Where Félix, journeying as much through his own thoughts as through the very places where traces left by Lucian and Igniatius are still to be found, begins to wonder whether, for a long time, he may not have been reading according to an idea far too simple of what reading means… As though a text, a notebook, a letter, sometimes even a drawing, were merely places where someone had deposited something for him to come along later and retrieve, understand, interpret, perhaps discuss, with the rather comfortable impression that there would be, on one side, what had been written or traced, and himself on the other, and between the two a kind of transmission whose success he might assess with greater or lesser tranquillity.
Félix’s Notebook
And yet I ought to remember what I had come here to do. That memory sometimes returns to me with an almost administrative clarity, and it would be easy enough to smile at the distance between that original task and what I am doing now. I was supposed to examine these documents, compare the different hands, bring dates together when dates existed, distinguish details, voices, repetitions or resemblances… try to determine who had written what, who had drawn… and what he might have drawn… what belonged to Lucian, what might belong to Igniatius, what one had received from the other or attributed to him, and above all to maintain, between what I was observing and myself, the distance required if my judgement was not to be carried away by the very object it was meant to examine.
Today… I feel no desire to return to that position… assuming, indeed, that I ever truly occupied it. But the memory of it has become useful to me in another way. It remains there like something that no longer moves, against which I can measure what, within me, has begun to move. Perhaps this is how a rock in the middle of a river makes the current visible. The water was flowing before it met the rock, and it will continue to flow beyond it, but around that motionless mass there suddenly appear eddies, foam, lines that separate and come together again, and at last one can see the speed of what, a little farther away, might have been mistaken for a momentarily tranquil surface. My original task now plays that part. It no longer tells me where I ought to return. It merely shows me how far I have moved away from the manner in which I once thought that task could be carried out.
Even when I spoke of participation, I think I still meant no more than completing what was missing, imagining what was not shown, interpreting what remained ambiguous, contributing some part of myself to what I was reading so that it might acquire greater relief. But for some time now I have been encountering something else, something far less peaceful, for it seems to me that certain writings, certain images, and perhaps books in general when they do not content themselves with obediently delivering what is expected of them, begin by disturbing the very manner in which we prepare ourselves to receive them, and that they sometimes do so by placing something directly in our path.
I think of those obstacles… those repetitions, those lengths, those detours, those resistances that might pass for defects if one assumed that the sole duty of a book were to lead its reader as comfortably as possible towards a meaning already prepared, whereas it may be that the obstacle is there precisely to prevent such comfort, to prevent the person reading from continuing to read in the way he already knows how to read, so that he is forced to do… what, exactly?
I remain seated. I am going nowhere. Before me are notebooks, loose sheets, letters, drawings, sometimes pages that seem to answer other pages without my yet knowing whether they were ever meant to meet, and materially nothing is required of me except to continue. And yet I slow down, I go back, I keep together for a while two things I would once have separated, I allow a sentence to remain open longer than I would have wished, and above all I become aware that certain habits of mine, those which ordinarily allow me quickly to recognise what I am reading and move on, are less effective here, as though what lies before my eyes were not refusing to give me something, but merely refusing to give it to me in the manner in which I had expected to receive it… And then a question occurs to me, in a form that at first seems almost excessive.
Might one have to act in order to read?
I do not yet even know quite what that verb means here. To act seems far too strong a phrase for someone who remains motionless before a few pages or drawings. Perhaps one should say only: to do something. Alter one’s pace. Go back. Wait. Connect. Allow, for a while, something to resist its name. But the more I think about it, the less secondary this almost imperceptible activity seems, for it does not simply accompany reading… there are moments when it becomes precisely that without which reading can no longer continue in the same way.
And perhaps that is what unsettles me in the question. It would not be a matter of acting after having read, as one acts after receiving an instruction, understanding an idea, or making a decision. The action, if that is indeed what it should be called, would take place within the reading itself. It would be that slight displacement which is sometimes required in passing from one page to another, from a letter to a drawing, from a notebook to a memory written down somewhere else, when merely continuing is no longer enough.
I realise then how foreign this idea would have seemed to the person I believed myself to be when I began. I would probably have said that an observer worthy of the name must above all guard himself against such movements, recognise them as effects produced within him by what he is examining, and hold them at a distance so that they do not alter his judgement. I would not even say today that this was false. I merely observe that such a precaution no longer describes what is happening to me, and that remembering it makes this change more perceptible than it would be if I simply surrendered myself to it.
And so my original function has not disappeared. It has changed its place. It was once the position from which I thought I could observe. It is now becoming the fixed point against which I discover how far I have moved.
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