Sleepless: Covid, Lautréamont, Trump, poetry

12.09.2112.09.21 from Kai Nonnenmacher

This article is written in German. Automatic translations:

The publisher POL announces Darrieussecq's novel Don't sleep a poetics of insomnia that has determined the author's life for many years: « J'ouvre les livres et tous me parlent d'insomnie. Woolf! Gide! Pavese! Plath! Sunday! Kafka! Dostoyevsky! Darwich! Murakami! Cesaire! Borges! U Tam'si! Across all continents, the literature is not the same as this. If you write it, it's not like you're sleeping. » ¹ The novel is far more than just an autofictional way of coping with this lack of sleep through writing; the absent sleep is symbolically charged as a disruption of modernity, for example in the pandemic Corona transmission, which is poetologically linked to Lautréamont's famous quote, and also to the sleep of reason in Goya (the book is, incidentally, full of illustrations): insomnia makes us aware of the otherness of the world.

Pendant un temps on a cru that the coronavirus is available to the man by the bias of the pangolin. The vengeance of the pangolin. Involuntaire et glaçante. A pangolin is available in contact with a chauvesouris on the animals of a march in Wuhan. Signe des temps que ces rencontres, also absurdes que « la rencontre fortuite sur une table de dissection d'une machine à coudre et d'un parapluie » : ainsi parlait Lautréamont, grand detector de catastrophes. The pandemic has been reported to the animals in our confinement. Des transmissions s'operent d'animal mort en animal mort dans une sorte de créativité barbare. No traffic créent des monstres. No coupes de forêts les débusquent. Le sommeil de notre raison nous tuera.
Marie Darrieussecq Don't sleep

For a time, it was believed that the coronavirus had jumped from pangolins to humans. The pangolin's revenge. Unintentional and terrifying. A pangolin had come into contact with a bat at an animal market in Wuhan. These encounters, as absurd as "the chance meeting of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissection table," are a sign of the times: so spoke Lautréamont, a great chronicler of disasters. The pandemic has brought wild animals into our lockdown. Transmission occurs from dead animal to dead animal with a kind of barbaric creativity. Our mobility creates monsters. Our deforestation drives them away. The slumber of our reason will kill us.

Goya: El sueño de la razón produce monstruos (The sleep [dream] of reason gives birth to monsters), Capricho No. 43, etching, Madrid, Wikipedia Commons

Darrieussecq's seemingly anecdotal bringing together of sleepless individuals becomes even more political: she combines small press reports into a scenography of unease, which she also in the interview for example, it is linked to the destruction of the planet or insomnia during war.

C'est Mme de Sévigné qui l'écrit après le départ de sa fille en Provence, au matin du 6 fevrier 1771: « Les réveils de la nuit ont été noirs, et le matin je n'étais point avancée d'un pas pour le repos de mon esprit. » This is a Toulousain qui a gagné 32 million d'euros à l'Euromillion le 28 mai 2019 et qui, au bout de sa nuit blanche, finit par "cacher le bulletin gagnant dans a chemise accrochée sur un cintre de sa penderie ".
This is also Sarah Forestier after the Cérémonie des César 2019 couronnant Roman Polanski: « J'aurais dû quitter la salle. On aurait du quitter la salle. I can't sleep at night. »
This is Ai Fen, medical director of a private clinic near the march in Wuhan, who reported on January 1st, 2019 that the coronavirus was transmitted between humans and received a response at 23:46 p.m l'hôpital: Passez me voir demain matin. Elle n'en there pas de la nuit ».
C'est James Comey, patron limogé of the FBI, who son entretien avec Trump réveille d'angoisse au milieu de la nuit et qui, dans son lit, prend la décision de faire fuiter leurs propos. After the election of Trump, the American press received a new phenomenon, the Trump-induced insomnia, the insomnia related to Trump, which is durable, said to be durable in the "PBI", post-Brexit insomnia, which has certain Britannian consternations.
Marie Darrieussecq Don't sleep

It was Mme de Sévigné who, after her daughter's departure for Provence on the morning of February 6, 1771, wrote: "The frequent awakenings during the night were black, and in the morning I had made no progress in resting my mind." A man from Toulouse, who won €32 million in the EuroMillions lottery on May 28, 2019, finally hid the winning ticket in a shirt hanging on a hanger in his wardrobe at the end of his sleepless night.
It was Sarah Forestier who, after Roman Polanski received the César Award in 2019, said: “I should have left the room. We should have left the room. I couldn’t sleep all night.”
It was Ai Fen, the chief physician of a private clinic near the market in Wuhan, who had known since January 1, 2019, that the coronavirus was transmitted from person to person, and who subsequently received this message at 11:46 p.m. from the "Head of Discipline Control of the Hospital: Come to me tomorrow morning." She would therefore not sleep all night.
It was James Comey, the dismissed head of the FBI, who was woken in the middle of the night by his meeting with Trump, overcome with fear, and who decided in his bed to publish what he had said. Incidentally, after Trump's election, the American press discovered a new phenomenon: Trump-induced insomnia, which unfortunately lasted a long time, just like the "PBS," the post-Brexit insomnia, among many bewildered Britons.

The psychoanalyst Marie Darrieussecq has already dealt with Notre vie dans les forêts The forest was chosen as a refuge from the demands of modern technology. The novel does not end with longed-for sleep or awakening on a new day, but with a reflection on hypnagogia, that blurred, poetically productive transitional zone. ²

La poetry, comme le rêve, dit une vérité sauvage. Le sommeil et l'insomnie, territoires asymétriques, ouvrent leurs propres chemins. In the zone of hypnagogique, our eyes with our feet like the Grenouilles, with our lateral lines like the requins, in our feet with the females. Les vibrations nous guident comme les araignées. Nous entendons les arbres. Nous quittons la ligne droite. Nous renonçons à notre excitation électrique, à notre conscience frénétique, à notre bon sens élagueur de rameaux.
Marie Darrieussecq Don't sleep

Poetry, like dreams, tells a wild truth. Sleep and insomnia, these asymmetrical territories, open their own paths. In the hypnagogic zone, we hear with our skin like frogs, with our lateral line like sharks, in our womb like pregnant women. Vibrations guide us like spiders. We hear the trees. We leave the straight line. We relinquish our electrical excitation, our frenetic consciousness, our common sense when pruning the branches.

Reference / Citation suggestion

Nonnenmacher, Kai. "Sleepless: Covid, Lautréamont, Trump, Poetry." Rentrée littéraire: contemporary French literature. 2021. Accessed on May 17, 2026 at 15:37 p.m. https://rentree.de/2021/09/12/ Schlaflos-covid-lautreamont-trump-poesie/.

This article is written in German and can be found at https://rentree.de. Automatic translations into English and French are available. English, French.

Kai Nonnenmacher

Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg | Contact

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Notes

"I open books, and they all tell me about insomnia. Woolf! Gide! Pavese! Plath! Sontag! Kafka! Dostoevsky! Darwich! Murakami! Césaire! Borges! U Tam'si! On every continent, literature revolves around this question. As if writing means not sleeping.">>>
Wikipedia explains: "Hypnagogia is a state of consciousness that can occur when falling asleep, i.e., during the transition from wakefulness to sleep. During this phase, waking dreams, visual, auditory and/or tactile hallucinations, as well as sleep paralysis, can occur.">>>

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