(266) The abracadabrante story of Child Moon

« One night — the weather was dreadful — the waves were striking us broadside. We were on deck with the captain and the helmsman. Drops of storm-rain ran down the panes of the lantern, and the wind was howling in the rigging. All at once, a huge wave, all white with foam in the night, swept across the deck: I was carried away. Fortunately, I managed to seize hold of a rope ladder, and as I was climbing back up, spitting and panting like an old seal, I saw the helmsman making the sign of the cross: he was a Breton. The captain, leaning against the rail, was shaking his head and shrugging his shoulders as he looked out at the sea. I searched for my friend; he was no longer there. I rushed toward the helmsman; I saw that he was mumbling a prayer. Then he pulled out his large silver watch, attached to a leather cord, held it up to the lantern, and laboriously read the figure: ‘It is eleven o’clock,’ he said slowly, ‘he will swim until four.’»

Marcel Schwob

 

 

 

Where Félix believes he is examining documents from the outside, yet his effort to understand them risks drawing him into the adventure himself. The ocean liner and the possible catastrophe lend this slippage an almost physical dimension. In the course of a thoroughly labyrinthine narrative, the illegitimate temptation of imagination, in his own words, gradually guides Félix beyond his own limits. Thus he crosses the boundary that allows him to understand how Lucian — and before him Igniatius — had found themselves embarked upon a voyage in which words constitute a language that remains unknown to him. He can no longer properly maintain the distance that would allow him to see from afar what he claims to know from close at hand… He examines the temptation to believe that truth lies somewhere outside ourselves, deposited in documents whose trace need only be recovered. He even imagines, in the passages that follow, a journey by water in search of that truth, with no guarantee that it may finally be attained. He sees it in a remoteness that attracts him. He immediately wonders whether he ought not rather to say: I see it in a remoteness that it attracts…”

What happens to Félix might at first be described as a difficulty in reading. He receives Lucian’s letters, discovers Igniatius through them, and then, through Igniatius, the characters who inhabit that strange territory where Child Moon, Pinocchio the Other, Don Carotte, Sang Chaud, the parrots, and a few others make their appearance. All of this reaches him, often at second hand, sometimes at third or even fourth, and he might believe, at least in the beginning, that his task consists precisely in tracing these transmissions back to their source in order to determine their origin. In distinguishing the one who tells the story from the one who invents it. In separating the one who observes from the one who is observed. In distinguishing testimony from fiction, and truth from falsehood.

But this method still presupposes that Félix remains stable in the face of what he reads… Yet this is precisely what becomes impossible. As he progresses, reading ceases to offer him an object he could place before himself, examine from a certain distance, classify, and explain. This whole, this accumulation of points of view, begins to act upon the very way he reads. Lucian’s hesitations become his own. He is well aware of this and tries in vain to explain it to himself. Not because he adopts Lucian’s opinions, but because he unknowingly reproduces the movement of his thought. Lucian had attempted to understand Igniatius by repeating certain gestures of his. He draws after him, travelling in the traces left behind in the drawings. At first, Félix observes this behaviour with the caution of a supervisor. But eventually he finds himself doing something similar. He takes up the letters again, returns to certain details, sketches a few forms of his own in his notebook, and soon discovers that he can no longer quite tell whether these drawings illustrate what he has just understood or whether they are in the process of bringing forth an understanding he does not yet possess.

It is then that reading changes its nature.

It is no longer merely the reception of a narrative. It becomes an event within the narrative itself.