(84) The abracadabranche story of Child Moon

“To understand that the capacity of a major hypothesis to resolve minor and independent enigmas may constitute an argument for its robustness, one must dwell upon one final methodological concept proposed by the astronomer and epistemologist William Herschel following an intuition of Sir Isaac Newton. It is the concept of vera causa, or ‘true cause,’ in Newton’s language. Herschel gives a formal definition to this concept by proposing that, within a theory, causal agents — those supposed to explain phenomena — must be verae causae, that is to say causes which, according to this definition, exist and act, but which moreover produce other phenomena than those which led to their proposal. To put it more clearly, the vera causa is an explanatory cause characterized by the fact that it is capable, through radiation outward, of explaining new and different facts from those that presided over its discovery. It is a powerful concept for evaluating the quality and strength of an idea.”

Baptiste Morizot, The Lost Gaze, Actes Sud

Where Félix, confronted with the drawings Lucian has sent him, reflects upon the causes and effects they produce…

Félix’s Notebook

I return constantly to this idea of Herschel’s that Lucian once mentioned to me almost distractedly, as though it held for him only marginal interest. The vera causa. The true cause. That whose reality is recognized by the fact that it explains more than what it was originally supposed to explain.
I am beginning to wonder whether this entire affair of the drawings is not precisely taking on that troubling form.
For after all, what truly lies before me?
At the beginning there were only a few drawings. Then notebooks. Then reported words. Then this figure of the Moon Child. Then Don Carotte. Then Pinocchio the Other. Then the parrots. Then Igniatius himself. And each time Lucian seemed intent on maintaining a cautious separation between these beings, as though they were distinct presences of which he was merely the embarrassed witness… Yet something resists… and returns… The same logic traverses all the figures. Everywhere I rediscover the same nuclei: silence before speech, the portrait before the face, the character seeking to emerge from his own figure, captivity within the book, oversized coats, hidden gazes, initiatory crossings, thresholds, ruins, islands, spirals, doubles, voices relayed through other voices.
At first I believed I was merely recognizing stylistic obsessions. That happens among writers or draftsmen. Certain themes repeat themselves because they constitute their inner world. But here repetition possesses another nature. It acts less as decoration than as a force of propagation. That is what troubles me.
My hypothesis, following Igniatius’s own, according to which Lucian would be the author of the drawings, was initially meant to explain only one very limited thing: the strange proximity between certain sketches found in his possession and those Igniatius claimed to have discovered in the gallery. Yet this hypothesis now begins to illuminate far broader phenomena. It would explain Lucian’s discomfort whenever he speaks of Igniatius. It would explain his almost excessive refusal to acknowledge certain resemblances. Above all, it would explain this recurring impossibility surrounding Igniatius’s presence.
I carefully note this word: impossibility.
Each time I question Lucian about concrete details concerning this man, something withdraws. Not like an ordinary lie. Rather like a construction struggling to sustain the weight of its own materiality.
Igniatius exists abundantly within the drawings, within the reported words, within the notebooks, within the effects he produces upon Lucian. Yet he exists very little in the world itself. I could almost say that he possesses more narrative reality than objective reality. And this is where the notion of vera causa becomes dangerous.