Thematically, the book pertains to be a creative account of the true-life account of Christopher Knight, a.k.a. “the North Pond Hermit,” who lived in the Maine Lakes area for 27 years, almost with no human contact and resorting to small thefts for survival. However, its relationship to the details and “historical truth” of this real life event is quite secondary. The protagonist is never mentioned, and the locality is not named. When I was reading this book for the first time, I was a little confused, because I assumed (I know, I know) that, being a French book, this would be placed somewhere within France, but the landscapes, the details, the cultures seemed to be from another place. My second assumption was Canada. Only at the end of the book, with the little editorial note, was this information about Knight confirmed (I was not familiar with this case). Perhaps this error or my part is in itself quite interesting, as it shows us that the very idea of “nature,” which is central to Les pistes invisibles is localized and cultured, not only because there are different biomes, of course, but because these very same biomes are understood and lived differently by their human cultures.
At a given point, we read “In twenty five years, I have not seen anyone. I have lived hidden in this forest, but not like a wildman” (“homme des bois,” literally “man of the woods”). This is not an epic poem nor a survivalist fantasy. Actually, the protagonist quotes Thoreau briefly, but to put the American philosopher to shame. After all, Thoreau did “simply” a brief and superficial stint with a tamed nature, entertaining guests and returning to civil society whenever needed. The Pistes‘ protagonist aim is to disappear, somewhat. The text is a sort of introspective, unorganized essay about the protagonist’s own process of becoming invisible. And becoming here should be understood in the ongoing, never-completed, Deleuzian sense: not a transformation, not a change of territorialization, but a continuous process of deterritorialization.
As the book is told in the first person, through an unrelenting first-person discourse, in the shape of captions (there is no direct speech via balloons), what’s at stake here is the investigation of the protagonists’ impressions of his surroundings, and the way his own presence and visibility can enmesh with what’s around him, perhaps in a distinctive Heideggerian way, distinguishing nature – every single object that is seen, identifiable, tangible – and “the world,” where human meaning emerges. The world is a horizon of context, as it were, drawn by us and read by us, which will have quite an importance in Mussat’s visual construction method for Les pistes invisibles. The protagonist’s goal, then, is not to become “part of nature,” but to shift the entirety of his own “worldy perception.”
Ths “facts” are more or less ordinary. One day, the protagonist drives his car near the forest until it runs out of gas, and where it stops, he steps out of the car and goes into the forest, never to return. His first few days are difficult, but there’s no plan. This is not a Burt Reynold or Rambo type showing us tips to survive harsh winters or how to find water by squeezing a squirrel or something. There are moments when the story is more or less straightforward. The voice tells us things about his past, his school days, his life with his parents, his first attempt to flee. And, indeed, it also gives an account of the strategies he learned on how to break into a house, how to disguise his passage, how to escape from searching parties, and so on. But the main lesson, if I can use this kind of language, is something else altogether.
The protagonist slowly understands that the secret to invisibility is not trying to be still, be silent or even camouflaging. Those would be mere human tactics of pretending to enmesh with the surroundings. A forest is filled with sounds and movements, a continuous visual and sound line between leaves in the trees, buzzing bees, deers walking by, water flowing. An unrelenting, fluctuating symphony, and one must learn how to become yet another note, floating by.
And this is where one must pay attention to the fact that were are reading a comic book. Not a work of literature, not a movie, not an audiobook. A book in which the visual, compositional, structuring text is paramount to its storytelling and philosophical meaning-making. The landscapes shown by Xaiver Mussat across these many panels, sometimes small and detailed, other times with large panels, even splash pages, are both physical, natural, tangible, objectual, and mental, like nodules that are weaved in complicated patterns. Mussat has translated this double approach by employing very detailed renditions of both the local fauna and the flora, the patterns of rock and the trickling brooks, and also the highly stylized and patterned art of that area’s First Peoples (Wabanaki art, if I’m not mistaken). But there are also moments when we see exploded views of cubes, parallel lines, concentric circles and other geometric shapes. Sometimes it is a detail of something natural shown so close – like a weave of a spider’s web, the circles of a cut tree, a cloud, fog, bubbling water, a wood floor – that they become only these isolated almost-abstract lines and patterns. And the ones create a rhythm and a dialog with the others, in a complicated, dazzling and even dizzying work of tressage. To a certan extent, but somewhat in a freer way, it reminds me of the juxtapositions with which Jens Harder engages in his books Alpha… directions and Beta… civilisations (3 volumes so far, Actes Sud, 2009-2022), connecting renditions of natural phenomena with heavily symbolized human artifacts and creations.
The purpose, of course, is not to show how one is like the other, or how one should interpret one through the categries of the other, but to retrain the eye in understanding the continuations and, therefore, the insivibility that arises from such stark presence. Despite how a few of the drawing show how virtuoso Mussat can be in the rendition of an animal or a single rock, the drawing are never descriptive. Or at least solely descriptive. They create an emergent rhythm.
As I was reading the book, and having worked with silkscreening techniques, I could understand how the color efects of the drawings were done. But at the end of the book, yet another production note explains in detail how the author achieved this look. Mussat brush-painted complete shapes, which were digitally scanned, and then turned into two sets with different colors (very precise shades of blue and orange; the Pantone codes are noted down). These sets became two “layers” that were then composed so that, when printed, a third color emerged from the superimposition. When we look at the pages, we see four colors: blue, orange, brown and white. But two of these “colors” were not drawn, and, of course, the white is not even printed. This creates an incredible assortment of light and color effects throughout the pages. Sometimes the “brown” acts like a deeper shadow of a mass object, some others it just assures the concreteness of the given pattern (natural or otherwise). The “white” is either the reflection of light, or the graphic sign of movement, or a structuring scaffolding of a pattern, or the background from which a figure pops out. So these colors are also enacting the appearance/disappearance game of the book, the seesaw between panels and interval, abstraction and figuration, description and relection…
A sort of returning trope is used to explain in part the overall impressions of the book: the wildman, the treeman, Bigfoot, Sasquatch, or other similar creatures. After all, there are so many people swearing that they have seen a creature like that in their hiking these (and other) landscapes, despite the fact that not even an ounce of evidence has ever been produced. It was “over there”, but when you pinpoint it, it vanishes, revealing something else, more concrete, and less fascinating. It something that emerged from the persistence of vision (here, “reading,”, “comics reading”) but that you can’t go back to.
I am quite certain that the book can be co-opted to more traditional environmentalist discourses, or even be found in a tug-of-war between anarchists and libertatians. It is open to a number of interpretations with a very specific ideological bent. However, I think that if that happens it will be “missing the mark”, in the precise sense that the ancient Greeks employed the word hamartia. Usually translated as “sin” within a Christian Biblical context, hamartia is the so-called “tragic flaw,” the “error in judgement” of the tragedy heroes. It is also that which Plato feared that mimesis, or “imitation” (i.e., art, poetry, and so on), would do: the reproduction of an error. Looking for these ontological ends – the protection of nature, a paen of human individualism, a cry against a stifling society, an appraisal of unbound yet balanced natural world – is the imposition of a human pattern that the protagonist of pistes wants to abandon completly. When reading, e will be tempted to follow the outlines of the patterns. But ny doing so, we will miss the invisible. That must be perceived in a different manner.
Note: images pilfered from the web, multiple sources.
Yellow Fast & Crumble 
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