Context N°22
The following interview was published as an afterword to the second edition of the French novel Camera (Editions de Minuit, 2007). It is published here with the permission of the author and of the Editions de Minuit.
Laurent Demoulin: Would you say that The Bathroom (1985) was successful as a novel in France, whereas Camera (1989) established the success of a writer? Several critics, who were disappointed in Monsieur, said Camera confirmed an author’s talent.
Jean-Philippe Toussaint: This excluded, at any rate, the idea that I had written only one book. There is a continuity between The Bathroom and Camera, of course. Something rather usual happened with Monsieur, a common phenomenon called “the second, failed novel,” as though everyone was content to say, “The second novel is always less good.” Which is, to be honest, not impossible. But I was not aware of this possibility when Camera came out.
LD: Given the success of Camera, did you think you could now live from your writing?
JPT: I have never thought of this in economic terms. The tough moment was rather before the publication of The Bathroom: I felt I’d become a writer but had no publisher. Afterwards, I never thought about it, I wrote, and that was it. I was completely immersed in the action, and wasn’t reflecting upon the action. I wasn’t aware, either, of how my books fit into the literary landscape.
LD: Critics, as well as the first academic theses, which date back to when Camera was published, put the focus mainly on the philosophical nature of Camera. So the spotlight was put on the intellectual aspect of your work, not on the humoristic one. Wasn’t this a rather dangerous emphasis?
JPT: No, quite the contrary. Back then, people who didn’t like my books accused me of being a light, offhanded, trendy author who lacked depth. It was therefore a blessing in disguise that critics focused on the philosophical aspect of the book, on the reflections it develops about thought and photography: it balanced everything out, as it were. Camera is indeed both a very serious and very casual book. My books never display a great unbalance between the mundane and the intellectual, or between the provocative, I-couldn’t-give-a-damn attitude of Camera’s narrator on the one hand, and the philosophical and metaphysical reflections on thought and the passage of time on the other.
LD: There is a significant rupture in the tone of the book at one point: the first part is humorous, and then the novel shifts to a state of anguish, and becomes both more philosophical and more poetic.
JPT: That’s right. After the boat trip the tone changes and a certain poetic solemnity emerges. It was the first time a darker tone appeared in my books, without being a counterpoint to humor, without the offhandedness of The Bathroom that offset the serious reflection on the passage of time.
LD: However, although the solemnity of The Bathroom is minimized by irony and humor, the character in Camera is going through less of a crisis than the character in The Bathroom. The last few pages of Camera are slightly darker, gloomier, but the tragedy is played down.
JPT: Yes, it’s true, The Bathroom can be described as the description of a crisis, whereas Camera is more the description of a condition, the condition of someone’s place in the world. The book progressively shifts from the “struggle of living” to the “despair of being.”
LD: These quotes from the book are very striking. Is it possible to read it as a reflection on the contemporary world, which relies on the struggle of living as a means of avoiding the despair of being, preferring stress to anguish? The narrator avoids stress thanks to thought, but does not avoid a profound anguish. Is this in response to the general, current mood of the world?
JPT: In my mind, that sentence clearly indicates how the book is split into two parts: the first part is dedicated to the struggle of living, which is always a great humorous device. “There’s nothing funnier than unhappiness,” said one of Beckett’s characters in Endgame. Then the second part deals with the despair of being, which has to do with the human condition, philosophy, metaphysics . . . From then on, the tone is more melancholic.
LD: Camera is probably your most self-referential book . . . The first sentence, for instance, is almost a manifesto.
JPT: Yes, you’re right, it’s a manifesto, a program. I don’t know how aware of this I was. But still, it took me over a month to write the first paragraph. I still know it by heart. “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.” It’s a very radical opening, and it really is having fun with the readers. Here I am, a thirty-year-old writer saying: “What I’m about to tell you is absolutely irrelevant.” In other words: “I’m about to make you feel foolish.” It’s a very impertinent opening. I’m responding very offhandedly to Kafka’s famous aphorism: “In the fight between you and the world, back the world,” with “In the fight between you and reality, be discouraging.” So yes, it’s a manifesto, but it isn’t a theoretical essay or piece; it’s there, in the book itself, in the opening paragraph of the book, as a theory in action. Underlying my novel is, although it isn’t expressed theoretically, an idea of literature focused on the insignificant, on the banal, on the mundane, the “not interesting,” the “not edifying,” on lulls in time, on marginal events, which are usually excluded from literature and are not dealt with in books.
LD: The mechanisms that you created in The Bathroom are perfected in Camera. Could we say that Camera is the outcome of The Bathroom?
JPT: You could, but Camera is also a dead end. It can be seen as the outcome of The Bathroom, but the outcome may be less interesting than the initial moment, the first attempt, the moment when a style, a manner of things, something new, appears, without our knowing quite where it comes from or how it was done. At any rate, I didn’t pursue this further. Something ends with Camera. I opened a path and then I stopped, went on to something else, I made movies, experienced other things in my books, I thought I wouldn’t write a novel like Camera every two or three years, but maybe others will. As far as I’m concerned, I intend to go further, I want to discover something else, find the initial impetus which had motivated me to write in the first place, a sharpness, something Kafkaesque or Dostoyevskian. My next book, La Réticence (1991), was written entirely in response to Camera. Critics had talked a lot about how light and virtuoso Camera was; I wanted to move away from such virtuosity, I wanted to break it apart. La Réticence is a difficult, demanding, tough book, it’s harsh and sometimes unpolished. I wrote this book trying to keep in mind a secret guideline, a Beckettian one, the one that says: “badly seen, badly expressed,” and I tried to fail to see things and to fail to say them (and I succeeded in doing so, I must say, if the reaction of the media and readers is any indication). It’s the only book of mine that didn’t sell, the only one that got negative reviews, but I’m very proud to have got to the end of it. La Réticence is the book that was the hardest to write.
LD: One striking feature of Camera, compared to The Bathroom, is the length and flexibility of the sentences. Whereas sentences in The Bathroom were quite restrained, they become more ample, more stylistically daring in Camera. From this point of view, Camera is the foretelling of the long periods of time found in Making Love (2002) or Fuir [Running Away] (2005).
JPT: When I wrote Camera, I was more experienced, I was more at ease, stylistically speaking. I felt tense in The Bathroom: my sentences are short, solid. In Camera, I allowed myself to write longer sentences, which is much more difficult stylistically. Camera is both the outcome of The Bathroom, and a novel which announces the novels that follow, some of which were books I wrote fifteen years later; a lot of elements are set in motion in Camera which have results only in Making Love or Fuir. I must absolutely stress the continuity in my work, even though I pay constant attention to the idea of renewal, even though I try very hard not to write the same book twice, even though writing is always searching. I don’t think that I moved on to something different after Making Love or Fuir, not at all, everything already existed in embryo, was potentially present, there in the first books. In this respect, the third part of Camera is very revealing, for it contains a lot of elements one finds in Making Love or Fuir: melancholy, poetic solemnity, the theme of the night, longer sentences, rain, metaphysics, and even light: the description of rain falling, seen through the rays of a streetlight, could have been a scene in Making Love or Fuir.
LD: Critics started seeing you as a leader when Camera was published. In the French magazine Le Point, Jacques-Pierre Amette even uses the term “standard bearer.”
JPT: Back then I had no idea what was at stake in this. The one who was aware of it was my publisher, Jérôme Lindon. He could see that a new generation of writers was emerging and he knew how useful it would be to create a new literary movement, which could succeed the Nouveau Roman.
LD: The media also started talking about a “school” back then. The piece in Le Point was entitled “The nouveau ‘nouveau roman.’ ” Other expressions were coined: “the minimalist novel,” “the Minuit school,” “the postmodern novel,” “the impassive novel.”
JPT: There were several phrases going around, but none of them took on. That was the context in which Lindon asked me, one day, if I knew what this new literary movement could be called. Back then, I had dodged the question, but now, eighteen years later, I think I can answer it. It took me quite some time, about twenty years of reflection, but I found the answer. The answer is in the last words of Making Love, where I’m writing about an infinitesimal disaster. I didn’t write “infinitesimal” thinking of a theory, but I didn’t write this word lightly either. Infinitesimal is the response, and I suggest speaking of “the infinitesimal novel.” The problem with the idea of the “minimalist novel” is that it’s very simplistic. The term “minimalist” calls to mind the infinitely small, whereas “infinitesimal” evokes the infinitely large as much as the infinitely small: it contains the two extremes that should always be found in my books.
Translation by Aude Jeanson
