“Why do you watch this stuff?”
That was baffled I, speaking to The Missus. She was telling me about a reality-TV show she’s become obsessed with fascinated by, called Hoarders. If you don’t know the show, here’s the opening paragraph of the current “About” page at the official site:
Each episode of this groundbreaking series follows two different people whose inability to let go of their belongings is so out of control that they are on the verge of personal disaster. In season three of HOARDERS™, the stakes couldn’t be higher as the people profiled are faced with life-changing consequences including eviction, divorce, demolition of their homes, jail time, loss of their children, and even death.
(I can’t bring myself to include a video clip here, but if you poke about on that site you’ll have a pretty good idea what it’s like.)
The reason for the obsession fascination, explained the love of my life, is that she believes us to be hoarders, and hence almost certainly — unless we take drastic action! — doomed to trip down the same cluttered, tragicomic path as those featured on the program. The appeal lies in the cautionary tale, not in mere voyeurism.
(I myself am not so sure. Our stuff doesn’t lie thick on the floor, after all. On only one small room’s door could you fairly hang a sign labeled Et Cetera. And I’d guess, without a formal inventory, that 95% of all the — limited — clutter is more than fifteen years old. We’re not accumulating new stuff. We’re hanging onto scraps of our pasts. Or maybe hoarding begins in this sort of rationalization?)
In college, I took several psychology courses — ostensibly because I had to, in order to get a teaching certificate in New Jersey. The actual reason was fascination* with the way the mind works, or anyhow, the way psychologists say it works.
Among these courses was a semester of Abnormal Psych, dealing with neuroses, obsessions, and compulsions, madnesses and maladjustments, and brain chemistry gone wrong in all kinds of ways. (I took Abnormal Psych in lieu of Adolescent Psych, the usual choice for teachers-to-be. Some might argue that the two courses could share a textbook, ha.) I remember in particular how Larry, the instructor, cautioned us on the first day of class:
Everyone who takes this class (Larry said) thinks they see themselves in the cases we discuss. Don’t make that mistake. Your own psychology is almost certainly not abnormal.
(This made me wonder how many times he had introduced the course this way. If many times, well, it hadn’t helped the “everyone” who’d taken it before, had it? Thus I assumed that ignoring his advice and seeing oneself in the case studies must be the norm — and don’t most of us want to be, or at least seem, normal? My logic was impeccable even if my self-preservation instinct was not.)
Let’s extrapolate to reading, particularly fiction:
- Do you prefer protagonists who are like you — resemble you psychologically — even if you’ll never share their exact experiences? (That is, even if your preferred genre is fantasy, s/f, horror, military or spy thriller, etc.)
- …or do you prefer main characters psychologically on the fringe?
- If you write fiction, do you tend to create characters like you?
- Do you ever dream of fictional characters in such a way that you’re seeing the world through their eyes instead of your own?
In my case, one writer who seemed to have my mind pinned down pretty well was Nicholson Baker, especially in his first book, The Mezzanine. I’m tempted to quote from it at length. Instead, I’ll just refer you to its Amazon page; there you can experience the protagonist, first-hand, from the very first paragraph (and footnote!).
One of the best (only?) films to deal with hoarderism, by the way, was Diane Keaton’s 1995 film Unstrung Heroes. (Keaton directed but did not appear in it.) The protagonist’s paranoid uncle (played by Michael Richards) shares an apartment with a hoarder friend (Murray Chaykin); in this scene, a practical joke nudges the uncle off the deep end. John Turturro plays the tightly wound father to the protagonist, and brother to the Michael Richards character:
_______________________
* Yes, fascination. And all right, near-obsession. But this is different. This is ME. Sheesh. Can’t I even be passive-aggressive with its getting all turned around?!?
Nance says
That video clip sent my heartrate up a good 15 bpm. The whole subject does that to me, I fear, although not because I’m a hoarder.
When my husband was an active duty AF officer, we were moved about every three years, on average. Sometimes, we got to stay in a home for four years and the shortest time in residence was 10 months. Since we would have to pay for any household goods over a certain weight for each move, I never saved ANYTHING. It made my depression-era mother insane to watch me fill a trashcan.
Now that we’ve lived in one place for twenty years, I worry that I’ve lost my lean/mean edge. We don’t shop and yet, stuff gets into our house! I could get just a teensy bit paranoid pondering how that happens. It’s time to downsize—big time–so our local Goodwill Industries gets regularly deliveries from us. And I still get anxious about hoarding, which makes no sense.
Maybe in each of us there is a primal, normal fear of deficiency. What the books, movies, and television shows actually trigger for us is that fear of doing without, a hair-trigger anxiety with a congenitally low threshold in all of us. Maybe, when it comes to hoarding, we all realize at some deep level that we are at all times just an event or two away from having our hoarding instinct triggered–much as the body can at times flip from steady weight to sudden increase or decrease without our knowing exactly why or how.
My favorite book on the subject–the first I ever read, and still one of the scariest novels I know of–is Marcia Davenport’s My Brother’s Keeper. I recently scored a first-edition paperback with a lurid, sexy cover that has nothing whatsoever to do with the story…and you’ll have to pry that one from my cold dead fingers.
John says
(Alas, no Kindle edition! I really don’t want to bring another book in the house right away, for obvious reasons. :))
Some good thoughts about what might trigger the fear of hoarding. As you describe it, it almost sounds like one of those tipping-point phenomena. Or like the way magnetic North supposedly switches, suddenly and without warning, to the other pole. (Another reason to avoid air travel, that.)
Our biggest enemy? Mail. It’s amazing how much mail and related miscellaneous paper we accumulate. I have resisted the idea of moving all our bills and statements online, but I may have to cave on that. We have one kitchen counter which almost seems to grow paper. And then phone books, sheesh. There doesn’t seem to be a national opt-out-of-phone-books service, alas. Getting one phone book is no problem. Getting TWO phone books — a full-size one and a “handy glove-compartment-size” one — from each of three different sources is pushing it. This goes back to that conspiracy I mentioned a few weeks ago, to make us all progressively crazier every single day.
Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series posits an alternate universe bleeding back and forth from/into our own. The other universe resembles the Old West of Hollywood and movies, with gunslingers and Stetsons and so on. But one feature always stood out for me: its denizens are amazed at how freely we waste paper. They themselves save it all — even like gum-wrapper in size — as writing paper, a precious commodity.
whaddayamean says
I often prefer narrators who remind me psychologically of myself. I know this because I tend to really enjoy close, emotionally vivid first-person narrators (I know some people HATE reading first person). For me, it’s kind of an escapism to be reading *as* someone else (as opposed to *about* someone else), and I guess the more closely delineated that character’s emotional trajectory is, the more deeply sunk into their narrative I get. Which means I favor narrators who (like myself) spend a lot of time, erm, talking about their feelings.
Interesting post! And good questions.
John says
whaddayamean: I know that you have recently posted numerous times about Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series and your obsession fascination with it. Not to shock or disappoint you unduly, I hope, but I haven’t read a single word of the series. So I checked around and learned that it’s mostly written in a sort of rotating third-person limited POV. Maybe the “limited” makes it functionally equivalent to first-person?
You also write fiction, right? Do you find your main character(s) behaving like little mini-whaddayameans in circumstance X, regardless of whatever POV you write in?
I wish I’d thought of the POV angle. That really makes the question much more interesting and complex for fiction writers…
marta says
My grandmother liked a clean, tidy house. No hoarding there. My mother moved every year. That is no exaggeration. No hoarding there either–“do you own it or does it own you?” she often asked. My dad had no patience for “pack rats” as he says, and even though he has lived in the same house since 1962, there is no indication he would ever hoard anything other than cash.
It is a mystery to me why I feel compelled to keep things. I do have to force myself to throw certain things away, although then I go slightly mad and throw away things I regret–like, say, journals. And I can see that my son would keep loads more stuff if we let him, and I don’t watch Hoarder because I have no time and I’m worried I will see my son’s future.
To be fair, I don’t keep trash and you can walk easily around our apartment, but when I compare our apartment to the homes of friends, I realize our home is a visual flood.
It probably says something that my favorite museum I visited in London was this one:
http://www.soane.org/
As for characters, I don’t mind if characters are on the fringe or more like me, as long as the main character is not vile. Stories that do the unlikable, horrible protagonist, don’t appeal to me. I’m a sucker anyway. Once I get into a story, I care for the main character anyway. I loved Anna Karenina and Humbert Humbert in a weird and terrible way.
I must have filtering problems. And I definitely don’t have money for therapy.
DarcKnyt says
I wish I understood myself well enough to know if I like protagonists like me psychologically. Among my favorite characters in fiction are Roland Deschain of Gilead from Stephen King’s The Dark Tower cycle, Mary Shelley’s creature from Frankenstein, and Jason Bourne/David Webb from The Bourne Identity/Supremacy/Ultimatum trilogy.
Um … I dunno.
John says
marta: I’d never heard of the Soane Museum — thanks! The Web site is frustratingly short of pictures in larger than thumbnail size, and I’m not sure what about its collection(s) draws you to it, and the tiny non-embeddable video at the site seems to focus primarily on the speakers rather than the spoken-of. Better overview on YouTube:
The words “eccentric” and “eclectic” seem to capture it. (So why couldn’t I figure out what you liked about it? :)) “Nearly every square inch is covered” too… wow.
(The exterior of the three adjoining houses, btw, looked remarkably like I’d imagined the Black family house in the Potter books.)
I’ve got greeting cards from family members going back decades, and knick-knacks of one sort or another. Almost anything I’ve ever owned that used to be my Dad’s I’ve still got, including his last book of crossword puzzles. (You can see the last puzzle he worked on, unfinished, the block lettering wobbly and skewed. Sigh…) And I keep a messy desk, which doesn’t help convince anyone that I’m not a pathological hoarder. Funny (in a way) that I’m reluctant to toss printouts of Web research for my “desk-drawer” novel, although presumably all I’d have to do to re-create it is return to the source sites.
Now I’m starting to worry myself.
I’m so glad you said that about Humbert. I’m within shouting distance of the end of Lolita and have been trying to figure out how, or whether, to admit in a review that I like him, too. (“In a weird and terrible way” is too lovely a phrase for me to steal, but I enjoyed putting it in quotation marks just then.)
John says
Darc: That’s quite a collection of favorite protagonists! I haven’t read the books, but I’ve seen the Bourne films, and I’ve read the other books you’ve seen… Maybe the key word connecting them (other than “dark,” ha) is, umm… “brooding”?
If you like the Frankenstein-monster character, by the way, you might want to take a look at Dean Koontz’s Frankenstein series — told from the “monster’s” perspective, but pushed forward in time to contemporary New Orleans. The original monster is still alive and has named himself Deucalion. Wikipedia excerpt:
marta says
@John – I liked seeing that video, John! Thanks. It doesn’t do the experience justice though. Every inch is covered and it is labyrinthian. I loved it best because, well, not because I liked all the art, but because I love the passion that went into it. It is not a collection of art approved of by a committee. It has personality and fascination…hmmm. There were small rooms and nooks and stairs and narrow halls… magic Potter house indeed.
I don’t like to admit to many that I liked Humbert in that weird and terrible way. I mean, I know he’s awful and everything. I know he is wrong, and I don’t exactly want him to win, but… yeah, Nabokov gets me.
Ashleigh Burroughs says
First of all, you are a superb moderator of this discussion – just look at how supportive and complimentary you are, and how you expand on our points with wit and wisdom. It’s such a delight to drop into The Hat ;)
My dad kept valentines and address lists and postcards (purchased at locations with silly names and never mailed) in his desk. It was a treat to sit there, cleaning it out as we prepared to sell the house, and think of him smiling at the detritus of our lives. I brought some of them back with me, adding to the pile which MY heirs will have to decide to toss or save.
TBG, reacting to his mother’s need to cover every surface with tchotchkes’s, to cover the wall-to-wall carpet with oriental rugs, to have cabinets filled with Toby Mugs and souvenir spoons and other collectibles, likes a lean and spare decorating style which I’ve dubbed “Episcopal”. I’d prefer to have my memories displayed about me, but I’ve lost the battle in every home we’ve had. Alas. I feel the lack.
I am going to have to think about myself and the characters I like. Quickly, Jo March was a role model and (with your encouragement) I may turn out to be her real-life incarnation. I have to study the notion some more….. and I have to eat turkey, too. Perhaps in my tryptophan coma some truths will be revealed.
Happy T-day to you and The Missus.
a/b
John says
marta: When I dream of houses, as I do pretty often, I tend to dream of houses with complex floor plans and a lot of “stuff.” Somewhere recently — might have even been here at RAMH — I mentioned a remark by a psychologist friend, that dreams of buildings can be interpreted as dreams about one’s self: the building represents your state of mind, your consciousness, your inner landscape. If this is true, then yes, I’ve probably had a Soane Museum of a mind for a loooong time.
When The Missus and I went on what we called a literary tour of Massachusetts some years back, one of our stops was the real-life House of the Seven Gables in Salem. I was thrilled to discover that it includes a secret staircase to the attic, accessed from the back wall of a closet I think — the first real-life secret staircase I’d ever seen. (All the others must have been doing their job. :)) But then I learned of the Winchester House, in California. Not much excess “stuff,” as far as I can tell, but a jaw-dropping floor plan. If the Mrs. Winchester who built it had a secret life as a time-traveling dream excavator, I’d suspect her of having rummaged around in my head as I slept.
When I do get around to that Lolita review, can I quote the last paragraph of that comment? (Seriously.) My favorite word there — outside the weird-and-terrible phrase — is “exactly.” Talk about complexity: in that word, in that context, is practically a whole graduate psych-course paper.
John says
a/b: There’s a certain post-Depression Era mentality at work in some homes. (TBG’s mother’s home might have been one of them. [Aside to readers who haven’t yet poked about at her blog: “TBG” is a/b’s Designated Husband: The Big Guy.])The floors are immaculate and not at all cluttered; you can walk around in them without knocking things over. But every other horizontal surface is occupied by those tchotchkes you mention: delicate little china place settings, milk-glass bowls and little tumblers, glossy-ceramic bears and squirrels and those creepily hydrocephalic Hummel kids. Funny thing is, when I’m in a house like that, I can feel my anxiety level rise. I’m not worried about breaking something. I’m vicariously freaked out by the fact that there’s no place to stack the mail. Ha.
I haven’t exactly lost the battle, as you say, in which I wish I had all my stuff out to see whenever something reminded me of it (and vice-versa), and The Missus — under Hoarders‘s alarming sway — wishes we placed more emphasis on useful possessions. The way it’s developed over the 10ish years we’ve been in this house, though, is that I have what I think of as enclaves: my side of the office, the Et Cetera room I mentioned above, and a couple of other nooks and crannies. We recently replaced our living-room carpet with hardwood floors; the installers would handle moving the furniture around, but we had to make it easier for them by emptying all the shelves, drawers, and such. All that stuff went into plastic bins. But not all of it went back on the shelves afterwards…
Ha! again. For some reason, I sense that you might’ve come up with that line fairly recently — sometime in the last 24 hours, say — and have just been waiting for a chance to expose it to public scrutiny.
Happy Thanksgiving to you and your family, too!
(P.S. Thank you for the nice things you said at the start of your comment.)
marta says
@John – I remember watching a program about that Winchester house. Amazing place. And yes, you can use any bit of the comment. Thank you for asking. I look forward to reading the review.
John says
marta: Thank you!
murr brewster says
Oh. The protagonist in my novel is a lot like me in fundamental ways. I had to make us look really different. But it was still hard to make bad stuff happen to her, as one must if one wants the reader to, uh, read. So I got her raped, and what do you know–it didn’t bother her all that much. I may be hopeless.
John says
murr: Well, I’ve made bad things happen to characters — even characters like me in one or more fundamental ways. (As you say, it can’t all be sunshine, lollipops, and rainbows.) Maybe it depends on the genre or the specific treatment… I mean, Lolita‘s title character, bluntly, “got her[self] raped” — and it doesn’t even seem to “bother her all that much.” (A sensitive reader knows better: knows about what (far too often) becomes of real-life Lolitas, and (likewise) what should become of their Humberts but doesn’t.)
So much depends on the author. Anthony Burgess in A Clockwork Orange and Nabokov in Lolita each created a brutish protagonist who managed to get away with his brutalities, at least for a time — both in the book’s world and in the reader’s mixed-message head — via charm, of one sort or another.
And what doesn’t depend on the author depends on the reader: how far we’re willing to let it go on. Thomas Harris doesn’t have the literary flair (nor, I’d wager, the aspirations) of a Burgess or Nabokov. Is Hannibal Lecter “charming”? And if not, why did we (a lot of us, anyhow) go so willingly along for the ride?
Beats me. Interesting, though, that in submitting to the victimizing “charms” of Burgess’s Alex, or Nabokov’s Humbert, or Harris’s Hannibal, we agree to become the author’s victims, page after page.
It sounds like you’ve attempted something very difficult — not so much eliciting sympathy for a brute, though. It’s a little like what Alice Sebold did in The Lovely Bones. (Not to say that her rape “didn’t bother” TLB‘s Susie, and not to say that her rapist was really depicted as charming.) That’s a very tricky tightrope to negotiate. I hope you’ve lined up great advance readers!
Froog says
One of the most striking, disturbing examples of identification with a vile character/situation I can recall occurred in Todd Solondz’s film Happiness, where a middle-aged family man has started conceiving an unhealthy interest in young boys, and invites one of his son’s friends over to the house with a view to taking advantage of him. He has to drug his entire family as well as the boy (it’s in the ice cream at the end of dinner, I think), and…. the boy is the only one who doesn’t want to eat the drugged food. Everyone else is snoring, while he’s playing with the food. And you find some part of yourself urging him Eat it, eat it, fall asleep. Maybe it was partly just a desire in me to get this unpleasantness over and done with. But it was a very disquieting experience.
I loved the John Soane Museum – something I happened upon by chance when I was at law school (it was a few minutes’ walk from where I studied, a regular lunchtime constitutional). It’s not just that the collection is so profuse and so, erm, eclectic, but that the house hosting it is so tiny – you worry that you’re going to knock something off the wall every time you turn around.
Another favourite is the Exeter City Museum in south-west England. Its holdings are basically the private collections of some local magnate of the early 1900s, and he had two magnificent obsessions – Polynesian war clubs and stuffed animals. The last time I went there (nearly 20 years ago; it may have changed) the stuffed animal room was rather hidden away in a side annex on the ground floor, and I’d missed it at first. I blundered upon it when, after enjoying the intricately carved hardwood cudgels on the upper floor, I suddenly found the head and neck of a stuffed giraffe protruding through a hole carved in the floor. Honestly.
John says
Froog: Oh jeez, Happiness — I’d forgotten all about that. Talk about a squirm-making film experience.
I regret that my best efforts have (so far) not turned up a photo of that giraffe’s head. However — assuming that the Exeter museum is the Royal Albert — I did learn that a stuffed giraffe known as “Gerald” was moved a while back from one side of the museum to the other. If so, the giraffe’s-head-through-the-floor gimmick has been watered down, like this:
Alas.
Nance says
That’s the cover! When I was really tiny, my parents had only one bookcase. It housed a brand new Compton’s Encyclopedia, two shelves of poetry and really lovely novels that I would come to appreciate later, and a bottom shelf of paperbacks…right at a four-year-old’s lie-on-the floor-and-ponder level. The covers gave me shudders that I didn’t really understand; I’m almost certain this was one of them. And a whole series of Erle Stanley Gardners there–did they think all paperbacks were destined for the back pockets of tough guys?
P.S. I paid somewhere in between the extremes for my excellent copy of Davenport. It’s the only vintage paperback I’ve ever purchased and I’m at a loss to explain it, but it seemed important at the time.@John –
Froog says
Ah, Gerald – yes, that’s him. I don’t think I’d ever known that it was called the Royal Albert Memorial Museum. I think that’s the entrance lobby. Mind you, the ‘hole in the floor’ in the other display room was square or rectangular and quite big – not quite a mezzanine deal, but a large enough opening for you to look down on the rest of the giraffe in the room below. I suspect you’re envisaging a hole-to-fit that makes it seem the giraffe’s neck is growing out of the floor? (It does look a bit like that at first, as you approach from the next room!)
Exeter is only 30 or 40 minutes away from Taunton by train, and Taunton was the location of my first job – as a live-in English teacher in a private boarding school. Exeter became a fairly regular bolt-hole for my afternoons off – a better cinema than Taunton, and a beautiful cathedral. And it was impossible to go anywhere in taunting without bumping into colleagues and pupils – no privacy!
Froog says
Oooh, now there’s a Freudian typo: ‘taunting’ for ‘Taunton’!!
The Exeter taxidermy collection also included a full-grown tiger, which I believe was said to have been shot by Edward VIII when he was Prince of Wales.
John says
That one at the left is probably my favorite of his. Why, it almost makes me feel like a (likewise tremulous) teenage boy again.
John says
Froog: It wasn’t quite that I’d pictured a hole in the floor that fit him like a collar. I did imagine, though, a scene in which they brought in the giraffe, set up a proper (and permanent) platform for him on the first floor, and then tried to stand him up.
That’s when they discovered that Benny, from the taxidermist ’round the corner, didn’t really mean “twelve feet in total height.” He meant “twelve feet of total neck length.” By that point it was too late — the exhibit was due to open tomorrow, couldn’t relocate it upstairs either because that storey wasn’t any taller, so they looked at one another, shrugged, and went at the ceiling with a saber saw.
Something like that, anyhow.
And you know I cracked up at that “taunting.” If you’d capitalized it, I might have assumed you’d done it on purpose — one can see it as a common nickname for a place, especially among literary schoolboy types. But the lowercase “l,” yes, provided you no such cover. Now I’m curious.