(260) Reader

 

Where Félix, still holding his staff, makes his way through his writings as ideas make their way through his thoughts. 

 

Félix’s Notebook

I know Lucian through his letters, Igniatius through Lucian and through the texts in which his name appears. Someone who knew me only through these pages could say exactly the same about me. They would see me here, bent over this notebook, writing down what is suggested to me by what lies before my eyes and what is taking place inside my head. At times, a peculiar sensation comes over me when I imagine this reader, who might regard me with the same distance from which I occasionally regard Igniatius. They might think that I am merely a character, even as I can distinctly feel the table beneath my arm and the weight of my hand resting upon my worn notebook.

Yet this sensation proves nothing, and that is precisely what interests me now. Igniatius, when he writes, must surely feel what I feel. The mistake would be to conclude from this that we are identical or equally fictional. The question that now opens up is stranger and simpler: from what position do we decide that something belongs to the narrative and that something else remains outside it?

I believed I occupied such a position because my role was that of supervisor. I am finally discovering the quiet presumption contained in that word. The idea that there exists a place somewhat higher, however slightly, from which the movements of the other become visible. That one can look without being looked at by what one observes, understand without being transformed by what one understands. And Child Moon, without saying a word, without even looking at me, since his face so often remains concealed, has been enough to make that position unstable.

I am therefore no longer certain that there is an outside to the narrative. I suspect that there must necessarily be one, but none of these possible outsides is the last. Igniatius may believe himself to live outside his characters, Lucian outside Igniatius, myself outside Lucian, and a reader may perhaps believe himself to be outside me… Each may discover, in turn, that the threshold from which he was observing was already contained within another space he could not see.

An image then comes to me, less frightening than I would have expected. That of doors opening one behind another, without our ever being able to reach the last. And this might happen without any architect having intended to lose us in a labyrinth. Each opening would reveal a space that the preceding doorway could not contain. I wonder whether an entire work, whatever its nature, might not be made in this way: a kind of construction enclosed within its own boundaries, or something like a succession of passages, each transforming the one who crosses it and, through that very transformation, changing what has just been traversed.

The author, then, would no longer simply be the one who stands at the beginning, the reader the one who arrives at the end, and the character the one who remains between them. They would be provisional positions within the same movement. If the one who writes receives something from what he writes, the one who reads adds something through the way he receives it. A character, too, is capable of changing the one who brings him into being. And what we call the work would be less an object passed from one to another than what happens in the course of that transmission.

I understand better now why Child Moon eludes me each time I believe I have caught up with him. I was looking behind him for someone who might have brought him into existence. He shows me, ahead of him, those whom he continues to bring into being. In searching for his origin, I discover his passages.

I wanted to know who his author was. I am beginning to understand that it would be more fitting to ask what each of us becomes when, for a moment, Child Moon passes through us.