“One Saturday in the month of August, you leave your home wearing your tennis gear, accompanied by your wife. In the middle of the garden you point out to her that you’ve forgotten your racket in the house. You go back to look for it, but instead of making your way toward the cupboard in the entryway where you normally keep it, you head down into the basement. Your wife doesn’t notice this. She stays outside. The weather is fine. She’s making the most of the sun. A few moments later she hears a gunshot. She rushes into the house, cries out your name, notices that the door to the stairway leading to the basement is open, goes down, and finds you there. You’ve put a bullet in your head with the rifle you had carefully prepared. On the table, you left a comic book open to a double-page spread. In the heat of the moment, your wife leans on the table; the book falls closed before she understands that this was your final message.”
You have to have the emotional maturity to cope with what you are reading, because straight from the start, Édouard Levé’s book, Suicide, begins with death.
The book has been compared to pornography since its mystique lies in the lurid promise of secret details. While sex contains the secret of new life, Suicide holds the secret of death. Just like pornography asks and answers forbidden questions about sex, Suicide goes on to answer questions about death.
If you were reading this with a sadomasochistic hope that this book is a graphic retelling of one character’s steps in their act of death, you will be disappointed. The book is less about the final act of suicide than it is about how someone reaches that point. Levé addresses “you” throughout the book, making it an introspective look into your deepest darkest secret.
Levé’s seems haunted by the fact that suicide is the magnum opus of a person’s life, “I’ve never heard a single person, since your death, tell your life story starting at the beginning. Your suicide has become the foundational act.” Levé seems to draw power away from the final act by starting his book with it, making your slow decline the real story.
Emptiness
Depression is not beautiful – just the opposite- but this book is. Levé describes depression in such a way that is so articulate and clear that it is like looking in a deep lake and seeing the bottom for the first time.
The vignette that Levé gives us is disjointed, but somehow it adds greater clarity. The book is a frantic piecing together of the greater question of “why?” Because it is so non-linear it seems all the more realistic. Ultimately the whole story is there.
It is all there: the lack of motivation; the sudden manias; the inability to focus; the need to sleep all the time; the inability to sleep; the desire for people; the need to be alone; the need for activity; the overwhelming inability to do anything; the acute awareness of your own existence and sentience; the confusion; and the questions.
In what Levé says and doesn’t say, he captures the essence of depression and the utter hopelessness of the situation:
“You imagined scenes in which someone tried to cheer you up… The repulsion that then took hold of you did not come from your rejection of this well-meaning woman, nor from the nature of the supposed objects of joy that she would show you, but from the fact that the desire to live could not be dictated to you. You could not be happy on command, whether the order was given by you or by someone else. The moments of happiness you knew came unbidden. You could understand their sources, but you could not reproduce them.”
Feeling Seen
This whole book comes from the view of a strangely personal yet impersonal “I”. Somehow “I” is a proxy to these very intimate core memories and yet has no real reason for knowing. There are many interpretations of why this is, but in my own opinion it stems from being understood.
“You” is stuck in a cycle of being aware of his cognitive impairments, and yet completely unable to do anything about it. His wife, his friends, and his doctor are there to help interpret some of these feelings, but “You” is stuck. One passage seems to sum it up nicely:
“Regrets? You had some for causing the sadness of those who cried for you, for the love they felt for you, and which you had returned. You had some for the solitude in which you left your wife, and for the emptiness your loved ones would experience. But these regrets you felt merely in anticipation. They would disappear along with you: your survivors would be alone in carrying the pain of your death. This selfishness of your suicide displeased you. But, all things considered, the lull of death won out over life’s painful commotion.”
We had seen throughout the rest of the book that there is no escape. Although he feels regret, he is already living death. The pain, the sadness, the solitude, and the emptiness are just the reality of his existence. By committing suicide he merely passes these expressions on to those he loves and gives it purpose.
That is the worst part of this entire novella; there is no answer to “why?”
“Your” decision to commit suicide is the most logical but also the most irrational course of action. You can fully comprehend what is going on in your mind but you can’t escape the torture. Depression is articulate and it commands your entire body with alarming dexterity. You even know it does, but you can’t do anything about it. Death should never be the solution, and yet for someone who suffers from depression, it is a valid thought process. How else can you escape from yourself?
I think Levé uses “You” so that this whole process is humanized. Someone does understand. “I” is there silently watching that struggle and is there to hold your hand through it. “I” won’t let you down because they know you are fighting yourself. They are the silent mediator in the fight against yourself and “I” is always rooting for the side that wants to live. They want you to live, not just in the physical sense but in the fullest sense of the word; free from depression.
This is where I finally tell you that Levé committed suicide ten days after delivering this manuscript.
It is impossible not to see this as a final suicide note, but I don’t think that it necessarily has to either. I think Jena Salon in her BOMB article articulates this more fully:
I see Levé’s game insisting on yet another twist. Writers know that upon their deaths everything, all their works, will be drilled for secrets, keys to their minds, clues to their souls. Even when writers are alive readers often assume that a work of fiction has more fact in it than it does. So Levé had to know that people would read this last work as autobiographical. He was daring them with the title, almost, not to. Maybe what he was saying was: I’m calling it Suicide, but what you find inside won’t be what you’re looking for. Maybe he, like “you” is saying, “How beautiful the words [a]re if they [a]re only half understood.”
I don’t think that anyone who commits suicide really wants to die, they just want their situation to end. I think Levé just wanted to be interpreted not just as the author who committed suicide, but as the author who understood.
jessicadickenson.wordpress.com 