Television - An Excerpt

Two paragraphs from Television by Jean Philippe Toussaint as translated by Jordan Stump (Dalkey Archive, 2004):

I went into the kitchen and opened the cupboard under the sink, kneeling down to extract a basin and a sponge, as well as the spray bottle of window cleaner, so beloved of my son (for its "tricker," as he said, doubly wrongly, to refer to the lever that operated the pump), which did not prevent him from displaying a particularly itchy forefinger whenever I authorized him, under my imperturbable surveillance, to moisten the windows or coffee table with a spray of that miraculous liquid, which went ssshhht and turned foamy the moment it touched the glass. It's true that this was a fascinating tool, this transparent plastic bulb, full of a limpid, blue solution with a lovely detergent scent. I threw open one of the living room's two French doors, almost two meters high, with a single unbroken pane of glass extending almost to the ceiling, topped moreover by a little transom, and I climbed onto the radiator, the basin at my feet. Standing on the brink of the void, clasping the French door with one hand while the other peppered the glass with the spray from my pistol, I soon realized that, once the first lighthearted spatterings are over, carefree and slightly silly, the window washer's delight, of which Jackson Pollock surely knew a thing or two, the task quickly turns tiresome, for now there's nothing to do but wipe, like some maniacal housewife, firmly pressing your sponge to the glass--or, even better than a sponge, a page from an old newspaper, for, even where windows are concerned, nothing will ever replace the printed page, in my opinion. I thus held in my hand a crumpled sheet of newsprint, and I was wiping the top of the windowpane, standing on the edge of the sill, sometimes leaning perilously into the emptiness to reach some complicated corner and give it a finishing touch with a sponge, when I saw a taxi rolling down the street before me. I stopped wiping for a minute, my sponge in my hand, to watch its approach. Slowly the car rolled to a stop in front of my building, the engine still running quietly. After a moment, the driver climbed out and raised his head toward me, casting a quick glance over the building's facade. Slightly uncomfortable on my second-floor window ledge, I looked away and began wiping distractedly, doing me best to look occupied. I wiped slowly, almost in place, my eyes downcast. "Hallo," the driver said abruptly, to attract my attention, "did you call for a taxi?" "Me?" I said, cautiously pointing at my breast with the sponge. Me? How could he accuse me? Couldn't he see I was busy, washing the windows? He let it drop there... (68-69)

Now I closed the window again, and, before heading into the kitchen to stow my gear, I did a bit more tidying up in the living room, summarily dusting the couch cushions, holding them up in profile to give them a few good swats with the flat of my hand, then spraying a few bursts of cleaner in the middle of the coffee table and giving it a quick circular wipe with the sponge. Finally, just as I was about to leave the room with my spray bottle and basin under my arm, I cast a quick glance toward the television set. Noticing that it too was dusty, I gave it a carefree little shot from my bottle, and the resulting spray crashed against the top of the screen in a little wad of whitish, effervescent foam; then, feeling a slight giddiness in which the simple childish pleasure of shooting mingled with a subtler sort of delight, symbolic and intellectual, linked to the nature of my chosen target, I kept firing agin and again, draining the spray bottle of almost all its detegent, firing shot after shot straight at the screen, point blank, squeezing the lever then relaxing my finger, squeezing and relaxing, faster and faster, anywhere that struck my fancy, all over the screen, until the entire surface was covered by a coating of mobile, foaming liquid, slowly slipping earthward, intermingled with grime and dust, in sluggish, oleaginous flows, that seemed to ooze from the machine like the residue of programs past, melted and liquefied and rolling in waves over the glass, the livelier ones speeding down in one non-stop swoop, while others sank more slowly and ponderously to the bottom of the screen, then changed course and poured over the floor, like shit, or like blood. (70-1)

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