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Does Lady Macbeth Have Brain Cancer? A Psychiatrist Decodes the Mental Health of Writers and Their Characters
Does Lady Macbeth Have Brain Cancer? A Psychiatrist Decodes the Mental Health of Writers and Their Characters

Le Figaro

time16-06-2025

  • Health
  • Le Figaro

Does Lady Macbeth Have Brain Cancer? A Psychiatrist Decodes the Mental Health of Writers and Their Characters

Literature is filled with characters suffering from mental health issues… and with authors who weren't necessarily much better off. In a fascinating book, a psychiatrist and a journalist attempt to unravel the mysteries of these minds. Does Lady Macbeth suffer from a brain disorder? Is Don Quixote delusional? Did Montaigne experience post-traumatic stress disorder? Did Baudelaire really have 'spleen'? And we —who delight in delving into the flaws and wanderings of great authors and their characters — might we all be a bit depressed, perverse, voyeuristic or addicted? It certainly seems that way: psychic suffering, often taboo in real life, 'erupts from all sides in literary masterpieces,' where it is not only 'tolerated' but 'magnified, sublimated,' notes psychiatrist Patrick Lemoine. After examining The Psychological Health of Those Who Made the World in his 2019 book, he now joins journalist Sophie Viguier-Vinson in exploring The Psychological Health of Writers and Their Characters. Together, they analyze some of literature's most beautiful pages to unearth madness. Are geniuses mad? Probably a little — otherwise, their works might be more reasonable — and probably far less beautiful. 'Literature reflects the world's complexity' and how each era and society perceives it. 'But it also reveals… the inner self and its fractures… Many writers were at the forefront of modern psychiatry,' the authors emphasize. Some because they could describe the depths of the human soul with astonishing precision; others because they were fascinated by the emerging science of mental illness; and some because they personally lived through the very torments they described. Each gets a diagnosis and prescription Just as a doctor questions a patient to understand their suffering, the authors delve into the works of Charles Baudelaire, Franz Kafka, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Stefan Zweig, Toni Morrison and others to find signs of mental illness. For each, the psychiatrist offers a diagnosis and a prescription — an original way to reread works everyone claims to know by heart… and discover surprising insights. In some cases, the ailment is clear. Unsurprisingly, the book opens with French poet Baudelaire. Drug-addicted, syphilitic, the author of Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil) lays bare his distress, starting with the spleen born of the 'low heavy sky [which] weighs like a lid.' Did the brilliant poet suffer from seasonal depression? From a neurological complication from syphilis, which a simple course of antibiotics could have spared him if only antibiotics had existed in his day? Or perhaps from bipolar disorder, explaining his creative bursts, disdain for norms, and reckless spending? As for Lady Macbeth — William Shakespeare's guilt-consumed heroine who becomes obsessive and sleepwalks — the diagnosis is more surprising: 'I think Lady Macbeth suffers from RBD,' or REM sleep behavior disorder, 'very often a warning sign of a serious neurological disease such as brain cancer, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, etc.' The prescription? Unfortunately, not much: perhaps an MRI to detect a possible early-stage neurological disorder, and melatonin to help with sleep disturbances. Gregor Samsa, the young man who turns into a cockroach in Kafka's Metamorphosis, could have been treated. He clearly suffers from early-stage schizophrenia, observing with horror his body's transformation and falling into neglect while his family gradually gives up on him. Madness or rebellion? In other cases, the diagnosis is murkier, and the line between illness and rebellion against societal norms becomes blurred. Take Don Quixote: He doesn't seem to be lying, as a liar knows what he's doing. A mythomaniac? Maybe, but that's tricky to treat. There's no medication, and you shouldn't confront the mythomaniac with the truth (lest they mentally collapse), nor should you encourage the delusion. So let's keep believing that the man of La Mancha is a gentle dreamer, who harms only windmills and scientific rationality. The Marquise de Merteuil in Choderlos de Laclos's Dangerous Liaisons is probably a narcissistic pervert 'and the term sadomasochism must be mentioned'; but she is also (above all?) a woman rebelling against male dominance, even if it means leaving victims in her wake. Elsewhere, the psychiatrist has fun, as literature reflects our own inner flaws. Take French playwright Molière's Monsieur Jourdain: dreamy, naïve, a bit foolish but not mentally ill. Unless Alzheimer's is 'lurking,' which would explain a lot... Or the clients in Émile Zola's Au Bonheur des Dames (The Ladies' Paradise), caught in a shopping frenzy (with one even resorting to theft), which we can't entirely mock — especially during sale season. With Michel de Montaigne, it was a fall from a horse, recounted in Essays, that triggered a 'vertigo of death.' Yet after discussing PTSD, which traps the sufferer in a loop of traumatic reliving, the psychiatrist concludes Montaigne likely had sound mental health. He may have experienced 'a certain form of traumatic dissociation' — but recovered and transformed it into the basis of his introspective philosophy. Lemoine is less sure, however, about Blaise Pascal's mental integrity. The mathematician became a philosopher after a serious carriage accident in which he almost fell off the Neuilly bridge. Could his Pensées (Thoughts) have been erased with a simple stroke of the pen by a psychiatrist prescribing EMDR sessions? Lifting us out of our inner turmoil 'The mark of literary genius is the ability to convey a clinical truth with extreme accuracy and precision, as if it had been lived, even by those who may never have experienced it,' Lemoine writes. Zola describes delirium tremens in L'Assommoir, while Zweig and Fyodor Dostoevsky masterfully depict gambling addiction. Guy de Maupassant and Edgar Allan Poe likewise brilliantly portray madness — Le Horla's psychosis and The Black Cat's alcoholic downfall — probably drawing from their own hallucinatory experiences. 'Of course, reading doesn't cure... but it can help us project ourselves beyond the torment,' Lemoine and Viguier-Vinson conclude. 'Because an author has turned suffering into something more: a moment of humanity and beauty to be shared.' Literature also gives us hope, the psychiatrist adds, when its characters 'strangely adapt to their quirks, flaws and misadventures… These are all valuable lessons about the strengths of the psyche that give us hope and set us on our path.' According to the World Health Organization, mental illness affects one in five people. That does not include the everyday disappointments that depress, sadden, exhaust or anger us. And literature, in all this? It's here to make us 'a little freer, perhaps'…

The Joy of Reading One Poem in Many Different Translations
The Joy of Reading One Poem in Many Different Translations

New York Times

time11-06-2025

  • Entertainment
  • New York Times

The Joy of Reading One Poem in Many Different Translations

One of my favorite pages on the internet contains eight back-to-back translations of 'Au Lecteur,' the first poem in Charles Baudelaire's 'Les Fleurs du Mal,' all in English. I have visited this page many times to compare the different versions of the last stanza. Initially, I was shocked that each rendition of the last line ('— Hypocrite lecteur, — mon semblable, — mon frère!') is unique. Most end with the phrase 'my brother,' but 'mon semblable' generates more variation: my fellow, my twin (several times), my likeness, my like, fellowman, my double. That last interpretation, which I like for its echo of the French word, comes from Robert Lowell's translation. Lowell also makes the choice that most delights me on the page, translating 'C'est l'Ennui!' not as 'He is Ennui!' (William Aggeler) or 'It is boredom!' (Wallace Fowlie) but as, surprise, 'It's BOREDOM.' The caps transpose all that emphatic energy from the exclamation point onto the word itself, a move with the casual flair of genius, yet faithful to the original. I'm not sure the choice would have struck me as much if I hadn't read it next to seven others. I once heard someone quote the end of Rilke's 'Portrait of My Father as a Young Man,' in Stephen Mitchell's translation ('Oh quickly disappearing photograph/in my more slowly disappearing hand'). I found those lines so moving I was nervous it would show. Years later I read Edward Snow's translation: 'O you swiftly fading daguerreotype/in my more slowly fading hands.' I vastly preferred the Mitchell — much more natural and immediate, and 'fade' seems so weak, in reference to one's body, one's existence, next to 'disappear.' This liking it less taught me something profound, not just about translations, but about words, and choices, in general. I love this feature of great poetry in other languages, the way it spins out mutations. I love to see how different minds find (hugely or minutely) different solutions to the same set of problems. An array of translations is decision porn. The Peruvian poet César Vallejo (1892-1938), like Rilke and Baudelaire, attracts many translators, as Margaret Jull Costa notes in the introduction to her new translations, THE ETERNAL DICE: Selected Poems (New Directions, 144 pp., paperback, $16.95). This is because 'translators are naturally, and possibly masochistically,' she writes, 'drawn to the difficult.' I suspect poetry is always hard to translate, but if Vallejo is especially so, it's because of his linguistic ingenuity, an innovative style that adheres to a complex worldview. When you're reading Vallejo, it may seem the rules of grammar don't obtain, but nor do the laws of physics — the self of his poetry is godlike, outside time, and anything is also its own opposite. These are poems about the constancy of suffering, as in 'I'm Going to Talk About Hope' ('My pain is so deep, that it has neither cause nor absence of cause') and 'The Nine Monsters' ('Never … has health/been more deadly,/nor has migraine extracted so much forehead from the forehead!'). They speak to the death always present in life, the dying of living. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

The death of Edmund White, the American writer who put the 'gay novel' at the heart of his work
The death of Edmund White, the American writer who put the 'gay novel' at the heart of his work

LeMonde

time06-06-2025

  • Entertainment
  • LeMonde

The death of Edmund White, the American writer who put the 'gay novel' at the heart of his work

Susan Sontag described him as "one of the outstanding writers of prose in America." A trailblazer in gay literature, American novelist, biographer and literary critic Edmund White died at his New York home on Wednesday, June 4. He was 85 years old. Unflinching and without taboo, White made the "gay novel," as he called it, the epicenter of his body of work. "What I aim to do is explore facets of it that have not yet been addressed," he told Le Monde in 2013. At the time, he was in Paris for the French release of Jack Holmes and His Friend, the story of a friendship between a gay man and a straight man – a visit that delighted the renowned Francophile. From 1983 to 1990, he lived in France and often pointed out that he had "met everyone," from Yves Saint Laurent to Catherine Deneuve and Michel Foucault. He chronicled this cherished period in Inside a Pearl: My Years in Paris (2014). Born on January 13, 1940, in Cincinnati, Ohio, White was the son of a Texas businessman and a psychologist. In A Boy's Own Story (1982), he recounted his childhood in the Midwest and described his father, "who'd been a Texas cowboy as a young man." As a teenager, he realized he was gay and confided in his mother, who sent him to a psychoanalyst claiming he could "cure" him. Isolation and self-loathing marked those years, as White described in the second volume of his autobiography, The Beautiful Room is Empty (1988). When he learned he had been admitted to Harvard, the young White chose not to attend so he wouldn't have to leave his therapist. Prolific body of work The 1960s marked a liberation for him. In New York, he discovered the antithesis of family values, haunted the underbelly of the Village, reveled in sex and became the great chronicler of the "life among men." He described it with a precision whose boldness fascinated some and repelled others. With a wealth of detail, he depicted the frenzy that consumed him, describing it like an itch: "The more we scratched the more we itched (...) For us, there was nothing more natural than wandering into a park, a parked truck or a plundering body after body," he wrote in The Farewell Symphony (1997). His writing blended rawness, violence, ugliness and beauty. About Lou, a character in The Beautiful Room is Empty, he wrote a line that summed up the essence of his approach: "But through some curious alchemy, he'd redeemed our illness by finding beauty in it. He loved Baudelaire and like Baudelaire he searched out beauty in whatever was foul, artificial, damned..." With more than 20 books to his name, White's body of work unfolded like a polyptych – a shifting tableau of what he called the social and sexual history of three decades of gay life in the United States. He sought to recount this history as a witness, as lived by his generation: "psychoanalyzed and oppressed in the '50s and liberated in the '60s and exalted in the '70s and wiped out [by AIDS] in the '80s." Also in 2013, and in perfect French, he told us how, in 1985, he learned he was HIV-positive and how he reacted. "I thought: I'm obviously going to die. So I challenged fate. I began writing a biography of [French writer] Jean Genet. Everyone thought I was crazy. In fact, I probably am." By chance, he was among those in whom the virus advanced slowly. Not only did White complete his biography (which came out in 1993), but he later turned his attention to Marcel Proust (1998), and above all to Arthur Rimbaud, whom he first discovered, dazzled, at age 14 in his Michigan boarding school (Rimbaud: The Double Life of a Rebel, 2008). At Princeton University in New Jersey, where he taught fiction writing, White was a colleague and friend of Joyce Carol Oates. The writer paid tribute to him on the social network X, praising his "boldly pioneering subject matter" and "astonishing stylistic versatility."

‘Chic' is dead, says Vogue. Is it time to revive ‘jazzy', ‘snazzy' and ‘swish'?
‘Chic' is dead, says Vogue. Is it time to revive ‘jazzy', ‘snazzy' and ‘swish'?

The Guardian

time02-06-2025

  • Entertainment
  • The Guardian

‘Chic' is dead, says Vogue. Is it time to revive ‘jazzy', ‘snazzy' and ‘swish'?

Vogue has spoken: chic is dead. Not being it, but the word. Chic has, Lauren O'Neill argues, lost its essence, co-opted to cover whatever glazed-doughnut-skinned influencers on TikTok decide it should, from monogrammed lip balm to iced matchas. 'Chic has come to be mistaken for certain monied strains of taste, rather than the sort of unique je ne sais quoi that I think the word at its purest actually means.' Baudelaire – the 19th century's Nicky Haslam, given how many things he disapproved of: photography, Belgium, Victor Hugo – would have agreed. He called chic an 'awful and bizarre word'. Are he and Vogue right? I'm not that troubled by chic. Certainly not as an aspiration – I'm currently wearing the stained puffer jacket I share with my most eccentric hen, who lays eggs in the sleeve – but also as a word. I find it far less objectionable than 'luxurious', which has been similarly overused into vapid meaninglessness but takes longer and feels creepy to say – to me, it feels like one of those awful massages that is just feathery stroking. 'Chic' is just a bit dull (unless used in conjunction with 'le freak', of course). Still, I'm gratefully chastened when someone tries to hold us to higher creative standards. I tried to check how many times I had used 'chic' in print and was appalled at the vast list of results, before realising most of them were actually the word 'chickens'. I did, however, use it twice in something I wrote just yesterday without even realising. To further linguistic plurality and make life more interesting, maybe we need to rehabilitate some alternatives. My suggestion: let's start describing stuff like baffled elderly fathers opining on outfits. I'd love to see the return of 'snazzy', 'trendy', 'swish', and other dad-jectives; let's have influencers calling their baby-blue crocodile Hermès handbags 'jazzy'. I fear, however, we're too far gone – chic is so ingrained, so ubiquitous and so damn useful, it will outlive us. I fully anticipate the last mutated giant post-apocalyptic cockroaches will be complimenting each other on the way their shells glitter in the burning wasteland – so chic! Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist

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