(188) The abracadabrante story of Child Moon

Where we might come to understand that a slight displacement within the visible can become the place from which several stories are made possible.

– Do you remember the recent image Félix was looking at not long ago?
– The one with the little fellow walking along?

– That very one… It provides a good way of showing the evidential paradigm…
– What is that?
– I shall try to be concrete, without dwelling on Morelli… or Freud, and so on. Above all, Ginzburg’s method introduces an essential rule, one that Félix had almost broken: not to name too quickly what a clue allows us only to suppose.
While Lucian travels, leaving here and there a few clues that may join other clues he gathers along the way, it may be worth recalling that the evidential paradigm is the name given to this way of looking whose importance Carlo Ginzburg brought to light: beginning with almost insignificant details, not in order to make them say what we already know, but to allow what they merely make possible to appear.
Take this image in which a tiny figure advances along a gangway, pushing aside or moving a few things that block his passage and seeming to make his way towards a big top, while a liner remains motionless in the background and an owl occupies, slightly apart, a position whose function we do not yet know. We were tempted immediately to call this figure Lucian. Perhaps it is Lucian… but his face, his apparent age, even his clothes—which, as you know, belong to others as well—are enough to turn that identification into a hypothesis.
This is precisely where the clue begins: when we accept that seeing something does not yet mean knowing what it is we see.
The gangway indicates a passage, but it tells us neither where the person crossing it comes from nor what he will find beneath the big top; the gesture by which he clears away what hinders him may be the gesture of someone entering, yet what he moves also takes part in the fragile construction of the place towards which he is advancing. The liner, because it appears to be at a standstill, could be what brought the walking figure here just as well as what awaits some future departure. As for the owl, we see it, while nothing allows us to assert that the figure sees it. It therefore already belongs to another line of reading: that of what the spectator knows, or believes himself to know, beyond what is known by the person whose passage he is observing.
This is how certain clues left by Igniatius may encounter those of the characters we attribute to him, and then those that Lucian discovers or leaves behind in his turn. It then becomes difficult to know whether we are following the traces of someone who has passed this way, of someone who is still passing through, or of someone whose passage will become perceptible only later, when another detail comes to alter what we thought we had understood.
The evidential paradigm, then, may consist less in reconstructing the past than in remaining attentive enough to allow traces to preserve their uncertainty for a while. For a clue is not proof that one particular story has taken place… it is that slight displacement within the visible from which several stories become possible.