The One has no plural. What grammar calls the ones is no longer the One. Just as truths are no longer Truth, the ones are no longer the One. They retain its name, but they have lost its nature.
This distinction seems to become one of the guiding threads of Félix's notebook, for it reaches far beyond grammar to touch the very way language transforms concepts as soon as it brings them into the world of countable things. According to him, this is precisely what these drawings seem to resist: they are many without ever ceasing to bear witness to one and the same presence.
Félix's Notebook
I believe that, by observing all these drawings closely, they are gradually teaching me something I had never truly understood before.
For a long time, I thought that style existed in order to identify an author. That is, after all, what art historians tell us: a particular way of drawing a hand, a face, a tree, a quality of light supposedly allows us to identify the one who produced them. Style would function like a fingerprint. And yet, the more drawings I gather together—drawings I assumed to be by Lucian or Igniatius... or at any rate brought by him—the less convincing that certainty now appears to me.
I recognize immediately that they belong to the same universe, almost never needing to look for more than a moment. A few lines suffice... a certain economy of stroke... heavy contours... silent areas of flat colour... a restrained palette, almost ascetic... figures reduced to a handful of essential signs... spaces largely left white or, on the contrary, enclosed within architectures of ropes, branches, or stones. All of it speaks with a single voice.
And yet that voice never tells me who is speaking.
There lies the paradox.
The unity of the style is unquestionable; the identity of its author remains uncertain.
I therefore begin to wonder whether I have been mistaken from the outset by confusing style with identity.
If style unifies, identity distinguishes.
Perhaps they are not the same operation.
I could almost go further.
Style sometimes seems to work against identification.
The more coherent the drawings become, the less identifiable their authors—or perhaps their single author—appear.
As though unity were gradually absorbing difference.
That thought leads me toward another, stranger still.
Our language brings together two words that seem to move in opposite directions: identity and identical.
Identity designates what makes a being unique.
The identical designates what may be repeated.
Yet both words derive from the same root: idem—"the same."
How can the same produce both uniqueness and repetition?
I do not believe this ambiguity is accidental.
To be oneself—is it to remain the same through time... or to be identical to another, sharing with that other the same form?
The same therefore works in two directions.
It founds the person... while at the same time founding the series.
Suddenly I begin looking differently at the figures inhabiting these drawings.
I had believed there were many of them.
Now I begin to wonder whether, in truth, they are far fewer than I had imagined.
They change roles more often than they change being.
Don Carrot.
The Moon Child.
Lucian.
Igniatius.
The Traveller.
The Reader.
The Draughtsman.
They sometimes seem to exchange places with astonishing ease.
The same cloak passes from one to another.
The same walking staff returns.
The same bare feet.
The same broad hat.
The same silhouette, almost always slightly inclined.
I no longer know whether the characters wear the costume—or whether the costume wears them.
The garment then ceases to be an attribute.
It becomes almost a character in its own right, circulating from one body to another like a function rather than a possession.
I can almost imagine a character leaving one drawing, quietly crossing the white margin, and entering the next without changing appearance at all.
The reader... the one who looks... like me... continues to give him a different name.
But the drawing itself seems to smile at such caution.
And if one were to grant it the faculty of speech, it might simply say:
"Look more carefully."
For even when a face changes, something remains...
Or perhaps the opposite is true.
The face remains, while the name changes.
Here I rediscover an old intuition that keeps returning under different forms.
Perhaps the characters are not individuals.
Perhaps they are positions—ways of inhabiting the story.
Today Lucian occupies that place.
Tomorrow it will be Don Carrot...
Then the Moon Child...
Then perhaps someone else.
The costume therefore does not conceal identity.
Perhaps it reveals that identity itself is mobile.
I also notice that the faces participate in this same strange economy.
They are scarcely described.
A few strokes are enough.
It is almost as though the drawing—or the one who draws it—refused to individualize the figures too strongly.
What matters is not their portrait.
It is their presence.
I then begin to wonder whether portraiture is, in the end, a form of signature.
To name...
To describe...
To distinguish...
To recognize...
All these belong to one and the same desire:
to fix.
Yet these drawings seem to resist every such fixation.
They prefer to leave their beings available... for another story... another reading.
Perhaps this is also why I can no longer think of these images as a collection.
The very word becomes insufficient.
A collection gathers together distinct objects.
Here, I have rather the impression of observing the metamorphoses of a single image.
Each drawing would be less a new work than a variation upon a deeper image that never entirely reveals itself.
That image—how shall I put it?... invisible... unreachable, rather... never ceases searching for its form.
It may become a circus.
Then a sea.
Then a tree...
Then two parrots...
Then a child...
Then a head carried upon the waves.
Yet every time I recognize less the subject represented than the manner in which the world itself appears.
Perhaps this, in the end, is true unity.
Not the unity of an author.
Still less that of a character.
But the unity of a gaze.
And that thought troubles me almost as much as it reassures me.
For if I recognize the same gaze everywhere, it becomes less and less necessary to know what name to give it.
I even begin to wonder whether style is precisely what remains once identity ceases to be a question.
As though style were a presence older than any name.
Or, more precisely:
a presence that, having passed through many names, ultimately belongs completely to none of them.
A remark that had at first seemed almost trivial suddenly returns to me:
the word one possesses a plural.
We speak of one image...
but also of many images.
Yet before these drawings I no longer know which of these two numbers is the more accurate.
Are they many images?
Or a single image which, incapable of containing itself, continues telling itself under different forms?
If the second hypothesis is the correct one, then unity is no longer what stands opposed to multiplicity.
It is precisely what makes multiplicity possible.
The One becomes the ones.
And the ones never cease searching, without ever exhausting it, for the One from which they came.
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