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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