“ My intention was to create the most precise literary portrait possible of an imaginary intellectual character as precise as possible. In reality, I proceeded by adjusting together a sufficient number of immediate observations about myself in order to give some impression of possible existence to a perfectly impossible character.”
Letter of May 10, 1936, to Mr. Goud, Paul Valéry, Œuvres II, Gallimard, collection “Bibliothèque de la Pléiade”, p. 1381.
Félix’s notebook
I am beginning to believe that the Moon Child must above all not be understood as a consoling figure. That would even be the most immediate error, and therefore the most dangerous one. His fragile appearance, his immense nocturnal coat lined with pink, his overly large hat, his attentive silence — all this could lead to a softened, almost protective reading. Yet something resists. Always.
There exists within him a fissure that never entirely closes.
I am not speaking of a psychological wound in the ordinary sense. That vocabulary quickly becomes insufficient. It is rather a kind of opening that has remained visible in his very way of inhabiting the world. As though something within him had never completely adhered to common reality. Not through refusal. Still less through incapacity. But because he perceives within every thing an additional depth that others immediately cover over with usage, habit, or language.
Perhaps that is what troubles Lucian so deeply when he looks at certain drawings.
The figures appearing around the Moon Child always seem to be emerging from unfinished matter. They never possess the tranquil stability of fully constituted characters. They keep their own birth visible. Or their own collapse. I no longer know how to distinguish the two.
Today I am looking at that image where he appears seated upon a narrow beam, lost within an entanglement of ropes, branches, and curtains resembling at once backstage scenery and roots. Nothing there possesses a truly stable boundary. Theater and forest interpenetrate one another. The wood of the walkways becomes branch. The vines take on the appearance of ship rigging or circus ropes. One no longer knows whether one stands within a setting constructed by men or within an organic growth older than every human stage.
And he remains there, suspended.
That is what strikes me first: he is not truly seated. He maintains balance. His bare feet hang within the void as though they no longer entirely belonged to the solid world. Even his posture contains an ancient fatigue. A calm weariness. Not the weariness of a defeated being, but of a being listening to something others do not hear.
Then there is the bird.
That immense blue owl — or perhaps something even older than an owl — does not appear merely as a companion. It stands beside him with an almost disturbing proximity. Its gaze remains open while the Moon Child’s face disappears beneath the shadow of the hat. As though the creature were seeing for him. As though a part of his perception had left the human face to migrate into that nocturnal animal.
I then think again of the ancient figures of the Ziz, that gigantic bird from archaic cosmologies, creature of heights and thresholds, intermediary between worlds. But here the myth itself seems wounded. The bird does not dominate the sky. It shares the precariousness of the beam. Its talons struggle to grip the unstable balance of the setting. Even its eyes carry something anxious.
That is what makes this image so “foreign.”
It does not represent a harmony between the child and nature. It keeps visible the tension linking them.
The ropes crossing the space could almost pass for remnants of an old captivity. They resemble the survivals of a dismantled carousel, an abandoned circus, or a forgotten machinery whose characters would nonetheless continue inhabiting the deserted structures. Nothing has entirely disappeared. The attachments remain visible.
Even the colors participate in this.
The pink interior of the coat discreetly survives within the folds of the garment, while the entire space seems invaded by dark reds, deep greens, nocturnal blues. No direct light comes to organize the world. Everything seems illuminated from some lateral depth, as in certain dreams where things become visible without any identifiable light source being present.
There is in this image something resembling a scar become landscape.
Even the Moon Child’s face participates in this logic. Or rather, his absence of face. For that immense hat does not function as a simple mask. A mask generally hides something already formed. Here I sometimes have the opposite impression: the hat protects a region of the world where the face has not yet fully completed its birth.
That is perhaps why, in other drawings, his eyes are so often closed.
They are not eyes closed to the world. They are eyes occupied elsewhere. Like certain creatures of the depths whose organs seem useless at the surface but become necessary within other regimes of light.
I then return to that idea of Theodor W. Adorno: a true work keeps the fissure visible instead of producing a deceitful harmony. The Moon Child seems to me to belong entirely to that category of beings. He repairs nothing. He reconciles nothing. His presence does not suppress the fracture. It gives it form.
And that is precisely why it becomes impossible to reduce him to a merely poetic figure.
He bears the trace of a world still seeking how to appear.
Even his movements possess that singular hesitation. He traverses ordinary spaces without apparent difficulty, yet never entirely according to accepted coordinates. As though the visible world were for him only one layer among others. The other characters obscurely sense this. The parrots especially… Though absent from this image, they too live within that strange proximity to a speech that passes through them more than it belongs to them.
Perhaps that is why so many figures seek to leave their condition behind.
Don Carotte wishes to become more than his role. Pinocchio the Other suffers from feeling his own representation clinging to him like a foreign mechanism. Igniatius brings drawings that seem to come from a place anterior to language. All of them appear to experience the same difficulty: becoming a true presence without losing the fracture from which they originate.
For the fissure is also their source.
A work completely closed within its own harmony would become uninhabitable for them. It would condemn them to decorative repetition. Whereas here something remains open. Dangerously open at times.
I am even beginning to wonder whether the Moon Child is less a character than a way for the book itself, endlessly opening and closing, to keep visible its own wound. As though the narrative obscurely knew that it proceeds from an ancient tear no explanation will ever fully suture.
Then beauty ceases to be perfection.
Beauty — or what approaches it — becomes the capacity to let a truth appear without forcing it to close too quickly.
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