Where Félix discovers that there is, there among the images and what is said in the notebooks and exercise books, something that still resembles the river of his childhood: the rock is not outside the current; it too is caught within it, but its resistance makes the shape of a passage appear, for an instant.
Félix’s Notebook
This idea makes me understand differently what I have been writing for some time about those I observe and, even more, about what happens to me while I am observing them. I have often spoken of entering their notebooks, their drawings, their letters, everything that has accumulated there without yet forming, at least for me, a whole of which I could say where it begins or where it ends, but the word entering quickly becomes a convenient way of speaking if I do not make clear what this entry requires of me. Perhaps entering means precisely this: carrying out certain movements that what I read makes necessary without being able to carry them out in my place.
I sometimes return to a drawing because another one, discovered much later, has changed it… or, in any case… has changed the way I was able to see it. I bring together two gestures that no indication tells me to connect. I notice that a clumsiness recurs, then that this repetition differs slightly from the one before it, and that, by continuing to differ, it perhaps ceases to be a clumsiness. I see a hat that is too large, a coat that hangs loose, a missing face, and I no longer know whether I am simply looking at the characteristics of a character or at the successive traces of something that has tried to take shape by passing through several hands.
And while I am doing this, something becomes difficult to ignore… what I do while reading begins to resemble what those I read are doing. Lucian follows Igniatius’s traces. Igniatius follows those of characters whom he himself may not know how far he can call his own. I follow the traces of both of them, at first convinced that my place consists precisely in examining their circulation without becoming involved in it, and then I discover that the movement by which I pass from one to the other also passes through my own way of seeing, and now I am beginning to suspect that whoever might come after me and, in turn, follow these notebooks, these letters and these images could be caught in a comparable movement.
It would then be much more than a mise en abyme, or at least something more concrete than that phrase suggests, for it would no longer simply be a matter of representing someone who reads, searches or interprets so that some future reader might recognise himself in him. It may be that the very arrangement of these traces, or more generally that a book, when it does not merely present things to the person reading it, leads that person actually to perform something analogous to what I myself am performing.
I discover that I cannot watch the river flow past while remaining on the bank, because I am already caught in its current, and the person who, one day perhaps, reads some of these pages may discover, at the very moment he understands this, that he too has left the bank without knowing exactly when.
I cannot help finding this possibility almost disturbing.
For the reader would have received no command. No one would have told him: now participate, now enter, now abandon your place. A book might merely arrange things in such a way that continuing to read it without making certain movements becomes difficult. One would have to go back, connect, hesitate, recognise, lose something one had thought securely acquired, and then continue differently.
I understand better, then, why the word act had occurred to me, excessive though it had at first seemed. It would not designate a gesture added to reading. It would perhaps designate what happens when reading no longer consists merely in receiving what comes towards me, but in responding through a movement to what resists.
It is therefore not exactly interactivity, a word that seems far too mechanical to me here, as though one had to choose between several paths already prepared, turn right or left, open this door rather than that one. Perhaps the reader chooses nothing at all. He is simply placed in a situation in which what he reads demands of him an activity without which something remains suspended.
And perhaps it is here that I begin to understand the idea that had at first seemed excessive to me: the act performed by the reader in order to pass through a book might itself become part of the work.
Not a material part, of course. The pages will know nothing of it. The drawing will remain what it was. The printed word will not move. But between two pages, between two images, between two almost identical occurrences of the same gesture, something will actually have taken place that was written nowhere in the form of an object: the passage made by the person who reads.
I think this is what the black border around all the images helps me to understand. At first I looked upon it as a limit, then as the trace of an outside that continues beyond the image, then as the place through which those who are inside the image may have come, but I am beginning to see that it concerns the person looking as well. It reminds him that he too comes from outside and that this boundary can be crossed. Yet crossing the border does not mean imagining that one literally enters the landscape as one would enter a room. It may mean ceasing to regard the image as a finished thing standing before us, and beginning to follow what is happening within it for long enough that this movement should need us in order to continue.
And then one no longer merely enters the image.
Perhaps one enters the gesture that made it.
This thought forces me to return to my own drawings, which pleases me only moderately, because for a long time I had contrived to regard them as simple instruments of observation, almost notes taken by the hand when the sentence was no longer enough. And yet, if I in turn draw something that Igniatius drew, or something that Lucian thought he recognised in one of Igniatius’s drawings, I am not merely reproducing a form. I am reenacting a gesture that reached me after passing through other gestures, and this gesture, in passing through me, is already no longer quite the same.
A reader may do something similar when he brings together two images that no one has asked him to bring together. He does not merely receive the result of an operation performed before him. He begins that operation again, in his own way, with what he has seen in the meantime, with what he remembers imperfectly, with what he thinks he recognises, and perhaps that is why repetition matters so much here.
I had believed that repetition consisted mainly in reproducing. I now wonder whether repetition might instead serve to make visible what changes as it passes through the one who repeats. A sentence returns, but the person who encounters it again is no longer quite the person who read it the first time. A drawing returns, but other pages, other images, other memories have settled between it and us. The same hat still appears too large, only it becomes difficult to see in that disproportion exactly what we saw there before, because other things have since attached themselves to it.
Repetition, then, does not simply place the same thing before us again. It might measure what has happened within us between its two appearances.
I understand, then, why the obstacle may not be what prevents passage.
It may sometimes be precisely what compels us truly to pass.
One can continue without passing. It is enough to turn the pages. One can advance a very long way into a book without having displaced very much within oneself. But passing implies something else, perhaps no more than a slight loss of speed, a hesitation, a return that makes us discover that the place to which we have returned is no longer the place we had left.
Perhaps that, then, is the price.
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