The Quarterly Conversation is soliciting submissions for our Spring and Summer issues, as well as pieces to be published in between issues. (Submission guidelines here.) We publish book reviews, critical essays written for a broad audience, and interviews. We pay upon publication.

Over the past three years, we have grown to attract a sizable audience and mentions from sites like the National Book Critics Circle. Our adjunct blog, Conversational Reading, attracts thousands of readers per week. We are dedicated to high-quality criticism of new and interesting works of literature, and we publish it for an educated audience of laypeople who care about good books.

The Quarterly Conversation’s focus is on literary fiction generally, but we have especially strong coverage of literature-in-translation.

Issue 14, just published in early December, features essays on authors including William Gaddis and Charles Bukowski.

Our reviews included new work from Roberto Bolano, Michelle Cliff, Attila Bartis, and poet Lyn Hejinian. Recent interviewees have been Aleksandar Hemon, Horacio Castellanos Moya, and Michael Martone.

Our reviews typically range from 1,000 to 1,500 words, and we usually publish between 10 and 15 per issue. Essays are typically between 3,000 and 4,000 words, roughly 5 per issue. Interviews are about the same length as essays.

We are also always interested in pieces on authors and works as yet unavailable in English. In the past we have published essays on unavailable works from Eric Chevillard, Rodrigo Fresan, and Macedonio Fernandez.

We are currently assigning for our Spring and Summer issues, and we are also accepting submissions for book reviews and interviews to be published in between our quarterly issues.

For full information, including our pay rates, see our submission guidelines page.

http://quarterlyconversation.com/submission-guidelines

For inquiries, please contact the editor at scott_esposito@yahoo.com.

I.

I am not a fan of Tintin, but I might become one after having read Tom McCarthy’s rigorous study, Tintin and the Secret of Literature; I want to go out and read a few of these iconic and previously unacknowledged ubiquitous texts (for McCarthy, Tintin has influenced everything from Indiana Jones to espionage thrillers). I do not wish to read them because McCarthy’s book is such a good analysis (though it is), but rather because it narrates so much of the books’ plots that at times I need to read the originals to follow along. And this is the predicament of McCarthy’s book: How does one discuss a topic with a general audience when that topic has become rather specialized or even forgotten altogether?

McCarthy attempts it by discussing a topic that is hot right now—comics—and using language that’s intellectually hip. McCarthy’s work comes on the heels of newly made comic-to-film blockbuster productions like Batman Begins and Sin City, and it comes at the reader from a popular stance, while applying methodologies that utilize terms that are anything but popular. For example, Roland Barthes’ seminal S/Z is used throughout this study. The usage is sound. The lighthearted nature in which it is applied is opaque (and I like it). However, I still feel that unless one is a member of what I like to call the League of Literary Studies, I fear many readers may feel ostracized or lost.

It is the lighthearted application of theoretical models like post-structuralism or psychoanalysis that drives McCarthy’s thematic point. The study wishes to show that what seems to be mere entertainment is really doing so much more. It is playfully serious and by extension approachable by a mass audience. Tintin, as the first real comic, undermines the distinction between high and low art, suggesting that such categorizations are arbitrary at best. Thus, Tintin’s creator, Hergé (Georges Remi) can and should be considered a forerunner to artists such as Andy Warhol and Salvador Dalí, for Tintin is an aesthetic prototype for the 20th century, serving as an amalgamation of various artistic forms: painting, literature, dime novels, serial works, burlesque shows, and caricatures, which have all been shaken and stirred for mass consumption. The study goes on to make loose connections between Tintin, its meaning for the 20th and 21st centuries, and the life of Hergé himself. None of McCarthy’s connections nor the subsequent conclusions are meant to stand as the infallible, final word on the comic. Like Barthes’ thesis, the work tries to evoke new meanings as long as people read and consume it, which establishes a contract of serious play between reader and text. And herein lies a major problem with McCarthy’s study.

First, the Barthesian idea of how a contract exists between the reader and the text is lost here; at least, this complex idea is lost without a more careful study and contextualization of the rather nuanced ideas Barthes considers (and later reconsiders in later works of his).

This mixture of the critical and the popular angles will dissatisfy many readers in the end. The academics want more than a light peppering of their belief-systems; many non-academics will be disenchanted by the jargon-laden language, with its linguistic lagniappes of enlightenment. The bridge that might otherwise exist here between the popular and the academic fails to hold one’s weight when jumped upon.

It seems, at least in part, that this is the book’s aim: In order to ultimately prove Tintin is great literature (or that there is no such thing as great literature, per se), then it must be compared to other great works of art. In order to make such a comparison, the methods of study applied to those other great works must also be applied to Tintin as well.

Very well.

Yet, where are the pictures? If we are going to discuss perhaps the most groundbreaking comic and one of the most influential bodies of work of the 20th century, then aren’t we to have some pictures? The general reading audience expects visuals; we are all visually oriented, more so than we used to be. With a comic, we expect even more of those images; we are trained to look for them. There are, however, none to be found, save for obscure images that open each section of the book.

There is an answer for this absence. McCarthy brilliantly criticizes the Hergé estate for its copyright protection policies, which explains the reason that no Tintin images appear in the book. And, in fact, McCarthy shows a fine capacity to make lemonade from lemons by making the pictures’ very absence from his study the point: Tintin is a blank slate, McCarthy argues, “His face, round as an O with two pinpricks for eyes, is what Hergé himself described as ‘the degree zero of typeage’—a typographic vanishing point. Tintin is also the degree zero of personage. He has no past, no sexual identity, no complexities . . . he is a writer who does not write. As Tintin could tell you, if there are secret operations going on in this degree-zero zone of writing, then these can only be approached by overlaying, reading across, reading through [an idea of Barthes' that McCarthy acknowledges using earlier]. That is what we will be doing in this book.”

But I still need the pictures. Rehashing the comics’ plots becomes a poor substitute, and through the various philosophical methodologies that are called upon and the visual examples that are not, the reader becomes aware of a divide between those who will revel in the academic language found throughout, in other words, those who might accept the McCarthy’s intellectual justification for the absence of the pictures, and everyone else.

Perhaps the book’s point, at least in part, is to draw the reader’s attention to an artificial divide that exists between high and low art. McCarthy asserts, “Hergé’s final, incomplete book Tintin and Alph-Art . . . betrays in its massive self-reflexivity a desire to be taken seriously, to be seen to be considering the highly conceptual issues in contemporary art with which its author is clearly au fait, alongside a desire to mock the highness of the establishment that never accepted him as highbrow, to expose its pretentiousness, its fraudulence. And literature? Hergé grew up reading lowbrow books. Later in life he read Proust and Balzac. He even read Barthes. But he never aspired to be considered a ‘writer.’”

II.

I don’t mean to say that comic books in general, or Tintin in particular, are unworthy of serious study. The very fact that comics sell and productions of classic and newly dubbed classic tales like Superman, Batman, Spiderman, X-Men, The Fantastic Four, The Punisher, Catwoman, Spawn, et al., serves as a signpost to this truth that the medium is worth investment. McCarthy makes sure the reader does not miss this point by mentioning Spielberg, who has been after the rights to Tintin for over two decades.

This is all to say that McCarthy’s study is a serious one, using theoretical disciplines to unpack the comic’s mysteries. But the text’s goals are ambiguous. Its success is even more so.

McCarthy certainly wishes to assert that the author, Hergé, can and should be considered in the same company as Shakespeare, Balzac, Dumas, Cervantes, Austen, Brecht, Dickens, Flaubert, Chaucer, Molière, Conrad, Marlowe, Eliot, Faulkner, James, Goethe, and Baudelaire—all names dropped within the first 11 or so pages of the book McCarthy simultaneously claims that Tintin’s author did not want to be considered a “writer.” This distinction is rather difficult to follow.

Does McCarthy wish to argue that the books are a window into the personal life of Hergé himself, into the psyche of the creator of what McCarthy hails as pure genius? Everything from the author’s supposed genetic connections to royalty, to his change from anti-Semite to near leftist thinker, or to his relationship, or lack thereof, with his father comes under the purview of the study, which utilizes such varied disciplines as pychoanalysis, post-structuralism and New Criticism, and even post-Marxist models of economic or cultural dynamics—all to pick apart the enigma that is Hergé, that is Tintin.

Thus, in the end the answer to just what this book purports to do is blank-slated and rather elusive. McCarthy’s project leaves us with an open-ended conclusion and the attempts seem to fall apart to a certain extent because they wish to achieve so much. Hergé’s work is finally authorized. It is given exposure and recognition. It is now also limited.

Yet, as optimistic as the character Tintin himself is, yet Barthes’ claim cannot be limited: the secret of literature lies in its secrecy, and no amount of analysis, or lack thereof, will deny the interpretations enacted in McCarthy’s study. The ability of Hergé’s work to yield meaning stops only when we stop reading it.

Matt Bowman is a doctoral candidate in comparative literature at Michigan State University. He currently teaches at Samford University.

The 20th century was fertile ground for literary investigation into the paradox of rendering nothing on the page. Nothingness’s depiction can be, as in Beckett, something utterly miserable: cosmic absurdity brought down to break the will of the average individual. It can become, as in Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel, The Road, part of a terrible existential moment as individuals confront the inevitable onset of a world without humans. But nothingness can also be quite different: it can be, as presented in Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s Monsieur, something light and comical. Call it an utterly banal, self-inflicted nothingness, the slacker’s dream of a nothingness full of comfort because it requires the least from him of anything. Perhaps this is the kind of nothingness with which we are now best able to relate.

Monsieur’s titular protagonist is about as inactive an anti-hero as you’re likely to get. Out of sheer inertia, he continues living in his fiancée’s parents’ apartment well after the bride-to-be has started up with another man. (Her mother eventually finds Monsieur a new place to live.) After moving out, when his new neighbor boorishly co-opts him into transcription duty Monsieur sees no escape: to move to yet another new apartment would require exertion, as would telling his neighbor to buzz off, so he just becomes the man’s secretary. Monsieur’s dedication to inaction runs so deep that even a painful, fractured wrist that is swelling right before his eyes cannot raise the tiniest note of urgency:

Monsieur knew full well that X-rays were common, painless procedures, and he would have gone along without too much apprehension if, to go through with it, he didn’t have to go to the hospital (Monsieur was not particularly fond of hospitals). And so, sitting down again, he asked the Parrains if by any chance there wasn’t a doctor in the building, for example a radiologist.

Toussaint’s peeking absurdity is visible, just barely, in what next happens to Monsieur. He’s told that there is in fact a doctor in the building and that he need only telephone to see if he makes house calls. Adverse as he is to telephones, our protagonist nevertheless contemplates the matter, decisively slaps his good hand on the table, and asks Monsieur Parrian for the phone. When he returns from the call, which we are not privy to, Madame Parrian remarks on her surprise that Monsieur already knew the doctor’s number. Monsieur replies that he didn’t call the doctor; he called his boss. “Oh, I didn’t know you worked,” replies Parrian. After a brief segue way Monsieur ends up—somehow, it’s never explained—in the doctor’s apartment, but his wrist is never definitely seen to.

It somehow makes no sense at all and exactly perfect sense that Monsieur would summon the resolution to make a call, and then call the wrong person, or that the lady of the house he lives in would have no idea that he’s employed. As in this segment, the strategies Monsieur implements to pursue inaction, and the effects of their successful implementation, give us very ambiguous insight into the protagonist. Is he pathologically shy, or does he just prefer to get along with minimum interference? We, like Madame Parrian, come to intimately know Monsieur’s defining trait, an all-encompassing drive toward inaction—and almost nothing else about him.

Although Toussaint never provides evidence to convincingly resolve the question of whether Monsieur is shy or misanthropic, it is certain that his goal is to arrive at the point of least interaction, and always by exerting as little energy as possible. He seems to be very much like the cat in Schrödinger’s famous thought-experiment, which Monsieur explains to his friend:

A cat was placed in a closed chamber with a capsule of cyanide in such a way that, if the atom underwent radioactive deterioration, the detector would activate a mechanism that would break open the capsule and kill the cat. . . . The atom in question having in fact a 50 percent probability of undergoing this radioactive deterioration within the hour, the question was the following: sixty minutes later, was the cat alive or dead? . . . However, according to the Copenhagen interpretation, he went on, when the hour was up the cat was in limbo . . . the simple fact of taking a look would radically alter the mathematical description of its state, transforming it from the state of limbo to a new state, where it was either positively alive of positively dead.

I believe Monsieur envies the cat in its box, sitting there happily in its state of limbo, completely unaware that someone could open the box and force it into a life or death confrontation. Similar to the cat’s delicate balance, Monsieur’s life is a fragile thing, and every intrusion into it is a calamity, a crisis whose resolution might be harmless or catastrophic. The cat’s advantage over Monsieur, what really makes its life enviable, is that it, being an animal in a box, has no idea that its limbo might ever end, whereas Monsieur must constantly fret over his and battle to preserve it.

Late in the novel, Monsieur discovers what must be his box: the rooftop of his apartment, where he can sit alone, staring off into the depths of space:

Around Monsieur, now, it was like night itself. Immobile on his chair, his head bent back, he once again let his view mingle with the infinity of the skies, his mind reaching out towards the curve of the horizon. Breathing peacefully, he scanned the whole night of thought, all of it, far into the memory of the universe, to the depths of the glimmering sky. Reaching ataraxy, no thoughts stirred in Monsieur’s mind, but his mind was the world—that he’d convened.

This moment occurs rather late in Monsieur, and it is possible to make out, although only by carefully looking (this is a novel about inaction and nothingness, after all), a definite withdrawal of Monsieur from the world, a withdrawal that finds its pinnacle in these evenings on the roof. As the short, spare, elliptical Monsieur progresses, its protagonist spends more and more time completely alone; he comes to talk as little as possible; he even figures out how to get other people at work to push the elevator buttons so he can keep his hands in his pockets.

In his pursuit of complete disassociation from the world around him, Monsieur comes to resemble an electron, perhaps one intent on joining an atom of inert gas. The people who continually attempt to impose their will upon him throughout the book—his neighbor Kaltz, a woman Kaltz attempts to ensnare, his brother, even a teenager who almost beats him at ping pong—may be seen as the cosmic forces the Monsieur/electron wishes to escape. At times Monsieur even describes himself as an electron that calls on quantum forces to tunnel to safety:

Perhaps seeing Monsieur there, before him on the pavement when he should have been behind him in the room, Ludovic, in a fit of giddiness, would imagine that Monsieur, who obviously could be in only one place at one time, displaced himself apparently without transition and that his energy, like that of the electron, in its sleight of hand (hip, hop), effected a discontinuous leap at a certain moment, but that it was impossible to determine at which moment this leap would take place as there was no reason, according to the Copenhagen interpretation, for it to happen at one given moment rather than at another.

Here, Toussaint is likening the cosmic randomness of the electron’s jump—one of the most fundamental activities in the universe—to the meaninglessness of all activity in Monsieur’s life. Why do things happen to Monsieur? Why do people keep disturbing him? And most importantly, why is Monsieur acted on at some times but not others? Monsieur has no idea, he uses the metaphor of the electron to demonstrate his utter bewilderment with a world that would first force him to teach physics to a teenager and then permit him to just jump free of his burden.

I would argue that a man in this kind of a relationship with the world, one who sees it as utterly capricious, as pure randomness to be escaped and avoided, cannot be anything but frightened of it. It’s quite easy to read Monsieur as more of a commanding figure, as an individual who, like many of Toussaint’s other characters, is a reluctant warrior, dispatching bolts of irony to preserve his distance from the world. This is indeed a popular reading of Monsieur’s character, one supported by his twin quips (“People, really” and “Indeed”), but I think this reading is wrong. Toussaint so rarely places us inside Monsieur’s head that any reading is ultimately fraught, but to me Monsieur seems rather frightened of the world. His irony isn’t haughtiness, it’s self-preservation. Certainly, Monsieur has his outbursts and his snide private jokes, but the fact is that despite these other people seem to greatly distress him. Here he turns something as simple and banal as a work meeting into a trial:

Monsieur sat at the 17th seat on the left where, he knew from experience, his presence went the most unnoticed, beside Madame Dubois-Lacour who, as supervisor to a large part of his activities, responded to most of the questions asked of him and, throughout the meeting, calmly smoked his cigarette. Monsieur was scrupulously attentive to remain in line with her body, drawing back when she moved backwards, leaning forward when she moved forward, so as to be never too directly exposed. Whenever the Chief Executive said his name out loud, Monsieur leaned forward, as if surprised and, inclining his head respectfully, responded straight away in dry, precise, technical, professional terms. Hip, hop. After which, fingers trembling slightly, he retreated into his neighbor’s shadow.

Notice that “hip, hop,” the same figure Monsieur employs while thinking of how he bounded away from the teenage physics student Ludovic. Monsieur’s frequent use of this phrase implies that his life is, like Schrödinger’s Cat’s, a series of close calls as fundamentally incomprehensible and random as an atom’s decay.

The book ends with Monsieur perhaps as happily in his box as will be possible. He has somehow gotten down off his roof and into the company of a woman, and the book ends with the two of them immersed in a blackout that, as far as we can tell, covers all of Paris. Monsieur, finally able to see “the sky in its natural state now, far from the parasitic city lights,” sided by a woman who has taken the liberty of making the first move, seems finally at ease with another human being.

Monsieur is a measured, pleasant read, but it does suffer in comparison to Toussaint’s mature work. This was his second novel, published and relatively successful in the U.S. at a time when not much of Toussaint was available to us. But now English-language readers have access to Television and Making Love, and these are more complex works, more rewarding novels than Monsieur. Though they retain the same basic character familiar from Monsieur (and The Bathroom, Toussaint’s first novel), they place this protagonist into increasingly complex situations, allowing the basic theme of the nothingness-loving protagonist to resonate against well-constructed scenarios involving contemporary phenomena. Television, for instance, pits the typical Toussaint protagonist against the lure of television, and as he wages his own inept, rationalization-ridden battle against the screen, Toussaint casually deconstructs the roll of TV in modern society.

There’s nothing quite that complex in Monsieur, although it does maintain its own particular pleasures. The novel is a marvel of restrained, polished prose, and the secondary characters are defined in the space of a beautiful, pithy sentence. It is a book that, though outshone by Toussaint’s later writing, remains definitely worth reading.

Scott Esposito edits The Quarterly Conversation.

The Quarterly Conversation is happy to announce that we will be running a special feature in our Winter issue on the theme of reading and writing at work. For this feature we are interested in:

• the literary criticism that we usually publish, only focused on authors who have unusual relationships to their places of employment (think Gaddis and Walser)
• personal essays that deal with one’s relationship to reading/writing and their work; or essays about reading/writing at work, provided that these essays have a significant literary criticism component
• reviews of books that deal with this subject

We are accepting contributions for this special feature on a rolling schedule. Inquire with the editor for specific deadlines.

As always, we will also be considering the usual array of features, book reviews, and interviews for the Winter issue.

An essay first published in The Quarterly Conversation will appear in Best of the Web 2008 from Dzanc Books.

The essay is The One that Got Away by Garth Risk Hallberg. It takes on James Wood’s negative opinion of Don DeLillo’s mammoth novel Underworld and explains why, in fact, Underworld is a model of innovative fiction.

Best of the Web 2008 is the first in a yearly series from Dzanc Books. According to Dzanc, it will “offer in an eclectic collection in the manner of other broad-ranging anthologies such as The Pushcart Prize anthology, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and Best American Short Stories.”

Best of the Web 2008 will be available in mid-July. Look for it, and look for our essay in there!