being its initiator. This confusion, far from alarming him, sometimes seems to reassure him… which is not the case for me.
From this perspective, the revolt of the characters ceases to be a convenient metaphor. It becomes a symptom. The disappearance of Don Carotte, followed by his reappearance under the name Anatole, is not a simple narrative choice. It corresponds to an identity shift that Igniatius no longer governs. He speaks of this change as a necessity internal to the narrative, but I mainly perceive his effort to follow a movement already set in motion.
The case of Sang Chaud seems to me even more revealing. This figure, initially peripheral, if I may say so, now occupies a vacant space without Igniatius having truly decided upon this substitution. He accepts it after the fact. He explains it by integrating it into his discourse. But he did not provoke it. Once again, the author arrives after what has occurred.
I do not use lightly the expression “disturbance of personality.” I am not speaking of a spectacular fragmentation, nor of a clear break with reality. I am speaking of a persistent porosity between positions. I am also speaking of a difficulty in maintaining a stable boundary between the one who tells the story and those who appear within it. This porosity manifests itself less in what Igniatius asserts than in what he attempts to justify.
You will tell me that writing has always functioned in this way, that it authorizes such slippages. I would respond that, with Igniatius, the movement no longer goes from the author to the text, but from the text to the author. He finds himself affected by his own figures as if he were their place of reception rather than their source.
I entrust this reading to you with caution. It is in no way definitive. It nonetheless helps me understand why these characters seem to rise up. They change names. They occupy other places. They do not rebel against an overly severe master. They take advantage of an authority already weakened.
I write this to you knowing that this hypothesis may shift your gaze, just as it has shifted mine. It is precisely this displacement that I wish to preserve, before an overly hasty and insistent normality comes to close it again.
With an attention that still seeks to remain lucid,
Lucian