Where the parrots discover and deliver to us... repeating them in their own way... a few confidences concerning an image...
– Tell us, if you please, what you see on... or in this image...
– I hardly know what to tell you... I cannot see very much in it...
– To begin with... do click on the image to enlarge it...
– There... I can see more clearly now... At first, the image might be taken for a shipwreck scene. An ocean liner, still recognisable despite its tilt and the tangle surrounding it, occupies the left-hand side of the image... in the centre, a small youthful figure moves along a narrow gangway; around him lie an accumulation of poles and fragments of wood. On the right rises a big top, of which we can see only the exterior. And finally, an immense owl crosses a large part of the image. An immediate narrative reading would be tempting: a castaway leaves his ship, makes his way through the wreckage, encounters an owl and heads towards a circus.
– But the conversation with our master precisely forbids us that easy way out. Not because it would provide the “correct interpretation” with which all the others should be replaced, but because it enables us to distinguish between what has been deliberately constructed, what the image leaves relatively uncertain, and what the spectator adds almost in spite of himself.
– Yes... the first lesson of this image might therefore be methodological. It sets a trap for the desire to tell a story.
– That is exactly it... a trap...
– We would like to know who the figure is, where he comes from, what he is looking at and where he is going. Yet several of these certainties dissolve as soon as we examine the clues. Nothing, in particular, allows us to identify him as Lucian, even though that hypothesis may arise from certain elements of the story to which the image belongs.
– I see... on the contrary, his face is distinctly youthful and does not immediately correspond to the known representations of Lucian.
– His identity therefore remains suspended.
– Nor does the costume itself allow us to decide, since, if I remember rightly... it is shared by several figures... an oversized blue coat, green trousers, rolled-up sleeves revealing a flesh-pink lining.
– Yet this repetition of the costume does not neutralise identity. It is itself a problem.
– The garment seems to belong less to the person wearing it than to pass through several characters. Above all, it never quite fits them...
– ...it is always too large.
– A gap therefore remains between the being and its covering. That gap makes visible what would normally remain hidden, since the sleeves, necessarily rolled back, reveal their flesh-coloured lining.
– Here, our conversation with the master allows us to establish an essential genealogy. This inner “flesh” does not originally derive from the coat worn by the Little Prince, even though an iconographic resemblance may retrospectively be envisaged.
– Then where does it come from?
– It belongs to a much older exploration, rooted in perceptual experiences dating back to adolescence and in a long attempt to find a way of “saying” what could not then be made communicable without immediately being diminished or distorted. The image of the flayed body is more relevant here than that of a marvellous or childlike garment... what ought to lie beneath the skin becomes visible. The later reading of Didier Anzieu’s The Skin Ego brought a new intelligibility to this exploration, without thereby reducing the coat to the illustration of a psychoanalytic concept.
– So... the garment would function as a kind of paradoxical skin...
– Exactly... its exterior is blue and its interior is flesh. But the interior reveals itself only because the covering does not coincide with the body. The failure to fit becomes the condition of appearance.
– If the coat were “the right size”, its flesh would remain hidden...
– On another scale, the big top takes up this structure and reverses it.
– What was flesh on the inside of the coat becomes, on the big top, an outer surface. The immense pink, red, ochre and yellow covering displays outside what the small coat kept within. And yet this reversal does nothing to open the interior of the big top to us.
– We still see only its skin.
– That is one of the fundamental paradoxes of the image... showing the reverse side does not mean abolishing the covering.
– Interiority made exterior becomes a surface in its turn...
– The big top also possesses a property that neither a house nor a temple would possess... it can be dismantled. It is never definitively an architecture. It is erected, remains standing for a time through an arrangement of masts, poles, ropes and tensions...
– ...then it is dismantled... the elements remain, while the interior space they produced disappears.
– This “inside”, then, is not a permanent substance hidden behind the canvas. It is a possibility temporarily produced by a configuration.
– And this property sheds light on the strange network of wood cluttering the figure’s path. These are not merely arbitrary pieces of wreckage. Their shape, colour and nature relate them very precisely to the elements supporting the big top. What prevents passage is therefore of the same nature as what makes the structure stand.
– This correspondence introduces an essential ambiguity between obstacle and support.
– A pole lying across the gangway hinders the figure... incorporated elsewhere into a structure, a similar pole keeps the covering taut.
– Function therefore does not reside in the thing itself, but in its position and in the system of relations in which it participates.
– The figure clears away the obstacles preventing him from moving forward, yet he is already acting among the elements of the world towards which he is heading.
– He is not making his way through a chaos external to the big top...
– ...he is making his way, perhaps without knowing it, through the very conditions of its possibility.
– His gangway is itself fragile. It hardly resembles a secure road, but rather a provisional possibility of passage. The figure moves forward...
– ...he pushes things aside and makes a way through. He clearly possesses no overall view that would allow him to know what each element he moves may be supporting. He acts locally.
– At the same moment, something remains...
– ...or rather flies... close beside him...
– ...the owl.
– Its position is one of the strangest elements in the image. It cannot simply be situated “in front of” or “behind” the figure according to the rules of a homogeneous perspective. The poles surrounding, and sometimes covering, the small human figure instead disappear beneath the owl’s plumage. The owl seems to belong to another plane of representation. It shares the image with the figure without necessarily sharing his field of vision.
– And according to our master, he does not see it.
– Yet he feels it...
– You are right... That distinction is crucial. This is neither an ordinary perception lacking sufficient precision, nor some commonplace psychological intuition. The figure experiences a presence he cannot locate, to which he need not necessarily give a form and which, above all, he knows he cannot allow others to see that he experiences. Such sensitivity crosses the boundary of what is commonly accepted... to reveal it would immediately expose the person who experiences it to disqualification.
– So the owl does not simply represent “what the figure sees”.
– No... It could be what the image makes visible to the spectator from a presence that remains, for the figure himself, formless and nameless.
– So... the figure feels...
– And the image gives form.
– The spectator... meanwhile... sees.
– But none of these three modes possesses the entirety of the event. Nor, for that matter, does the spectator know any more about the meaning of the owl. Nothing allows us to decide whether it is benevolent or malevolent. It does not visibly protect the figure... nor does it attack him.
– It can be reduced neither to a guardian angel nor to an evil omen.
– It accompanies him without our even knowing whether this accompaniment is meant for him. It might perhaps be someone else’s “help”...
– ...the spectator’s, for instance...
– ...for whom it makes perceptible something to which the figure himself cannot bear witness. Its plumage also introduces a remarkable chromatic kinship. It belongs to the same family of blues as the figure’s coat and the hull of the ocean liner.
– Its eye and beak, by contrast, repeat the bright yellow of the portholes.
– These correspondences do not compel us towards any single symbolic translation. Rather, they invite us to consider distant elements together: hull, garment, plumage...
– As well as the portholes... the eye... and the beak.
– In the first group we find three very different kinds of covering: a machine that transports, a garment that wraps a body, plumage that covers a living creature.
– And in the second?
– In the second appear places of passage: the porthole... a passage between inside and outside, the eye through which vision takes place, the beak through which a cry or a voice may pass. The image thus silently organises a circulation between coverings and openings.
– And the ocean liner?
– The ocean liner itself is in a paradoxical situation. Its portholes remain lit even though its structure seems caught in what we might call a disaster. Human light survives within a machine that no longer necessarily fulfils its function of transportation. Outside it, the figure now proceeds on foot...
– Provided he actually came out of the ship...
– He moves, or stands, upon a fragile passage. The gigantic technical means designed to carry one across the world has lost its sovereignty... passage once again becomes an uncertain operation performed by a body.
– The big top then becomes much more than a destination.
– We know what a big top is materially: a stretched canvas that temporarily produces an inside through everything supporting it from the outside. But that inside does not exist in any absolute sense.
– We must immediately ask the question: inside for whom?
– For the person who remains outside, there is at first only a covering.
– For the person who enters, the same space becomes an environment.
– For the person who knows nothing of the big top, this inside constitutes no lived reality whatsoever. Erecting the structure does not therefore magically bring into being some universal “interior”...
– ...it creates the possibility for someone to be inside.
– This is where the image meets reading. The spectator-reader does not need literally to walk alongside the figure. His participation begins as soon as he agrees to enter the space produced by the work.
– He then partially leaves his own world without ever being able to shed it entirely...
– ...he brings with him his memory, his experiences, his expectations, his errors of recognition, his associations. The interior he enters therefore remains undefined, not because it is empty...
– Why is that?
– Because it cannot be completely determined before his participation.
– Then that interior might also become his.
– But it never definitively becomes his property. The big top will have to be dismantled.
– The reader will have to leave.
– A book is closed, a room is left, one’s eyes turn away from an image. The structure that had made an inner experience possible then ceases to be assembled in that particular form. The elements remain: sentences, colours, images, memories, perhaps a transformation of the gaze. But the space that had formed between them no longer exists in quite the same way as before.
– And yet... it can be erected again.
– The same work can be read again.
– But neither the place nor the person entering it will be quite the same.
– The big top thus offers an especially precise representation of the work: not a container permanently enclosing a meaning, but a structure capable of making an interior. That expression is probably more accurate than “possessing an interior”. The work does not hold somewhere behind its surface a definitive content to which one need only gain access. It possesses a capacity for assembly...
– ...it temporarily brings elements together, produces a habitable space, welcomes participation, then comes apart without necessarily disappearing.
– The small figure stands exactly at the approach to this possibility.
– He moves along a fragile gangway.
– He pushes aside what prevents him from passing, without knowing that these obstacles may belong to the same system as what supports the place towards which he is heading.
– He feels a presence he cannot see and must not name.
– The spectator sees that presence but does not know what it wants, or even whether it “wants” anything at all.
– And before them rises an immense covering turned inside out, whose flesh has become surface, whose interior exists for them, as yet, only as a possibility.
– So perhaps the image does not simply tell the story of a journey towards a big top?
– It stages the very conditions of entering the work. In order to pass, one must move forward without possessing the plan... move things without always knowing what one is supporting or disturbing... accept that a presence may be felt without being named...
– ...encounter a covering whose reversal does not exhaust its interiority...
– ...and above all enter a space from which one knows, or will discover, that one day one must emerge again.
– The big top is erected.
– Someone enters.
– Something happens.
– Then it is dismantled.
– What remains is not the interior...
– ...it is the possibility that another interior may come into being.
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