“To write is to surrender oneself to the fascination of what withdraws. Writing begins when the writer realizes that he is spoken more than he speaks.
A voice calls to him that is not his own, a voice without origin, an alien thought that comes to him without aiming at him.”
A voice calls to him that is not his own, a voice without origin, an alien thought that comes to him without aiming at him.”
Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature
Where each sentence awaits its incarnation, and where Don Carotte, midway through his story, alone and having, according to himself, accomplished nothing yet, seized as though by vertigo, as much from the effects of the leaves of the tree he has just left as from this solitude, brings forth what he does not understand.
Floating, literally seated upon a fallen sun from the battered big top of a circus travelling from island to island across the Archipelago, quill in hand, brow furrowed and eyes closed, he allows the slightest destiny to come to him...
Don Carotte’s Notebook
— Something is coming to me, something muffled, tangled... stirring inside me and making me tremble slightly. It twists my guts and announces itself like a thought. But then it slips away from me in a flash, like an eel beneath a rock. It is there, I can feel it... not here... (he taps his skull)... but lower down, or farther away... or inside... A deep inside that carries me away...
He rises and endlessly turns round and round upon himself...
— Could this be... an idea I feel welling up beneath my cap? Some kind of naked knowledge, stripped of its vocabulary... or an ancient murmur that has never yet been put into words? I trace, I write, I cross out, I scribble, I erase, and yet... I can feel it, it is looking at me... passing right through me... and still I tremble...
I feel it as though I myself were being thought... from outside... by a thought that is not mine.
(He stops, eyes wide.)
No, I must not remain alone... I need some companion, for want of a lady companion in this countryside. Someone to assist me, who will know what I am saying before I have even said it. A being... capable of thought. Yes... but not too much... and one I would make myself, mind you! A creature of intelligence... homemade... whom I could keep at the end of my quill or my stick whenever he became too sharp. That is it... I shall call him... What shall I call him?... Sang Chaud. There: Sang Chaud... because true thought... burns! And because I am cold... I tremble, and the blood rushes to my head whenever anyone speaks to me of ontology.
Exhausted, he lets himself fall... sits down once more, and writes into the emptiness of the blank page.
— Sang Chaud it is! he says, gazing into the distant void. And since here you are, Sang Chaud, speak to me! Explain what is coming to me and what I cannot yet grasp. You are of my mind, so you owe me at least that much. But beware... if you surpass me... as befits the creator, I shall tear the words from you... I am your author, am I not?
Silence. Then a calm but firm voice rises from no one knows where. Sang Chaud enters the scene.
Sang Chaud
— You might, Messire Singulier...
Don Carotte
— Don Carotte... that is my name, and I beg you not to tear it from me!
Sang Chaud
— Messire Don Carotte au noble Fan, I thank you... whether through distraction or fever... for having invented me...
Don Carotte, dubious to say the least... unable to distinguish l’art du bon port, finds nothing to object to... Sang Chaud continues...
— Indeed, Don Carotte... Perhaps I was created so that I might better understand you... though that remains to be demonstrated... But... dare I say it... yes... understand that... nevertheless, in this present, this beginning, I meant to say... I do not... or no longer belong to you...
Don Carotte
— The slightest step in that direction may prove to be one too many... Knave!
By good fortune, or through shared interests, Don Carotte tells himself that it would be wiser to calm down...
— I shall know, Sang Chaud, for the sake of a better beginning... how to show myself magnanimous... but this once only... Mark my words!
The name Sang Chaud has deliberately been left untranslated. Literally, it could be rendered as “Hot Blood,” but such a translation would lose much of what the French name carries within it: blood, warmth, heat, temperament, agitation, and the bodily surge of thought itself. It is therefore “untranslatable” not because no equivalent words exist, but because translating it would diminish its meaning.
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