“But this knowledge, which the mind’s keenest perceptions had failed to give me, had just been brought to me, hard, brilliant, strange, like a salt crystallised by the sudden reaction of pain. I was so accustomed to having Albertine beside me, and suddenly I saw a new face of Habit. Until then I had regarded it chiefly as an annihilating power that suppresses the originality and even the awareness of our perceptions; now I saw it as a fearsome divinity, so firmly bound to us, its insignificant face so deeply embedded in our hearts that, should it tear itself away, or turn away from us, this deity we had scarcely been able to distinguish inflicts sufferings more terrible than any other, and is then as cruel as death.
The most urgent thing was to read Albertine’s letter, since I wanted to consider the means of bringing her back. I felt that these were within my grasp because, as the future exists only in our thoughts, it still seems to us capable of being altered by a last-minute intervention of our will.”
Marcel Proust, Albertine disparue, Gallimard
Where Lucian, in a letter to Félix, does more than acknowledge that he has, in a sense, forgotten Igniatius. He feels the almost compromising nature of this omission. Though he claims to be travelling in his footsteps, he discovers that, as he reflects on writing, the self, the characters and their transformations, Igniatius has vanished from his letter, as though he himself had already begun, without even noticing, to take his place.
My esteemed Félix,
I have just reread the letter I sent you. I thought I had said everything in it. Something struck me. A kind of discrepancy. A slight delay—the word is somewhat vague—unpleasant enough, which becomes unmistakable once it has managed to conceal itself precisely within the activity through which we thought we were examining such things. To put it simply: I forgot Igniatius. You are better placed than anyone to understand the gravity of this lapse.
Admittedly, to speak of forgetting may be excessive, since I do speak to you about him, and about his drawings. I even acknowledge that it was in trying to reproduce some of his gestures that something began to change in my own way of seeing. You will surely understand what I mean. He is present in the letter as a place marked on a map might be. A map we no longer consult because we believe we already know where we are going. I mention him. I pass through him. I attribute to him the drawings that brought me here. Then, almost immediately, I continue without him. As though the movement that interested me could now continue between his characters and my own journey… In doing so… I dispense with… I even, curiously enough, I admit, forget the very person whose traces I have come to seek.
Naturally, I am trying to correct this by writing to you today. I immediately see the trap of adding what is missing. That would mean putting Igniatius back into the compartment I had left empty and considering the problem solved. But what interests me is precisely not that he was missing from my letter. It is that I did not notice while I was writing it. That is considerably more embarrassing.
I am here for him. At least, that is how I described the journey. I do not think I was lying when I did so. I wanted to follow his traces, to understand what he had seen or thought he had seen, to find the places to which certain images seemed to correspond. I wanted to examine what he had made of Pinocchio the Other, of the Moon Child, and of those who subsequently began to proliferate around them, with that singular ability certain characters have to make the narrative that purported to contain them suddenly seem too narrow. All this remains true. Yet, at the very moment I was writing to you, I managed to make the person whose work prompted my journey disappear almost entirely.
I was trying to understand why I write to you. Perhaps it is to escape the prison of the self.
I do not really know what that means, and I would be careful not to decide too quickly that it means anything at all. We both know well enough how easily an omission, when scrutinised with sufficient insistence, becomes a perfectly convincing symptom of whatever we already wanted to discover. Yet neither can I act as though it were insignificant. It is precisely this position in between that is beginning to make me uneasy.
There is one thing I cannot forget… I remember your slight suspicion.
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