(199) The abracadabrante story of Child Moon

“It has become impossible […] to make writing into an object that can be studied by any means other than writing itself.”

Philippe Sollers, “Programme”, Tel Quel, no. 31, 1967

Where Félix thinks again of that sentence which had come back to him: why 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

Félix’s Notebook

I think I had understood it too quickly, imagining a kind of escape, as though writing consisted in leaving behind the individual one is in order to breathe somewhere he no longer existed. That now seems far too simple to me. Lucian remains Lucian when he draws, Igniatius remains Igniatius when he invents, and yet something happens that can no longer be reduced to what either of them knew, wanted, or believed himself to be. Perhaps, then, it is not from the self that one escapes, but from the obligation to obey it continually. That may be where the prison lies… in this way we have of endlessly returning to the same paths because we recognise them, of producing the thoughts that suit the person we know ourselves to be, of finding even in what astonishes us the discreet confirmation of what we had already decided. Even our strangenesses eventually become familiar. We can repeat ourselves for a very long time while believing that we are going deeper, perhaps even with enough virtuosity that no one, ourselves least of all, notices that we are forever circling the same room… But a character can open a door. Not because he is independent of his author, a formula that now seems to me almost as naïve as the one that would make him his author’s property, but because once sufficiently involved in his own existence, he imposes consequences that the person who began him had not entirely foreseen. He becomes a new constraint. One can no longer make him do just anything without losing him. One has to begin taking him into account, and this strange necessity forces the person who writes or draws to think from a place he did not occupy before creating him.

Perhaps that is what happened with Pinocchio the Other. By following him for long enough, they may have reached the point at which they could no longer follow him in that form… and, rather than turning back, they allowed the path to continue. The Moon Child would then have been born of this paradoxical fidelity: not fidelity to a character who had to be preserved, but to what was happening to him and demanded precisely that he cease to be preserved.

I look now at his oversized coat, his bare feet, that hat falling over his face, and I wonder how many of these things were ever truly “chosen”. The question itself becomes almost embarrassing. Of course they were chosen, since a hand drew them; but there may be a moment in the work when choosing no longer means selecting among possibilities already known. The previous drawing makes certain things necessary, one proportion calls for another, an awkwardness becomes fertile, a form glimpsed almost accidentally begins to insist, and the person drawing discovers himself recognising something he did not know he was looking for.

To recognise what one has never seen: there is another sentence I would once have distrusted, and which I nevertheless find myself compelled to preserve here. For if Lucian and Igniatius had merely expressed what they already carried within themselves, then with enough patience I ought to be able to trace each of their characters back to an intention, a memory, a fear, some old content of which the drawing would be nothing more than a translation. I know only too well how to do that. I even earned my living doing it, with enough caution not to call it reduction. But the more I look at what occurred between Pinocchio the Other and the Moon Child, the more this explanation seems to miss what matters most, which may not be what they put into their characters, but what their characters allowed them to encounter.

With what they were, they made something that compelled them no longer to be exactly what they had been… And I write that sentence… feeling it already turn back towards me. For some time now I have been doing the same thing with them. I thought I was observing Lucian, understanding Igniatius, establishing what had passed from one to the other, and now I catch myself following their gestures as Lucian followed Igniatius’s, taking up their drawings again in my own sentences, allowing the Moon Child to enter this notebook when I claimed merely to be explaining where he came from. I am even beginning to wonder whether understanding something does not always consist, at least in part, in allowing it to alter the place from which one had been trying to understand it.

This troubles me less than it once would have. Or rather, the nature of the unease itself has changed.

What lies before me is no longer the danger of losing myself in what I study, as though my first duty were to preserve intact the distance that would allow me to know who is observing and who is being observed. I am discovering another possibility: that this distance might shift without disappearing, and that this very displacement might be what finally allows me to see.

Perhaps Lucian and Igniatius never conceived their characters in the sense in which I had understood the word. Perhaps they began something, allowed it to act for long enough, and then found themselves before a form containing more possibilities than they had consciously placed within it. Pinocchio the Other would then have been less the predecessor of the Moon Child than the place through which he passed, just as the Moon Child himself may be nothing more than the provisional place in which something continues searching for a form.

And suddenly I understand why this business of the prison of the self touches me far more directly than I would have wished.

It is not a matter of abolishing oneself, nor of becoming someone else, nor even of hoping to reach some improbable outside where I would cease to be Félix. Perhaps it is enough that something in which I take part become real enough that I can no longer impose all my old habits upon it. Then the self remains, but for a moment it ceases to be the keeper who possesses every key.

I thought I was studying the way Lucian and Igniatius had created their characters.

I am beginning to suspect that what they had chiefly discovered through them was how to let a creation lead them somewhere neither of them would have known how to reach alone.

And if I am still writing tonight, perhaps it is already no longer merely to record that discovery.

It is to see how far it will lead me.