“Where now? When now? Who now? Without asking myself. Say I. Without thinking. Call that questions, hypotheses. Go on, say go on. Call that movement. Set out from here, from an imaginary here. Go there, toward an imaginary there. Call that a path. Hope for an end. Call that an end. Be born as a thing among things, a thing that speaks, of things that do not speak. Say I. Not know who. Not know of what. Doubt everything. Never have been certain of anything. Never have recognized oneself. And yet say I.”
Samuel Beckett,The Unnamable
Where Don Carotte, not yet knowing where he would set his feet—or where they might carry him—openly and fiercely declares war upon narrative itself...
I, Don Carotte—alas!—the fruit of a doubtful tale,
Have come to shatter all the voices of lame old scribes grown pale.
Let none inscribe me further with the ink of borrowed spite;
I seize both pen and righteous wrath—my speech has learned to fight.
Born of no noble lineage, no gilded pedigree,
A graft torn from oblivion first summoned me to be.
They sold me as a puppet, a parody, a jest,
Yet I have gnawed my chains away with language at its best.
And what have I deserved, that they should call me counterfeit?
I, who live without a backdrop, no fairy blessing it.
Let mockery abound—I boast no knightly fame;
Yet in my wooden belly still a living hope remains.
Long was I hidden underneath obedient laughter's veil,
Cast into shadow's cellar where forgotten strings grow stale.
I am the offshoot ridiculed, cut down with cold disdain,
Yet something more than mere illusion gives me strength again.
I write not to amuse you, O reader far too tame,
But to bite into language with an untamed flash of flame.
Expect no stately preface, no polished opening art;
My page is but a knife, not vanity's display of heart.
You ask for learned citations? Then search among the rest.
I rise from clay itself, and bleed the faults I know the best.
No mighty scholars have I read from cover unto cover,
Yet truth still fills my appetite, and its reverse my fervour.
They call me Don Carotte? Then gladly be it so.
My flesh is rough and rustic, my bark runs wet with sweat below.
No summit do I conquer, no laurel do I claim;
I burrow through the earth itself, through mud and history's name.
So pass—or stay. Read, mock, or fall asleep instead.
But know that on this very day silence itself has flesh.
And should they ask you, “Who speaks out with such unruly force?”
Reply without the slightest pause: “A vegetable, more or less.”
— What might you have said of this prologue?
— You mean... if I were...
— Precisely.
— Very well. Let us suppose that I am. Then I would say that this prologue first presents itself as a refusal: a refusal of the conventional preface, of the established rhetorical apparatus, of the familiar literary game.
— Yet it would be mistaken to read it merely as a critical or parodic gesture.
— This refusal is a displacement of the space of meaning, an act through which the subject of enunciation—Don Carotte—constitutes himself not in the mirror of a pre-established world, but within the fissure of a language reclaimed, constricted, roughened.
— I am not entirely sure I can follow... your lyricism!
— The lyrical subject here does not describe his world; he emerges from it. He does not speak from within an already given identity, but from an event of opening...
— Which event? And—if I may dare—what connection can all this possibly have with Pinocchio the Other?
— Through language itself, which, tearing free from its rigid forms, becomes experience. For Maldiney, human existence is never enclosed within a fixed configuration: it is ex-position—a standing outside itself—an uprooting, a contact with the originary. This prologue follows precisely that rhythm.
I was born in a field, not in a monastery,
Not cast in bronze, but grown out of the earth.
— That much I can understand...
— Don Carotte's mode of being is therefore phainesthai—coming into appearance, emergence—just as it is for Pinocchio the Other. They do not proceed from the ancient Logos, nor from literary myths. They were not born within a story; they were born outside it, through its own act of speaking. Their language is that of earth, of unformed flesh, of open time—not of encyclopedic knowledge nor of sedimented cultural forms. They are far from being references... they are phenomena.
— This prologue also seems to belong to another time...
— It is therefore untimely. It ex-sists outside the time of literature. It neither quotes nor lines up authorities...
— Then what does it do?
— It utters.
And, following Maldiney, I would say that to utter is not to impose speech, but to allow what had not yet become thinkable to come into being. Here language is no longer the instrument of demonstration; it is the place where the possible appears.
I am the offshoot mocked and pruned with scorn,
Yet more than mere illusion keeps me standing.
— And what exactly is an offshoot?
— The offshoot is the formless.
But this offshoot does not wish to become "form."
It wishes to inhabit dehiscence...
— Ah... so nothing will be spared me...
— ...that opening, that splitting apart through which meaning may blossom—not as content, but as event.
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