English Studies Forum

The Forum Reviews

Addicted to TV

Jean-Philippe Toussaint. Television.  1997. Trans. Jordan Stump. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 2004. 168 pp.  Paper, $12.95.

By Joseph Dewey, University of Pittsburgh—Johnstown  

There is a subtle violence in Scrabble. Words are torn from context, deprived of inviting complexity, flattened into unmotivated glyphs. Like Audubon Society members compelled to tour an elaborate aviary, lovers of words can be pained to see them so casually trivialized, deployed to mean, well, nothing. It is not difficult to imagine a teenage Jean-Philippe Toussaint relishing, even thriving amid the cool vacuum of competitive Scrabble—Internet sites offer little about the forty-ish Belgian writer (his seven novels to date have resisted the imperative of self-revelation) save that in 1973 he won the Junior World Championship Scrabble title. That game’s Beckettesque relish of language, its enormously satisfying tidiness, its elegant, if absurd symmetry (words stacked against and atop of each other) creates an enticing, protected game-world where letters are sufficient, where words dismiss the expectation of interaction. Self-sustaining, self-justifying, words here engage without depth, persuade without emotion, convince without demand, enthrall without catharsis.

Like a Scrabble gameboard, the narrative-space of Television is (paradoxically) compellingly un-involving with its minimalist gesture toward a plot (a man gives up television) and with its depthless narrator who monotones the minutiae of his routine experiences—he swims, he visits a library, he sunbathes, he takes his son to school, oh and he watches a fern.  His is an intriguing parody of narrative, a character resisting the involvement of revelation or the vulnerability of confession, preferring on the whole to tell us what is in his refrigerator, satisfied with small dilemmas and contained gestures. He is less a character than a well-played word in Scrabble—any complexity ironic, any context lost, a featureless conjure of words, a clean and evident surface designed largely to occupy space. Toussaint abstains from penetrating his character. Like Beckett’s cartoons, this narrator parodies a traditional hero—an arch-intellectual (a French art history professor on sabbatical leave in Berlin to research an unstart-able monograph on the Renaissance master Titian), he is happily horizonless, contentedly shapeless, a man uncomplicated by emphasis, involvement, risk, expectation, passion, stamina, and perception. He is, we fear, the very sort of person lots of television might engender.

The narrator faces a long summer alone without the cool company of his television—his pregnant lover (he lacks the commitment necessary for marriage) is off to Italy with their son. He is certain the television is a burdensome distraction and in the interest of committing himself to his research he goes cold turkey—only to find, of course, that television is impossible to avoid. He watches the television in an apartment whose owners have asked him to water their plants while they’re gone—he rationalizes that it does not count if the television isn’t his; he watches other neighbors’ televisions from his apartment window; he gazes into screens at department store displays, at library security surveillance consoles, even his own computer screen. His addiction is deep--he absently thumbs through the television listings in the newspaper. Even his research topic—Titian’s given name was Tiziano Vecellio—is another TV. Far more problematic, his decision to liberate his time by renouncing television does not lead to any sustainable results—his writing stalls (he convinces himself that not writing is actually a form of writing). Rather he strolls leisurely about his summer (and his narrative) really not doing all that much of anything.

Herein, of course, Toussaint reveals with understated comedic resonance a life that resists awareness of its own absurdity. Following the narrator as he maneuvers through long days that are clearly not any more rewarding because they lack the dimensionless entertainment of television, we tap what works as the ironic backstory of Toussaint’s parable—just when you think you can blame television for our thin and horizon-less existence, take it away and find it actually was our horizon. Has television created virtual people or have virtual people created television? The narrator, with Gulliveresque spleen, critiques the sorry impact of television on contemporary culture, its irresistibility, its pervasiveness, its superficiality. The very hopelessness of this man’s curmudgeony gesture, however, renders it heroic. Toussaint allows the gesture a stature beyond a profitless tantrum, a capricious, even poignant gimmicky resolution.

            It is, of course, not earthshaking to observe that television dominates our culture. Never has an artistic medium tapped such massive influence—more people will watch syndicated reruns of Saved by the Bell in any given week than will read Moby-Dick in the five years. It is telling that the narrator’s pivotal moment in his Titian monograph is an apocryphal meeting between the painter and his patron, Charles V. When the monarch strolled into the artist’s studio uninvited and unannounced, the painter continued to work, fretting over the shading of a detail on the canvass and thus distracted from paying appropriate attention to his august company. When the artist accidentally let slip his paintbrush, the king impulsively bent to retrieve it for the painter, a moment freighted with symbolic resonance for the narrator as the moment when art trumped reality, when the art made a servant of the king.

Some four centuries later, television has enslaved us all, thinned us into unimaginative spectators craving the simulated realities of unprocessed, unending images, bored with the unexamined world bursting about just outside the tidying frame of the picture tube. Even as the narrator stubbornly resists approximate intensities (doing nothing “requires method and discipline, concentration, an open mind”), it is just this uneasy quiet of the unlived life that creates the indirect, gentle comedy.  The narrator lacks the flamboyant madness of Howard Beal; the tender naivete of Chauncey Gardner; the disconcerting depths of Bartleby. Detached, he watches people, he sunbathes at a nudist beach, he sips coffee, he visits a library, he swims. His fascination with doing laps in the local indoor pool is telling—alone, suspended in tireless, tedious, pointless exertion, a terrifying/hilarious caricature of purpose. Toussaint captures with Beckettesque relish this character’s non-life—executes carefully, non-intrusively a plot without the engine of suspense (its episodic discreteness accentuated visually by the generous spacing between paragraphs), a plot without the reward of insight, a plot that refuses to lead to a climactic implosion. Like television (like Scrabble for that matter), the narrative celebrates words, not action. Our impatience with the narrator, with his fondness for delay, creates the subtle comedy.

There is a single dangerously eccentric moment—in the Durer room of the local museum the narrator pauses with epiphanic jolt and feels the “internal chaos” of feelings that defy translation, a sumptuous moment ignited by art in which the heart and the intellect find each other. That moment has always been the special privilege of art, the exploration of its dimension always asserting an intrinsic value to experience itself as it offers the possibility of such a moment. Without such intensity, Toussaint fears, narratives become no more powerful than a well-played Scrabble board. That the moment here passes into irrelevancy, that the narrator cannot summon the stamina to sustain its implications, that it essentially dissolves like a television being turned off, is perhaps the most unsettling moment in what is otherwise a droll and inviting leisurely stroll of a narrative. If narrative is to sustain a counterforce to the suasive reach of television, Toussaint warns, we must assess the damage it has done to the subtlety of character, to the reach of desire, to the need we have to assert. Television has not made us less interesting, Toussaint cautions, television has simply made us less interested in ourselves. Television cannot be shut off; television cannot be ignored into insignificance. Until we strike a workable coexistence, Toussaint fears, we have surrendered too easily the horizon, the restlessness, the capacity for wonder that has always compelled the reality that is not virtual.