Suicide

Review

Simon Critchley often references this work in his book, “Notes on Suicide.” Levé, on page 29, writes:

The way in which you quit it rewrote the story of your life in a negative form. Those who knew you reread each of your acts in the light of your last. Henceforth, the shadow of this tall black tree hides the forest that was your life. When you are spoken of, it begins with recounting your death, before going back to explain it. Isn’t it peculiar how this final gesture inverts your biography?

It is now impossible for this book to be read as anything other than a form of suicide note, which makes it voyeuristic. Levé ended his life ten days after submitting this manuscript. It is of course interesting that this happened, and, as Jan Steyn writes in his afterword, “demands” the work be interpreted through this lens. For me, the author’s actions are less compelling than a simpler fact: the book demands that we imagine ourselves as both Levé’s “you” and “I.” The character who ended their life, and the narrator who imagines and recalls the life ended.

You directed toward yourself a violence that you did not feel toward others. For them you reserved all your patience and tolerance.

(page 28)

We aren’t given access to the mind of he that ended himself. We are given limited views through the understanding of Levé’s “I” – through which we can understand his “you” as gentle, introverted yet social, and intelligent. We learn of his exercise habits, his nervous tics, his experiments with psychotropic medication that do not ultimately improve his condition. We understand that he is beautiful, that he has money, and that the reasons for his suicide are not circumstantial or temporal, but an almost inevitable result of his psyche. We are forced to look at our psyche and ask it if we could do something like this, or how we would respond if a loved one did something like this. “Could” does not mean “will” or “would” or “should.”

We, I, look for meaning in things. In small behaviors, big behaviors. What does this person mean when they say this, what did they mean when they did or did not do these things? Searching for meaning is often as fruitless as asking about meaning. The asking of meaning can change the motivation of the thing itself, because meaning cannot be explained to a third party. A motivational Heisenberg effect. Third parties are to be convinced, and that means attempting to convince yourself.

You used to give yourself over to endless sessions of doubt. You would claim to be an expert on the subject. But doubting would tire you so much that you would end up doubting doubt itself. I saw you one day at the end of an afternoon of solitary speculation. You were unmoving and petrified. Running several kilometers in a deep forest full of ravines and pitfalls would have exhausted you less.

(pg 25)

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Doubt. Should it be called a condition, an experience, or a glass through which all things diffract? Jennifer Michael Hecht, poet, wrote a book in the wake of the suicide of a friend. That book is called “Stay: A History of Suicide and the Philosophies Against It.” I wonder how many times I’ve read it? Within she recalls Hamlet’s great soliloquy, To be, or not to be, that is the question…. It was not the first time I’d heard it, but sitting in the stacks of my University library in 2013, it was the first time I’d read those words with understanding. I know them by heart.

Hamlet considers suicide, but what we are seeing is the diffraction of reality through his mind. He is describing doubt. If death were not that undiscover’d country, there would be no risk. What if is the initiator and the hesitator of suicide. If knowing were possible, would the draw towards eradication be so? The secret is that doubt is cancerous to knowledge – as Levé writes above, “you” doubted so that he doubted doubt itself. Paralysis.

Hecht’s previous book is called Doubt. Though it is not about doubt in quite as fundamental a way; it is about religious doubt. Which is to say, epistemological doubt. As opposed to doubting the self-evident or the input of our senses and experience, existential doubt.

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I recall Hecht’s text on suicide because in it, she states that he that destroys himself destroys the world. Levé says something quite similar on page 18:

Your choosing to erase the world exempts those surviving you from doing so. What you miss, they see. Their pains become pleasures when they think that you are no longer anything at all.

(I admit I don’t fully track the last sentence. I think Levé is saying that, when survivors feel pained by life, they feel grateful that they can experience anything, as “you” feel nothing. Or, perhaps they are grateful that “you” no longer feel anything. I’m not sure. I don’t think I accept either premise, though.)

—

Levé’s “I” still feels connected to “you” – perhaps moreso than before he eradicated himself. By dying, he has made himself a permanent fixture in the mind of our narrator. This is not a particularly kind act.

As my thoughts turn to you again, I do not suffer. I do not miss you. You are more present in my memory than you were in the life we shared. If you were still alive, you would perhaps have become a stranger to me. Dead, you are as alive as you are vivid.

(page 101)

Levé’s “I” at one point contemplates, if “you” remained alive, would they even be friends? Perhaps “you” would have faded away into dim memory. At some point in the narrator’s life, he would have thought about “you” for the last time, and that would have passed unnoticed. “You” would have been forgotten, forever.

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You knew that some of those close to you would feel guilty at not having anticipated your choice to die, and that they would deplore their inability to help you to want to live. But you thought them mistaken.

(page 101)

Levé does not discuss responsibility or apology, but does examine guilt, albeit briefly. Levé says that “you” weigh the pain of life against the lull of death and the selfishness (in “I”’s words) of suicide. Yet, “I” doesn’t contemplate personal guilt, and of course nor should he. I think Levé, had he lived to see his countryman Céline Sciamma’s film Petite Maman would have resonated:

“Tu n’as pas inventé ma tristesse.” “You didn’t invent my sadness.”

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I give this book a high rating not because I find it beautifully written, though it often is (with deserved credit to translator Jan Steyn), but because it is thought provoking and has that voyeuristic quality. There are so many speculations on suicide. Hamlet, sure, but the one I think of most often is It’s a Wonderful Life, Frank Capra’s 1946 classic where an angel shows George Bailey how those around him would suffer if he were to end his life. We would all like to think that the world would miss us, wouldn’t we?

The way in which you quit it rewrote the story of your life in a negative form. Those who knew you reread each of your acts in the light of your last. Henceforth, the shadow of this tall black tree hides the forest that was your life. When you are spoken of, it begins with recounting your death, before going back to explain it. Isn’t it peculiar how this final gesture inverts your biography?

What a tragedy that life should be defined via death. There is an interesting analogical proportion in the closing pages:

Death is to life what birth is to the absence of life.

(page 65)

What a great gamble. We don’t know what was before our birth, and we don’t know what is after our death. So, the experienced pains of today are for most of us preferable to the unknown pains of potentiality. What an equation. The pains those who depart experienced to change this calculus must be astonishing.

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It is probably not accurate to say that I “liked” this book. I would probably not recommend it to someone unless I thought that person were relatively stable, or perhaps the right kind of unstable to read this and not be desirous of it. Yet, I did find it interesting, compelling, and beautiful.

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Kindle Highlights: Suicide (French Literature) (Levé, Edouard)

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. > > - Your Highlight on page 2 | Location 32-33 | Added on Monday, April 21, 2025 11:11:45 AM

The two of you are alone in the house. In tears, she throws herself on you and beats your chest out of love and rage. She takes you in her arms and speaks to you. She sobs and falls against you. > > - Your Highlight on page 2 | Location 40-41 | Added on Monday, April 21, 2025 11:12:48 AM

Memory, like photographs, freezes recollections. > > - Your Highlight on page 3 | Location 49-50 | Added on Monday, April 21, 2025 11:13:44 AM

He is looking for the page, and on the page for the sentence, that you had chosen. He keeps a record of his reflections in a file, which is always on his desk and on which is written “Suicide Hypotheses.” If you open the cupboard to the left of his desk, you’ll find ten identical folders filled with handwritten pages bearing the same label. He cites the captions of the comic book as if they were prophecies. > > - Your Highlight on page 6 | Location 68-71 | Added on Monday, April 21, 2025 11:16:19 AM

Now, since you no longer speak, you will always be right. > > - Your Highlight on page 6 | Location 72-72 | Added on Monday, April 21, 2025 11:16:40 AM

You remain alive insofar as those who have known you outlive you. You will die with the last of them. Unless some of them have made you live on in words, in the memory of their children. For how many generations will you live on like this, as a character from a story? > > - Your Highlight on page 6 | Location 74-76 | Added on Monday, April 21, 2025 11:17:07 AM

Often all it took was for someone else to speak your own words back to you for you to like them. You would note down those sayings of yours that were repeated back to you. You were the author of this text twice over. > > - Your Highlight on page 7 | Location 83-85 | Added on Monday, April 21, 2025 11:17:54 AM

Your life was a hypothesis. Those who die old are made of the past. Thinking of them, one thinks of what they have done. Thinking of you, one thinks of what you could have become. You were, and you will remain, made up of possibilities. > > - Your Highlight on page 7 | Location 85-87 | Added on Monday, April 21, 2025 11:18:08 AM

If you were still alive, would we be friends? I was more attached to other boys. But time has seen me drift apart from them without my even noticing. All that would be needed to renew the bond would be a telephone call, but none of us are willing to risk the disillusionment of a reunion. Your silence has become a form of eloquence. But they, who can still speak, remain silent. I no longer think of them, those with whom I was formerly so close. But you, who used to be so far-off, distant, mysterious, now seem quite close to me. When I am in doubt, I solicit your advice. Your responses satisfy me better than those the others could give me. You accompany me faithfully wherever I may be. It is they who have disappeared. You are the present. > > - Your Highlight on page 8 | Location 88-93 | Added on Monday, April 21, 2025 11:18:50 AM

Dead, you make me more alive. > > - Your Highlight on page 9 | Location 96-97 | Added on Monday, April 21, 2025 11:19:19 AM

A ruin is an accidental aesthetic object. If it becomes beautiful, this was certainly not the intention. A ruin is not constructed or maintained. The tendency of a ruin is to crumble down into a heap. The most beautiful parts remain standing despite their wear and tear. The memory of you is what stays up, your body what subsides. Your ghost remains upright in my memory, while your skeleton is decomposing in the earth. > > - Your Highlight on page 10 | Location 103-106 | Added on Monday, April 21, 2025 11:20:30 AM

“All the people celebrating don’t realize that it’s my party too. Being forgotten spares me the trouble of having to shine.” > > - Your Highlight on page 10 | Location 107-108 | Added on Monday, April 21, 2025 11:20:44 AM

A man once said “I love you” to you. It wasn’t me. I didn’t feel that way about you while you were alive, but today I can say the same thing, though it wouldn’t be the sort of love formerly declared to you. My words come too late. They would not have changed your decision, but they would have changed the way I remember. To love someone from the moment of his death: is that friendship? > > - Your Highlight on page 10 | Location 108-111 | Added on Monday, April 21, 2025 11:21:06 AM

You used to believe that with age you would become less unhappy, because you then would have reasons to be sad. When you were still young, your suffering was inconsolable because you believed it to be unfounded. > > - Your Highlight on page 12 | Location 128-129 | Added on Monday, April 21, 2025 11:23:44 AM

Only the living seem incoherent. Death closes the series of events that constitutes their lives. So we resign ourselves to finding a meaning for them. To refuse them this would amount to accepting that a life, and thus life itself, is absurd. Yours had not yet attained the coherence of things done. Your death gave it this coherence. > > - Your Highlight on page 17 | Location 171-173 | Added on Monday, April 21, 2025 11:28:50 AM

Your choosing to erase the world exempts those surviving you from doing so. What you miss, they see. Their pains become pleasures when they think that you are no longer anything at all. > > - Your Highlight on page 18 | Location 181-182 | Added on Monday, April 21, 2025 11:30:00 AM

She admired your theories and your language. What became of her? Has she resigned herself to your death? Does she think of you when she makes love? Did she remarry? In killing yourself, did you also kill her? > > - Your Highlight on page 21 | Location 204-205 | Added on Monday, April 21, 2025 9:24:36 PM

==You used to give yourself over to endless sessions of doubt. You would claim to be an expert on the subject. But doubting would tire you so much that you would end up doubting doubt itself. I saw you one day at the end of an afternoon of solitary speculation. You were unmoving and petrified. Running several kilometers in a deep forest full of ravines and pitfalls would have exhausted you less.== > > - Your Highlight on page 25 | Location 235-238 | Added on Monday, April 21, 2025 9:28:48 PM

But his guilt was your final humiliation: he appropriated your death for himself by holding himself responsible. > > - Your Highlight on page 27 | Location 259-260 | Added on Monday, April 21, 2025 9:31:35 PM

One day you directed the violence you had inherited toward yourself. You dished it out like your father and you took it like your mother. > > - Your Highlight on page 28 | Location 262-263 | Added on Monday, April 21, 2025 9:32:01 PM

==The way in which you quit it rewrote the story of your life in a negative form. Those who knew you reread each of your acts in the light of your last. Henceforth, the shadow of this tall black tree hides the forest that was your life.== > > - Your Highlight on page 29 | Location 272-273 | Added on Monday, April 21, 2025 9:34:00 PM

I don’t try to explain to myself in what form you might have survived your suicide, but your disappearance is so unacceptable that the following lunacy was born along with it: a belief in your eternity. > > - Your Highlight on page 30 | Location 281-283 | Added on Monday, April 21, 2025 9:35:07 PM

For you, the past would be forever improving, the future would draw you forward, but the present would weigh you down. > > - Your Highlight on page 31 | Location 289-290 | Added on Tuesday, April 22, 2025 5:03:16 AM

The crowd guaranteed your anonymity. > > - Your Highlight on page 31 | Location 292-293 | Added on Tuesday, April 22, 2025 5:04:07 AM

One evening you were invited to dine at a friend’s house with other guests. To the host who, opening the door for you on your arrival, asked you how you were doing, you responded, “Badly.” Disconcerted, the host didn’t know what to say—all the more so because you were standing in his doorway, and because when you had rung the bell, an enthusiastic and impatient “Ahhh!” from the assembly of guests gathered in the living room had resounded through the walls. > > - Your Highlight on page 38 | Location 353-356 | Added on Tuesday, April 22, 2025 5:22:42 AM

In this atmosphere, which made you feel foreign, you were surprised at your success in putting on the appropriate face, which, if it didn’t contribute to the general euphoria, at least didn’t destroy the mood with its indifference. > > - Your Highlight on page 39 | Location 362-363 | Added on Tuesday, April 22, 2025 5:23:55 AM

You were surprised that your state of mind could be so variable without those around you noticing. Once you confessed to someone that you had been very depressed when dining with her several months earlier. She was stunned, discovering her blindness like a time bomb. And you, faithful, kept a straight face. > > - Your Highlight on page 40 | Location 364-367 | Added on Tuesday, April 22, 2025 5:24:42 AM

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. > > - Your Highlight on page 57 | Location 516-518 | Added on Tuesday, April 22, 2025 11:27:48 AM

==You directed toward yourself a violence that you did not feel toward others. For them you reserved all your patience and tolerance.== > > - Your Highlight on page 58 | Location 518-519 | Added on Tuesday, April 22, 2025 11:27:54 AM

You would have preferred to join a group of strangers getting to know each other rather than this tribe that had formed so far from you, so long ago. > > - Your Highlight on page 62 | Location 561-562 | Added on Tuesday, April 22, 2025 2:54:48 PM

To live death—was this to see it coming and to welcome it, rather than abruptly undergoing it, without having the time to feel oneself departing? > > - Your Highlight on page 64 | Location 574-575 | Added on Wednesday, April 23, 2025 11:04:25 AM

“Death is to life what birth is to the absence of life?” > > - Your Highlight on page 65 | Location 582-582 | Added on Wednesday, April 23, 2025 11:07:05 AM

You wanted to be discreet; you were said to be elegant. You would have preferred to be neutral, but your beauty and your stature ensured you were noticed in a crowd. > > - Your Highlight on page 70 | Location 629-630 | Added on Wednesday, April 23, 2025 11:16:43 AM

You didn’t identify with happy people, and in your excessiveness you projected onto those who had failed in everything, or succeeded in nothing. > > - Your Highlight on page 71 | Location 638-639 | Added on Wednesday, April 23, 2025 11:17:49 AM

This was perhaps what you feared: to become inert in a body that still breathes, drinks, and feeds itself. To commit suicide in slow motion. > > - Your Highlight on page 72 | Location 649-650 | Added on Wednesday, April 23, 2025 11:19:38 AM

“A self excused is a self accused.” > > - Your Highlight on page 91 | Location 812-812 | Added on Wednesday, April 23, 2025 3:25:55 PM

==This party, to which you had come without conviction, ended up enchanting you. You belonged to a community united by memories. Later, none of the guests at the party believed, when they heard what happened, that you were already thinking of suicide then.== > > - Your Highlight on page 96 | Location 855-856 | Added on Wednesday, April 23, 2025 3:39:50 PM

You knew that some of those close to you would feel guilty at not having anticipated your choice to die, and that they would deplore their inability to help you to want to live. But you thought them mistaken. > > - Your Highlight on page 97 | Location 856-858 | Added on Thursday, April 24, 2025 5:37:10 AM

It wasn’t money that guided your choices, but your mania for collecting nearly identical outfits. > > - Your Highlight on page 98 | Location 867-868 | Added on Thursday, April 24, 2025 5:38:30 AM

==She had recognized the shoes you were wearing. They were the ones that she had given to her nephew, and which his mother had sold after he committed suicide.== > > - Your Highlight on page 99 | Location 881-882 | Added on Thursday, April 24, 2025 5:41:01 AM

As my thoughts turn to you again, I do not suffer. I do not miss you. You are more present in my memory than you were in the life we shared. If you were still alive, you would perhaps have become a stranger to me. Dead, you are as alive as you are vivid. > > - Your Highlight on page 101 | Location 892-894 | Added on Thursday, April 24, 2025 5:43:20 AM

Your mother cried for you when she learned of your death. She cried for you every day until your burial. She cried for you alone, in her husband’s arms, in the arms of your brother and your sister, in the arms of her mother and your wife. She cried for you during the ceremony, following your coffin to the cemetery, and during your inhumation. When friends, many of them, came to present their condolences, she cried for you. With every hand that she shook, with every kiss she received, she again saw fragments of your past, of the days she believed you to be happy. Faced with your death, scenarios of what you could have lived or experienced with these people, gave them a feeling of immense loss: you had, by your suicide, saddened your past and abolished your future. Your mother cried for you in the days following your funeral, and she cried for you again, alone, whenever she thought of you. Years later, there are many, like her, whose tears flow whenever they think of you. > > - Your Highlight on page 102 | Location 898-905 | Added on Thursday, April 24, 2025 5:49:07 AM

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. > > - Your Highlight on page 104 | Location 907-909 | Added on Thursday, April 24, 2025 5:50:14 AM

Arriving changes me Staying costs me Leaving animates me > > - Your Highlight on page 118 | Location 1023-1024 | Added on Thursday, April 24, 2025 5:56:33 AM

To please pleases me To displease displeases me To be indifferent is indifferent to me > > - Your Highlight on page 118 | Location 1025-1027 | Added on Thursday, April 24, 2025 5:56:50 AM

The way in which you quit it rewrote the story of your life in a negative form. Those who knew you reread each of your acts in the light of your last. Henceforth, the shadow of this tall black tree hides the forest that was your life. When you are spoken of, it begins with recounting your death, before going back to explain it. Isn’t it peculiar how this final gesture inverts your biography? > > - Your Highlight on page 126 | Location 1097-1100 | Added on Thursday, April 24, 2025 6:26:14 AM

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