Insomnia by Marina Benjamin review - sleeplessness as resistance

Ranging from Penelope to Virginia Woolf, this study makes a case for restlessness and insomnia as acts of female rebellion

If you think you sleep badly it will soon become clear, on witnessing Marina Benjamin wrestle with the problem, her mind “on fire … messages flying, dendrites flowering, synapses whipping snaps of electricity across my brain”, that you really don’t. Never again will I refer to the kind of sleeplessness that can be tamed with Ovaltine and a few pages of Knausgaard as “insomnia”. Benjamin’s impassioned and elegant memoir is not just an intimate account of a disorder for which there is still no straightforward cure, but a defiant celebration of its paradoxical potential. For, as she suggests, insomnia is more than “just a state of sleeplessness, a matter of negatives. It involves the active pursuit of sleep. It is a state of longing.” In fact she pursues sleep so hard that an entire book is the result.

Fittingly for a meditation on a disrupted process, her method is fragmentary, hurtling from thought to thought. Its starting point is Lacan’s observation that desire is born out of lack. “On certain turbulent nights this longing is so great and deep and bald it swallows up the world,” she admits – and after that, anything goes. All literature is raw material for the pursuit, because if the “enervating mania” of insomnia involves “an excess of longing”, it also involves “an excess of thinking”. Benjamin never offers a medical explanation for her insomnia. Is it a side-effect of the menopause, she wonders? The result of chronic hip pain? Fallout from a melatonin deficiency? These questions are all red herrings. Her key idea, approached via detours into history, philosophy and art, is that the inability to sleep is not just a symptom of an underlying pathology, but an existential experience that can give us fresh insights into the nature of creativity and love. If there is an answer to why she can’t drift off we have to find it, as she does, in the stories of others.

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from Books | The Guardian http://bit.ly/2QSWk6s

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