Hesitation · Television · Self-Portrait

Author: (Chinese) Jean-Philippe Toussaint / Jiang Xiaowen / Li Jianxin / Zeng Xiaoyang
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2004-05-01
Features: In Hesitation and Television, Jean-Philippe Toussaint continues to cautiously avoid engaging with meaning. However, compared to his earlier three works (The Bathroom, Monsieur, and The Camera), the protagonist of the novel no longer appears to be passively withdrawing from the world. He becomes obsessed with small things—such as a dead cat—which makes us believe he is engaged in a different kind of struggle with reality. He has a child, and soon he will have a second one; he does everything a normal person does—visiting a friend or conducting research on Titian. Yet, at this very moment, his old habit resurfaces: he hesitates whether to visit his friend; his old habit resurfaces: he hesitates whether to visit his friend; his thesis always remains stuck on that half-page of Musset; he has decided not to watch television, but he says this doesn’t mean surrendering to the artificiality of daily life. This person, we speculate, is sometimes the author himself. In Self-Portrait, the traveler doesn’t see a foreign city but himself. Finally, this portrait is cut into countless small pieces and placed into the entire narrative system since The Bathroom.