(198) The abracadabrante story of Child Moon

“What happens to me happens to no one, and is anonymous by the very fact that it concerns me.”

Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, “The Essential Solitude,” Gallimard, 1955, p. 31.

 

 Where Félix, taking care not to set forth a theory of writing, discovers, by looking at and feeling what Lucian and Igniatius have done, that this discovery is beginning to concern him personally.

 

Félix’s Notebook

I believe I am beginning to understand why I was mistaken each time I tried to determine which of the two, Lucian or Igniatius, had invented the characters appearing in the notebooks and drawings, as though invention necessarily had to belong to someone and all that was required, in order to solve the problem, was to go back far enough to find the owner of the first idea. I would look at Lucian, then at Igniatius, comparing their drawings, their ways of doing things, their sentences, even their hesitations, with that professional obstinacy which for so long made me believe that a phenomenon becomes more intelligible as soon as one succeeds in assigning it an origin, and I now discover that what I called the origin may have been precisely what prevented me from seeing what had happened.

It occurred to me that they probably did not begin by inventing the Moon Child... they may have arrived at him.

And before him there was already Pinocchio the Other, if indeed I can still use this “there was” without suggesting that he was a fully constituted character waiting somewhere to be discovered. Pinocchio the Other had been made, unmade, dismembered, taken up again... something in him had ceased to be able to remain within the form first given to him, and that very impossibility had begun to do its work. What I had taken to be the replacement of one character by another now seems much more like a passage during which the former form does not entirely disappear, but becomes incapable of containing what is happening to it. The Moon Child, then, would not have been imagined in place of Pinocchio the Other... he would have appeared at the point where Pinocchio the Other could no longer continue to be merely what he had been.

And I realise that this difference changes almost everything I had thought until then. I can still see Lucian bending over Igniatius’s drawings, reproducing his gestures, trying less to copy their result than to enter into the movement that had made that result possible... but at first I regarded this as a method, perhaps even as a rather clever stratagem: to imitate in order to understand. I had failed to see what imitation might do to the person who imitates, for when a gesture is reproduced with sufficient attention it ceases to be merely another person’s gesture. The arm learns something the mind had not foreseen, the hand encounters a resistance, the line deviates, one form calls forth another, and the person who thought he was following begins to produce what he would never have known how to conceive before he began to trace it.

Perhaps... and this remains a hypothesis... this is how the Moon Child began to exist between them. I say between them, and immediately feel how much I prefer that expression to through them. “Through” would still preserve an author behind the work, a commanding will, a cause strong enough to explain its effect. “Between,” in its double meaning, takes nothing away from either Lucian or Igniatius, but forces us to consider what passes from one to the other, what changes in the course of that passage and, because it changes, can no longer belong entirely to the one from whom it came.

I then wonder whether this is not what they had done with Pinocchio the Other before they even knew they were doing it. They pushed him far enough for the character to cease confirming what they already knew about him. Something came undone before their eyes, and instead of repairing the figure, instead of restoring it to its first coherence, they allowed that failure to produce its consequences. The wood opened, the puppet lost the self-evidence of being a puppet, the body scattered, and from that scattering came a figure that could no longer bear the same name because it no longer quite inhabited the same world.

And then I think again of that sentence which had come back to me: why, after all, do we write, if not to escape the prison of the self and its banalities?*

 

* Gabriel Josipovici, Moo Pak, Les Nomades–Quidam éditeur, p. 20.