Reading Materials of the Week: Veronika Decides to Die – Paulo Coehlo; The Second Sex – Simone De Beauvoir.
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Veronika, a young woman who finds herself disenchanted by everyday life, never able to have any real “strong emotions”, decides to kill herself. Veronika Decides to Die begins at the decisive moment of her suicide, which she has carefully planned for months, claiming sleeping issues in order to obtain various sleeping pills from her friends. She is not depressed, she is not angry at the world – in fact, she believes herself to be “completely normal”. Her reasons for dying are completely rational:
“The first reason: Everything in her life was the same and, once her youth was gone, it would be downhill all the way, with old age beginning to leave irreversible marks, the onset of illness, the departure of friends. She would gain nothing by continuing to live; indeed, the likelihood of suffering would only increase. The second reason was more philosophical: Veronika read the newspapers, watched TV, and she was aware of what was going on in the world. Everything was wrong, and she had no way of putting things right – that gave her a sense of complete powerlessness.” (7)
When she wakes up, Veronika is in a mental asylum, Villete. They inform her that she only has five days to live, a week at most. Veronika reflects that “This could only happen to me” given that she has “spent her life waiting… Normally, people die on precisely the day they least expect.” Although the reader receives evidence that a plan – constructed by the doctor – is afoot, there is a general sense that Veronika really will die. In addition to Veronika’s perspective (told to us in third person), we follow the thoughts and reflections of Dr. Igor, Zedka, Mari, and Eduard (the latter characters are patients at Villete), as each reflect on Veronika as well as life itself. Each of them articulate the sense that society structures the life of the individual in accord with the status quo; to go against this means you’re mad – unless, of course, you are sanctioned by your station, as Dr. Igor is. For Dr. Igor has set the girl up as an experiment; the truth is that Veronika has made a full recovery from her overdose and is fully ready to re-enter the world – except, of course, for the tiny problem that she intends to off herself as soon as possible. Indeed, quickly after being satisfied at the fact that she is going to die, she realizes that even a few days is too long to wait. She has spent her life waiting – how can she wait for death? She must bring death herself, that is the one pronouncement of the self that she can make over her body. “She reflected on her situation there; it was far from ideal. Even if they [Villete] allowed her to do all the crazy things she wanted to do, she wouldn’t know where to start.” (40) Here, unlike The Bell Jar, it is made clear that purposelessness in the face of a unified body is shared, by lawyer and artist alike (Mari and Eduard), not just the individual body (though it is an individually felt thing). But the full extent of the individual’s entrapment is not fully realized until Veronika’s immanent death is brought into play; only then does Mari realize eventually that life outside the asylum is exactly the same as in the asylum: “Both there and here, people gather together in groups; they build their walls and allow nothing strange to trouble their mediocre existences. They do things because they’re used to doing them, they study useless subjects, they have fun because they’re supposed to have fun, and the rest of the world can go hang – let them sort themselves out. At the very most, they watch the news on television – as we often did – as confirmation of their happiness in a world full of problems and injustices.” (198) Still, it is Dr. Igor who coaches Mari in this direction, just as he guides Veronika (in the negative) by telling her that she will die:[To Mari]”You’re someone who is different, but who wants to be the same as everyone else. And that, in my view, is a serious illness… It is [a serious illness] to force yourself to be the same as everyone else. It causes neuroses, psychoses, and paranoia. It’s a distortion of nature, it goes against God’s laws, for on all the world’s woods and forests, he did not create a single leaf the same as another. But you think it’s insane to be different, and that’s why you chose to live in Villete, because everyone is different here, and so you appear to be the same as everyone else. Do you understand?” (169) The doctor is part of the ruling class, so to speak; he speaks from a place of privilege as he who can tell people what they feel and why: because his role allows him to do so. He is able to think “I know the world will not recognize my efforts,” and in so doing be “proud of being misunderstood.” (92) He holds the proverbial phallus. Yet, Coehlo’s Villete is also not any normal asylum; it essentially has no security barriers, and so Eduard and Veronika easily just walk out of the institution. The point here I think that Coehlo is making is that, since the ‘King’ has yet to prove his cure-all theory (which will be proven by the results of Veronika’s test), the ‘institution’ as such does not yet exist. Yes, there are pieces of one – the nurses and electroshock treatment, for example – but these are pieces that exist at other asylums too. It is the result of Dr. Igor’s experiment which will allow him to form a basis for his treatment center, and thus for a miniature society – for is not every new governmental system constituted on a hypothesized set of solutions to pre-existing problems? Further, to build walls is to designate place, and to designate place is to affirm a particular makeup of people – here, this is obviously a ‘makeup of people’ which are evidently being cured because of Igor’s experiment. Villete is thus able to be constructed on the premise of this ‘thesis’ (solution), and walls may be established after: :Meticulously he began to write up his experiment with Veronika; he would leave the reports on the building’s lack of security until later.” (210)
So what about Veronika? Is she freed? Certainly; she has freed herself. She has shirked the bond of fear of/for other people about her. She has been liberated – not really because she was going to die, but because she manages to live. Her masturbation before Eduard allows her to break this structure of fear that impedes the body and the mind from doing whatever it likes. However, it is interesting that this happens before the male gaze, if a schizophrenic can be said to be ‘of the male gaze’. Actually, the notion that Veronika needs any sort of witness to confirm her act in and of herself is questionable. Still, at least in one way, her suicide attempt was actually a birth; it allowed her to start anew because the notion ‘I am already dead,’ was in mind. What this says about Death and Desire (of course in the Lacanian sense!) will be explored further in the process of writing my thesis.
