4 - Décalage Permanent: Jean-Philippe Toussaint's Fuir

Summary

Ce qui caractérisait Marie, et rien d’autre, c’était sa faculté d’être en adéquation avec le monde.

– Jean-Philippe Toussaint, Nue

In Contre, Lydie Salvayre said she’d had to ‘fuir’ [flee] her ‘étrange République’ [strange Republic] and therefore also her/its ‘sommeil abject’ [abject sleep] (11). Moreover, the word fuir occurs frequently in Salvayre's novel Portrait de l’écrivain en animal domestique, the subject of Chapter Three; flight is an obsession of the narrator, who longs to escape her servitude to the Donald Trump-like CEO, Jim Tobold:

uir fuir fuir, comme si le diable était à mes trousses, fuir ce monde épouvantable des affaires, dans lequel tout me blessait, tout heurtait mon cerveau et mon coeur, tout anéantissait mes dispositions créatrices, ce monde dans lequel tout était en totale contradiction avec mes façons de penser, d’agir et de sentir, ce monde qui était en somme la figure renversée du mien, pauvre en avoir mais riche en être … . (58)

Flight is also a response to having one's existential territory crowded out by the progressive encroachment of monetization and commodification into the furthest recesses of everyday life. As we saw in Salvayre's novel, these pressures were expressed on an intimate level by the analogy of an animal kept on a leash. A similar malaise of confinement and control—and a concomitant urge to flee—opens Jean-Philippe Toussaint's eighth novel, Fuir [Running Away] (2005). In Fuir, the second in the Marie Madeleine Marguerite de Montalte (MMMM) tetralogy, Marie, a businesswoman and intimate relation of the narrator’s, sends the narrator to Shanghai, supposedly just to deliver a package and then enjoy a ‘voyage d’agrément’ [‘pleasure junket’] (11, 11). In fact, Marie's Paris firm is—like Jim Tobold's King Size corporation—also in the business of expanding its empire, in this case by purchasing devalued properties in certain ‘zones désaffectées’ [‘rundown areas’] of China, and by engaging in ‘des opérations immobilières … peut-être douteuses et illicites, locations et ventes de baux commerciaux, rachats de surfaces constructibles’ [‘real-estate investments … possibly dishonest and illicit activities, renting out and selling commercial leases, purchasing building space’] (13, 13).