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Wherein the distinction between reading, writing, interpreting and living becomes increasingly precarious.
Félix is therefore not simply reading the story of the Moon Child… The way he reads it begins to belong to that story. His suspicions, his reconsiderations, his possible mistakes, the connections he attempts to draw between Lucian and Igniatius, between Igniatius and his characters, gradually enter into the same movement as the events he seeks to examine. The reader he thought he was thus becomes one of the places where the work continues to come into being.
This is probably why the world of the Moon Child can hardly be considered a closed world. It is not already constituted somewhere. In a place that would then merely need to be commented upon. It never exists quite independently of the passages through which one enters it. Don Carotte does not simply remain Don Carotte, since his name, his role, his companion, his staff—everything that initially seemed to define him—can shift and be redistributed. Pinocchio the Other is not someone’s descendant… however famous that someone may be… Nor does he remain the stable object of a story, since he literally comes apart. This dismantling seems to release something else, of which the Moon Child might be a consequence without quite being its successor. Even the parrots, who seemed condemned to repeat, begin to alter what they repeat as soon as they hear it differently. As for the Moon Child, he remains perhaps the most unsettling case, because he seems to appear at once as a character, an image, a trace left by others, and something that continually eludes explanations of his origin.
Asking who invented him therefore becomes a dangerously simple question.
Igniatius? Lucian? Someone Igniatius himself might have met, dreamed of, or merely glimpsed?
Or did the Moon Child gradually take shape in the passage between them, like a figure no one had wholly produced, yet everyone had helped to make possible?
Félix is beginning to sense precisely how the choice between creation and discovery no longer suffices. A form can be invented and yet surprise its inventor; it can be received and yet exist only through the transformation imposed upon it by its recipient. What passes between Lucian, Igniatius and himself therefore scarcely resembles an object passing intact from hand to hand. The passage works upon what passes. Perhaps this is where Félix’s journey truly begins.
