Where, during Lucian’s journey, one sees that whoever follows traces would do well, from time to time, to look behind and around himself… he might discover that, while searching for the passage of others, he is already leaving traces of his own…
… and where one discovers, with some surprise, that in a puzzle, the final image might not be created by the pieces…
– Do you see what our master means?
– I don’t see what you hear…
– Could you tell me… whether what I have just heard… means anything?
– You would first have to tell me what you heard…
– There was something about a final image… which… in a puzzle, might not be created by the pieces…
– I see… I hear you perfectly well…
– And I understand nothing of it…
– As our master used to say… it means that the image, before becoming a puzzle…
– … an image broken into pieces…
– That image was already there, no longer as a visible image…
– Then how?
– As a principle of belonging. The assembly… of the pieces… does not produce the origin.
– I think you are playing on words… somewhat… if not considerably more!
– At most… I might be playing with words…
But to return to the image… you see… assembling the pieces makes it perceptible. Understand that this is not a matter of returning to some vanished beginning…
– But then!
– It is a matter of allowing a coherence that was already at work within every piece to appear.
– Each fragment, if I understand correctly… therefore carries more than itself.
– Precisely… It carries the whole in an invisible form.
– Like the letters of a word… or the words of a book…
– That is very precisely what was no doubt so fascinating in the book Life: A User’s Manual. Have you read it?
– No… but our master told us about it…
– The novel is constructed like an immense puzzle, but Perec, Georges… the author, adds a striking idea…
– Which one?
– The person who makes the puzzle…
– The one who breaks the image into pieces…
– Yes, well, that person already has in mind the difficulties that will confront the one who solves it.
– You mean that the maker and the player converse through the very shapes of the pieces!
– The puzzle becomes a silent conversation between two intelligences separated in time.
– That is paradoxical, to say the least!
– You are right… and you may also observe that when one finishes a puzzle…
– I understand… the game disappears!
– The more perfect the image becomes, the less puzzle remains. The puzzle lives in incompletion. Once completed, it ceases to be a search and, if we push the idea a little further, we might consider it dead.
– A dead image…
– In that sense, the puzzle closely resembles thought. A thought that is completely finished often ceases to think. It becomes doctrinal.
– Rather like you… piece after piece… you are beginning to resemble our master…
– Perhaps that is where Don Carotte, Pinocchio the Other… and others… never seem to be trying to complete the world…
– They are trying to discover which pieces already belong to the same movement.
– Lucian, Félix, Igniatius, ourselves, Don Carotte… neither make nor constitute a totality.
– We gradually discover that our voices fit together…
– … without ever merging.
– The reader believes, or would like to believe, that he is assembling the characters. But…
– … perhaps it is the book that, silently, is assembling the reader.
– The true puzzle is therefore no longer the one laid out on a table.
– It is the one in which each piece discovers that it has always belonged to an image whose existence it knew better…
– … than the way in which it would appear.
– In other words, the difficulty was not the absence of the image…
– … but the absence of a gaze capable of recognising its living unity.
– Thus the puzzle is no longer merely a metaphor for knowledge…
– … it becomes a phenomenology of appearance. Each piece is one way in which the whole appears, and the whole exists nowhere else than in these successive appearances.
– The origin, then, lies neither before the fragments nor after they have been brought together…
– … it circulates between them, discreet yet insistent, like that coherence which precedes every demonstration…
– … and which one finally comes, one day…
– … almost in spite of oneself…
– … to recognise.
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