Colin Marshall

Chantal Akerman: Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles

You can read my latest Humanists column, on Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, this week on 3Quarksdaily:

"No good movie is too long," Roger Ebert once wrote, "and no bad movie is short enough." Oh, how my inner cinephile regrets bringing up the 201-minute length of Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles so early in the discussion, it supports that dictum so well! Later revised to "All good films are the right length," the line now applies to the film that much more directly. I'll sound higher-flown but surely even more accurate when I claim that the form of all good movies closely fits their substance. Here we have one of the closest form-substance matches ever made.

The title may have already given this away, but those three-and-change hours don't serve a labyrinthine plot, an ensemble of dozens, or any particular historical sweep; we get a widow, her son, three days in mid-1970s Brussels, and the preparations for those days' three dinners. Already we hit the fearsome wall this film raises against critics: having watched (and perhaps loved) it, you want to insist that, against the implication of all possible summaries, it's not boring. Yet that insistence sounds, to the rightfully skeptical reader, like too much protestation. What's more, you feel all the while that the very impulse to deliberately highlight non-boringness trivializes the many fascinating (and actually relevant) qualities of a picture so richly non-boring on every level. It's like making a big deal out of the fact that it was shot with a camera; sure, it's true, but it's also part of the work's very nature.

Generally speaking, no serious viewer considers boredom a function of length. After all, many boring movies clock in around 90 minutes, and often they're filled with event after tiresome event. Neither, then, can a serious viewer consider boredom a function of happenings. Let's not even start on all the turgid "epics" the annals of cinema history offer us. I would submit that boredom is actually the result of a form-substance mismatch; it's the unpleasant sensation of those two aspects of a film grinding away at one another, rattling, vibrating, putting out that awful burning-rubber smell. Hence the dullness of so many films adapted from other media — literature especially — as well as those conceived first and foremost as screenplays. When the material can't properly engage all the creative bandwidth cinema has to offer, something's bound to burn out. Usually, it's the audience.

I promise you more paragraphs over at 3QD. What with this and all the Jean-Philippe Toussaint I’ve read, this has been not just a very Belgian month for me, but a very Belgian-aestheticization-of-the-mundane month for me. Shouldn’t we have long ago made that month official, like Poetry Month or Black History Month?

Jean-Philippe Toussaint: The Bathroom

Jean-Philippe Toussaint sometimes gets called a novelist fascinated by structure, and here, his first book, you can see that impulse at its least masked. The first and last sections are both called “Paris”. The middle, longer, section, is “The Hypotenuse”. Each of those sections comprises a string of numbered — not quite paragraphs, but — chunks of text. The first “Paris” has 40 chunks; “The Hypotenuse” has 80; the second “Paris” has 50. I’m not sure that makes a triangle.

Some describe Toussaint as a novelist fascinated by goofy situations, so fascinated that he writes them as if they’re the most normal in the world. “When I began to spend my afternoons in the bathroom I had no intention of moving into it,” begins this novel’s nameless narrator. Naturally, he’s moved into the bathroom. A bit of activity swirls around him as he settles into his lavatorial routines, though he’d rather it didn’t. He receives a letter of invitation from the Austrian embassy; though certain it came by mistake, he nonetheless fantasizes about the Soirée it announces. His girlfriend Edmondsson, an art gallery employee, hires a couple of Polish painters exhibited by her workplace to paint the apartment. The painters don’t seem to do much painting, spending most of their energy instead on struggling to skin a pile of octopuses.

If life has driven you into bathroom exile, suddenly taking off for Venice presumably doesn’t seem so bad an option. The entirety of “The Hypotenuse” takes place there, where the narrator goes “abruptly, without telling anybody.” One obvious interpretation says that, fed up with the Polish painters and their squids by the end of the first section, the protagonist flees for the Continent and then returns toward the end of the third. But is that really the chronology? Reflecting on the book, I do wonder. The Venice segment could, in the chronology of the story, actually be the earliest. In other words, the Venice trip comes first, then he moves into the bathroom, then — and this would be the text of the first section — he reflects on the events of his bathroom days before the painters show up.

We won’t settle this here. Hell, since I’ve never heard anyone else bring up this issue of multiple interpretations, I might well be wrong about it even being an issue in the first place. What’s not in doubt is the protagonist’s action in the 75th chunk of the middle section, when the visiting Edmondsson has been spending her days at various Venetian cultural attractions and the isolated protagonist has been spending his running imaginary international darts tournaments:

Edmondsson found me a bore. I let her talk and went on with my darts game. She asked me to stop and I didn’t answer. I was sending darts into the target, stepping up to pull them out again. Standing in from of the window, Edmondsson stared at me. Again, she asked me to stop. I hurled a dart at her with all my strength, and it stuck straight in her forehead.

This reads as somewhat less horrific moment than it sounds, but, if we’re going to bring up Camus again, it does have a certain Meursault-shooting-the-Arab flavor. Both characters commit their acts of violence suddenly, out of what appears to be nothing more than irritation. (“When The Bathroom’s narrator throws a dart at Edmondson’s forehead,” Toussaint said in one interview, “I understand his gesture and I find it unforgivable, all at once.”) Yet whereas Meursault’s shot lands him on the 1940s Algerian equivalent of death row, The Bathroom dude’s stray dart seems to bring no discernible major consequences at all. You can call this bad storytelling — maybe it is — or you can call this a crock of Frenchy bullshit — maybe it is — but the dart incident goes on less as a driver of the plot than as a sort of spill that seeps into the very fabric of the story. It potentially has many effects on the text before and after, and if it does, they’re near-invisibly subtle.

Jean-Philippe Toussaint: Monsieur

At this point in my Jean-Phillipe Toussaint readership, I couldn’t help but be struck by one element of this novel above all its others: it’s written in the third person! He writes all other books in the narrative voices of the usually nameless protagonists, but in Monsieur, he omnisciently observes the day-to-day of an ontologically distinct character with an actual name, albeit the name Monsieur. Employed in some executive position at Fiat’s commercial department, he displays “in all things a listless drive.”

Those two words, “listless drive,” get at most of the actions Monsieur takes in the book. Maybe hanging a couple scare quotes around the word “action” renders the word more appropriate: motivating all his acts is a desire not to have to do more of them. His carefully cultivated idleness at work somehow convinces his boss of his pure dedication. He injures his writs playing soccer and either does or does not have it x-rayed. He finds a fiancée and moves into her family home; when the relationship disintegrates, he simply remains there, finding it easier than moving out. When his ex’s mother finally points Monsieur toward a new place to live, a geologist neighbor has him take dictation for the book he’s writing. Monsieur dislikes this, and comes to perceive only one way out: moving again.

I struggled even to summon that short list of events to mind, partly because I’ve been reading so much Toussaint lately and because his books are so similar — “I think a real writer always writes the same book,” he’s said — but partly because his work feels engineered to allow you to forget the plot. Whether Toussaint’s central character is Monsieur, the standard nameless protagonist, or Jean-Philippe Toussaint, I come away thinking not about what they’ve done but how they’ve thought, how they’ve perceived. I imagine this seems terribly Gallic, but remember, Toussaint is Belgian. World of difference.

Certainly, he resolutely inertial Monsieur has little going on for him but his thoughts and his perception. Nevertheless, I find something to admire in him, something almost Taoist. Ginger Danto wrote that “things that profoundly disturb others, from losing apartments to losing a would-be wife, affect Monsieur rather like mild indigestion.” I aspire to that. I mean, I aspire to a great deal more proactivity, not to mention productivity, than Monsieur displays, but who wouldn’t kill to float on so even a keel? Then again, I fear his utter peace and utter indolence may be two sides of one coin.

Jean-Philippe Toussaint: Camera

Rather than making the usual Jarmusch and Tati comparisons, Dalkey Archive’s back-cover copy on my edition of Camera calls Toussaint “a comic Camus for the twenty-first century.” I wasn’t going to say anything, but yeah, the Meursault-ish detachment, observance, and sometimes kinda violent semi-reactivity of Toussaint’s oft-nameless protagonists screams the comparison, never mind that the guy writes in French. Yet whereas The Stranger still instantaneously wins over hundreds of thousands of high school literature students over the world each and every year, nothing in the Toussaint oeuvre seems to do the same. What gives?

I can only say that I’m reacting to Toussaint’s novels in the way I was supposed to react, back in junior year, to The Stranger. (As for how I was supposed to react to Catcher in the Rye, I’m still waiting for a proper literary surrogate to come along. Maybe something by J.G. Ballard?) I never quite understood what so many American sixteen-year-olds of the early 2000s found to identify with in that Frenchman in 1940s Algeria, though I suppose one’s surroundings do feel just as bleak after so many years of mandatory public schooling. But does it make much more sense for me to clench my fist in solidarity at books like these?

Whatever the answer, I have to admire an opening paragraph like this:

It was at about the same time in my life, a calm life in which ordinarily nothing happened, that two events coincided, events that, taken separately, were of hardly and interest, and that, considered together, were unfortunately not connected in any way. As it happens I had just decided to learn how to drive, and I had barely begun to get used to this idea when some news reached me by mail: a long-lost friend, in a letter composed with a type writer, a rather old type writer, had informed me he was getting married. Now, personally, if there’s one thing that terrifies me, it’s long-lost friends.

Over the remaining 109 pages, Unnamed Toussaint Dude hangs around the licensing office drinking tea and reading the paper, falls in with a single mother working the desk there, gets driven around by her mildly eccentric Eastern European dad, eats olives, gets a pedicure, crosses the Channel, goes around Europe, finds a camera on a boat, and throws the camera off a boat. Among other things — I think. But is there any point plot summary here? Toussaint’s books practically exist to make the argument that plot doesn’t really matter. You might call his characters’ lives dull but well-observed — his characters might call his characters’ lives dull but well-observed — but are they really even all that dull?

Maybe I’m wrong, but if any of us fell in love with a driver’s ed office attendant by repeatedly showing up yet never quite bothering to get the necessary paperwork together, we’d dine out on the anecdote for the rest of our lives. If, visiting Milan, any of us were asked by our host (of the name Il Signore Gambini, no less) if we needed anything else, clutched his arm and incongruously demanded a pedicure, then got one at the most opulent place in the city, we’d never forget it. Hell, if we visited Milan at all — or London, or any of the places to which the other Toussaint protagonists jet at a moment’s notice — we’d think we were doing pretty well for ourselves.

So I might read about a life like this even if Toussaint’s consciousness wasn’t interpreting it. Fortunately, it is. He’s mentioned in a few interviews his opinion that novels should be “infinitesimal,” that they ought to put the infinitely small right alongside the infinitely huge. Hence Camera’s celebrated passage (among Toussaint fans) analogizing the eating of an olive with a fork to nothing less than a strategy for taking on reality:

I vaguely felt that the reality with which I was grappling was beginning to show some signs of fatigue; it was beginning to soften and slacken, oh yes it was, and I had no doubt that my repeated assaults, in their tranquil persistence, would end up exhausting reality little by little, as one wears out an olive with a fork, if you will, by pushing down on it lightly from time to time, and then when, weary, reality finally offers no more resistance, I knew that nothing could then stop my impetus, a furious surge that had always been in me, strengthened by everything I had accomplished. But, for the time being, I had all the time in the world: in the battle between oneself and reality, don’t try to be courageous.

I myself can’t get enough of the mundane shoved up against the cosmic, but if that’s not your bag, you could just take Camera as a love story between the protagonist and Pascale, the woman who, in a different reality, would have issued him a driver’s license. But on this inferior approach I can comment no better than did Tom McCarthy, a huge Toussaint fanboy and another of my favorite novelist working today:

For all their narrative refusal and machine-like logic, Toussaint’s first three novels also involved emotional encounters between men and women. They could even be seen as playful renditions of quite conventional romantic situations, but only if re-engineered through a certain kind of reading, much as some student guides to Ulysses try to persuade us that what’s ‘really’ going on in such and such a scene is Bloom pining for Molly, for example (‘No,’ I always want to shout out when I read accounts like these, ‘what’s really going on is tramlines vibrating, soap singing and language rioting, just like it says!’).

Jean-Philippe Toussaint: Self-Portrait Abroad

If we’re drawn to the books we ourselves would like to have written, then it’s no wonder I couldn’t wait to read this one. After all 84 pages of vignettes from the protagonist’s travels in Japan, Germany, the Czech Republic, Vietnam, and Tunisia — internationalism and textual brevity being two of my recent “things” as well — you’re tempted to ask the same question Dan Visel did: “What, precisely, is this book?”

Despite the many resemblances, physical and stylistic, to Toussaint’s other books, one factor complicates everything: this one’s protagonist has a name. What’s more, his name is Jean-Philippe, and his wife’s name is Madeleine. (“I will call Madeleine Madeleine in these pages to help me get my bearings.”) Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s wife’s name is Madeleine! (My own lady, by way of comparison, is named, with similar non-Anglo-standardness, Madelaine. One more on the pile of commonalities even now suggesting I can become as cool as him.) Both Jean-Philippe and Jean-Philippe Toussaint are globetrotting authors forever trying to make their various speaking engagements. I’d be tempted to call this straight-up nonfiction if Jean-Philippe the protagonist wasn’t written as quite so buffoonish and Dalkey Archive wasn’t selling it, seemingly, as fiction. I realize novelists often self-deprecatingly repurpose elements of their own lives up to and including their names, but damn.

On top of all this, I’ve heard rumors that the pieces Self-Portrait Abroad comprises are all or mostly previously-published travel journalism. (“Journalism” in the loosest sense, that is.) So jeez, I don’t really know what to say about the nature of this book, other than that it delivered to me an unpindownable sense of literary pleasure. Whether you’ll feel the same depends on how you like your stories told, and as I’ve written here many times before, I like my stories to barely be stories. So, apparently, does Toussaint; keeping the plot running in the lowest possible gear allows him the time and space to make his usual fascinatingly detached observations before his characters reach their miniscule victories or, more likely, their wet-fuse fizzles.

One of the Kyoto sections begins with “I didn’t get much chance to improve my German in Kyoto” and ends with Jean-Philippe arriving at a friend’s house (in an ambulance on which he had hitched a ride) only to find him not at home. A chapter in either France or Corsica describes a game of boules (which I’ve always known as the old Italian guy-friendly bocce or the nudist colony favorite pétanque David Sedaris wrote about) that Jean-Philippe wins with a particularly lucky move. “The best day of my life,” he declares it.

“Narratives of futility,” I could grandly call these but won’t. But if it’s not futility, what is it? These events seem thin, but this book teaches more sharply the lesson I’ve drawn from everything else I’ve read of Toussaint’s: no matter what happens or doesn’t happen, who it happens or doesn’t happen to, and where it does or doesn’t happen, a skilled writer can approach the material with the right mindset to crank out a thin volume that appeals highly to Colin Marshall. It helps if you include the following, which Toussaint does:

• A flower-arranging publishing house liaison desribed as “a thug from a film by Godard”
• A battle of wills with a German butcher shop attendant
• A beerishly hazy on-train meal in Prague of “sausages and pork embellished with an unavoidable side of potatoes”
• A Japanese girl who speaks only in Spanish
• A fish-slicing class under an impossibly stern master
• Surely the lease erotic strip-club visit ever taken
• A motorcycle ride through Hanoi
• An academic conference that forces Jane Birkin to sing a song
• A hilariously prolonged and futile effort of trying, and failing, to will oneself to tears of wistfulness

That last one’s familiar. Life gets a lot easier when you give up being outwardly sad about anything, in my opinion.

Jean-Philippe Toussaint: Running Away

Making Love was the first volme of Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s “Marie” trilogy; this is the second. It’s also, for my purposes, the most recent, since I’ve now got to stand around until a translation of last year’s La Vérité sur Marie appears. I hope it’s written and/or translated differently than Running Away because, even though I read a fascinating book at it its core, man, there’s something the matter with this prose.

Perhaps an example:

I became the person responsible for her suffering, I was the one who was tormenting her, without my even doing anything — my presence alone was making her suffer, my absence even more so — me, the one who wasn’t there when she needed me, not in Paris when she found out her father had died, not in Elba when she arrived, when all the practical details of the funeral had to be arranged, the one who, after having finally showed up, this morning, at the church, had immediately disappeared, before talking to her, before saying a single word to her, before kissing her and holding her in my arms, before sharing her pain, depriving her of my presence at the same time as making it flicker in front of her, causing her to tremble, giving her chills, just as I always did.

This, I would argue, does not read smoothly. Maybe it’s different for those possessed of particularly poor reading skills and who thus ride all texts as rocky roads, but I couldn’t stop re-punctuating this book in my head for improved flow. Here’s how I would’ve done the above passage:

I became the person responsible for her suffering. I was the one who was tormenting her, without my even doing anything. My presence alone was making her suffer; my absence even more so. Me, the one who wasn’t there when she needed me: not in Paris when she found out her father had died, not in Elba when she arrived, when all the practical details of the funeral had to be arranged. The one who, after having finally showed up this morning at the church, had immediately disappeared: before talking to her, before saying a single word to her, before kissing her and holding her in my arms, before sharing her pain; depriving her of my presence at the same time as making it flicker in front of her, causing her to tremble, giving her chills, just as I always did.

If I’m going to get impudent, I might as well take it to the limit. Here’s another degree of revision:

I became the person responsible for her suffering, the one tormenting her without even doing anything. My presence alone made her suffer; my absence even more so. Me, the one who wasn’t there when she needed me: not in Paris when she found out her father had died, not in Elba when all the practical details of the funeral had to be arranged. The one who, after finally showing up this morning at the church, disappeared before talking to her — before saying a single word to her — before kissing her and holding her in my arms, before sharing her pain — depriving her of my presence while making it flicker in front of her, causing her to tremble. Giving her chills, just as I always did.

Why would I feel it my place to retool the words of an internationally respected novelist nearly 30 years my senior? One excuse: I’ve spend the past couple weeks editing a friend’s novel, putting myself in a prose-economizing sort of mood. A more complicated reason: I’ve grown to enjoy Toussaint’s books enough that the dull-throb-inducing qualities of Running Away — and as far as I can tell, they’re isolated to Running Awayspecifically — spooked me. What could be the correct response?

I’d like to buy translator Matthew B. Smith a beer and talk this over. I have so many questions: did Toussaint actually write the original sentences this way, all mismatching clauses grafted together with comma after comma after unsuitable comma? If so, does that flow better in French? If it does, does it or does it not fall under the purview of translatorial duty to rework the text — minimally, of course — for better Anglophone consumption? Is this a case of too much faith to the original, or not enough? If the former, which particular elements of it won the bulk of that faith?

I can’t tell you whether or not these readability issues are beside the point, but at least they don’t render the book completely opaque. In a way, you could call the story’s surviving clarity a transcendence of the style. (Oh, and did I mention that there aren’t any paragraphs, just medium-to-large chunks of text separated by line breaks?) The summer before the planned breakup of Marie and the nameless Toussaint protagonist, she sends him on a combined business trip and “pleasure junket” in Shanghai. Zhang Xiangzhi, a mild small-time gangster type, meets him at the airport and acts as his handler; later, a girl named Li Qi turns up and rapidly develops what seems to be a crush on our hero.

Li Qi becomes, of course, the other player in that abortive sex scene on a train I mentioned hearing about on Bookworm. She and the narrator spend the first half of the book wordlessly waiting for their moment, and when it finally comes in the middle of the night on the railway to Beijing, Marie wrecks it. She calls on the protagonist’s hated cellphone, handed to him at the beginning by Zhang Xiangzhi. Marie’s father has drowned, had a heart attack, or both, and now she needs her man to help out with the funeral. Which is on Elba. (A big three-in-the-seat motorcycle chase comes first, though.

When not focused on racing over Beijing sidewalks or undressing Chinese women in train bathrooms, Running Away lays itself bare to the saddeningly common accusation that “nothing happens.” That’s not true, of course — it almost never is — but nor does the appeal of Jean-Philippe Toussaint lay in what he makes “happen.” Increasingly, I find great pleasure in the way that his nameless narrators’ internal monologuesreflect almost exactly the way I perceive and experience the world. (And that's not even counting its love for coffee houses!) To flip to a random example:

I was still, and I remained for a long time, in that state of suspension one enters while traveling, that intermediary state in which the body, in motion, seems to be making steady progress from one geographical location toward another (like the arrow I’d tracked on the in-flight video screen on my trip back from Beijing, charting the plane’s movement over a stylized world map, covered with mountains), but in my mind, incapable of adapting to this mode of steady and slow transition, is, for its part, unable to keep from splitting its attention between thoughts of the place we’ve only just departed, and concurrent thoughts of the place we’re approaching.

This passage has to do with travel, which I can already tell will turn out to be one of those elements of Toussaint’s novels that won’t go away. No problem; all this jetting to and fro did more than its part to attract me to his books in the first place, and I’ve got some catching up to do in that department. I’m thus provided with the distinctively fascinating combination of a voice that essentially echoes my brain’s own which belongs to a character whose motion strikes me as not simply desirable but inevitable. I mean, what am I going to do instead — buy a house?

Jean-Philippe Toussaint: Making Love

“Day was dawning over Tokyo, and I plunged a finger into her asshole.” There we have, in sentence-sized microcosm, much of what I’ve found appealing in the novels of Jean-Philippe Toussaint. Another nameless narrator finds himself in a situation he didn’t expect in a place he didn’t expect it to happen, one he wound up in by only the faintest traces of his own volition. Just as something grand happens in an exotic setting, a much smaller scale presents something decidedly more, er, intimate.

If all you knew about this book was that it contains that quoted line and that it opens with the protagonist handling his precious bottle of hydrochloric acid — “I carried it around at all times, with the idea of one day throwing it right in someone’s face” — you might assume it to be the work of one of those Frenchie “transgressives.” In the event, I’ve read few novelists less transgressive than Toussaint, who — and this may go some way to explaining that — actually comes from Belgium. I’ve never been to that country, but most of the accounts I’ve heard of it take great pains to stress its boringness. Nothing I’ve yet read of Toussaint’s says a thing about Belgium, which squares with that image, though I wonder if his homeland shaped what I’ll call his meditatively adventurous mindset. Seemed to do it for Hergé.

But nobody’s numbly getting that acid dripped onto their nipples or anything; when I want to write about stuff like that, I’ll get to work on my Michel Houellebecq primer. That plunge is by far the most sexually unconventional act on offer in the book, the first but not the last to feature the owner of the orifice in question. Marie Madeleine Marguerite de Montalte, a big-name fashion designer and the narrator’s longtime girlfriend, has come to Tokyo to put on an exhibit. The couple has come together in order, effectively, to break up. As a means of decoupling, this at least beats the hell out of an SMS message.

Nearly every element of the plot conspires to create a state of hazy unease which the text delivers with a curious resignation, in both senses of the word curious. The protagonist is traveling with his girlfriend, but she’s mostly occupied with professional obligations. And while she technically retains that title, both she and he know, on a deep level, that the union approaches its end. This all goes down in a land of whose language the protagonist is more or less ignorant; what’s more, he’s usually outside in particularly desolate wee hours. (Shades of Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation, but even lonelier.) On top of that, the protagonist spends a third of the novel suffering under a disorienting fever, and let’s not forget the floating question of who best to splash that acid on.

If Joy Press called Television spare and oddly limited, man, I wonder what she thought of this. Running barely over 100 pages, the book operates under what seem to be stiff textual and psychological confines. Its most harrowing piece of action comes then the narrator, his head clouded with sickness, hops on a train to Kyoto to visit a mostly absent Western teacher friend. He struggles to find his pal’s house and, once there, collapses on a mat and shivers for days. This situation is as strange and outwardly unproductive as he and Marie’s last-gasp attempts at sex early in the novel or his late-night break-in to the hotel gym to swim a few laps.

Yet there’s an intriguing interiority here, not just that of the Westerner bumbling through Japan, but specifically of the Francophone Westerner bumbling through Japan. I’ve long felt those cultures go well together, for sufficiently loose definitions of well. Some Japanese idealize France from afar to such a baroquely brittle point that, when they come up against Paris’ small rivers of dog crap and sullen, shove-y populace, there’s actually a syndrome for it. When I’ve seen French (or Belgian) writers and filmmakers examine Paris, they’ve usually done it with a kind of grand incomprehension — they throw up their hands, but they do it so artfully — that renders near-inconsequential details weirdly amusing. However the dynamic really works, it aligns well with Toussaint’s literary skill set.

(This would be as good a time as any to mention that I love Toussaint’s web site, which appears to be as internationalist as his writings themselves. I’ve gotta get me one of those. A few similarly neato Éditions de Minuit covers wouldn’t hurt, either.)

 

Jean-Philippe Toussaint: Television

I’ve chosen Jean-Philippe Toussaint as the subject of my next contemporary novelist primer for The Millions; think of these posts on his individual novels as preparatory notes. My first long-forn encounter with the man came in the form of an interview on Bookworm, the radio show that has introduced me to so many authors and asked so little in return. (PROTIP: Whenever you see a name you don’t know come up on that show, listen to the interview immediately.) I couldn’t tell you exactly why the conversation between he and (former Marketplace of Ideas guest) Michael Silverblatt so captivated me, but it surely had to do with their description of a scene where a Toussaint protagonist, on a train to Beijing in the middle of the night, readies himself for unexpected sweet restroom love with a Chinese girl he met the day before just as his hated cellphone rings, bearing a call from his on-again-off-again French girlfriend announcing that her father has drowned.

That bit comes from Running Away, which I just finished, but I began my voyage through the Toussaint oeuvre with Television, which seems best known among his Anglophone readership. Its nameless hero — a Toussaint specialty, I’ve learned, and one I always enjoy — ambles around Berlin, supposedly on some sort of academic sabbatical to write a book about Titian. He normally lives in France and has just seen his wife and son off on a mini-vacation to Italy, relegating himself to the company of his computer’s blinking cursor. Displacement? Check. Isolation? Check. Realizing how lazy his increasingly expansive television-watching schedule has made him, he’s decided to quit that habit cold-turkey, which both reduces and intensifies that isolation.

Despite the high number of words here about television — its nature, its effects, the measures needed to effect its absence, and the effects of that absence — I didn’t feel television itself taking on a particularly looming presence. Is this because television has no presence of any kind, much less a looming one, in my own life? I haven’t regularly watched television in nearly a decade; I haven’t even owned one. This came less out of addiction to it than boredom with it; it’s not that I took a long, hard look at myself laying around in pajamas staring at all-day Tour de France coverage like Television’s protagonist does, but that I couldn’t find anything good on.

I guess that, when Toussaint wrote this novel in 1997, television was a more maliciously all-consuming sort of force. I think back to David Foster Wallace’s 1990 essay “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction” which, among its many threads, talks about the ill effects of television’s primary purpose: to hold just enough of the viewer’s attention to keep him from turning it off. I buy that, though this seems less sinister than just totally unappealing. Our French art historian recalls a habit of “turning on the TV in the evening and watching everything there was to see, my mind perfectly empty, never choosing any particular program, simply watching everything that came my way, the movement, the glimmering lights, the variety.'” Or, here is David Sedaris:

To say that you did not believe in television was different from saying that you did not care for it. Belief implied that television had a master plan and that you were against it. It also suggested that you thought too much. When my mother reported that Mr. Tomkey did not believe in television, my father said, "Well, good for him. I don't know that I believe in it, either."

"That's exactly how I feel," my mother said, and then my parents watched the news, and whatever came on after the news.

The task of not watching television, which almost completely eclipses the task of writing about Titian, forces the protagonist to bounce from vignette to mildly weird Berlin vignette. He wanders a museum, contemplating most intently its televisual bank of security monitors. He cautiously climbs out his neighbors’ bathroom window into their kitchen window in order to remove their fern from the refrigerator before they notice he put it there in the first place. He sits in for a psychiatrist friend, counseling his patients for same-day cash. He sees an episode of Baywatch (long a German favorite) playing in the distant window of another building while he hears its sound coming from the set in a nearby room. In a sequence of especially inexplicable beauty, he looks out at Berlin from the cramped cockpit of a small plane piloted by one of his academic buddy’s students, a sullen girl, quite possibly hung over, with a penchant for flying as closely over buildings as possible.

Call this fragmentation, call it pointillism; I like stories told this way. In fact, they’re barely stories; they’re fabrics. Dalkey Archive’s press materials compare Toussaint’s novels to the films of Jim Jarmusch and Jacques Tati. I can’t call that inaccurate, in the sense that both directors’ work deals similarly with individuals drifting through, and failing to understand, complicated systems. But the filmmaker Television really gets me thinking about is Chris Marker; the detached, clear voice of Sans Soleil and the like make the world interesting in the same way Toussaint’s prose does. Marker is French, Toussaint Belgian; could this be a strain in the Francophone cultural sensibility — one of the very few — that taps straight into my preferences? If so, that must be why I’ve started to feel twinges of urgency about getting better acquainted with those cultures.

In the NYT, Joy Press calls the Toussaint form “spare novellas bounded by odd, self-imposed limitations.” This literary form has recently come to fire me up more than any other. Is that because it’s an analog for what I want to do in media in general: clear, clean, and driven by unconventional rules? It also dovetails with the appeal of what I call “life experiments,” which are nothing but “self-imposed limitations” one places upon one’s own actions — like, say, quitting television. The union of these concepts pleases me immensely; after all, I’m the one who won’t be satisfied until life and work merge inextricably, and likely not even then.

(Another point of convergence between Toussaint and I: he says he can’t write at home, preferring to do it in coffee shops instead. No wonder I’m excited to get to the rest of the guy’s work.)