A Nothing Match
Jean-Philippe Toussaint, trans. Shaun Whiteside, Football
Fitzcarraldo, 88pp, £12.99, ISBN 9781910695173
reviewed by Joe Kennedy
Right at the beginning of the Belgian novelist and filmmaker Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s gnomically titled Football, in a stark epigraphical boot-print on an otherwise immaculate page, we’re told that:
For any reviewer, this is almost certainly the element of the text which will offer the greatest critical access. Is Toussaint being serious? Or is this a stylisation of flippancy, the kind of tonal pranking familiar from his novels? How should we take the confession, or mock-confession, of compulsion? Does such a claim to necessity raise, or lower, the stakes of the text?
Reduced to its bare bones, the suggestion seems to be that the sport, and that definite article is essential, offers a safe route to the ‘real’ world, which is also unworldly in its unmediated, unthought innocence. Football is one of the last predictabilities; it is triumphantly resistant to intellectualisation, a reliably unspoiled place where dialecticians go for some R&R. The broader context of the work as a whole suggests that there is a good chance that this is how Toussaint really feels. Given that he only really takes an interest in, and attends, football during big international competitions – this is largely a book of anecdotes about supporting Belgium, up-close or from afar, at various World Cups – one might see why he apparently regards it as an especially-privileged outsider, a break from the all-consuming day job of Being An Intellectual.
Full disclosure: personal vested interests make it difficult for me to feint around this apparent provocation. I’m imminently to publish a book about football of similar length to Toussaint’s; in it, I argue pretty much the opposite to what is suggested, whether ironically or not, here. Football, I claim, makes a lot more sense if we realise just how entwined with intellectual culture it is. It is no accident that its rules were formalised in 1863, the same year that Charles Baudelaire defined the aesthetics of a coming modernism in his essay ‘The Painter of Modern Life’: football’s drama of anticipation and loss tracks modernity’s impermanency, its transience, its everything-solid-melting-into-air no less than Proust or Woolf. Being a football fan is not simply something to be thought about, sociologically or psychoanalytically or anthropologically, using Marx or Nietzsche or Freud; it can be its own, experiential way into such schools of thought. For what it's worth, my first real exposure to Beckett and Kafka, writers who would prove influential in my decision to study Literature at undergraduate and postgraduate levels, came through football fanzine writing.
Many intellectuals, if we’re using Toussaint’s term, have also been football fans. The quickest off-the-top-of-the-head roll-call brings to mind Derrida, Camus, Negri and Pasolini. Derrida dreamed of becoming a footballer while growing up in Algeria, Camus famously was one – a goalkeeper, no less – for a time in the same country. Nevertheless, most attempts to think about the relationship between football and intellectuals fall into oversimplification. The most famous, and perhaps notorious English-language example, Fever Pitch (1992), an endlessly readable sport-and-books memoir, is ultimately undone both by the fact that its ‘intellectuals’ aren’t especially intellectual and, more damagingly, by its tendency to position football as an enjoyable catharsis for an otherwise embattled masculinity. Toussaint’s book is less annoying politically than Hornby’s, but it seems to bring little weight argumentatively to its subject; as regards said subject, there’s a frustrating absence of detailed knowledge. A celebration of the ‘grace […] lightness and speed’ of the horribly ungraceful, prosaic Brazilian team who fortuitously won the 2002 World Cup in Japan is but one giveaway that the author’s knowledge of the sport is deeply mediated by hearsay and backpage cliché.
So, a book by a prominent-ish intellectual about football seems to fall awkwardly between the stools it oppositionally sets out in the epigraph. Consequently, this work feels rather light. What’s interesting here is that Toussaint’s fiction produces an illusion of lightness which, in the subtlest way possible, holds its nouveau roman predecessors to account. Unseriousness, in, for example, 1985’s Bathroom seems to operate in the service of a critique of ‘bad’ existentialism’s solipsistic authenticity. If hell is other people for you, it asks, do you ever wonder if perhaps you are hell for other people? By puncturing the seriousness of the nouveau roman’s register, it poses the mode with one of its vital problems.
Here, though, the breeziness often feels akin to rushedness. An under-baked comparison between the monastic life of the experimental novelist and that of ‘even the least significant football star,’ who has access to ‘glory, money [and] fame’ in untold abundance, is simply grating. When I was studying in East Anglia, my local newsagent was run by a man who’d scored a brace of goals in the FA Cup final; a friend of my mother’s was managed at work by a member of Liverpool’s all-conquering 1970s side. Below the absolute pinnacle of the modern game, most players retire into a life of anxious uncertainty, particularly if their careers have been ended prematurely by injury. Football is, predominantly, far, far less glamorous than people (like Toussaint) who know it mostly through World Cups think it is.
Elsewhere, his essay on the 2010 South African World Cup is actually a Geoff Dyer-ish account of being separated from the 2010 South African World Cup due to a need to watch the Le Mans 24-Hour Rally with Jeff Koons (as you do). I can take or leave most of Dyer’s work, but I can’t help feel but this meditation on not writing about the thing you’re supposed to be writing about would be better (and funnier) coming from him. Bits and pieces of Football do point towards an unwritten, better book – a lovely description of the ‘electronic baby-burp’ of an illegal live stream resuming after a dropped connection points towards some interesting thoughts on the changing ways in which technology shapes our experience of the game – but these are too rare.
Football closes with Toussaint's previously published, sort-of-famous essay 'Zidane's Melancholy', which is about the French captain's red card in the 2006 World Cup final. It's better than what comes before: it has the conviction to think about football in the language of an intellectuality the rest of the work seems wary of committing to the subject. Nevertheless, this doesn't read like a book that needed to be written. While Toussaint's fiction is properly enigmatic – you read it knowing it has to exist, but without the faintest idea why – Football is haunted by a strangely frustrating superfluity.
This is a book no-one will like, not intellectuals, who aren’t interested in football, or football-lovers, who will find it too intellectual. But I had to write it, I didn’t want to break the fine thread which connects me to the world.
For any reviewer, this is almost certainly the element of the text which will offer the greatest critical access. Is Toussaint being serious? Or is this a stylisation of flippancy, the kind of tonal pranking familiar from his novels? How should we take the confession, or mock-confession, of compulsion? Does such a claim to necessity raise, or lower, the stakes of the text?
Reduced to its bare bones, the suggestion seems to be that the sport, and that definite article is essential, offers a safe route to the ‘real’ world, which is also unworldly in its unmediated, unthought innocence. Football is one of the last predictabilities; it is triumphantly resistant to intellectualisation, a reliably unspoiled place where dialecticians go for some R&R. The broader context of the work as a whole suggests that there is a good chance that this is how Toussaint really feels. Given that he only really takes an interest in, and attends, football during big international competitions – this is largely a book of anecdotes about supporting Belgium, up-close or from afar, at various World Cups – one might see why he apparently regards it as an especially-privileged outsider, a break from the all-consuming day job of Being An Intellectual.
Full disclosure: personal vested interests make it difficult for me to feint around this apparent provocation. I’m imminently to publish a book about football of similar length to Toussaint’s; in it, I argue pretty much the opposite to what is suggested, whether ironically or not, here. Football, I claim, makes a lot more sense if we realise just how entwined with intellectual culture it is. It is no accident that its rules were formalised in 1863, the same year that Charles Baudelaire defined the aesthetics of a coming modernism in his essay ‘The Painter of Modern Life’: football’s drama of anticipation and loss tracks modernity’s impermanency, its transience, its everything-solid-melting-into-air no less than Proust or Woolf. Being a football fan is not simply something to be thought about, sociologically or psychoanalytically or anthropologically, using Marx or Nietzsche or Freud; it can be its own, experiential way into such schools of thought. For what it's worth, my first real exposure to Beckett and Kafka, writers who would prove influential in my decision to study Literature at undergraduate and postgraduate levels, came through football fanzine writing.
Many intellectuals, if we’re using Toussaint’s term, have also been football fans. The quickest off-the-top-of-the-head roll-call brings to mind Derrida, Camus, Negri and Pasolini. Derrida dreamed of becoming a footballer while growing up in Algeria, Camus famously was one – a goalkeeper, no less – for a time in the same country. Nevertheless, most attempts to think about the relationship between football and intellectuals fall into oversimplification. The most famous, and perhaps notorious English-language example, Fever Pitch (1992), an endlessly readable sport-and-books memoir, is ultimately undone both by the fact that its ‘intellectuals’ aren’t especially intellectual and, more damagingly, by its tendency to position football as an enjoyable catharsis for an otherwise embattled masculinity. Toussaint’s book is less annoying politically than Hornby’s, but it seems to bring little weight argumentatively to its subject; as regards said subject, there’s a frustrating absence of detailed knowledge. A celebration of the ‘grace […] lightness and speed’ of the horribly ungraceful, prosaic Brazilian team who fortuitously won the 2002 World Cup in Japan is but one giveaway that the author’s knowledge of the sport is deeply mediated by hearsay and backpage cliché.
So, a book by a prominent-ish intellectual about football seems to fall awkwardly between the stools it oppositionally sets out in the epigraph. Consequently, this work feels rather light. What’s interesting here is that Toussaint’s fiction produces an illusion of lightness which, in the subtlest way possible, holds its nouveau roman predecessors to account. Unseriousness, in, for example, 1985’s Bathroom seems to operate in the service of a critique of ‘bad’ existentialism’s solipsistic authenticity. If hell is other people for you, it asks, do you ever wonder if perhaps you are hell for other people? By puncturing the seriousness of the nouveau roman’s register, it poses the mode with one of its vital problems.
Here, though, the breeziness often feels akin to rushedness. An under-baked comparison between the monastic life of the experimental novelist and that of ‘even the least significant football star,’ who has access to ‘glory, money [and] fame’ in untold abundance, is simply grating. When I was studying in East Anglia, my local newsagent was run by a man who’d scored a brace of goals in the FA Cup final; a friend of my mother’s was managed at work by a member of Liverpool’s all-conquering 1970s side. Below the absolute pinnacle of the modern game, most players retire into a life of anxious uncertainty, particularly if their careers have been ended prematurely by injury. Football is, predominantly, far, far less glamorous than people (like Toussaint) who know it mostly through World Cups think it is.
Elsewhere, his essay on the 2010 South African World Cup is actually a Geoff Dyer-ish account of being separated from the 2010 South African World Cup due to a need to watch the Le Mans 24-Hour Rally with Jeff Koons (as you do). I can take or leave most of Dyer’s work, but I can’t help feel but this meditation on not writing about the thing you’re supposed to be writing about would be better (and funnier) coming from him. Bits and pieces of Football do point towards an unwritten, better book – a lovely description of the ‘electronic baby-burp’ of an illegal live stream resuming after a dropped connection points towards some interesting thoughts on the changing ways in which technology shapes our experience of the game – but these are too rare.
Football closes with Toussaint's previously published, sort-of-famous essay 'Zidane's Melancholy', which is about the French captain's red card in the 2006 World Cup final. It's better than what comes before: it has the conviction to think about football in the language of an intellectuality the rest of the work seems wary of committing to the subject. Nevertheless, this doesn't read like a book that needed to be written. While Toussaint's fiction is properly enigmatic – you read it knowing it has to exist, but without the faintest idea why – Football is haunted by a strangely frustrating superfluity.