{"id":4528,"date":"2009-01-26T14:31:05","date_gmt":"2009-01-26T14:31:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/?p=4528"},"modified":"2009-01-27T09:05:42","modified_gmt":"2009-01-27T09:05:42","slug":"you-know-life-%e2%80%93-the-translated-novels-of-jean-philippe-toussaint","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/you-know-life-%e2%80%93-the-translated-novels-of-jean-philippe-toussaint\/","title":{"rendered":"You Know, Life \u2014 The Translated Novels of Jean-Philippe Toussaint"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cWriting registers new forms of dramatic stress, of a self-referring kind: writing becomes the record of compulsions and resistances to write. (In the further extension of this view, writing itself becomes the writer’s subject.)” So argues Susan Sontag in her introduction to A Roland Barthes Reader<\/em>. In Jean-Philippe Toussaint<\/a>‘s novel Television<\/em><\/a>, the narrator, after deciding to quit watching TV, going cold turkey on his compulsion to take part in the passive act of staring at the small screen \u2013 which he implicates as the cause of his non-writing \u2013 spends his time thinking about but never actually pursuing his would-be groundbreaking book on Titian. Apart from the opening words \u2013 \u201cWhen Musset” \u2013 his work remains defiantly palimpsestual, the novel Television<\/em> overwriting the \u201cfictional” work on Titian Vecellio (TV). Toussaint’s novels create a \u201cdramatic stress” in their striving to be, in the tensile force of the paragraphs, in the play between humour and significance, surface and depth, the infinite and the infinitesimal.<\/p>\n

\"bathroom\"<\/p>\n

L’appareil photo <\/em>published in France in 1988 by Les \u00c3\u2030ditions de Minuit (and as Camera<\/em><\/a> by Dalkey Archive Press in 2008) is the fifth of Toussaint’s eight novels to be translated into English. Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, \u201cFar from being superficial, a great Frenchman has his superficies to the extreme degree, a natural envelope which surrounds his depths” (Dawn<\/em>). As a Belgian writing in French who calls himself a European, assumed into the contemporary cluster of novelists working beyond the \u201cnouveau roman” \u2013 Jean Echenoz, \u00c3\u2030ric Chevillard, Marie Redonnet, and Marie Darrieussecq \u2013 Toussaint’s novels are concerned with the banalities of everyday life, the quiddity of objects, the psychological abrasions caused by humankind’s interaction with phenomena \u2013 the superficies. To read Camera<\/em> is to experience one long blink of the I, a movement from the light to darkness. In the words of Mark Z. Danielewski<\/a>, “photography [gives] permanence to moments that [are] often fleeting. Nevertheless, not even ten thousand photographs can secure a world” (House of Leaves<\/em>).<\/p>\n

\"monsieur_\"<\/p>\n

Who writes like Toussaint? And whom does Toussaint resemble? The latter, more easily approached, would include obvious Toussaint progenitors such as Samuel Beckett, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Maurice Blanchot, Georges Perec, Raymond Queneau, and Francis Ponge. Like Beckett’s characters, Toussaint’s nameless protagonists find humour in despondency. In Television<\/em>, the scene in which the narrator attempts to hide the neglected fern he is supposedly looking after for his vacationing neighbours is a comic masterpiece. Beckett would have approved and so would have Buster Keaton, Jacques Tati, Miguel de Cervantes, and Herman Melville. With perfect comic timing, the fern becomes the narrator’s windmills, his pteridophytic Moby Dick. Toussaint’s intense gaze is reminiscent of the nouveau roman<\/em> writers; his playfulness evokes the works of the Oulipo<\/a> group; while Making Love<\/em><\/a> (Faire l’amour<\/em>) and Camera<\/em> suggest Blanchot’s Awaiting Oblivion<\/em>.<\/p>\n

A contemporary of Toussaint, Nicholson Baker’s first two novels \u2013 Mezzanine<\/em> (1988) and Room Temperature<\/em> (1990) \u2013 also explore the minutiae of existence, the anxiety of being, the relationship between the human and the plastic, between time and technology. Baker and Toussaint inhabit a world in which milk cartons, Instamatic cameras, and overnight bags are as significant as love, sex, and death. Few writers work in this way \u2013 maybe W.G. Sebald, Ben Marcus<\/a>, and the Patrick S\u00c3\u00bcskind of Pigeon<\/em> and The Story of Mr. Sommer<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\"camera\"<\/p>\n

Toussaint’s signature literary dish is the paragraph. His sentences \u2013 short in the early works, more intricate, serpentine, and poetic in the later \u2013 create blocks of prose that, rather than dense and impenetrable, are light but rich, airy but flavoursome \u2013 a souffl \u00e9 of introspection, reflection, and observation. Rather like Ponge’s prose poems, Toussaint’s paragraphs are responsive to the process of their own presence.<\/p>\n

\"television\"<\/p>\n

The narrative of Camera<\/em> moves through sequences of action as thought \u2013 the narrator learns to drive, goes shopping \u2013 but he does so without consequence, without subsequence. The idea of the act is to think about the act in the process of doing. His actions and thoughts are synchronized. Camera<\/em> is the reverse lens of Xavier de Maistre’s A Journey Around My Room<\/em>. Toussaint’s works \u2013 autistic and present-at-hand \u2013 are the means by which he thinks the world, are his being-with.<\/p>\n

\"1436cover\"<\/p>\n

Not much happens in the nouveau roman<\/em>, but the narrative \u2013 charged with significance, however unapparent \u2013 forces the reader to acknowledge that something must be happening. In Toussaint’s novels (and in Baker’s early work) the narrators\/characters withdraw from the action, hide away in a bathroom (The Bathroom<\/em><\/a>), travel without seeing anything (Camera<\/em>), refuse to take part in the spectacle (Television<\/em>), and take on activities they have no intention of finishing (Monsieur<\/em><\/a>). If the characters lack emotional depth, it is given to them by the objects they refute, desire, disdain \u2013 Toussaint’s metro maps, his \u201cmustard container adorned with smurfs”, and his televisions replace wandering clouds, Grecian urns, and albatrosses. The properties of things penetrate the infinite responsibilities of being. That is, Toussaint’s characters repudiate action in preference to the plastic while simultaneously delaying and relaying their thoughts on doing. Objects \u2013 cameras, baths, and designer clothes \u2013 reflect an apparition of the (apparently motiveless) self.<\/p>\n

In his review<\/a> for The New York Times<\/em>, Tom McCarthy<\/a> asserts: \u201cthat Camera<\/em> should have waited 20 years to find an English-language publisher is scandalous.” Indeed. Dalkey Archive<\/a> has published four of Toussaint’s novels: Television<\/em>, Monsieur<\/em>, The Bathroom<\/em>, and Camera<\/em> and is to publish a translation of Fuir<\/em> (set in China) sometime in 2010. Making Love<\/em>, a love story set in Tokyo and Kyoto, is published by The New Press<\/a>. Toussaint’s novels, in direct language belying an embedded poetry, interrogate the (de)real with precision, deftness, and humour. (There’s a potential PhD thesis here: Toussaint, Heidegger, and the Uncanny<\/em>.) Infinitesimal gems to read and re-read.<\/p>\n

\"parissf\"<\/p>\n

ABOUT THE ANALYST<\/strong>
\nSteve Finbow<\/a>‘s novel Balzac of the Badlands<\/em> will be published by Future Fiction London<\/a> in October 2009.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Who writes like Toussaint? And whom does Toussaint resemble? The latter, more easily approached, would include obvious Toussaint progenitors such as Samuel Beckett, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Maurice Blanchot, Georges Perec, Raymond Queneau, and Francis Ponge. Like Beckett’s characters, Toussaint’s nameless protagonists find humour in despondency. In Television, the scene in which the narrator attempts to hide the neglected fern he is supposedly looking after for his vacationing neighbours is a comic masterpiece. Beckett would have approved…<\/p>\n

A short analysis by Steve Finbow.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":119,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4528","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-criticism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4528","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/119"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4528"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4528\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4528"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4528"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4528"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}