Opening Félix’s notebooks does not mean reading according to an order defined in advance. What is missing from them is precisely what gives a novel much of its charm: a progression governed by its own logic. The sequence of Félix’s ideas offers no guarantee that such a progression will follow the logic one expects.
Félix’s Notebook
I think I am beginning to understand why I was mistaken every time I tried to determine which of the two, Lucian or Igniatius, had invented these characters, as though invention necessarily had to belong to someone and all that was required, in order to solve the problem, was to go back far enough to find the owner of the first idea. I read the notebooks, looked at the drawings Lucian sent me, then imagined Igniatius from what Lucian told me about him in his letters; I compared their drawings, their ways of working, their phrases, even their hesitations, with that professional obstinacy which for a long time made me believe that a phenomenon becomes more intelligible as soon as one succeeds in assigning it an origin, and I now discover that what I called the origin may have been precisely what prevented me from seeing what had happened... and I have come to think that they probably did not begin by inventing Child Moon... They arrived at him... And before that strange child... there was already Pinocchio the Other, if indeed I can still use the words “there was” without suggesting that he was a fully formed character waiting somewhere, I know not where, to be discovered. Pinocchio the Other had been made, unmade, dismembered, taken up again... something in him had ceased to be able to remain within the form first given to him, and that very impossibility had begun to work. What I had taken to be the replacement of one character by another now looks more like a passage during which the former form does not disappear entirely but becomes unable to contain what is happening to it. Child Moon would therefore not have been imagined in place of Pinocchio the Other; he would have appeared at the point where Pinocchio the Other could no longer continue to be merely what he had been.
Today, discovering this difference changes almost everything I feel. I can still imagine Lucian bending over Igniatius’s drawings, reproducing his gestures, trying less to copy their result than to enter the movement that had made that result possible. At first I regarded this as a method, perhaps even as a rather clever stratagem: imitate in order to understand. But I had not seen what imitation might do to the one who imitates. When a gesture is reproduced with sufficient attention, it ceases to be only someone else’s gesture. The arm learns something the mind had not foreseen, the hand encounters resistance, the line deviates, one form calls forth another, and the one who thought he was following begins to produce what he would not have known how to conceive before he had begun to draw it.
Perhaps this is how Child Moon began to exist between them. I say between them, and I immediately feel how much I prefer that word to “by them.” “By” would still keep an author behind his work, a commanding will, a cause strong enough to explain its effect. To say “between” takes nothing away from Lucian or Igniatius, but forces us to consider what passes from one to the other. What is altered in the passage and, because it is altered, can no longer belong entirely to the one from whom it came.
I then wonder whether this is what they did with Pinocchio the Other even before they knew they were doing it. They pushed him far enough for the character to cease confirming what they already knew about him. Something came apart before their eyes, and instead of repairing the figure, of restoring it to its original coherence, they allowed that breakdown to produce its consequences. The wood opened, the puppet lost the self-evidence of being a puppet, the body scattered, and from that scattering emerged a figure that could no longer bear the same name because it no longer inhabited quite the same world.
