Symptômes

By Annemarie Jutel

Catherine Ocelot’s Symptômes is a lovely piece of embroidery.  A collection of graphic narratives about pain, illness, suffering and loneliness are carefully stitched together to bring agency, if not quite joy, to the female protagonists whose suffering creates the fabric of the novel.

While it is hard to know if the story is autobiographical (and perhaps it doesn’t matter), the principal character bears the author’s name, and prefaces the book by letting us know about her simultaneous fixation with medical television drama and her parallel hypochondriac tendencies.  She is enthralled by these confident and capable white-coated creatures, whose ability to diagnose and treat goes hand in hand with love, sociability, and full fridges.  She exalts them as guaridan angels, even while they may lack the sensitivity and the experience of suffering that makes one human.

Each of the subsequent chapters deals with the distress of one of a group of female characters, from Lady Gaga and her chronic pain, to Ocelot’s own preoccupation with catastrophe, an older woman’s loneliness, and the eating disorder of a woman in Ocelot’s support group.  The top-stitch-like drawing style connects the ideas, the frames, and the characters; linking their respectives states of disarray.

It is a diagnosis which sets the scene for the support group.

“Ok.  Mrs…. Mrs Gariépy.  That’s right isn’t it?  Mireille Gariépy, born 22 Dec 1955.  That’’s you?”

“Yes doctor.  That’s me.”

“Perfect.  Mrs Gariépy, we have your results.”

“OK”

“Yes.  I have all of your tests.  We have looked at your scans, Xrays, ultrasounds, blood tests, every seam

….

My diagnosis is clear and unequivocal.  You suffer from loneliness. [pages 38-40]”

Madame Gariépy’s treatment plan includes, among other things, attending Loneliness Anonymous, a regular support group comprised of each of the characters whose stories make up the chapters..  Modelled on AA, we hear the confessions of the particpants: “I am Catherine and i am a member of Loneliness Anonymous…” They visit their psychologists, reveal their dreams, following the dotted thread that connects them all.

As the book progresses towards its denouement, we end up where we started, in a group of hip, gloved, masked and gowned surgeons, gathered around Ocelot in an operating room.  While they are technically fascinated by her state, they are also preoccupied by their busy, unproblematic social lives:

“Someone will have to contact my wife to tell her I can’t make the concert this evening.  If you have any plans, I suggest you do the same.  I might be mistaken, but I think this is going to take all night. [227]”

Page 227

This time, however, the members of Loneliness Anonymous are watching from behind the double mirror, giving a running commentary:  suspicious, guarded, skeptical, and finishing up with muffins.

In a sense, this beautifully drawn chronicle is showing the possibility of the power shift:  transferring the authority for happiness from medicine to the human, showing that love and care are what matters, and how that manifests in many ways.  This is emphasised as Ocelot confronts news from her father about a relapse from his cancer.  She is devastated, and distressed, and ultimately turns to her Loneliness Anonymous group with a cake.  The food provides a form of sublimation.  This carefully-crafted, laboriously-prepared bit of pastry transforms her pain and makes it digestible.  With food and friends, she is not alone, yet she is always alone.

This is a book about demedicalising emotions.  It is clever in the way that it brings in more than one storyteller to tell what is essentially, Ocelot’s character’s story (I am loathe to call this Ocelot’s story, as she has only named her character Ocelot, but has not affirmed that it is her story.  Also, it is fictional in other ways, so to treat this as memoir may be a step too far).  The girlfriend brigade and the muffins are what save Ocelot above and beyond what her pretend Gray’s Anatomy friends ever could have done.

Ocelot’s drawing style sits somewhere between quilting, topstitch and applique.  This works visually as well as metaphorically.  It is at the same time creative (like embroidery), but also reparative (like darning), and connective (like weaving).  Even non-human elements, like the abundant plantlife in Ocelot’s drawings, are part of the tapestry of her cartoon life.

Written in French, plans for Symptômes to be translated into English by its English language partner publisher, PowPow Press are underway.  Keep your eyes peeled!

About the reviewer:  Annemarie Jutel is a sociologist of diagnosis and author of the books “Putting a Name to it:  Diagnosis in Contemporary Society (JHUP)”  and  “Diagnosis: Truths and Tales (TUP)”