(259) The abracadabrante story of Child Moon

 

 

Where Félix’s mind, deserting its own memory, ponders and literally discovers itself in the act of thinking. Alone before his notebook, pencil in hand, like the staff in Child Moon’s hand, he thinks that he cannot disappear as long as he thinks…

Félix’s Notebook

If I am to make any progress in understanding the situation into which I have placed myself, I must stop asking where Child Moon comes from and begin looking at what happens when he arrives. This distinction seems important to me. I must recover a sense of logic that has tended to elude me ever since I began following this entire story too closely. An origin still belongs to the past; it presupposes a point somewhere behind us that an investigation might recover. A passage, on the other hand, continues to act, involving both what precedes it and what follows. And it does so to such an extent that Child Moon would no longer be merely the effect of Igniatius, Lucian, or some other as yet unknown author, but would himself become one of the causes of what happens to them… and of what is happening to me now.

For a long time, I found the idea that a character could create his author absurd. Such a claim is obviously false if taken literally. A character clearly does not bring into existence the author who writes him. I finally understand that he can bring into being, within that man, the person he becomes through writing him. This kind of birth is no mere image without consequences, since the person who existed before drawing Child Moon could not yet have been the person who had drawn him. Just as, before reading Lucian’s letters and notebook, I was not yet the person that reading would bring into being. This simple observation opens onto something far more extensive than I would have wished. It means that the beings we believe we create participate in the transformation of those who bring them into existence.

I then wonder what would become of all my precautions if I discovered tomorrow that Lucian had invented Igniatius. As though there had never been an Igniatius sitting before him. As though there had never been any voice but his own behind the letters and narratives I have been trying for so long to disentangle. For a moment, I might believe that everything had been resolved. An entire part of this story would then have collapsed into fiction. But almost immediately I would have to acknowledge that Igniatius, even if invented, would have produced very real effects. I would have to acknowledge that he would have prompted Lucian to write, then to draw, and eventually to travel as well. He would have altered the way Lucian perceived his surroundings. Those changes would then have reached me, so that the existence of Igniatius could no longer be judged solely by asking whether or not he had lived, but also by asking the far more troubling question of what he had brought to life.

As I write this, I feel something shifting within the word, or rather within the very concept of reality. I can no longer be content simply to oppose the real to the fictional. Something that has never existed as an embodied being can produce actions in the real world. It can lead someone to an actual place or cause them to write an actual letter. It can frighten and exhaust them. None of these actions is any less real because its origin passes through fiction. Must we, then, carefully preserve the distinction between fiction and reality while ceasing to imagine them as two sealed territories? Or must we acknowledge that they seem capable of passing through one another without becoming indistinguishable?

At this point, I begin to understand what is happening to me with Lucian and Igniatius, and why their resemblance troubles me all the more as it becomes increasingly difficult to explain. I still want to know whether one is the other, or whether one has created the other. I wonder whether two people are concealed behind two names. And then another question arises: would the truth consist in confining each of them to the place assigned to him?

Everything before me reveals forms that pass through one another. I observe thoughts that no one seems able to claim entirely as their own. I wonder why Lucian and Igniatius resemble each other so closely. Might each have become a place through which something of the other passes?

And as for me, what could possibly allow me to believe that I am exempt from this confusion which I am polite enough to call circulation?