English

 The Abracadabra Story of the Moon Child

The story, if it deserves that name, that is at stake here does not present itself as an ordinary novel that one could follow from beginning to end according to the reassuring progression of a plot. It resembles rather a collection of traces: recovered notebooks, recurring drawings, letters, fragments of narratives, interrupted dialogues, philosophical quotations. Everything seems scattered, as if the story had to be recomposed from dispersed materials.

At the center of this ensemble stands a psychiatrist named Lucian. He has not always borne this name: once he was called Lucien. The modification is slight but significant. It marks an inner displacement, almost a doubling of perspective. For Lucian is not only the one who listens: he gradually becomes the one who tries to understand a set of documents that seem to tell a story—but a fragmented one.

These documents reach him through a patient named Igniatius. Igniatius is a long-standing patient. For a long time he remained almost mute. Not entirely silent, but as if held back by a profound difficulty with speech, with the very act of speaking or expressing what was happening within him. The sessions often seemed to sink into silence or into a few isolated sentences that led nowhere.

Then one day Igniatius arrives with a drawing and a small notebook containing texts—most often illegible—and drawings. From that moment something begins to move. Speech gradually loosens. Not because Igniatius describes the images he shows. On the contrary: he almost never speaks about them directly. Yet their presence acts as a trigger. As if there existed between words and images a secret connection that was not a simple repetition of one by the other. The image does not serve to illustrate the narrative, and the narrative does not serve to explain the image (or only rarely). Yet something circulates between the two.

Whenever Igniatius opens a notebook or takes out a drawing, he begins to speak, sometimes at length, but about things that at first seem foreign to what one sees: an anecdote, a reflection, a fragment of a story. At first glance there is no link. Then, at a distance, an echo appears. It is as if the image and the narrative belonged to the same network of meaning but at different degrees.

The drawings themselves display a striking coherence. The subjects change abruptly: volcanic landscapes, silhouettes, fragments of figures, isolated objects. At times the whole gives the impression of “jumping from one thing to another.” But the expression deserves here to be understood differently from its ordinary sense. Some scholars recall an older form attested as early as the fourteenth century: saillir du coq en l’asne, which later became sauter du coq à l’âne. In this primitive version the image is even stranger: it evokes the improbable attempt of a rooster trying to fertilize a donkey. The passage “from rooster to donkey” therefore does not merely describe a rupture of discourse. It suggests the improbable and incomprehensible encounter of two orders of meaning that should not meet and that nevertheless come into contact through an unexpected detour.

This is precisely what the book seems to produce.

This logic of displacement is also found in the notebooks themselves. They contain numerous literary and philosophical quotations that almost never serve as illustrations. They do not come to explain the text. They place themselves beside it, slightly askew, as if they participated in the same field of meaning without ever closing it.

Lucian therefore finds it very difficult to follow exactly what Igniatius is telling him. At certain moments he believes he perceives a story. At other moments he has the impression that Igniatius himself is searching for the meaning of what he recounts—or perhaps the meaning of what is being narrated through him.

Despite this apparent dispersion, a motif eventually emerges. It concerns a child.

In the notebooks and the gathered fragments this child gradually receives a name: “the Moon Child.” An image returns several times in the drawings. On a volcanic island made of basaltic rocks and steep cliffs, a child crosses the landscape on the back of a singular mount. The beast resembles a donkey. The child wears a blue hat far too large for him. The sky is grey-green and torn flags flutter in the wind.

This scene acts like a founding image. For despite the disorder of the notebooks, the story exists from the beginning: that of a child in search.

But this quest unfolds in an unstable world. The notebooks speak of a volcanic archipelago named “Terra Archipelago.” The descriptions evoke black rocks, burning fissures, sulphurous vapors, a sea stirred by unpredictable currents. Some islands seem ancient, as if they had always existed. Others appear barely to emerge from the sea.