Édouard Levé - Suicide

Edouard Levé committed suicide on October 15, 2007. Ten days earlier he had given a manuscript to his editor; it was a novel entitled Suicide , the same you hold in your hands.

Suicide ’s reception in France has been deeply influenced by the circumstances of the author’s death. Although it is a fictional work, written in the second person about a friend of the narrator’s who had committed suicide twenty years earlier, its title and subject matter ensure that, despite reports that Levé did leave a suicide note, the present text is taken as a sort of literary explanation of his decision to die. Levé’s readers are left to ask, along with the narrator of Suicide :

Did you know why you wanted to die? If you did, why not write it down? Out of fatigue from living and disdain for leaving traces that would survive you? Or because the reasons that were pushing you to disappear seemed empty? Maybe you wanted to preserve the mystery of your death, thinking that nothing should be explained. Are there good reasons for committing suicide? Those who survived you asked themselves these questions; they will not find answers.

Suicide demands interpretation. No one who reads this novel and knows of Levé’s suicide (and its timing guarantees that nearly every reader does know of it) can avoid projecting Levé’s questions back onto his own choice of death.

To what extent can we conflate Levé’s characters and their motivations with the author and his? The “you” of the novel shares at least two factual details with Levé’s life: each were born in winter, and each ended his life by his own hand. But we can find Levé in the artistic method and philosophy of Suicide ’s “I” as much as we can in the taste for sparseness and stoicism of Suicide ’s “you.” The narrator claims that

[t]o portray your life in order would be absurd: I remember you at random. My brain resurrects you through stochastic details, like picking marbles out of a bag.

This stochastic, yet formally constrained, method of “picking marbles out of a bag” is present in all of Levé’s writing. In this regard Levé owes a self-acknowledged debt to the writers of the Oulipo group, especially Georges Perec. The opening sentence of Levé’s Autoportrait —a novel without paragraph breaks consisting of facts about the author as well as his opinions—reads:

Adolescent je croyais que La Vie mode d’emploi m’aiderait à vivre, et Suicide mode d’emploi à mourir. [1] Levé, Edouard. Autoportrait . Paris: P.O.L, 2008, p. 7.

As an adolescent I believed that [Perec’s] Life A User’s Manual would help me to live, and that [Claude Guillon and Yves le Bonniec’s] Suicide A User’s Manual would help me to die.

Stylistic and thematic elements of Suicide were already present in Levé’s Autoportrait . This is not unusual for Levé’s works, which frequently announce or contain later works in embryonic form. For example, Œuvres (2002) consists of the author’s description of 533 imagined œuvres (works). Levé brought some of these works to completion later. In 2006, for example, he published Amérique , consisting of images of arbitrary parts of obscure American towns named after grander world cities—Florence, Berlin, Jericho, Oxford, Stockholm, Rio, Delhi, Amsterdam, Paris, Rome, Mexico, Lima, Versailles, Calcutta and Baghdad. [2] In 2009, two years after Levé’s suicide, the writer Gérard Gavarry published Expérience d’Edward Lee, Versailles , a series of fragmentary texts, each using one of the photos in Amérique as a starting point. “Edward Lee” is Gavarry’s Americanization of “Edouard Levé.”