THE LITBLOG CO-OP

READ THIS! - TELEVISION by JEAN-PHILIPPE TOUSSAINT

The Litblog Co-op is pleased to announce its Spring 2006 READ THIS! Selection: Television by Jean-Philippe Toussaint, translated by Jordan Stump (Dalkey Archive, 2004). The weeks ahead will include a chat with the translator and discussion of the novel by members of the LBC.

We will unveil the other four considered titles over the next four days, and having week-long discussions and posts by LBC members taking up the pros and cons of each title. Television will be discussed the week of May 29th, six weeks away (we are taking the week of May 22th off as many of our members will be at BEA), which you gives you plenty of time to find the book, read it, and join the discussion.

Now we present Derik A Badman, who nominated Television, as he explains why you should Read This!

I first discovered the novels of Jean-Philippe Toussaint while looking for a French language novel to follow up my reading of Camus' L'Etranger in the original language. I was not ready for the complicated and playful language of a Queneau or the descriptive vocabulary of a Flaubert. I needed something short, contemporary, and relatively unadorned. As it is my normal method of literary discovery, I turned to other authors I respected, in this case Warren Motte and his Fables of the Novel: French Fiction since 1990 (Dalkey Archive, 2003, a short essay by Motte follows the text in the Dalkey edition of Television), a collection of essays on current French literature. Motte calls Toussaint's work an "epic of the trivial" (179), a perfectly concise way to sum up the novels that have given Toussaint fame in Europe and little notice at all in the U.S. (though Television is the fourth of his eight novels to be translated into English). My library happened to have one Toussaint novel, La Television, the story of an academic who decides to stop watching television.

The narrator of Television is living in Berlin to work on a book about the painter Titian and art's connection to political power. His wife and child have left for a seaside vacation, and he is supposed to be writing. As the book opens he has decided to stop watching television. What follows is more a chunk of everyday life than an example of Freytag's Pyramid. The narrator goes about his days: swimming, meeting friends, "working" (mostly not, because "not writing is at least as important as writing"), washing the windows (likening the spray of washer fluid to the painting of Pollock), watering his vacationing neighbors' plants. Throughout, he seems incapable of avoiding the ever glowing gaze of the television set. The ubiquitous television and the conflicting relationship we have with it provides the thematic structure for the book, which both begins and ends with a renunciation.

The narrative voice is the stylistic star of the novel. The protagonist narrates his own story as if he were telling it to a stranger, not in a literary approximation of colloquial speech but in a casual manner that leaves out details and jumps around into the narrative past. Toussaint is a master of this style that presents us with a narrator who is not necessarily unreliable but not completely forthcoming either. The gap between how the narrator sees himself and how we see the narrator provides a great deal of the humor in the novel, and it is quite a funny novel.

My first reading of Jordan Stump's translation of the novel was my third reading of the book. In switching the language in which one reads a book, one might find the experience of a very different book, but the voice Stump creates in English was familiar to me and just as enjoyable.

Even after three readings, I find the book a funny and joyful read. There is something here that leaves me with a feeling of both the strangeness and banality of life. My hope in nominating this novel for the LBC is to share my interest in the fiction of everyday life, as well as spreading the word on a contemporary translated work and another fine book from Dalkey Archive Press.

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)