health tolerates disintegration

I approached Siri Hustvedt’s The Sorrows of an American with some excitement. I loved the first half of What I Loved; enjoyed The Blindfold and really appreciate the essays in In Defence of Eros. At it’s simplest it’s a novel of ideas about how the brain – memory, dreams, our sense of self – deals with loss and trauma. In an interview with Hustvedt Radio National’s Peter Mares gets to the heart of this idea:

Magda, who is Erik’s mentor in the book .. says that all of us go to pieces at one time or another, and that wholeness, the idea that we’re a whole person, an integrated person, is a necessary myth. In fact we’re fragmented beings who cement ourselves together, but there are always cracks. Living with the cracks is part of being reasonably healthy.

Siri Hustvedt: …That is a statement out of my own inner belief about who we are as human beings. It is a form of translation of a very beautiful quote that is not attributed in the novel but it’s put in italics. DW Winnicott, the paediatrician and psychoanalyst, the Englishman, who wrote very beautifully about children who are separated from their families during WWII…in one of his books he said, ‘Health is not a flight into sanity. Health tolerates disintegration.’ I love this quote, and I think it is true. We have a tendency to imagine that being healthy or normal is some ideal form of wholeness, and I think it’s not at all. I think it’s a kind of resilience when we’re cracked up or beaten up.

The characters’ ever present weaknesses, foibles, less than honourable thoughts and actions, are one of the book’s strengths. It’s certainly refreshing to live in a world that honestly records as ordinary behaviour which in everyday life, if admitted to, would count as at least a failing of taste if not an immoral act; things that we all or almost all do but which one can talk about only with one’s psychiatrist (or perhaps in the anonymity of an online forum!). This ‘verisimilitude’ ought to warm me to the book and the characters – to promote identification rather than judging as a friend said. But for me it promoted identification AND judging which is ultimately depressing. I not only sympathise with Erik but empathise with him. And yet ultimately I don’t like him. Which may say more about my state of mind than anything else.

Another way of putting it, as one of my closest friends wrote to me in email: maybe there is nothing really to be decided about – and we just bumble from one thing to another doing the best we can.