Navigating Cape Horn: Negative Near-Death Experiences in Philippe Labro’s Dark Tunnel, White Light

To write often means remembering what has never existed.

—Clarisse Lispector

The Near-Death Experience (NDE) has been described as “the report of ‘unusual’ recollections associated with a period of unconsciousness during either serious illness or injury, or resuscitation from cardiac or respiratory arrest” (Morris 139). This is precisely what Philippe Labro depicts in Dark Tunnel, White Light: My Journey to Death and Beyond, the autobiographical account of his struggle with a dangerous bacterial infection that nearly took his life. Like many individuals who go through such an ordeal, he recalls entering a world entirely divorced from his ordinary life. Clichéd depictions of NDEs include references to a brightly lit, placid setting inhabited by the individual’s long-departed friends and loved ones; more often than not, these are positive, life-affirming episodes (Appleby 976). Labro’s NDE stands out from that of the typical patient in that it begins benignly enough but quickly develops into terrifyingly real hallucinations. Initially, the hallucinations seem to derive their meaning from the author’s close relationships, but as his condition worsens, he experiences visions with no link to his life, belying the popular belief that individuals on the brink of death see their lives pass before their eyes. Because Dark Tunnel explores what Leigh Gilmore terms “the coincidence of trauma and self-representation” (Limits 2–3), it belongs to a distinct form of autobiography, that of the limit case. The authors of limit cases, Gilmore maintains, reject the notion that the autobiographical subject is the “representative or sovereign self of autobiography” (146). This is true in Dark Tunnel because Labro’s narrative shows how one’s view of the self changes in the course of a traumatic event.

Recent criticism has suggested that autobiography is rarely a simple recounting of facts and events with the aim of accurately depicting the “truth” about a single static self (145). Instead, life writing is a collection of the stories that make up, as Gilmore puts it, “the story of the self” (Autobiographics 157). Nowhere is this more evident than in Dark Tunnel, in which the author describes an event that literally occurs within the self, one that is not visible (or verifiable) and thus cannot be directly shared with others. Because his hallucinations lack chronology and defy logic, Labro is burdened by the need to create, as Gilmore says, “order where there is chaos, structural voice where there is silence” (84–85). The memories that resurface during his illness are, as Gilmore might see it, “dissonant materials, fragmented by trauma,” which he attempts to organize “into a form of knowledge” (Limits 146–47). Labro himself notes that during an NDE, instead of seeing one’s whole life pass before one’s eyes in chronological order, “you see only fragments, tatters, a jumble of life. It’s chaos, a charivari, a maelstrom, a kaleidoscope in furious motion with no hand to steady it. Everything is shattered, exploded, pulverized as though you were in a cauldron or turning in all directions, shaking up bits of debris from life” (56). With its focus on the memories and hallucinations that his physical illness dredges up—what Gilmore terms the “interrupted and fragmentary discourses of identity” (Autobiographics 16–17)—Dark Tunnel presents an intriguing limit-case autobiography. Indeed, as we shall see, the work suggests that one’s body may influence or add to the stories that make up the self.¹

Much of Dark Tunnel deals with what Labro “sees” while in a medically-induced comatose state, anesthetized to make the physical pain bearable. It is also interesting to note that what Labro describes is similar to the way in which autistics perceive their bodies and interact with their world. Autistics, Sidonie Smith explains, are “eccentrically bodied” (qtd. in Glass 244),² which means that those afflicted with autism are exceptionally sensitive to light, sound, and touch (Mayo Clinic Staff). Of particular interest is Smith’s observation that an autistic’s “secondness” “confuses the limits of the subject because it intimates another register of...