the choosing debate: belief as flatulence
Marathe wondered why the presence of Americans could always make him feel vaguely ashamed after saying things he believed. An aftertaste of shame after revealing passion of any belief and type when with Americans, as if he had made flatulence instead of had revealed belief.
Context
The theme's sharpest single diagnosis: in a culture organized around irony, sincere conviction is socially shameful — filed, physiologically, in the same drawer as a bodily accident. Marathe is the novel's great single-entendre speaker, earnest and accented and unembarrassed, and yet even he cannot say a thing he believes to an American without an "aftertaste of shame," as if belief were flatulence. That's the whole disease compressed into a sensation: the American reflex has trained everyone, even the Québecer immune to it, to experience earnestness as a social odor. Sincerity isn't refuted here, it's made to smell — which is a more total defeat than any argument, because it operates below argument, in the body's cringe.