Human Traces

Human Traces is a 2005 novel by Sebastian Faulks, best known as the British author of Birdsong and Charlotte Gray. The novel took Faulks five years to write. It tells of two friends who set up a pioneering asylum in 19th-century Austria, in tandem with the evolution of psychiatry and the start of World War I.

Plot summary

Human Traces presents a fictional attempt to discover the nature of mental illness in the late Victorian period through the intertwined lives of Doctors Thomas Midwinter, who is English, and Jacques Rebière, from Brittany, France. Jacques and Thomas meet as teenagers in 1880 when Thomas holidays in France with his sister Sonia and her husband. Jacques and Thomas come from very different backgrounds, but instantly become friends as both have burning ambitions to become doctors. In particular, they are fascinated by the way the mind works. Jacques has a particular interest in the subject because his older brother Olivier has a mental illness, the symptoms of which have progressively worsened as he has grown up. Olivier is plagued by voices in his head; Jacques refers to this as 'Olivier's disease', although the reader is likely to recognise it as schizophrenia. Central to the plot is the theory of Bicameralism (psychology).

The novel records the attempt by Jacques and Thomas to understand the mind and the cause of mental illness. Their ultimate aim is to discover what makes us human. The novel spans almost fifty years and contains much detail about the psychiatric environment of the day. As pioneering psychiatrists, their combined quest takes them from an English country lunatic asylum to the plains of Africa, the lecture rooms of Paris and the mountains of Austria and California. Jacques eventually marries Sonia after she is cruelly divorced by her first husband, and the three of them establish their own clinic for mental illness in Austria. The Schloss Seeblick sanatorium becomes well known, and Thomas and Jacques are able to observe their patients and discover much about the mind. It is here that Jacques also misdiagnoses a patient, Katharina, whose life is only saved by Thomas' quick intervention and whom he eventually marries. This medical failure on Jacques' part exposes profound differences between them and the two are only reconciled after the end of the First World War and the death of Daniel, Jacques' son, who dies fighting in Italy.

The pair never find a cure for madness, but they move humanity along in its quest for understanding of the human mind. Thomas never discovers what it is that makes us human, but throughout the novel there is a suggestion that mental illness may be part of the price humans pay for being human at all.

Although Human Traces is wide ranging, ambitious and well-written, some have criticised it for being excessively expository, detailed and didactic. The novel ultimately fails to live up to the high dramatic standards of Faulks' previous books such as Birdsong, Charlotte Gray, and On Green Dolphin Street, possibly because of the lack of focus on one particular main character. There are also the passages of Jacques' and Thomas' lectures, and the conversation between Thomas and his colleague, Hannes, in Africa that fail to grasp the reader's imagination owing to their longevity and overly-scientific content. The novel does have some dramatic flourishes - such as Jacques childhood at Sainte Agnés and Charcot's lectures under the great dome of the church of the Salpêtrière. However, these are spoilt by annoying situations like Jacques and Sonia's role-play of lecturer/student in his digs, the madness of Olivier (written in a highly Joycean style) and his sudden headlong flight over a cliff, as well as Sonia's highly improbable forgiveness of her husband's infidelity with Roya Drobesch, not to mention the latter two's rampant sex together. One passage, for example, reads,

Jacques was surprised that he could manage at her merest suggestion to be ready. It was not an area of psychology, but folk wisdom had it that after the age of thirty a man needed longer to recover. It was a though each act, exciting as it was, failed to kill the urge. A brash part of him was secretly proud of his vigour, but he wondered if there was something wrong in their ideas of one another that so much lovemaking seemed not to satisfy them.

(pp.536-537)

The Daily Mail review of the novel points out that 'Faulks has a great ability to meld scientific theory with human drama...' but unfortunately the two remain unreconciled in this novel.

Background to the novel

Faulks himself says:

Human Traces was a Sisyphean task. After spending five years in libraries reading up on madness, psychiatry and psychoanalysis (my office had charts and timelines and things plastered all over the walls), the act of finishing it felt like a bereavement.

Human Traces sets out to illustrate the advances in cognitive psychology during the late Victorian era. Faulks has stated that he doesn't know what motivated him to write a novel about mental illness. The psychiatric research that Faulks puts into his novel can be illuminating in places. Over the course of his investigation, Faulks was able to gain access to Broadmoor, the hospital for the criminally insane which stands at the top of the valley above the private college where Faulks went to school.

He has commented in an interview that ‘there's no doubt that the hearing of voices is much more common than we generally acknowledge, and I don't think it's necessarily a sign of being mad'. He himself experienced hearing voices (something which also prompted him to write his latest novel, Engleby):

It was a classic case of being in stress after our second child had been born. I thought I heard my wife's voice screaming for me. It was not in my head, it was not just on the other side of the room, it was up the stairs. I had been deeply asleep, I leapt up, and went up the stairs - there was nothing.

This experience makes its way into the novel, and shows Faulks' long term interest in the subject of psychiatric illnesses, especially as his mother, Pamela Faulks, had a nervous breakdown when he was a child.

Controversy and reviews

In the course of the book the author mentions many actual early workers in the field of psychology whose contributions to our current understanding have been overshadowed by what is referred to, often contemptuously, as 'the Viennese school', meaning Freud and his followers though Freud's name, significantly, is never mentioned. Charcot, Pierre Janet, Alfred Maury, Morel, Moritz Benedikt, Max Dessoir, Karl Albert Scherner and F. W. Hildebrandt are all named as making significant contributions, emphasising the fact that the idea of the sub-conscious mind existed long before Freud, as did dream interpretation and the idea of censorship in the mind.

A key idea introduced by one of the two main characters is that schizophrenia might be an unavoidable consequence of an evolutionary development that made us essentially human by giving us introspection, and that this might be connected with the fact that only humans have asymmetrical brain function, with language processed in, usually, the left hemisphere. Tim Crow, professor of psychiatry at Oxford University has complained that Faulkes borrowed his ideas, making it look as if they arose in the nineteenth century. Apparently Faulks and Crow argued before publication and Faulks allowed Crow to dictate his own acknowledgement at the end of the book, though this does not appear in the paperback edition[1].

The idea was actually put forward under the name of Bicameralism by psychologist Julian Jaynes in 1976, and found little acceptance among mainstream academics, being presented in a book aimed at the general public rather than in a peer-reviewed journal.

External links

• "All in the Mind". The Guardian.
• "Faulks: a Tolstoy for today". The Telegraph. September 4, 2005.