Anthony Doerr's Cloud Cuckoo Land - Is Dreaming of Eden Good for Us?

 

Anthony Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land, Psychoanalysis, Psychology, Novel

Cloud Cuckoo Land is a very long book (over 600 pages) by a Pulitzer Prize winning author that has a central concern the issue of climate change.  In this, it would seem to closely resemble a very long book that won the Pulitzer Prize, The Overstory.  Both books also use a similar approach of following different characters through the arc of the book with the connections between the characters unfolding across the course of the novel.  Despite their surface similarities, these two books lead to vastly different experiences for the reader.

That Cloud Cuckoo Land is so long is somewhat ironic in that the tale that lends the book its title – presumably a tale created by the author but attributed to a lost classical writer – Diogenes – is quite short.  The translation of the story, by one of the characters in the novel, is included as one of the threads that makes up the interweaving stories of the characters – characters that span classical times to the 1400s to current days and into the future.  And I think each of the characters in each of the stories, could, in his or her own way, be read as living the tale of Cloud Cuckoo Land.

The length of this book, if you have not read it, should not scare you off.  It is a page turner.  You will be done with it before you know it (and there are a lot of blank pages – it isn’t really 600 pages long…).  Besides, we are in the middle of a pandemic, retreating from another surge, and this book will give you lots to think about that surge and the process of being isolated.  It will also, in contrast to The Overstory, reassure you.  Somewhat.

I hesitate to say that.  Part of what is delightful about this book is the suspense that hangs in the air – we do not know how things will turn out for any of the protagonists for long stretches of time.  I will try not to undercut that by doing big reveals – but this book is a story told by a master storyteller about the power of a story to transform peoples’ lives.  It is an ode to the story and to its value.

The story that the storyteller has chosen to put at the center of the entire tale is a comedy – it (theoretically) comes from the lost trove of comedies from Ancient Greece and may be the earliest novel, a form of art that the Greeks, who excelled at so many things, failed to master.  The did, however, get comedy.  And the art of the comedy is not to make us laugh, but to help us live in the world.  It, like tragedy, cannot transform our world into something that it is not – even if its protagonist can be turned into a mule and then into a crow by witches.  Just as the witches in MacBeth foretell a story that humans must act out, so the witches in this story tell an allegory that people act out in the various ways that they do within the interwoven tales.

I found myself feeling that the author was being self-serving – he was advertising for his craft by making up a story that includes the positive outcomes that one can expect from stories.  He has a singular way of doing this.  The threads in the sub-stories do not so much weave a pattern as they are knotted together to form a single strand – and part of the magic of the story telling is the fear that if any of the strands breaks the loves of the people, separated by millennia, will be broken as well.  And yet the string holds.

In this way, this feels more like the impact of psychoanalysis than the impact of group psychotherapy or, frankly, writing or teaching or televangelizing or anything that reaches a broader audience.  At the same time that the author is selling his craft, he is also significantly underestimating its power by focusing on the individuals who are in line to be affected by this story.  Maybe he expects that we will realize, as he, for instance, points to the similarities between his tale and the much better known story of the Odyssey, that the power of the story is being underestimated here.  Or maybe his point is that a single story, known to a very tiny group of people, can have different, but equally powerful effects across millennia, continents, and even space…

Many years ago my mother wondered about my pouring as much energy as I have into learning a craft (psychoanalysis) that I would necessarily be able to practice with only a few people.  My quick response was that I would be practicing with people in positions of power and the effects of my analyses would be felt far and wide.  Well, I don’t know how much that has been the case.  But I do think that the ways that I have learned about how people function, from learning the craft, from my own analysis and from working with my patients, has informed my teaching and my research and hopefully that has had a few ripple effects.  I also, of course, hope that the work with my patients has affected not just them but those around them.  Certainly the lives of the characters are not the primary lives that this author is interested in, but rather the lives of us, the readers.

So, the question becomes, what does the author want us, the reader, to take from this work?  Perhaps he realizes that we don’t have the reach that he does.  But we can, as the characters do, carry the author’s work forward.  Maybe it’s that the experience we have of each story is what matters.  The irony, then, is that this story, as a comedy, allows us to live with the world as it is.  It, in the words of Hannah Gadsby about standup comedy, creates tension (over and over in each of the parallel stories) and then resolves that tension.  We walk away, as we sometimes walk away from a good therapy session, feeling more or less good about ourselves.

It is weird to think, then, that a tragedy does the same thing.  We look deeply into some aspect of ourselves – something that is horrible and disruptive – and we experience catharsis – we see the consequences of our wish for power (in the case of MacBeth, for instance).  But this also leads to a kind of cleansing.  We walk out of the theater, or the book, or the therapy hour clean.  The world is a mess and so is my part in it.  Movies and books that don’t do that – and here I am nominating The Overstory as such a book – are different.  They leave us unsettled and feeling that there is more to do. 

I suppose this suggests something that I found quite disruptive when I was in psychoanalytic class while also being in my own psychoanalysis.  Ed Kohn, who was teaching the class, proposed that the goal of psychoanalysis to teach the analysand – the patient – to engage in self-analysis.  His point was that we will never be perfectly analyzed.  We will always be discovering parts of ourselves that are unknown to us – and we will always be encountering new situations that will try us in new ways. 

I think that both tragedy and comedy don’t quite capture this part of experience.  They reassure us that this mess we are in is like every other mess people have ever been in (in the case of this novel, people have always striven towards Cloud Cuckoo Land – a sort of Eden in the clouds).  And we always fall short of it, but somehow we muddle on.  The Overstory has the ability to leave the reader with the concern that maybe things would not go on as usual – that we might have to do something to prevent a collapse of the entire system…

 

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