The Foundational Act
by Jon Repetti
Dalkey Archive Press, 100pp, ISBN 9781628976106, £12.00
A conceptual artist completes a novel titled Suicide and kills himself ten days later. The book becomes a cult hit after the act provokes a media frenzy. This sounds like satire, but it really happened — in France (where else?) — circa 2008. That novel, by Édouard Levé, was translated into stark, devastating English by Jan Steyn in 2011. It’s out in a new edition from Dalkey Archive this year.
The circumstances of Suicide’s publication immediately prompt questions about the relationship between art and life, text and biography, ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ — all the more because these questions are central to Levé’s body of work as a whole. For much of his career, Levé was known primarily as a photographer, and his form of choice was the photo-series. He made obsessive use of what Zadie Smith calls, in an essay on Levé published in Harper’s, the ‘deferred term’: the absence that structures the aesthetic field, nowhere visible in the frame but for this very reason determining our experience of every object within it. In the series Rugby, for example, Levé depicts men’s bodies tangled up together in piles; thanks to the title, we can recognise this scene as a scrum, and the men as players grouped around an invisible ball.
Most of the series can be described in a single phrase: Amérique, photographs of small American towns with the same names as major global cities; Homonymes, portraits of ordinary people who share names with celebrities; Pornographie, fully clothed men and women photographed in sexual positions. Levé seems to begin each new project with its conceit fully formed, and then to repeat the same idea systematically in photo after photo until its aesthetic possibilities have been exhausted, or until he simply gets bored and finds a new dead horse to beat. These conceits are not, on their own, particularly interesting; nor are the photographs themselves, to my amateur eye, particularly distinguished. Their combination, nonetheless, proves by turns drôle and pathétique in the classic Parisian manner.
If we insist on calling Levé’s photo-series works of ‘conceptual art’, as many have, then we should also insist that their interest lies precisely in the gap they emphasise between the concept of the artwork and the artwork itself. This gap is the space of making, occupied by the artist as maker. One can’t encounter the VFW halls and gas stations of Amérique without considering how many miles Levé traveled to capture them on film, and wondering what the locals thought of this impeccably-dressed Frenchman crashing their bingo night. One can’t look at the portraits of Homonymes without imagining the artist thumbing through a phonebook and cold-calling his subjects, trying to convince each in turn that his request isn’t a weird scam, or some kind of elaborate joke (or at least that the joke is not on them). And maybe there’s some pure-hearted l’art pour l’art type out there who can view the meticulously posed photos of Pornographie without speculating about the fetishes of the man who arranged those bodies, but I haven’t met such a person.
Levé’s first major literary work, Oeuvres, all but gives the game away with its opening sentence: ‘A book describes works that the author has conceived but not brought into being.’ What follows is, of course, that very book: a catalogue of 533 such imaginary works, including several that he would go on to actually produce. Some of the entries are genuinely intriguing (‘An orchestra plays a symphonic piece. The instruments are assigned to musicians by lottery a few moments before the start of the concert’), others are funny in a juvenile kind of way (‘A leather jacket is made from a mad cow’), and a few stand out as genuinely sublime (‘A liter of molten lead is poured out in zero gravity in a vacuum. Brought back to earth, it is exhibited in the form into which it has hardened’). As Mark O’Connell puts it in Slate, Levé’s ‘signature’ is his ‘unflappable insistence on going on like this’, his interminable repetition of a single gesture. This gesture is both almost immediately exhausted (‘Jesus, Eddie, we get the idea!’) and yet inexhaustible (‘But wait I’ve got just one more!’). There is, in principle, always one more; thus, the end of any given series always appears as an arbitrary cessation, not an ‘end’ or a ‘limit' internal to the logic of the series.
The basic structure of a Levé work now comes into focus: a conceit is introduced; a series embodies that conceit across multiple variations; the ‘meaning’ of that series is derived from one or more ‘deferred terms’ or absent referents; the relation (or gap) between ‘inside’ (the work) and ‘outside’ (the referent) is itself experienced as part of the work itself; that very gap indexes the artist as embodied maker, both emphasising the tedium of his artistic labour and exhibiting his palpable (often perverse) enjoyment in it. It is, if one wants to be cynical, an aesthetic perfectly crafted for the interview circuit, or for dinner parties where the artist must schmooze potential buyers. ‘So, monsieur, what was it like down there among the savages in Bagdad, Kentucky?’, and so on.
With Autoportrait, Levé’s third book and still his most famous in the Anglophone world, this structure is turned further in upon itself. It is a memoir without narrative, made up of approximately 1400 statements about the author: facts of his life, opinions he holds more or less strongly on various topics, ruthless analyses of his motivations and obsessions. They give the impression of being set down at random, though surely a narratologist or psychoanalyst could unfold a logic to their succession. To cite a representative page: ‘I own my apartment. I may prefer one of my parents to the other, but I would rather not think about it. I can do without music, art, architecture, dance, theater, movies, I have trouble doing without photography, I cannot do without literature. Digging a hole makes me feel good. The sound of water bothers me. I have few regrets. I do not seek novelty, but rightness. I wept reading Perfecto, by Thierry Fourreau.’ It goes on (and on, and on) like this.
In Autoportrait, the artist no longer presents himself merely as the labouring mediator between the work and the world, but also takes up the (non)position of the deferred term itself. He appears everywhere in the ‘I’ that begins each sentence, but constantly disappears among the plenitude of information to which that ‘I’ cannot be reduced; or, rather, his ‘I’ appears as its very failure to appear as a positive term among others. As Levé himself puts it: ‘If I look in the mirror for long enough, a moment comes when my face stops meaning anything.’ Is this not the very moment he is seeking to induce in the reader? The longer we read, the more facts we learn, the more obscure and incoherent our object becomes.
Suicide deploys many of the same techniques as Autoportrait to deal with many of the same themes. For this reason, they are often read and reviewed together. Like its brother-book, Suicide is a ‘pointillist’ account of a life, without traditional narrative order, filtered through the pen of an elusive ‘I’ or ‘je’ reflecting on its own elusiveness and the elusiveness of others. Or, at least, that of one particular other: a friend, referred to only as ‘tu’, who killed himself twenty years prior to the writing. Again, Levé confronts us with the problem of narrating a life. But while Autoportrait is presented as a rejection of the narrative tout court, a smashing of traditional plot into a million luminous shards of pure fact — an early example of what Fredric Jameson has called the ‘itemization’ impulse often attributed to autofiction — Suicide returns us to narrative by picking through its wreckage. Having shattered his illusions about the self, Levé dramatises a series of increasingly desperate and convoluted attempts to cling to those very illusions, on the part of both the suicidaire and those who survive him.
We begin with the act. Tu shoots himself in his basement after setting a comic book on the table, left open to a significant page. His wife hears the rifle shot and finds his body, but in her panic she disturbs the book before she can read its final message. There is no other note, and those left behind are compelled to construct their own explanations, their own narratives. The dead man’s father buys dozens of copies of the comic book, ‘looking for the page, and on the page for the sentence, that you had chosen’. He keeps a cabinet of folders full of ‘Suicide Hypotheses’, interpreting the text like a biblical exegete, seeking the master key that will unlock his child’s secret life. He comes to blame himself for all of tu’s suffering. He is a sad but misguided figure, and je speaks of him with contempt: ‘[H]is guilt was your final humiliation; he appropriated your death for himself by holding himself responsible.’
Je also offers hypotheses — indeed, several contradictory hypotheses — but he reaches them by a different method: not the careful examination of facts but the self-conscious production of fictions. The majority of the text consists of episodes from tu’s life at which je was not present. They are described in such minute detail that the reader cannot but read them as imagined by je within the frame of the novel. And as je comes to identify more and more intensely with tu, whom he simultaneously addresses and conjures with each sentence, we are forced to give up any pretense of disentangling the real from the imagined, having no other access to either but the words before us. Perhaps this self-conscious-to-the-point-of-being-apologetic construction of a life and a death is less humiliating than its appropriation, or at least that seems to be je’s gambit.
Though marketed as ‘the author’s own oblique, public suicide note’ (per the back cover copy of the Dalkey edition), Suicide is perhaps better approached as a kind of anti-suicide note: not in the sense as a statement opposing to suicide as such, of course — Levé would likely find such an abstract judgement absurd — but rather as a demand that both the suicidaire and the survivors move beyond any comforting notion of suicide itself as a communicative act.
Early on, je gives one of several accounts of tu’s motivations. ‘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.’ Suicide is conceived here as an attempt to close the series of events that make up a life and thus render that life ‘coherent’ by framing it, delineating its inside and outside. It is a claim to meaning in the face of absurdity and at the cost of (merely) personal existence.
But whose meaning? Certainly not that of the dead, who ‘will never be able to enjoy the fruits of this labor’. Nor does that meaning belong to the living, who never fully convince themselves of any given narrative, from whom sense always slips away. In any case, Levé’s entire career speaks to the impossibility of such a strong delineation. Thus an act that might seem to lend coherence to a life, to grant it a kind of immanent necessity, and thereby to transform it into an aesthetic object (à la Yukio Mishima’s public seppuku, which looms large over Levé’s text and interpretations of it), serves only to foreground the very contingency from which tu seeks desperately to escape.
Je takes up this theme again later, predicting the response to Levé’s own book: ‘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 light of your last. . . Your suicide has become the foundational act, and those early acts that you had hoped to relieve of their burden of meaning by way of this gesture, the absurdity of which so attracted you, have ended up simply alienated instead.’ Made always to refer beyond itself, every act of the life is traversed and haunted by the suicide just as every pixel of a Levé photo is permeated by the too-present absence of its deferred term. Likewise, in relation to the suicidaire, we all take up the position of Hegel’s Unhappy Consciousness: that of a roaming negativity never satisfied with any object, always able to say of any particular explanation ‘perhaps, but that’s not quite it’, but never able stop seeking new hypotheses. Every attempted flight from alienation only leaves us further from ourselves, and from the other.
Having stripped suicide of all its hermeneutic and aesthetic pretences, Levé’s text, which cannot and should not be disentangled from his death, seeks to restore to the act its existential grandeur. Suicide may be, in the end, a choice between two equally unpleasant options — Life and Death — but it is, at least, a free choice, such a choice as only a human being can make. In these pages, Levé seems to be saying to himself: ‘You will be misunderstood, appropriated, humiliated in death, just as you were in life. Your existence in the memories and words of others will mutate immediately. Your freedom itself, to which your act attests with absolute force, will be denied by those seeking to take or assign exclusive blame. You must choose in full awareness of these facts, without illusions.’ And so he did.