Parody and Palimpsest: Intertextuality, Language, and the Ludic in the Novels of Jean-Philippe Toussaint by Sarah L. Glasco (review)

This is a welcome addition to the growing body of critical work surrounding the Belgian writer, filmmaker, and photographer Jean-Philippe Toussaint. Sarah Glasco is chiefly concerned with the early novels, La Salle de bain (1985), Monsieur (1986), L’Appareil-photo (1989), La Réticence (1991), and La Télévision (1997), although she also devotes a long chapter to his ‘cycle de Marie’ tetralogy, Faire l’amour (2002), Fuir (2005), La Vérité sur Marie (2009), and Nue (2013). Given the frequent mundaneness of the author’s subject matter, Glasco’s goal is to demonstrate how ‘Jean-Philippe Toussaint is able to turn something seemingly quite ordinary on the level of content into something rather extraordinary in the end through his very creative use of narratology and style’ (p. 212). The essence of Toussaint’s style for Glasco is what she repeatedly describes as its playfulness, or ‘his use of ludic devices such as irony, pastiche, and parody’ (p. 4), resulting in the distinctive humour of his work, which, she argues, is often overlooked by critics. Glasco offers a chronological examination of Toussaint’s novels, in order to elucidate the ludic techniques of his fiction and argue that, while the author’s later work is less immediately funny, many of these tropes can be mapped directly from his earlier work. These ludic techniques fall into two broad areas: the linguistic and the intertextual. Accordingly, Glasco’s analysis examines the author’s use of wordplay and stylistic invention, for example in a rich description of an earthquake in Faire l’amour, and his frequent descriptive juxtapositions of quotidian details with surprising, even repulsive and comedic, examples of the saugrenu scattered throughout his texts. Intertextuality, inspired by Kristeva, Genette, and Riffaterre, forms the major focus of Glasco’s enquiry, and she is correct to argue that ‘Toussaint’s works are tied to cross-disciplinary texts that reveal transcultural discourses and include not only Russian, American and Japanese literatures [ . . . ], but also film, visual art, and socio-cultural and linguistic markers’ (p. 2). Her careful reading, often taking its lead from media interviews with the author, identifies implicit references in his work to artists as diverse as Beckett, Proust, and the Hong Kong film director John Woo. For Glasco, such references are evidence of Toussaint’s literary playfulness, but although she asserts that Toussaint explicitly ‘infuses neither politics nor philosophy nor morality into his texts to make serious statements therein’ (p. 118), the monograph would have benefited from some degree of political, philosophical, or moral consideration of the implications of the author’s ludic approach. The emphasis on Toussaint’s humour is mostly well judged, although a deeper consideration of its relationship to the French and Belgian absurdist traditions would, perhaps, also have been productive. Glasco is correct to note in the opening pages that ‘humour is subjective and thus impossible to prove on a universal level’ (p. 5), but her subsequent repeated assertions of what a reader would find amusing in Toussaint could be seen to impose a normative reading of his playfulness. On the whole, however, Glasco’s analysis is a rich and valuable resource through which to approach one of the most engaging contemporary writers in the French language.