Félix continues writing his notes for a long time without truly managing to close the question. The further he advances, the more it seems to him that the Archipelago and the theater-circus secretly belong to the same structure. As though one represented in geological form what the other represents in a theatrical and shifting form.
The circus first appears as a provisional construction. Every morning it is assembled and every night it is dismantled. The canvases snap in the wind, the masts creak, the ropes tighten and then disappear once more. Nothing there possesses the massive stability of a definitive architecture. Even the stands, though possessing a certain elegance, give the impression of having been assembled for a very brief duration, almost against the world itself.
Yet Félix notices that the Archipelago possesses exactly this same quality of precarious existence. These islands too seem provisional on the scale of the forces passing through them. The volcano brought them forth. The ocean constantly reshapes them. The wind carries away their dust. The cliffs slowly collapse into the sea. Certain caverns appear and then vanish beneath the tides. Even the paths, if there are any, change after the storms.
Then a hypothesis begins to take shape in his mind.
Perhaps the theater-circus did not welcome the Archipelago as a simple exotic setting. Perhaps the Archipelago took its place beneath the big top because it represents the true nature of the theater itself. The theater-circus then becomes a mobile island. An island that travels.
A provisional formation erected among men just as volcanic lands arise in the middle of the oceans.
In a fragment from Igniatius’s notebooks, Félix finds this strange remark:
“The big top seemed to breathe beneath the night wind. The canvases slowly lifted like marine sails. At moments, the great flames painted on the walls gave the impression of drifting through the darkness like signals glimpsed from a ship.”
Félix then understands why the narratives constantly return to notions of crossing, gangways, caravans, wagons, abandoned ports. The entire circus functions like an unstable geography. It carries within itself fragments of incomplete worlds.
But another thought troubles him even more deeply.
Why does Lucian claim to have “made the journey” into the Archipelago?
Félix rereads the sentence several times. Lucian does not write that he dreamed the Archipelago. Nor does he write that he imagined it. He speaks of a journey. And this nuance becomes disturbing. For Félix knows Lucian too well to reduce this to a simple poetic metaphor. Lucian generally chooses his words with extreme caution when writing in his notebooks. If he speaks of a journey, it is because he wishes to preserve the idea of a real displacement. Even if that reality remains undecidable.
Then several hypotheses appear.
The first would be the simplest: Lucian may have taken up Igniatius’s narratives until he finally came to inhabit them inwardly. By listening, interpreting, sometimes even drawing certain figures himself, he may have begun to perceive that universe with enough intensity to speak of lived experience.
But Félix immediately senses that this explanation remains insufficient. Something resists him, something he struggles to grasp.
For Lucian’s descriptions sometimes possess a sensory precision difficult to explain through mere imaginative contamination. The notebooks evoke the metallic smell of rain upon hot basalt, the very particular sound of volcanic cavities when the sea wind rushes into them, certain colors of the sky before oceanic storms. These are not merely literary images. They bear the mark of an almost physical experience.
Then Félix arrives at an even more troubling hypothesis.
What if the Archipelago were not exactly a place?
Or rather: not merely a geographical place.
Perhaps it exists within that ambiguous zone where psychic landscapes, narratives, and certain lived experiences cease to be entirely separable.
After all, he thinks, the theater-circus itself already functions in this way. Once beneath the big top, the spectator temporarily accepts another regime of reality. Ordinary laws continue to exist, yet they become porous. Bodies defy gravity. Voices seem to come from elsewhere. Masked figures cease to be merely actors.
The big top produces a transitory world.
Why should the Archipelago not produce the same effect?
Félix then writes:
“Perhaps Lucian is telling the truth. Perhaps he truly traveled. The only question would then be: within what kind of world?”
Then lower down he adds:
“The ancient navigators often spoke of islands before knowing whether they truly existed. Some appeared several times upon maps before disappearing. Others existed without anyone later being able to find them again. The problem was not always one of truth or falsehood. Sometimes it concerned the very nature of accessible worlds.”
This thought suddenly brings him back to the Moon Child.
For he too seems to live within this intermediate state.
Like an island glimpsed through mist.
Visible.
Perhaps real.
But according to a mode of reality the other characters still struggle to understand completely.
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