Delphine de Vigan: Mental illness, the middle class… and how much is a mask?
It was mid- March. Winter, that season encapsulating darkness and misery, continued perhaps its malign grip on London, but there seemed too a hope of spring, of light, of sweetness, and blossom, and energy.
And we had arrived in the Salons for the Reading Group to discuss a book- ‘Nothing Holds Back the Night’ by Delphine De Vigan- which is, in its plot, maybe a combination of spring and winter. It deals with mental illness, with the causes of mental illness, in a middle class setting. There is a psychological winter, in terms of the tragedy that enwraps the characters, of the manic depression suffered by the mother, but there is spring too, maybe a false spring, with the author showing (showing off?) the energy and resilience of her family despite the accumulated horrors it goes through.
The book had been advertized, second hand, for only a penny on Amazon, but in translation, not in the French original. I always feel guilty when I do not purchase a bargain, so the volume, which had been Essex library stock, was shoved after a few days in a cardboard covering through my letter box. The problem with any translation is that it may conceal as much as it is able to reveal. The basic plot seemed apparent, but the style in French of the author was not so easy to ascertain. I thus feel tentative in my criticism and judgment of this book.
The novel- or biography- revolves around the mother, Lucile, and starts and ends with Lucile’s suicide, which the author discovers with a grim startled prolonged shriek. The book is based on documents and recordings from her family on the subject of Lucile. It is both fact and fiction, a recreation of Lucile through the prism of the daughter’s art and research.
It has parallels with the previous book in the Reading Group season, ‘En Finir Avec Eddy Bellegueule’, which was a novel by Edouard Louis involving an exposé of a family in its bigotry and violence. One could question both authors as to how much they are endeavouring to alter, warp, truth, for the sake of an agenda. The all too elaborate appearance of veracity may itself be strangely a mask to conceal motives that are not at all disingenuous. Edouard Louis emphasizes the viciousness and prejudice of his working class upbringing, to bring out his need for escape as a gay adolescent. It is almost as if he is betraying his own class in his desire to ‘come out’ as a homosexual.
But the intention of Delphine De Vigan is less blatant. The novel/ biography is chiefly about her mother, not herself. The family here is middle class, and one might suggest that, where Edouard Louis is uncompromising in attacking his own rough background, Delphine De Vigan seems more defensive about her kith and kin- she establishes a heroic ‘we can cope, in spite of everything’ framework. Disasters occur, but the family often cuts through them with a demonstrative middle class verve that can become irritating for the reader. For example, in describing the grandmother, Liane, Lucile’s mother, the author creates a jovial ‘eccentric pillar of the community’ character who is just cardboard and two- dimensional. Thus, of Liane: ‘Her gaiety, her faith and her humour were irresistible… Up to the age of seventy- five at least, Liane stuck with her satin leotards and gave a gymnastics class twice a week that was famous throughout Pierremont.’ The elderly crones in ‘En Finir Avec Eddy Bellegueule’ are not inspiring like Liane. Perhaps because the author is a woman, maybe through the writer being middle class, there is a sense in which ‘Nothing Holds Back The Night’ is less thorough, less convincing, than it ought to be, despite its use of interviews and documentation.
What both plots share- from the books by Edouard Louis and Delphine De Vigan- is the presence of an authoritarian, indeed fascist, male figure governing the family almost like a ghoul. Eddy’s father is a thug with an overwhelming dislike of immigrants, homosexuals- and the bourgeois. Lucile’s father is Georges- a middle class and fundamentally macabre figure, who, as a journalist in the Second World War, wrote for a collaborationist weekly, ‘Revolution Nationale’, admired the editor, Lucien Combelle, and became eventually sub- editor for this pro- Nazi rag. Georges is described as a typical ‘reactionary’ later in life, resenting anything that was modern about France. Subsequently in the book, there is evidence that Georges may have raped his own daughter, and the implication of course is that Lucile’s bipolar nightmare stemmed from violent incest.
This may be a middle class family which is embedded in the media- Lucile was a child model, and members of the family feature in the French press and in French TV- but Georges is the fascist father who, one might argue, brings a curse upon his own family. He is the focus of the darkness in which some of his children die, in which Lucile, no longer able to cope with her past, or her present, degenerates into manic depression- Georges is the night, or nightmare, that cannot be held back. Fascism is the fog that blinds fate and the heart.
But the author is unable to properly identify Georges as the villain he most evidently is. She draws back from the condemnation he deserves. She often seems emollient about her own family in a way that Edouard Louis refuses to be. Thus, of Georges: ‘And yet, however disillusioned he became, Georges continued till the end of his life to fight for unlikely or desperate causes… As far as I know, Georges was neither anti- Semitic nor a fascist… Georges’s collaboration with Revolution nationale was the act of an opportunistic young man who was eager for recognition and lacking in judgment.’ And so on… A member of the Reading Group proposed that Georges’s care for his Down’s Syndrome son was actually a front, a mask, to conceal the actual horror of all the sinister grandfather was.
Some discussion took place in the Reading Group about the impact of Freud on this novel. There is certainly a Freudian atmosphere to it, with its interplay of sexuality and psychology. One contributor to the Reading Group countered it was, in reality, an anti- Freudian work, in that it opposed Freud’s Seduction Theory- viz. the idea females readily incite sexual advances from males, whereas Georges, the essentially cruel grandfather, imposes himself in bed on the innocent and vulnerable daughter, Lucile.
It is Lucile’s manic depression that becomes the core of the book. As a psychiatric patient myself, I could alas identify with Lucile’s predicament, her crisis. Lucile’s control of everything that constitutes her evaporates. She fractures mentally, she overspends, she grows erratic, and the inevitable crisis seizes hold of her and her children. Lucile is arrested, naked, wild and dangerous, in her own home, on 31 January, 1980, a day that is a gruesome watershed. There must inevitably follow the plight of mental hospitals and medication. The author is shocked by the impact of medication upon Lucile, who becomes a frozen automaton, losing her intellect and her identity because of the drugs imposed on her. The mask –like face and the movement disorders would indicate Lucile was going through the Parkinsonian syndrome and the subsequent Tardive Dyskinesia that anti- psychotics as dopamine- blockers engender. I pointed out as an aside that the initial anti- psychotic, Chlorpromazine, was actually discovered in France in the early 1950’s, though it was an American company that subsequently marketed it.
Lucile becomes what is termed a ‘revolving door’ patient, having to return to confinement in a psychiatric unit at intervals. The slumped inertia of patients locked up in Sainte- Anne Hospital, the corridors where they whine and crawl, the locked doors at the end of those corridors, are mentioned by the author, but only as a (prolonged) phase in the family’s history.
An alternative novel that had focussed extensively, compassionately, on mental illness, psychiatric medication, and mental hospitals, that had burrowed into the sadness of manic depression and society’s desire for revenge on those who act and think outside the usual boundaries, might have had more of the air of a crusading cause. But it is her family, and her family alone, on which Delphine De Vigan concentrates, to provide the impression of an almost narcissistic exercise.
Of course, the mirror she holds up to her own kith and kin is not always flattering, though, even with an ogre such as the fascist grandfather, Georges, she seems to feel that she must dredge up some alleged virtue. This is a middle class family involved in the media and publicity world, in ‘glamour’, as it were, and Delphine De Vigan does not sufficiently use the story of her own family to point out the hollowness inherent in the atmosphere of show and sham that the media and publicity world involves.
The novel does indicate the thesis of R. D. Laing, the Scottish anti- psychiatrist of the 1960’s, that the dysfunctional family is at the root of the mental illness suffered by an individual within it. And the instability surely emanates from grandfather Georges, whose penchant for the fascist approach, above all in the Second World War, but persisting afterwards, only ensures misfortune to those around him. Death, incest, and madness become embedded in his family.
Maybe both the ‘End of Eddy and ‘Nothing Holds back the Night’ inform us of the dangers of male fascism, whether in a working class or a middle class family. The problem for me with ‘Nothing Holds Back the Night’ is its narcissistic ambience, its emphasis on one family, without presenting us with a greater ideal. How much is this novel a mask?
The Reading Group ended, with the audience agreeing that there is not enough tolerance in society for those bleak people under the dilemma of mental illness, however difficult, or even dangerous, they may be. I talked with one audience member, who showed sympathy to the mentally ill, and recalled how, when a child at school, he had heard pupils make fun of the inmates at a local asylum. I replied that, in the Second World War, Germany had gassed its mentally ill- indeed, the first gas chambers of the Third Reich were set up in mental asylums- and mental patients in their thousands were starved to death in Vichy France.
We ambled out into the dull streets of South Kensington. I headed for the Underground Station, and, amidst the crowds, as I was pushed here and there, I wondered where madness is located. In just individuals? Or in us all? I boarded the train, which then hurried into a tunnel of shadows.
ZEKRIA IBRAHIMI (AGED 58)