“There are those who sleep, and the others. That’s all, ”believes the French novelist Marie Darrieussecq. She explains, explores and tells herself in a free and fascinating autobiographical essay entitled Not sleeping, mixture of confessions, literary anthology and symptom of a problem perhaps more common than one thinks.
But what do you really lose when you lose sleep? “We lose an interruption,” believes the 52-year-old writer, contacted by phone at her Parisian home. It is the dialogue between oneself and oneself which is infernal. It has to stop. You can’t stay in your own company 24 hours a day, ”says the author of Truisms and of Our life in the forests (POL, 1996 and 2017), recalling that lack of sleep is a form of torture still practiced today (in Guantánamo, China or Saudi Arabia).
A good sleeper until the day she gave birth to her first child in 2001, Marie Darrieussecq has since suffered from chronic insomnia. As a couple and mother of three children (12 to 20 years old), she has managed for a few years to have short restless nights, always inevitably waking up around 4:04 am.
Over the years, Marie Darrieussecq says she has tried everything to solve her problem. Sleeping pills and acupuncture. Fasting, food and digital. Hypnosis. Psychoanalysis. “I tried the herbal teas. Entire fields. None of them make me sleep. And alcohol. Lots of alcohol, with a strong predilection for red wine. In a chapter of disarming sincerity, the writer admits: “I am unable to fall asleep without my red drug. “
But it was his experience with refugees in Calais, during the winter of 2018, which served as the trigger for the writing of Not sleeping, she says. She left them every evening to find herself in an “extremely comfortable” hotel, while they, after the dismantling of the famous “jungle” of tents, slept on piles of gravel in the industrial zone. “I would come back to the hotel and… I wasn’t sleeping. I was ashamed. I found the world to be absurd and unfair… ”
And for Marie Darrieussecq, when there is embarrassment, there is writing. “I always write about the places where it bothers me, where it also bothers people in general, these areas of discomfort that we have. And I thought it was a good subject. And then I realized that it was, of course, a very literary subject. The authors I loved were all insomniacs. Really all of them. “
A collective phenomenon
If it is the result of “a sort of sinister lottery”, insomnia has also appeared to him as a great collective phenomenon. “At the same time very intimate, because at 4 o’clock in the morning we are really very alone. And collective at the same time, because I realized that I was part of a sort of all insomniac. “
A reality that has been exacerbated, according to her, with COVID-19. “We all went to sleep in a strange way,” continues Marie Darrieussecq. Either more or less. It was a little weird. We had more time to sleep, but we were more anxious. And I started to scrutinize my insomnia as a collective phenomenon as well, as something that involved a lot of people and that also made political sense. “
To this end, she cites two readings which tackle the political dimension of sleep head-on: 24/7. Capitalism assaulting sleep, by Jonathan Crary (Zones, 2014), and The great transformation of sleep. How the industrial revolution changed our nights, by historian Roger Ekirch (Amsterdam, 2021).
“When you are obsessed with a subject, you find it all over the place. My whole library told me about it, ”she says. Her obsession with animals has also nourished, as with rhizomes, this book which she describes as “willfully screwing up”. To his eyes, Not sleeping is moreover a bit like insomnia, with a spiral, looped side.
“I like the idea that people dig into it at night,” adds the author of the Babe (POL, 2002), the one of his books which most closely resembles, in its form, Not sleeping. “These are two books on fragmented sleep. Sleep that does what it can. “
“Nothing disturbs the insomniac. No event. No daytime spark illuminates his relationship to the night. Nothing prevents the insomniac from not sleeping, ”writes the one who has become a psychoanalyst to cure herself of her clinophilia – the learned name given to the mania for staying in bed, a kingdom whose undisputed prince remains Oblomov , eponymous character of a famous Russian novel of the XIXe century. ” My patients pulled me out of bed », She admits.
Bedside books
And who says insomnia, of course, says bedside books. Marie Darrieussecq’s readings are overflowing with insomniacs. Starting with the Newspaper of Kafka, this “patron saint of insomnia”. Or Proust (maddening consumer of sleeping pills), admitting to living “in a kind of death, cut off by brief awakenings. “Without forgetting Cioran:” Those who have not experienced this tragedy themselves cannot understand anything. Insomnia is the greatest experience you can have in your life. “
The polysomnographic examination to which Marie Darrieussecq herself submitted a few years ago revealed that she woke up twenty times… per hour. After a diagnosis of “hypervigilance”, followed by sound advice for better sleep, a somnologist psychiatrist advised the author toYou have to love men a lot (POL, 2013, Prix Médicis) to start her day when she woke up. His last books were written under this regime.
To write and not to sleep, same struggle? If Kafka believed that his insomnia was caused by the fact that he was writing, Marie Darrieussecq for her part rejects this explanation: “There is Marguerite Duras and all those romantics of insomnia who say that insomnia and writing, it is the same thing, or almost. She even says: insomnia leads to great intelligence. I don’t believe it at all. It doesn’t help me sleep, it doesn’t give me any particular ideas. I would prefer to sleep. And I’m very suspicious of this election mythology. “
“It’s curious how sleep is crossed by several mythologies. To sleep well is to have a clear conscience, it is to have the sleep of the righteous. At the same time, we can also see it as selfishness: Proust saw good sleepers as selfish morons. It does not make sense ! There are the two opposite mythologies. It would be better to sleep, that’s it, ”she concludes with a big laugh.