“The character born within the work is not a person. It is that which remains in withdrawal, on the threshold between being and non-being, the figure of a possibility without reality, without substance, yet charged with all the powers of becoming. It does not become; it is becoming itself, always already other, never complete. It is neither ourselves nor someone else: it is a fiction in search of a form, a voice that has not yet found its body.”
Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature
— My dear friend, I recognize in your gaze the fire that so many critics lack. But I implore you: allow the world, from time to time, to emerge before you scrutinize it. Listen to its very substance as a child listens to the waves. If only for a minute... or for a few seconds...
— Allow me to ask you a question...
— By all means.
— Who are you?
— My name would mean nothing to you, though it is possible you have heard me before... I dwell in this Archipelago...
— One could almost believe one is dreaming... Here we are, finding fragments of a puppet upon this island. An articulated arm, a head rolling among the rocks, a hollow torso like an empty shell. What else might there be? Who, I wonder, thought it fitting to bring Pinocchio here? Is it a ritual... a jest... or an art installation? Or perhaps... something else?
— Look... the wood is ancient, yet it has not rotted. It has withstood moisture, salt, and fire. It could well be pine. It seems... like a foreign presence and yet, strangely enough, perfectly at home within the landscape. As though the island itself had dreamed it.
— No. Islands do not dream. It is you who lend them your fantasies. If this puppet is here, it is because someone placed it here. And with it, an intention—or perhaps a message. It might even be a provocation.
— It could just as well be an offering, you know. An offering to life, to becoming. You see... a mere simulacrum.
— I see a metamorphosis. This puppet is not an error; it is a stage. Matter itself rising upright, asking to be given a name.
— Do you truly fail to perceive the irony? This puppet, upon an island of scoria and sulphur, is a parasite. An artefact, a wooden intruder in the heart of a mineral chaos. It is the perfect image of our denial. Even here, in this telluric wilderness, we cannot help projecting yet another reflection of ourselves.
— That is not wonder. It is narcissism.
— No. It is memory. Pinocchio the Other—for it is indeed he, as his very name suggests—is not ourselves. He is something else entirely. A figure of the incomplete, the imperfect, the almost. Upon this Archipelago, which throbs without even possessing a name, he becomes an embryonic consciousness. He is that which wavers between the world and the fable.
— You are incorrigible. You make a cosmogony out of a puppet. Very well, then. Let us indulge your poetry for a moment. But why him? Why Pinocchio?
— Pinocchio... the Other!
— Why this wooden liar, this little body forever falling short?
— Because he is an archetype of doubt. And of desire. He longs to become real, yet he is already alive. He lies, and through that lie he is transformed. It is not a fault; it is an initiatory stratagem. And upon this island of lava and ash, he becomes the perfect totem: the being who seeks himself without ever reaching completion.
