(55) The abracadabrante story of Mooon Child

“This book traverses the site of a wound between our lives narrated by fictions, languages, human codes, and the rest of terrestrial life.”

Camille de Toledo, Une histoire du vertige

Every living thought inevitably ends up, one day or another, stumbling somewhat. A perfectly smooth prose sometimes gives the impression that no true inner movement has taken place.
The reader who might arrive here, after having wandered through scattered fragments of this story in no particular order, could at first believe that it is a collection of more or less distinct characters evolving within a strange setting called the Archipelago. Depending on the accidents of publication, he will have encountered the Moon Child wrapped in his oversized clothes, Pinocchio the Other uneasy with his resemblance to an earlier model, Don Carotte pursued by roots… pursuing uncertain visions and vainly trying to resolve the enigma of a Leviathan as theatrical as it is troubling, Sang Chaud murmuring behind his back, Lucian studying drawings that Igniatius claims to have found, Félix writing increasingly anxious supervision notes, perhaps even a Nounours speaking softly in the corner of a room, or a mysterious cat, whom no one has yet seen, silently crossing a scene whose importance escaped him.
All this might appear discontinuous to him. Fragmented. Perhaps even arbitrary.
And yet, as he advances, another impression may slowly begin to emerge: these figures are not arranged around the chessboard like spectators watching a game already underway. They are inside the game. Better still: they gradually discover that they themselves are pieces moving within a game whose rules none of them entirely possesses.

It is precisely what happens when Lucian, still believing he is analyzing the drawings as a psychiatrist examines the productions of a patient, decides one day to travel de visu to the islands represented in these images. Such a displacement may seem insignificant to the inattentive reader. A simple journey. Yet something shifts at that moment. Lucian imperceptibly ceases to occupy an external position. He enters the very chessboard he believed himself to be observing.
From then on, the drawings change nature. They are no longer merely representations. The islands they contain resemble possible squares of the world more than images, places capable of absorbing whoever contemplates them too long.
The reader will perhaps then understand why this story sometimes seems to build itself from almost insignificant elements. A misread word. An old expression. A slip of the tongue. A childhood memory. An animal crossing a conversation. Nothing is entirely prepared in advance. Certain pieces appear because a previous displacement suddenly renders them possible.
Thus the cat. At first merely a word lost among other modern “chats” exchanged through screens. Then the animal slowly returns toward its ancient depth: a nyctalopic creature, seeing in darkness, inhabiting thresholds, staircases, silent passages between the rooms of a house. Then the expression “to give one’s tongue to the cat” also begins to transform itself. Why to the cat rather than the dog? Why entrust one’s lost speech to this animal capable of moving through zones where the human gaze scarcely distinguishes forms?
The attentive reader may eventually begin to suspect that the characters themselves obey comparable metamorphoses. Pinocchio the Other contains something of the Moon Child. Don Carotte sometimes slides toward Anatole while Sang Chaud seems to take his place. Nounours progressively ceases to be a simple transitional object. Félix himself discovers that supervising also means being observed by what one attempts to understand.
Then the Archipelago ceases to appear as a fixed setting. Each island becomes a moving square. Each fragment read retroacts upon the previous ones. A forgotten sentence several chapters earlier suddenly returns like a move played very early in a game whose significance no one had yet understood.
And the reader himself, if he persists long enough within this discontinuous serial tale, may perhaps begin to experience a deeper unease: the sensation that he is no longer merely reading the story, but that he too is advancing within the chessboard itself.