In 1698, the Duc de Berry had a nosebleed. This calamity was brought on by his “overheating” during a partridge hunt. Three hundred and nineteen years later, the writer Anaïs Vanel quit her editing job and went surfing. What links this unlikely couple? Well, both of them earn a mention in “A History of Fatigue” (Polity), a new book by Georges Vigarello, translated by Nancy Erber. The book sets out to examine, in frankly draining detail, the many ways in which humans, often against their will, end up thoroughly pooped.
Vigarello is not, as his name suggests, an irrepressible sidekick in a minor Mozart opera, egging his master on to commit extravagant japes, but a research director at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, in Paris. He has previously written books about, among other things, cleanliness, obesity, and sports. Now it is the turn of the tired—the French tailors, for instance, who worked “fourteen to eighteen hours in the most painful positions,” as one of their number reported in 1833. Or the combatant in the First World War who found himself “on the brink of the void, feeling nothing but monotony and lassitude.” Or, at a slightly lower pitch of extremity, the supermarket cashier who, in 2002, was struck by “terrible pain” after lifting a pack of bottled water. Will the agony never cease?
As a theme, fatigue is so extensive, and so intrinsic to the fact of being alive, that demarcating where it begins or ends is no simple task. One can imagine a Borgesian fable in which a fatiguologist, bent upon covering every aspect of the topic, dies of sheer inanition with the project incomplete. The more encyclopedic the mission, the stricter the boundaries that need to be set; if you’re expecting “A History of Fatigue” to begin with the Iliad—whose protagonists are pre-wiped, having battled for nine years before the action of the poem gets under way—you are doomed to disappointment. Nothing about the ancient world, it would seem, appeals to Vigarello. He doubtless believes that everyone back then was brimming with juice and zip, and that if Achilles harried Hector three times around the walls of Troy it’s because both guys needed the exercise.
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Defiantly, then, and without ado, Vigarello starts his clock in the Middle Ages. One of his earliest witnesses is Constantine the African, an eleventh-century physician, who issues an ominous caution: “You must avoid and reject heavy burdens and cares because excessive worrying dries out our bodies, leaches out our vital energies, fostering despair in our minds and sucking out the substance from our bones.” (Sounds to me like last Thursday.) Nine centuries and three hundred pages later, Vigarello finally reaches the tribulations of the now, including the shatteringly thankless experience of life online. In a despondent afterword, he casts his gaze upon COVID-19, though not, oddly enough, upon the specific drudgery of long COVID. What that bequeaths, as I could have assured him, is the very dreariest of double whammies—feeling tired of feeling tired.
As with chronology, so with geography: Vigarello, having the entire globe at his disposal to comb for traces of tiredness, opts to be as French as possible. There are cursory nods to other countries, most of them in the Northern Hemisphere, and Theodore Roosevelt gets a shout-out for his 1899 collection of essays and speeches, tellingly titled “The Strenuous Life,” but, for the most part, Vigarello plants his heels in home turf. To be fair, some of his compatriots are a treat. Say hello to the bilious M. Petit, aged fifty, “overwhelmed with business stresses and worries,” whose heart was “irritated by strenuous exercise, by heat, by bathing and sexual intercourse, by intoxication, by drinking strong wine and by quarrelling.” He could be the deserving victim in a Maigret mystery of the nineteen-fifties. In fact, his troubles date from 1646.
Sometimes the Frenchness kicks in as a curlicue—a tiny twist to an otherwise solemn recitation of scholarly facts. Here is a prime example:
What we really need at this juncture is a graph, with the dual amours helpfully plotted along the x- and y-axes. Or a Venn diagram, with adultery lurking and smirking in the shaded area. In the event, Vigarello’s book is bereft of diagrams—a genuine surprise, given how insistently he is drawn toward the calibrated and the categorized. (“Using the diagnostic tools of the time, they measured strength with a dynamometer, fatigue with an ergograph, and lung power with a spirometer.” Be still, my beating pulse!) His methodology places him squarely in the most distinctive of Gallic traditions, as a long-range beneficiary of the Enlightenment; hence the jolt of fellow-feeling with which he seizes on his forebears, such as the nobleman who rides from Fontainebleau to Paris, in 1754, with “a watch sewn onto his left sleeve so that he can always know the time.” The driving principle of “A History of Fatigue,” indeed, is that the human race is a race, with every generation of innovators striving to outrun the discoveries of the previous one, and the march of progress quickening into a sprint. To be honest, the whole thing is exhausting.
So, what’s the plot? What has fatigue been up to? Well, initially, it was all about the leaching. In the medieval map of the body, Vigarello tells us, we were filled with fluids, and the trick was to prevent them from dripping or flowing away. Withering and stiffness were signs of superfluous exertion, and perspiration was “a dangerous symptom,” though how you were meant to stanch your sweat while bending over to dig up root vegetables, say, is unclear. If we hear little of the laboring poor, that’s because documentation was, by definition, the preserve of the literate, notably the highborn and the priestly. When it comes to clanking knights, loaded down with armor and knocking lumps out of each other with the swing of an axe, the records give Vigarello a ringside seat, and he is pleased to register the tally of blows that were stipulated by Jean Pitois for his bout with Jacques de Lalaing on October 15, 1450: sixty-three. Talk about crunching the numbers.
We are also honored with a useful section on “redemptive fatigue”—the soul-cleansing result of pilgrimages and other acts of penance, undertaken either barefoot or in shoes that were, as Vigarello says, “usually made of one piece of leather.” You have to admire the Count of Flanders, Guy of Dampierre, who died in 1305; skillfully covering his bets, he left the huge sum of eight thousand pounds in his will to anyone who would walk to the Holy Land on his behalf. All of the shriving and none of the blisters. Job done.
The strange thing is that Vigarello, having glanced at the subject of spiritual exhaustion, goes briskly onward and doesn’t look back, as if the figure of the pilgrim were too antiquated to detain him further. Yet the Christian narrative of depletion and renewal has proved stubbornly enduring. Crowds of the faithful have sat in the pews of churches and listened to this:
That lofty guarantee, from the Book of Isaiah, is borne forward into a single verse in the Gospel of St. Matthew, and thence into the Book of Common Prayer: “Come unto me, all ye that travail and are heavy laden, and I will refresh you.” Spurn or scorn such promises, if you will, but it’s hard to deny them a place in any history of fatigue, just as the history of art has been enriched by recurring images of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, surrounded by his somnolent disciples (“Could you not watch with me one hour?” he asks Peter), or rising from the tomb, unnoticed by the dozing Roman guards. Of all the tumults in the world, they sleep through this one.
Vigarello is unmoved. He is concerned with religious instruction, but solely as it pertains to remedies for the flagging. Prospective travellers, in the thirteenth century, were advised by Aldebrandin of Siena “to eat only light meats and drink plain water or water infused with onion, vinegar or sour apples to purify their humors.” How comforting to know that our weakness for dietary elixirs, far from being a passing fad, is one of the eternal verities, and that, when Aldebrandin counsels his readers “to keep a crystal in their mouths to calm their thirst,” he is not, as you might think, clinging to absurd superstition but courageously paving the way for Gwyneth Paltrow.
Like any chronicler, in other words, Vigarello is alert to the competing claims of common sense and nonsense. “During the Enlightenment, interlocking fibers, filaments, ‘currents’ and nerves took the place of bodily humors, and they explained the presence of fatigue,” he says in his introduction. “New physical sensations were recognized that interacted with a feeling of emptiness, a lack of motivation, and the loss of spirit.” The fibres and the filaments may strike no chord with us, but the emptiness is gallingly up to date, as is a guilty suspicion that complaining about it, and seeking tonics to allay it, may be more entwined with privilege than we care to admit. If you’re holding down three jobs to feed your offspring, it’s unlikely that “lack of motivation” will earn much space in your head.
Some of the most mordant passages in “A History of Fatigue” focus on the advent of “languor” in the vocabulary of the well-to-do, and on the vexation that ensued. “I was feeling weary since I left Fontainebleau,” Madame de Maintenon wrote in a letter of 1713. “I was able to rest more there and that affects my health.” What’s interesting here is the intimation of a rift in meaning; ennui is peeling away from fatigue. You can be tired of something—or, more querulous still, sick and tired of it—despite not being tired by it, or falling demonstrably sick. A routine of social conduct, even one that might be envied as luxurious, winds up cosseting, jading, and eventually stifling the souls (if not the bodies) of those whom it was devised to entertain. Politically, such a rift can yawn as wide as a gulf; stuck in Versailles, in 1705, Madame de Maintenon confided that she felt “massacred by the life one leads here.” Massacred? Only eighty-four years to wait.
With the grind of factory labor, in the nineteenth century, Vigarello hits his most thrustful stride—and, incidentally, compels the reader to question the title of his book. Is it actually a history of fatigue? Does it not become, in truth, a history of work, of which fatigue is but one of the by-products? Vigarello cites a three-volume book on industrial economy, from 1829: “Think through all the steps in the work process” and “You will feel much less fatigued but you will earn much more.” The emphasis is now on the human frame as a machine, or a furnace (“Food is for the animal as fuel is for the stove,” one German scientist proclaimed, in 1842), which can be regulated to function as efficiently as possible in the manufacturing process. You need not be a trained Marxist to catch the whiff of irony that rises, at this point, from the molten core of capitalist enterprise. Whom to assign to delicate duties, for example, once mechanization, as Vigarello says, has “lessened the need for brute strength”? Why not call up the kids?
That is a statement read to the Chamber of Deputies, then the lower house of the French Parliament, in 1840. To our ears, it is a near-parody of demonic utilitarianism, and, compounded by Vigarello’s revelation that some children were shod in tall metal boots, to stop them from keeling over with the strain, it leaves one profoundly grateful for legislation that has—in many countries, though by no means all—laid such debasement to rest. At the same time, today’s reader will be amazed to scour the index and to realize that, in a book that dwells at length on forced employment, there is just one reference to African American slavery. To work for a pittance, in brutish conditions, is dire enough; to do so because you are owned by another being, and cannot voluntarily withdraw your labor, is iniquity of a different order, and, had Vigarello turned to canonical texts, such as those of Frederick Douglass, he would have been confronted with recitations of fatigue that verge on the elemental. Enslaved people, Douglass says, “find less difficulty from the want of beds, than from the want of time to sleep.” He adds:
It is the phrase “drop down” that pierces. For a moment, we could be reading about a battleground, strewn with the wounded and the dead.
Seldom does Vigarello accost you with so startling an image. Not that he stints on torments, as his research drags him into the twentieth century, and to chapters titled “From Hormones to Stress” and “From Burn Out to Identity.” We are introduced to Alexei Stakhanov, the Soviet worker who mined more than a hundred tons of coal in a single night shift, in 1935, and who lent his name to an ideal—or a perilous myth—of inexhaustibility. We learn of soldiers, both Allied and German, being given amphetamines to keep them awake and alert during offensives in the Ardennes or North Africa. (Were seventy-two million doses of Benzedrine, as Vigarello alleges, really issued to pilots during the Battle of Britain?) The discussion of fatigue as a weapon, deployed in the Gulag and the Nazi labor camps, consumes a mere two pages of this lengthy work. You may regard that as a mercy.
Despite this litany of ordeals, all too corporeal, the course that is set by Vigarello in the latter stages of his book is steadily inward, into what he calls a “detailed inventory of psychic malaise.” Reports, filed not from the trenches but from assembly lines and offices, start to speak of fragmentation, helplessness, and an imprisonment that requires no bars. A new fear wells up: a tired mind may be more resistant to healing than the body in which it is housed. Vigarello turns his own, untiring mind to the matter of neurasthenia, a term that crept into common parlance after being used by the neurologist George Miller Beard, in 1869; yet again, though, one can’t help wishing that “A History of Fatigue” would linger, and prolong its investigations, in the United States. Where else would a pharmaceutical company advertise an elixir concocted to soothe “the peculiar exhausted nervous conditions resulting from the continuous rush and tension under which Americans live”? The miracle cure was made by Rexall, and the conditions had a name, bestowed with God knows what amalgam of pride and dread: Americanitis.
So heavily armed is “A History of Fatigue” that only someone with a matching arsenal of data would dare to tackle Vigarello on his own ground. All one can manage is the occasional prod of doubt. If, as the book appears to suggest, fatigue has relocated to the human interior over the past hundred and fifty years or so, what are we to make of the voyage that is charted by Shakespeare, in the opening of Sonnet 27?
“A journey in my head”: it could have been scribbled yesterday, or uttered from a couch to a sympathetic shrink. Maybe Shakespeare should be shrugged off as a weird exception to the psychological rule, or drafted as a very early recruit in what, more than once, Vigarello calls “the onset of modernity.”
When was that, by the way? Was there a particular wet afternoon in March, 1744, when mankind, drumming its fingers on the kitchen table, and fed up with the creaky old ways of thinking and behaving, decided to get modern? Few historians can fend off the temptation to wield a broad brush, and Vigarello is a doyen of the bold swipe: “Rationalism was on the rise”; “The home was reinvented.” While many readers will be quite content with such swift changes of scene, I’m afraid that skepticism was drilled into me, at a tender age, by Michael Palin and Terry Jones, of “Monty Python” fame. In “Bert Fegg’s Nasty Book for Boys and Girls,” they came up with this richly educational passage:
I thought fondly of Bill and Enid as I read Vigarello’s bracing reference to “the rise of individualism, the desire for autonomy and a new concept of the body and also of time itself”—an all-you-can-eat buffet of fresh and tasty ideas. No one will refute, let alone regret, the medical refinements to which Vigarello attests (we are fortunate not to be prescribed “strychnine arsenate” for our nervous headaches, as patients were at the end of the nineteenth century), yet few of us would venture, as he does, to reprimand the past for not doing its homework or keeping up to speed. Like an old-school teacher with a swishing cane, he looks out for knuckles to rap:
Exactitude alone, however, does not suffice. Here is the verdict on the polymathic mathematician Gerolamo Cardano, who, in 1550, had the uphill job of working out how much energy we expend in walking on a slope rather than on the flat:
Poor Gerolamo! Stay in after class and work on your rationale! And no chatting to Charles Coulomb, that sluggard from the seventeen-eighties in front of you! (“His was a promising start rather than a concrete final result.”) Now and then, testimony is chided for simply not existing: “We find no mentions of tennis players or hunters relaxing in a bath after their exertions.” Sorry, is that the fault of sixteenth-century Roger Federers for not hurling aside the shower gel and grabbing a pen and paper, or merely a gap in the archives?
Zonked, bushed, or just plain hebetudinous, most readers will be glad to get to the end of “A History of Fatigue.” Its virtues are undeniable; it is stoutly industrious and inquisitive, and, in the corralling of evidence, Vigarello shows such dedication that he should seriously consider moonlighting as a homicide detective. Any corpse would give its eyeteeth to have him on the case. The problem is that Vigarello’s piling up of information becomes too much to absorb, and he’s so frantically busy thinking everything through, as it were, that he neglects to pause for thought. Compare one of his predecessors, the Italian physiologist Angelo Mosso, whose own study of fatigue was published in 1891 and translated into English in 1904. (Vigarello rightly praises him but can’t resist a sniff; on the question of circumstantial variables, we are told, “Mosso’s work merely hinted at their importance.”) Nothing can equip you for the bewitching start of his book:
What an opening! How vividly the season, the hour, and the place are established as the curtain is raised. It’s plausible, moreover, that Mosso may be harking back, whether or not he’s aware of the reverberation, across an expanse of eighteen hundred years, to an even more beautiful excursus, in Pliny’s “Natural History.” There, too, we track the flight of the long-suffering birds. The quails, Pliny tells us, “desire to be carried by the breeze, because of the weight of their bodies and their small strength (this is the reason for that mournful cry they give while flying, which is wrung from them by fatigue).” No research, however assiduous, could engender such a lyrical perception. It makes us wonder whether wingless beasts, including ourselves, can be left quailing at the demands that are imposed upon us—so much so that we, too, make involuntary music from our frailties.
To indicate how far “A History of Fatigue” lies from Pliny is more of a lament than a criticism. Vigarello is not, lucky fellow, signed up to the literary racket. Regular readers of fiction will be bemused, nonetheless, by his new book, because, in many ways, it’s the opposite of literature—an uncanny simulacrum of a novel. It has a story to tell, it bustles with tangible detail, and, above all, it is crammed with characters. The difference is that none of them are granted more than a fleeting quiddity. They exist for a purpose: not to come alive in themselves but to revolve as cogs in the unrelenting engine of the argument. You can all but hear the clicks as the book inches forward, notch by notch. Some folk don’t even make the grade as cogs; why bring up brandy drinkers of the eighteenth century, if “the situations were so banal that they are not worth describing”? It is those banalities, needless to say, onto which any thirsty novelist would leap.
Vigarello, on the other hand, prefers to single out those conscientious citizens who, like sociologists-in-waiting, take the trouble to quantify their findings. People such as Jules Lefèvre, who descended the Pic du Midi de Bigorre, in the Pyrenees, in 1904—or, as he said, “more than 20 kilometers of distance and 2,200 meters of incline, the equivalent exerting of 250,000 kilogram-meters in two hours.” Vigarello, glowing with approval, adds:
I long to hear more from the companions, who presumably asked why they had to traipse down a mountain with “a total douchebag,” who “wouldn’t shut up” about how “fit” he was. What’s missing from “A History of Fatigue” is the atmosphere of casual interaction in which most of us dwell, and which is constantly dramatized by our dealings with others, even when there is no drama to be seen:
The father is Thomas Gradgrind, in Dickens’s “Hard Times” (1854). In his astonishment, we catch—as we rarely do in Vigarello’s compendium of weariness—the daunting disbelief with which the tireless tend to greet, or to mock, anyone who is constitutionally less stalwart than themselves. Thomas, who has an almost Vigarello-like zeal for measuring and anatomizing all that comes within view, is not so much wanting in compassion as incapable of grasping why Louisa should have had enough. Those who go for it, as a rule, will never comprehend the urge to let it be.
What is remarkable, even now, is not just the diligence but the candor with which Dickens and his contemporaries explored the emotional landscape of fatigue. The weekly serialization of “Hard Times” in Household Words, a magazine that Dickens edited, was followed by that of Elizabeth Gaskell’s “North and South,” another novel preoccupied with labors—and, indeed, with the relationship between a father and his daughter. Whether grand or humble, those labors exact a cost:
Notice the supple scrutiny with which Gaskell maps the lines graven in Margaret’s face onto the seams in the linen, or whatever it is, that she is folding. Fatigue has merged the toiler with her task. When Dickens said that “North and South” was “wearisome in the last degree,” his grumbling was a form of tribute; the mood of the book had got to him. Again and again, in a supposedly straitlaced period, feelings of lassitude get carried beyond the confines of what is either comfortable or proper. Though we idly talk of being bored to death, or of dying to do something with our lives, it takes a poet like Tennyson to ask whether such feelings might not swell into a palpable death wish:
That is a stanza from “Mariana” (1830). You can feel the minutiae scratching away at the weariness, inflaming it from the drab into the unbearable. (T. S. Eliot noted that changing “sung” to the more correct “sang” would reduce the force of the line. Vigarello would probably request the decibel rating of the mouse’s shriek.) What’s extraordinary is that, when John Everett Millais came to paint his version of “Mariana,” twenty-one years later, he pushed the legend—derived from “Measure for Measure”—to a further stage. The lonesome woman, pining for her paramour, is depicted in a dress of midnight blue, stretching, with her breast uplifted and her hands at the base of her spine; the posture is a kind of pun, expressing both fatigue (that is how we all like to stretch, at the close of a working day) and a physical craving yet more intense. The death wish is entangled with desire.
And so to one last species of fatigue that Vigarello, keen-eyed as he is, would rather not observe. Would it offend the premise of his book to point out that fatigue can be a joy? Is that why we hear not a murmur of sexual satiety—of lovers who delight in the easeful exhaustion that pleasure-hunting brings? Away from the boudoir, there is the immeasurable Levin, in “Anna Karenina,” who, with an eagerness that baffles his fellow-aristocrats as much it would Vigarello, goes to the meadows and cuts grass, alongside the peasants on his estate. He wants to be tired—to pass beyond fatigue, by making hay, into a state of uncomplicated bliss. “It was not his arms which swung the scythe but the scythe seemed to mow of itself,” Tolstoy writes. “These were the most blessed moments.” The moments pass, of course, and the blessing subsides. What enraptures Levin is, for the mowers, one day in a life of toil. His weariness is a dream. ♦
