Death Completes Me: Edouard Levé's "Suicide"

Looking back on a previous essay, I realized that it's been nearly a year since I read Edouard Levé's Autoportrait. I was very much enthralled with his semi-fictional/autobiographical sketches, a collection of seemingly random observations and reflections that managed to tell his whole story and say almost nothing about him at the same time. His most famous work, Suicide, has been on my list since then, stemming from a desire to complete these related texts. Suicide is famous for the details surrounding its publication. It's a fictional imagining of a friend's suicide and the details surrounding the act and notes from the friend's life and philosophy. Levé turned in the manuscript just days before his own suicide, therefore making it impossible to read or acknowledge the work without wondering if it was meant as a creative suicide note. Based on the few details I know about Levé as a writer and photographer, I didn't go into my reading with any sense of mystery or subconscious dread, but rather with burning curiosity. I expected my reading to be full of wonder as to how the passages related to him, in a way that truly blends the text and the end of the writer's life. However, I was much more aware of Levé's presence in Autoportrait than I was with Suicide. While this book has dashes of creepiness and morbidity, his writing strengths pull through and put the majority of the emphasis on the words, not the idea of "novel as goodbye."

The unnamed narrator addresses the now-dead friend, and there's no buildup or foreshadowing. The suicide is referenced immediately, as if to get the obvious details out of the way to spend more time on the past and the life that preceded the death. Suicide is a marvel of psychology and sometimes intangible details, but the opening is stark and pointed. The explanation and intensity is heightened through the unemotional, careful attention to detail.

"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 (Levé 1-2)."

Some of the aftermath of the friend's suicide is written, but then the text immediately goes into a biographical mode, full of observations about the friend's personality. Levé doesn't seem interested in how these traits explain the suicide, nor is the book an exact "celebration" of the friend's life. Much in the same way Autoportrait covered a wealth of small reflections, Suicide is an examination. At times, the actual suicide seems like an afterthought. It is referenced, yes, but it doesn't seem to be intended as a cast shadow. The friend is very complex, with some concerning psychological traits, but he's never uninteresting.

"Since you seldom spoke, you were rarely wrong. You seldom spoke because you seldom went out. If you did go out, you listened and watched. Now, since you no longer speak, you will always be right. In truth, you do still speak: through those, like me, who bring you back to life and interrogate you. We hear your responses and admire their wisdom. If the facts turn out to contradict your counsel, we blame ourselves for having misinterpreted you. Yours are the truths, ours are the errors (Levé 6)."

When the suicide is mentioned, it's done so in very original ways. Levé has astute examples of how society views suicide, and explores it in ways I haven't thought about, such as:

"When I hear of a suicide, I think of you again. Yet, when I hear that someone died of cancer, I don't think of my grandfather and grandmother, who died of it. They share cancer with millions of others. You, however, own suicide (Levé 9)."



Given that the reader knows this friend only through these passages, the seemingly random assemblage actually creates a fully-formed character. There are some passages that brought me back to wondering how autobiographical the novel actually is, since they are so precisely detailed. This doesn't detract from the reading, but rather enhances it. The reader goes from the intense reality and confusion of suicide to the inner workings and complexities of a character to the idea that Levé could very well have been drawing from his own experiences.

"It was twelve thirty. Back at your hotel, you took notes on the last two days. You described what you had seen, done, and thought. While you believed that you had only passed through a zone of emptiness, the writing of this text kept you up until five in the morning. When you reread it the next day on the train that was carrying you back home, you added numerous notes in the margin. And when your wife asked you what you had done, you spent the entire night telling her, with innumerable details. You had felt idle in this city through which you had paced only to kill time. But the emptiness that you believed yourself to be confronted with was an illusion you had filled those moments with sensations all the more powerful in that nothing and no one had distracted you from them (Levé 57)."

My only critique of Suicide comes at the end. The last several pages are devoted to short poems supposedly written by the friend, found by his wife following the suicide. The stanzas are short, personal notes on how various ideas, objects, and emotions affect the friend, but they seem out of place following such a painstakingly detailed book on occurrences, interactions, and an ultimately tortured human being. It's not that the poems are bad, it's just that I found the forms to be such a jarring change of pace. But then, I found myself thinking of Levé the person and not the writer, and I wonder if these notes were his own. On a positive spin, these could be seen as an extension of Autoportrait, but with a somber atmosphere of the rapidly approaching end.

"Birth befalls me
Life occupies me
Death completes me

To climb is difficult for me
To descend is easy for me
To be stationary is useless to me

Homage obliges me
Oration touches me
Eulogy buries me

The flash blinds me
The beam dazzles me
The reflection intrigues me (Levé 113)."

In spite of the poetic ending, I was surprised at how Levé created a character, likely based on himself, but still wholly original. To have such a notorious final act (a submitted manuscript, an immediate suicide) and to make it more about the text than the writer's own ending is no small feat. Autoportrait was meant to be about Levé in all of his internal and external forms; Suicide is a novel at heart, even in the face of the surrounding timeline. The reader is drawn to the friend as an actual friend or a fictional character and not always as a stand-in for the author. This book went in a much different direction than I expected, and for that I am grateful. This isn't to downplay or dismiss Levé's actual suicide, but taking the text at face value, it's the work of a terrific, still relatively unknown artist. The randomness of the character's life feels like a combination of improvised events, carefully edited character sketches, and autobiographical honesty. Suicide is simple and complex at the same time, and stuns in its deviation from the obvious.

Work Cited:
Levé, Edouard. Copyright 2008 by P.O.L. éditeur. Translation and afterword copyright 2011 by Jan Steyn.

"Words Become Road:" Edouard Levé's "Autoportrait"

While the two works couldn't be more different in their themes, structures, and tones, my recent reading of Edouard Levé's Autoportrait reminded me, at least subconsciously, of Padgett Powell's The Interrogative Mood. However, the biggest difference lies in their presentations. Powell's work is a series of questions that cover a wealth of ideas, hypotheses, and philosophical discourses. Its subtitle is "A Novel?," a play on the interrogative formats, as well as its classification. Is it a novel, or more of a psychological exercise? Autoportrait, however, offers no such "disclaimer," and is a series of declarations and moments from Levé's life, past and present. I decided to read it after a friend of mine made a passing mention of his final book, Suicide. I did some online research on Levé's art, and was immediately curious, and having finished Autoportrait, I find myself even more curious, not just about his life and works, but about how to approach the written words. On the surface, I highly enjoyed the book, but it's the kind of piece that seems to resist a need to provide satisfaction or dissatisfaction, and also opens up thought-provoking, conflicting views.

Whenever I read a book, I tend to do a lot of underlining and notes for citations and compelling passages, but my copy of Autoportrait has maybe one or two underlines, and no notes; it's simply impossible to judge whether one sentence or sentence cluster is "more important" than the next. The work is meant to be taken as a whole, and while I will offer some select passages, the examples I choose are taken at random, and work as part of the aforementioned "conflicting views:" any assemblage of sentences work quite well for example's sake, but are no more or less indicative of the rest of the work. Levé is presenting virtually every aspect of his life, and only he would have been able to know what was more important to him, and what was more mundane. The main source of curiosity, at least for me, is the juxtaposition of the serious and the banal, with some ideas begging for further explanation which then lead into vastly different territories.

"I attended a school that employed several pedophiles, but I was not among their victims. One of my schoolmates, at age twelve, was followed by an old man into a stairwell, where he dragged him into a basement and had his way with him. The dog belonging to a friend of mine disfigured his best friend when my friend was fourteen. I have never missed a flight that then exploded in mid-air. I almost killed three passengers in my car by looking for a cassette in the glove compartment while I was going one-eighty on the highway from Paris to Reims (Levé 15)."

Again, with this review, much like the mixture of Levé's thoughts, forces me to be repetitive and contradictory. In addition to resisting a singular emotion, Autoportrait resists genre, but clearly has a hand in two designations. The bookstore I work in has the title classified as fiction, even though one wouldn't be faulted for placing it in the biography section. As much as I hate to sound like a tenth grader forcing a summary from the book's jacket, the synopsis mentions the work as "perfect fiction...made entirely of facts." But what this really boils down to is the occasional pointlessness of needing literary classifications. To put this even more vaguely, Autoportrait is a work of art in words, not immediately poetic, but a canvas of pages mirroring its subject (the author) and at times reflecting the reader. While we don't have the exact lives or memories that Levé possesses, there's a universality in the bulk of what he writes. I'm writing this in the evening after visiting Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art--perhaps this is a stretch or a subconscious influence, but could Autoportrait be a work of literary performance art? Why not? It manages to be so much already.

"My memory embellishes. I often apologize, always thinking I shouldn't, and that I shouldn't have to. Over one summer I got six tick bites, only four years later did I become convinced that I had contracted Lyme disease, after I read a list of the symptoms on a Web site. I have cheated on schoolwork, but not at games. I dine alone in a restaurant if I have no choice, which happens only on trips. To dine alone in a restaurant seems paradoxical to me: going out to a restaurant is festive, festivities are collective. To find out whether I was homosexual, I tried to masturbate while thinking of men, it didn't work. When I watch the hunting show Trés Chasse, I have the impression that the hunters feel no guilt after the orgasm of the shot. I thank people easily (Levé 90)."

Edouard Levé was a painter (according to Autoportrait, he burned the majority of his early works), and a photographer in addition to being a writer. This work came before Suicide, which was turned into the publisher ten days before he killed himself. His various art mediums could very well support my hypothesis of the work being a form of performance art, but I'm treading carefully, especially since I mentioned his final work. As much as I champion creative expression and integrity, I feel it would be too harsh to link Suicide in this category, since I haven't read it, and even though it was clearly his way of expressing what was going through his mind, I wouldn't want to call it a piece of performance art, since we don't know what drove him to that final act. Has this essay illuminated anything about the reading? If not, that's understandable, since I'm holding Autoportrait in such high regard, and because it's the kind of work that has no true happy medium. It's a form of expression that will appeal to a reader or turn him/her off. There are so many ideas and facts to process, and in the end, you'll likely feel that you know Levé more or feel even more distanced from his persona. And really, these dueling ideas strongly hint to this work being a success, since Autoportrait evokes such a diverse range of emotions in its diverse range of revelations. The reader is free to choose the classifications that he or she feel are appropriate. I'm glad I chose this as my introduction to his writings, since I knew so little going in, and now I have a cache of information about Levé that explores more than any biography could hope to do. Like any review I post, I hope my opinions, whether one agrees or disagrees, will make a given work more illuminated. With Autoportrait, there's simply no way for that to happen without reading it.

"I do not read Faulkner, because of the translation. I made a series of pictures based on things that came out of my body or grew on it: whiskers, hair, nails, semen, urine, shit, saliva, mucus, tears, sweat, pus, blood. TV interests me more without the sound. Among friends I can laugh hard at certain unfunny TV programs that depress me when I'm alone. I never quite hear what people say who bore me. To me a simple 'No' is pleasantly brief and upsettingly harsh. The noise level when it's turned up too high in a restaurant ruins my meal. If I had to emigrate I would choose Italy or America, but I don't. When I'm in a foreign country, I dream of having a house in Provence, a project I forget when I get back. I rarely regret a decision and always regret not having made one (Levé 22)."

Work Cited:
Levé, Edouard. Autoportrait. Copyright 2005 by P.O.L. éditeur. Translation copyright 2012 by Lorin Stein.