Taking the time

“– Well then no, my dear Unamuno, you cannot kill me.
– How so?
– No, you cannot. Because you yourself are a fictional character. And I am as real as you.”

Miguel de Unamuno, Mist

Dear Félix,
I am finally taking the time to write to you about Igniatius, not to return explicitly to what has recently complicated our exchanges—you are no doubt already sensing its indirect effects—but to share with you a new element, or rather a new configuration of old elements, which seems to me to deserve your attention.
Igniatius has sent me a letter that is unusual both in tone and in subject. He does not speak there about himself directly, which is hardly surprising, but about one of his characters whom he calls Don Carotte. You will readily understand that this is not a simple playful pseudonym. This displacement of the name, almost derisory in appearance, produces a precise effect: it authorizes a more risky discourse while maintaining a protective distance.
In this letter, Igniatius tells me—and I stress the verb—that he has received a message from Don Carotte. He does not pass it on to me; he reconstructs it. This detail seems essential to me. What I receive is not Don Carotte’s letter, but the version Igniatius is able to give of it at that precise moment. In other words, a narrative already worked through, filtered, perhaps even reorganized in order to produce a certain effect on its recipient.
According to what he tells me, Don Carotte declares himself in a state of insurrection. Not a noisy revolt, but a firm, almost composed stance, directed exclusively against the one who brought him into being. He accuses without invective. He demands nothing. Above all, he affirms his refusal to be enclosed in a story that, he says, does not belong to him, and especially in an ending that does not suit him. This posture, as Igniatius reports it, acts on him like a silent provocation.
What interests me even more is the way Igniatius describes his own reaction. He speaks of an initial movement of anger, which he associates with a loss of control, then of a gradual shift toward something more ambiguous. It is no longer only a matter of defending himself, but of recognizing a form of attraction. Don Carotte, in this account, becomes less an adversary than a center of tension around which Igniatius begins to reorganize himself.
I note carefully the prudence displayed by my patient. He describes himself as attentive and measured. One might almost take him for conciliatory. Yet between the lines there emerges a less avowable project: that of prolonging the situation, of relaunching the dialogue, not in order to end it but to expose it further. This intention, his obstinate refusal of an imposed ending, perfectly similar to that of Don Carotte, is presented as an opening, but it retains something stratified. Igniatius knows how to handle language to the point of making it an instrument of circumvention.
I share this with you without seeking to decide anything. It seems to me that Don Carotte, as he appears in this indirect account, functions as a figure that refuses to be fixed in a single version. 

Each voice that speaks of him slightly modifies his outline. The truth of this insurrection does not lie in any one of these narratives taken in isolation, but in the gap that separates them. I observe that the story is constantly reworked or reconstructed. Moreover, he explicitly claims his own right to reorganize it. It is this gap that, for the moment, seems to me the most operative.
I remain attentive to what follows, without intervening more than necessary. Igniatius is not a man to receive a warning without turning it to his advantage. I prefer to observe how this figure he believed he controlled continues to act within him, through the very language he uses to speak of it.
I am writing to you less to obtain a directive than to inscribe these elements within a shared frame. Your reading, if you are willing to share it with me, will no doubt displace mine, which can only enrich the approach.
With all my professional consideration,
Lucian