“Remember that your readers dislike making an effort and prefer to learn as though they were playing a game. It is also painful to discover one’s ignorance of a subject one believed oneself to know. If ever fate obliges you to instruct the public on matters familiar to them, take care to prepare them gently, and confess in your preamble that, before being enlightened by some scholar (whom you will name), you were just as ignorant as they were. Do not be afraid, on such occasions, to make fun of yourself and to appear thoroughly stupid in everyone’s eyes.
Although your role is to be one degree above the public, you must not, if you wish to please them, allow them to feel it. You will never enjoy greater success than when the least of your readers believes himself more learned or more witty than you. Every man likes to persuade himself that he possesses more intelligence and wit than others. Your business is to help him do so.
You must supply him with witty remarks without appearing to do so, just as court fools once supplied them to their kings.”
Mœurs des Diurnales: Traité de journalisme,
Paris, Société du Mercure de France, 1903.
Where the relationship of descent between Pinocchio the Other and Child Moon is called into question. Félix tries, as best he can, to transcribe the flood of words assailing him. He wishes with all his heart to succeed before, exhausted and already grateful, yielding to the hypothesis of shipwreck.
Félix’s Journal
Quite often, outside my professional duties, I find myself thinking about Pinocchio the Other and Child Moon. They are creatures of Igniatius. That is what Lucian says. I wonder what connects this entire little world. At first, when I received Lucian’s earliest letters and drawings, I considered that the second might naturally be the symbolic evolution of the first. That was how they appeared to me. I regarded them as two characters invented in succession. This now seems increasingly inadequate. Such a formulation assumes that a mind first conceived the former and then, observing his evolution, decided upon the latter. What I perceive between them resembles rather a transformation in which the first form would have evolved to the point where it could no longer prevent what was happening to it. Something within Pinocchio the Other seems to have come undone of its own accord. He disappeared. Child Moon would therefore not be exactly his successor. Still less his replacement. He would be what becomes of a question when that question can no longer continue to be asked within what first gave it form.
According to what I read in the letters and writings of Lucian and Igniatius, there was a shipwreck there too. But let us not be too hasty. I am wary of such easy explanations. A metaphor that begins to explain too many things generally ends up illuminating none of them. Yet something persists. I cannot silence it. In the ship, as in the drawings, an organisation that had hitherto seemed sufficiently stable ceases to be capable, on its own, of maintaining the coherence of the world it contained. What follows is not nothingness, but another way of holding together. That is what troubles me. The discovery that the collapse of a form does not necessarily entail the collapse of everything it once organised. What remains may reassemble itself according to relationships that were not previously visible.
The brain, it seems to me, is constantly doing something rather similar. I would hesitate to draw a theory from this too hastily. Aboard the ocean liner, my eyes and my sense of balance began to provide information that no longer agreed. Something within me had to negotiate their disagreement so that I could still move about.
Even here, when I look at an expanse of water reflecting the sky between two masses of rock, I know that what I simply call “seeing” involves a multitude of adjustments of which I perceive almost nothing. The light changes, the surface moves, the angle of my gaze shifts, while the world nevertheless remains stable enough for me to continue recognising water, rocks, a sky, and that strange continuity which allows me to believe that I am still standing before the same scene. Perhaps the self comes into play precisely there, not as a little person enclosed behind the eyes, an image that has never convinced me, but as that continuity constantly being reconstructed between what happens and the one to whom it happens.
