Quirky and curious yet charming and, dare I say, existential.
Although there is zero information provided relating to his background or profession, I picture the somewhat eccentric unnamed narrator of Jean-Philippe Toussaint's short novel as a well-educated, thirtysomething Parisian working a cushy job requiring scant hours but a certain amount of international travel.
Also included in this Dalkey Archive Press edition is an interview wherein the Belgian author relates that Camera contains elements both humorous and cerebral; it’s a novel serious as well as casual, although the more intellectual, philosophic dimension doesn’t kick in until the later part, following the protagonist's boat trip when the story shifts from the struggle of living to the despair of being.
As part of the same interview, Jean-Philippe relates two additional points worth mentioning: 1) his entire corpus of fiction, Camera included, might best be categorized as infinitesimal rather than minimalist since minimalist brings to mind the infinitely small, whereas infinitesimal evokes the infinitely large as well as the infinitely small, and 2) he quotes Kafka: "In the fight between you and the world, back the world."
Recall I alluded to Camera as an existential novel. And that’s existential as in a keen focus on the singular, the particular, the uniquely individual to better comprehend, or at least come to terms with, our all too human predicament. So, employing this existential lens, I’ll shift to select passages of Camera to both flesh out the observations Jean-Philippe offers in his interview and illuminate several other aspects of this delightful fiction.
"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 any interest, and that, considered together, were unfortunately not connected in any way." Jean-Philippe worked and reworked this, the novel’s first sentence, over the course of a month. The Belgian author is all about giving voice to the banal, the mundane and the “not-interesting” all the while injecting an element of humor. Obviously, he takes the exactitude of his language seriously. I reread this first sentence multiple times, and must admit, it sets the tone for the entire novel in all its quirkiness.
“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.” The narrator’s reflection echoes the above Kafka quote and highlights his philosophic side. In dealing with the everyday stuff of the world – completing forms, gathering documents, learning to drive a car, filling a propane tank, waiting for a mechanic at a service station (among the challenges encountered in the tale) – resist the temptation to become frustrated or angry; much wiser to approach the world’s minutiae with equipoise or, in hip parlance - hang easy; dangle loose.
“The next morning, I woke up, still half-asleep in the partial shade of the room, Pascale in my arms, and I was gently caressing her breasts under her pajama top. She wasn’t any more awake than I was and, both of us still sleeping, we moved closer together in our sleep, hands touching cheeks or running fingers through hair." Pascale is the name of a single mom working at the driver’s ed office, a gal the narrator falls in love with (ah, a love story!). But please don’t expect sizzle or hot passion; in keeping with the author’s literary aesthetic, we’re treated to moments usually judged trivial or prosaic. I say “usually” since, if we read with care and attention, there’s great beauty and tenderness in the couple’s maneuvering in and around a driver’s ed office, her father’s Triumph, a slot machine, an Indian restaurant.
“It was night now in my mind, I was alone in the semi-darkness of the booth and I was thinking, protected from outer torments. The most favorable conditions for thinking, the moments when thought can let itself naturally follow its course, are precisely moments when, having temporarily given up fighting a seemingly inexhaustible reality, the tension begins to loosen little by little, all the tension accumulated in protecting yourself against the threat of injury." The narrator is in a photo booth and here we have an initial glimmer of the novel’s shift from action and struggle to a formless, still realm of Being. Reading this section, I was reminded of Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time as well as The Upanishads and the Tao Te Ching.
“Leaning over the guardrails, photos in hand, I saw the endless sea, waves swelling off into the distance, immense and formless.” Our narrator has an even deeper, more direct experience of the boundless, infinite fullness (or emptiness) of Being beyond the turmoil and habitual tug-of-war produced by the mind.
“Less than a meter from me, leaning over the machine, the man frantically worked the joysticks, having his helicopter suddenly gain altitude – lips pressed tight, and thrusting his pelvis against the machine – discharging a salvo of electronic beams that blew up boats on after another . . .” Ah, the stark contrast! It’s predawn and the narrator leisurely roams the boat, his mind continuing to mirror the stillness and quietude of the immense and formless sea when he’s jolted by an island of violence and war.
“I took the camera out of my pocket and almost without moving, I let it fall overboard, smashing against the hull before bouncing off into the sea and disappearing in the current.” Bravo, sir! No comment of mine needed here; rather, I will end with Jean-Philippe Toussaint's Zen-like words when an interviewer asked: "What is the role of the artist in society?" J-P T's answer: "To run away."
Belgian novelist Jean-Philippe Toussaint, born 1957
"A few minutes earlier, on the maritime platform, I had stopped to watch the rain fall in a bright projected beam, in the exact space delineated by the light, enclosed and yet as devoid of material borders as a quavering Rothko outline, and, imagining the rain falling at this place in the world, which, carried by gusts of wind, passed through my mind, moving from the shining cone of light to the neighboring darkness without it being possible to determine the tangible limits between the light and shadows, rain seemed to me to represent the course of thought, transfixed for a second in the light and disappearing the very next second to give way to itself." - Jean-Philippe Toussaint, Camera
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