Socrates on the beach, 2023
English translation by Tobias Ryan de Une école buissonnière (AOC, 2021)
“Patrick Autréaux’s bewitching “A School of Life” (translated from the French by Tobias Ryan) tells of the author’s beginnings as a writer, while sunk in the profession of doctor, before his own bout of illness settles over the whole picture, creating certain paradoxes.”
Greg Gerke, Editor of Socrates on the beach
“… To become this crucible of psychic reconciliation, it took me falling ill (with a cancer that initially condemned me), which is to say, doubting the tacit fidelity of my body, becoming a stranger to myself, and submitting to hands that considered me an object of investigation, of protocol and of care.
Becoming such an object is a source of violence, real and symbolic, of unconscious and verbal abuse, as well as a lot of attention. In any case, it confronts you with a representation of the self which risks swallowing you whole, transforming you into an object in your own eyes. The majority of doctors seemed indifferent to (or were hiding their embarrassment at?) the way I looked at them and followed their gestures, indifferent to my awareness of having passed, in their view, from a person to thing to be analysed – despite the oratorical precautions and apparent empathy they displayed.
As I never stopped being a doctor, slipping between one and the other, I superimposed these antagonistic representations of myself: a well-ordered garden in the French style, raked by medical reason, and a wild forest, the terrifying poetry of what was happening to me. I was, myself, the border; my instincts pricked. I would observe the abyss of uncertainty from the promontory of meagre knowledge I had been given as to what would become of me. I didn’t know if I would survive, but I wanted to remain spiritually alive until the end. I had known the shock of a death sentence; I was being offered the chance of recovery through heavy treatment, and was full of a life that strove to regain the ground that had been pulled out from under it. As a student, I had fought against an inner desiccation; as a patient, I was fighting not to be extinguished before the flame burnt out. One has to have known this force of anxiety, this urgency, to have accepted its consequences, so as not to panic when actually left on the lip of the volcano, to glean that even there an invitation to become fully alive can be found.
Knowing you have an identified illness moves you from the anxious interpretation of symptoms and phantasmagorical projections to a circumscribed and more tangible reality. In my case, it meant the conversion of an inexplicable pain, one that I had called my Rosemary’s Baby (child of the Devil), into gastrointestinal non-Hodgkin lymphoma, type B with kappa chains, stage 1E.
Becoming ill is to belong to the club of the “recumbent”, that which is qualified by Virginia Woolf in her short essay On Being Ill; to that rather large club which includes all those for whom life has stopped, driven to their beds or onto chaises longues, in rooms or quiet little corners, who are suffering, convalescing, mourning, in love or reading in isolation. Once the diagnosis had been established and the routine of treatment initiated, I found myself on the side-lines to which we retreat to read, in that folk-school again, from where I could listen more attentively to the multitude of voices and impressions escaping from the existential explosion that had stunned me; but also, as I’ve said, resist spiritually, remain joyous even, despite the effects of the treatment and the exhaustion, and rescue myself from the inner wreckage I would dread no sooner did I consider the loneliness of the little man I was – who also experienced, nonetheless, as Maurice Blanchot evokes in The Instant of My Death, a strange peace in feeling an intense “compassion for suffering humanity.”
To experience through illness one’s belonging to the human race is to feel, perhaps, what the first astronauts who travelled beyond terrestrial limits have described: an exclusion from humanity that offers a profound awareness of that very humanity, and of its unity. In extending an intimate ordeal into that of an exemplary condition, we are a little like those pioneers of space who powerfully felt how they belonged to the planet, and understood the relativity of borders and identities, whether chosen or imposed; we undergo a quasi-religious experience, close to oceanic feeling, which momentarily annuls the divisions of human history. Fantasy or wisdom, the overview effect that I experienced believing myself to be damned nonetheless transformed the man I am, and realised the writer in me.
Without doubt, this is why I have always defended the facile designation which threatens all autobiographically-inspired writing: my books are in no sense testimonials. There is often something degrading in talking about testimonials, a way to reduce (I almost wrote “defuse”) the aesthetic impact, which is to say the ethics of the text. Perhaps it is done only to soften the subversive violence – a violence done to the denial which, for the most part, blinds us – or from reticence at unveiling a buried and elusive form: the structure of a certain manifestation of Evil (mapped by the literature of the camps, for example) or the vertiginous effects of intruding upon that which alienates us from ourselves (thinking of Jean-Luc Nancy’s The Intruder.)
As such, the very first book I was able to write, In the Valley of Tears, was not an account of having cancer, but rather gave shape to the adventure of survival and a return to the world of the healthy. It depicts the unexpected trap into which healing and the impression of re-birth sometimes tumble, overlapping, in the wake of a traumatic shock. We can become prisoner of an overview effect, of the retrospective fascination such an opening exerts, of an influence that, long term, can become a heroic narrative. Threatened by the risk of posturing, we can lose, by virtue of this same fascination, that which makes up the meat of another quest: that singular literary voice, the sap composed of sensation and reminiscence, which rises under the impulse of extreme danger but does not get bogged down in the discourse of the convert, in thaumaturgical language or in moral ideals.
Illness, it seems, does not instruct, but may sometimes only teach no more than that we are inaccessible to ourselves, as well as a compassion, beyond the simpleminded, for our human condition. It leaves nothing but questions and the indelible certainty of our fragility. And yet that was exactly where I began, in that place from which, following my implosion, I was able to perceive, though not clearly discern, a deep form that was to overwhelm my relationship with literature and my “vocation” as a carer.
As a medical student, I believed, or wanted to believe, that books nourished me and helped to condense my empathy, and make it more complex – even if I felt that I had never fully immersed myself in the flesh of the world, and that, paradoxically, my folk-school was keeping me on the margins of the very body of which it offered greater understanding. For a long time I sought the moment in which I would incarnate myself in literature – without ever really knowing what that would truly mean. Before falling sick, however, for all those books which I had avidly read, I didn’t know what I was doing. The death sentence stunned me. A slow transformation followed. Something else emerged, the beginning of an outline forming in literature, a form which I had to invent, like how from earth one can imagine the contours of constellations.
What could it mean to have discovered such a thing as this deep form? It would not mean having a design, a goal or a project. But to feel that what is diffuse, without sense or patent logic, is underpinned by a possible structure. It would mean seeking and accepting the singularity of our point of view; it would perhaps mean accepting that we each have our place. Long, hard graft. Shifting. Unattainable. We must battle on all plains: interior and exterior. First against the doubt which rarely lets up in alternating between uncertainty and conviction, and which belongs to those of faith engaged in spiritual combat; and then against those who would dissuade us, well-intentioned friends and loved ones, reasonable people who try to advise us but who are ignorant of the imperative one might call, in line with Socrates and the Ancients, our guiding “demon” or “genie”.
Having a place, therefore, in spite of this new awareness which re-forms and disorients us, that makes us, we who are no more than that, survivors. Having a place which finally integrates, within our contradictory impulses, the inclination that leads us to care for others. In lasting remission, however, as I was starting to write again, beginning to discern that care and writing are very subtly linked, the consciousness of that deep form and the persistent sensation of being henceforth settled on the lip of the volcano, demanded of me that I find my own way of writing, and perhaps a mode of care that was compatible with what I had received – and could pass on. Caring differently, writing differently… “