“I think of this sentence, which I read I no longer know where and which has come back to me: 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
Where even our strangeness eventually becomes familiar.
Félix’s Notebook
“Why do we write, if not to escape the prison of the self and its banalities?”
I had misunderstood this sentence. I had read it too quickly. I had imagined a kind of escape, as though writing consisted in leaving behind the person one is in order to go somewhere where that person would no longer be. That is obviously far too simple. 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 or wanted to be. It is not, then, from the self that one escapes, but from the obligation to obey it continually. That is where the prison lies.
In this way we have of endlessly returning to the same paths because we recognise them. What confines us is producing only the thoughts in which we can comfortably recognise ourselves. It is also finding, even in what surprises us, the discreet confirmation of what we already knew. It is repeating ourselves while believing that we are going deeper, perhaps even with enough virtuosity for no one, ourselves least of all, to notice that we are going round in circles.
A character can open a door that was never planned. Not because the character is independent of the author, a formula that now seems to me almost as naïve as the one that would make the character the author’s property. But because, once sufficiently engaged in its own existence, the character imposes consequences that the author had not entirely foreseen. A gesture becomes a new constraint. The author can no longer make the character do just anything without losing it. He must begin to take account of the character and of its gesture. This strange necessity forces the person who writes or draws to think from a place he did not occupy before creating it. To shift, however slightly, his point of view.
Perhaps this is what happened with Pinocchio the Other.
By following him far enough, Igniatius and Lucian reached the point where they could no longer continue in that form. Instead of turning back, they allowed the path to continue.
Child Moon would then have been born from this paradoxical fidelity. Not fidelity to a character who had to be preserved, but to what was happening to him and which required precisely that he cease to be preserved.
I look now at his oversized coat, his bare feet, the hat falling over his face, and I wonder how many of these things were truly “chosen” by the author. Whoever that may be. The question itself is becoming almost embarrassing. Of course they were chosen, since a hand drew them. But perhaps there comes a moment in the work when choosing no longer means selecting among possibilities already known. The drawings follow one another. Admittedly, I do not know the order of that succession. But a previous drawing, through what it contains, makes certain things necessary. An awkwardness becomes fruitful. A form that appeared by accident makes itself indispensable. The person drawing discovers himself recognising something he was not looking for.
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