J Med Humanit (2015) 36:217–230 DOI 10.1007/s10912-015-9346-4

Acquiring Things: Strange Cases of Compulsive Hoarding Paul Cefalu 1

Published online: 2 July 2015 # Springer Science+Business Media New York 2015

Abstract Why has compulsive hoarding recently captured the American imagination? To what extent is hoarding a subtype of OCD or a discrete "disorder" in its own right? Can a cultural-studies and philosophical assessment of hoarding complement the medical model that has recently been offered by clinicians and the DSM IV? This essay tracks these and related questions in order to offer a theory of compulsive hoarding that pays particular attention to the sometimes distorted representation of hoarding in literature and the mainstream media. Keywords Hoarding . OCD . Cultural studies . Philosophy . Literary criticism . Psychoanalysis . Medical humanities On April 7, 1947 Life magazine published a three-page article entitled the BStrange Case of the Collyer Brothers.^ From the headline alone one might have expected a serialized psychological horror story inspired by Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The subtitle, however, makes clear that the story is about the circumstances leading to the death of Homer Collyer who, along with his brother Langley, had by the late 1940’s become the century’s most notorious recluses and compulsive hoarders: BHomer dies in junk-crammed house and police search for Langley, who only wanted to be left alone^ (49). After an extensive investigation, police discovered that the blind Homer had died of starvation only after Langley, his principal caretaker, had been killed by a junk-rigged booby trap which the brothers themselves had built in order to trip up burglars. When police finally gained access to the mansion–which was so cluttered with found objects that engineers needed to bore a hole in the roof of the building in order to make entry–they discovered hoards of curiosities, memorabilia, scientific gadgets, and plain old garbage, including Bfive pianos, several guns, thousands of empty bottles and cans, some 1910 pin-up pictures, dressmaker’s dummies, machinery, [and] parts of a Model T-Ford^ (49). During a thirteen-day period more than 130 tons of junk were unloaded, bringing no more than $2,000 at auction (Abrahamson and Freedman 2006, 272).

* Paul Cefalu [email protected] 1

Department of English, Lafayette College, Easton, PA 18042, USA

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The case of the Collyer Brothers garnered so much media attention over a ten-year period more than half a century ago that it might seem redundant to reopen it. However, not only did the quirky brothers inspire two later plays–Mark Saltzman’s Clutter (1999) and Richard Greenberg’s The Dazzle (2000)–but, given the obsession in the media of late with the nature of compulsive hoarding, the Collyers seem to have strangely become our contemporaries. The last several years alone have yielded at least six best-selling self-help books on compulsive acquiring, collecting and hoarding; dozens of medical and scientific articles devoted to studying the relationship between hoarding and obsessive-compulsive disorder generally; two documentary films on notable hoarders (perhaps inspired by the BBC documentary A Life of Grime that tracks the lifestyle of the colorful British hoarder Edmund Trebus); the successful Bravo series, Hoarders; and a spate of websites, civic legislation and a best-selling novel by J.A. Jance on the especially strange case of animal hoarding.1 All this as well as an entire pop-cultural movement, the so-called anti-clutter campaign, which has worked to blur the very distinction between pathological hoarding and simple messiness. What is it about compulsive hoarding that has suddenly captured the American imagination? The following pages provide a phenomenological account of pathological collecting and hoarding that helps to explain why the popular, fictionalized representation of the disorder tends both to depart from but also supplement the clinical etiology of the disorder as described in the Disagnotic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, fourth edition (DSM IV).

Hoarding and post-war culture In 1953, the Collyer case was given extended attention in Helen Worden Erskine’s Out of this World, a monograph that profiled six notorious American hoarders and hermits. Erskine’s account of the Collyers underscores her culture’s tendency to mythologize the brothers’ curious but otherwise unobtrusive lives (Erskine 1953). In a series of rare interviews, Langley Collyer complained to Erskine that neighborhood children would routinely vandalize the already-decrepit Collyer mansion: BThey break my windows. They make my life miserable. They even put a sign on my door saying, ‘This is a Ghost House’^ (6). Langley’s comment is just one of many that reflected the local legend according to which the brothers were specters who were Bentombed in the old house^ (14). As Erskine notes, BWeird rumors were tossed about like bones. ‘There are five coffins in the basement,’ declared one woman. ‘Langley’s a raggedy man what goes out after dark. He hauls dead bodies through a tunnel in the street to his other house yonder,’ said a second^ (24). Erskine herself finally enters the house, but instead of providing a reportorial counterstory to what had by then become an urban legend, she offers a stylized portrait of decaying, latenineteenth-century opulence. One room in particular reminds her of a once-perfect BVictorian drawing room^: The ceiling, a fresco of wild roses, was. . . peeling. In places it had fallen, revealing big gaps of wood lathing. The glory of a more glamorous past shone through in the handpainted ceilings, tarnished gold-leaf trim and elaborately carved woodwork. . . . A mysterious cabinet, at first thought to be a calliope, was identified as an early X-ray machine used by Dr. Collyer. On a chair was a small box. . . . On the back was printed in Victorian type: ‘Davis & Kidder Magneto for Nervous Disorders’ . . . . Books were piled on a table. The top one was Military Heroes of the Revolution, published in 1857. Here

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was an ancient clavichord, there a Victorian mantel clock. At the rear of the front parlor stood a mahogany grandfather’s clock ten and a half feet high. Its case was solid mahogany. Three figures decorated the face. (42) Rather than describe a random collection of junk and objects– the very randomness which is underscored in most of the more objective newspaper articles that had come out in the preceding years–Erskine here and elsewhere selectively itemizes the objects as if they were the paraphernalia of a bygone era: mysterious cabinets housing machines that can penetrate one’s body and mind; antiquarian tomes on bloody past wars; ancient musical instruments that once resounded throughout the cavernous rooms; an oversized grandfather clock decorated with cryptic figures on its face. The house itself harbors dank, tucked away rooms–the Brooms had the dark mustiness of a tomb- in one of which Blay the dismembered automobile^ (17). The description of the decaying mansion bleeds into Erskine’s portrait of Langley himself: BLocks of long gray hair straggled over his shoulders. In the half-light I was conscious of a white face and drooping Victorian mustache (6). The tendency to mythologize the Collyer case was not Erskine’s idiosyncrasy. In 1954 Marcia Davenport, best known for writing the first American biography of Mozart, published a dark, fictionalized reconstruction of the Harlem hermits entitled My Brother’s Keeper. If Erskine provided the stage-setting props of the Collyer tale, Davenport’s psychological thriller peopled the Collyer mansion with a dysfunctional family. The novel chronicles the slow degeneration of Lily Holt, the Havisham-like mother of Seymour and Randall who, after her husband passes, is left at the mercy of the dictatorial grandmother Holt. Grandmother so governs the boys’ lives that Lily eventually gives up parenting and withdraws into the recesses of the house and the clutter of her room. Her degeneration is first noticed by her eldest son, Seymour: BThis clutter, this thing of furniture piled with small objects and boxes, or strewn ribbons, bits of lace, hat-trimmings, and unfinished scraps of knitting, had become much more noticeable in the past year or two. . . Now it appeared as if the system, whatever it had been, had worn out and bust at the seams" (91). Eventually, Lily turns into a Bdim and dusty wraith^ (107) and dies amid the domestic keepsakes and curiosa of her room: BEverything ran into a dark blur, the tomblike pieces of walnut and rosewood furniture, the heavy bed, the chairs and divan strewn with boxes, baskets, pictures, papers, ribbons and laces and slippers and clothing^ (123). Something about the mother’s hoarding seems to have infected the children who languish in the overstuffed house after decades of continued pathological hoarding, their decomposed bodies eventually discovered underneath the piled-up refuse in one of the upstairs rooms. There are a number of availing sociological explanations behind the post-war preoccupation with collecting and hoarding. Again and again Erskine and Davenport suggest that the Collyers’ hoarding allowed them to cling to an earlier era, to somehow freeze time through an association with their found objects. The impact of urban renewal and racism on the Collyers is the subject of Franz Lidz’s Burban historical^ novelization of the case, where Lidz records complaints published in the New York Times by white Harlemites–BCan they do nothing to put a restriction on the invasion of the Negro into Harlem,^ for example–and a Harper’s Weekly article which complained, BAmid scenes of indescribable squalor and tawdry finery dwell the Negroes, leading their light-hearted lives of pleasure, confusion, music, noise and fierce fights^ (2003, 50). The Collyers, Lidz concludes, Bturned into reclusive hermits who barely acknowledged the passing of time. They remained locked in a turn-of-the-century time warp through both world wars, the Great Depression, and the devolution of Harlem from an

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exclusive white suburb to a poor black ghetto^ (45). Lidz’s assessment is provocative as far as it goes, but he implies that the Bdegentrification^ of Harlem is causally connected to Homer and Langley’s idiosyncratic behavior; it is more probable that writers like Erskine and Davenport who sensationalized the case were responsible for giving this impression, and for fueling the belief that, along with the media, the Collyers shared a cultural fear of racial integration. That some such post-War anxieties were projected onto the Collyers can be glimpsed not only through the cultural reconstructions of Homer and Langley’s objects, but also through the mannered descriptions of the brothers themselves whose spectrality reflects the desperate need to maintain some cultural contact with a partly mortified, aristocratic past. There is a phenomenological counterpart to this historical reconstruction of the Collyer case. Consider the perception of the brothers’ collecting habits in relation to Susan Stewart’s distinction between the souvenir and the collection. The collection, unlike the souvenir, removes objects from their historical origins: BThe collection seeks a form of self-enclosure which is possible because of its ahistoricsm. The collection replaces history with classification, with order beyond the realm of temporality^ (1984, 151). Unlike the souvenir, which still bears a trace of its use value, the collection effects a total aestheticization of its objects, situating them in an entirely new context and rendering their relationship to the everyday world purely metaphorical rather than metonymical. As depicted in the media, the Collyers emerge as closer in spirit to souvenir-gatherers than collectors: the objects described in the contemporary reportage– the dismantled vintage model T, the antiquarian pianos, unsent postcards, loads of unused theater tickets dating ten and twenty years earlier–bear a contiguous relationship not to one another but to an earlier, albeit only recently displaced era; and to the extent that the Collyers themselves take on the past pedigree of their objects through their demeanor and dress, the brothers in turn materialize as souvenirs for later epochs.

The medical and psychological basis of compulsive hoarding The post-war coverage of the Collyer case is notable in assuming that the Collyers’ hoarded items point to something beyond themselves as material objects. Functioning as symbols, hoarded objects are understood either metaphorically (as tokens of the past) or metonymically (as immemorial truths). The failure to theorize such objects in a non-tropological sense stems partly from the failure to understand the nature of the disorder suffered by the objects’ owners. Since no sound medical or scientific explanation of hoarding is offered (which would not be expected from such stylized literary accounts), one tends to assume that some underlying trauma shapes the way in which the hoarding subject relates to his or her objects. As we have seen, when the trauma is historical in nature, the subject-object dialectic collapses in such a way that subjects begin to resemble their objects, both serving to conjure a mythical past. When the trauma is more personal and psychic in orientation, the objects are seen as fetishes that are symptomatic of unresolved Oedipal pathology. So Leon Edel suggested in a PM essay that Langley is a Bclassic textbook case of infantile regression. His life was a journey back to the security of the womb instead of the normal adult journey away from it^ (a diagnosis that is hinted at throughout Davenport’s My Brother’s Keeper); Walter Skidmore noted, for example, that BLove does queer thing to you. If you ask me, it left Langley a little touched,^ which is a leitmotif in Davenport’s novel as well as Greenberg’s play (quoted in Lidz 2003, 157). Other pop psychological accounts suggested that lost love was somehow motoring Langley’s attachment to objects (quoted in Lidz 2003, 155). I would suggest that an understanding of

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the medical and scientific basis of hoarding can help us to see just how radically the actual experience of hoarding diverges from the literary and cultural reconstructions of the disorder. What, therefore, is the actual medical and psychological etiology of pathological hoarding? In Buried Treasure: Help for Compulsive Acquiring, Saving, and Hoarding (2007), leading researchers David Tolin, Randy Frost, and Gail Steketee offer an incisive, taxonomical explanation of hoarding behavior. Most sufferers of the disorder not only harbor unusual emotional attachments to and beliefs about possessions, but also have trouble processing information. In terms of erroneous beliefs about objects, hoarders are so confident in their resourcefulness that they believe virtually any item can be put to good use. A typical hoarder’s logic runs as follows: BI can think of some ways to reuse this item. Therefore, I am responsible for doing so, and if I fail to do so I am being wasteful. . . . However, because of my fatigue, stress level, time constraints, or other factors, I am unable to actually follow through with this plan. Therefore. . . . I will hold onto this item^ (35). Because hoarders tend to be perfectionists, they believe that since so many items might be useful in the future, they might Baccidentally throw something valuable away, and so [they] tend to preempt the anxiety of doing so by putting off disposing of items properly^ (36). In terms of processing problems, most hoarders suffer from difficulties with attention and memory, as well the inability to categorize objects appropriately. Like the sufferer of attention deficit disorder, the hoarder either has trouble sustaining attention when cleaning or organizing or has difficulty shifting attention away from an item that he or she might want to acquire. As for categorization, most hoarders make too many fine distinctions among their objects, carving things up into many exceedingly small categories rather than larger, compendious ones. As Tolin and his colleagues remark, BIf you’re working with just one category of ‘food,’ for example, it’s much easier to deduce that everything from this category belongs in the kitchen. If, on the other hand, you have 8, 9, or 10 different food-related categories, you then have to consider and make decisions about each one. What would have been a relatively straightforward decision now becomes a complicated series of decisions^ (33). The medical, cognitive-psychological explanation of hoarding departs significantly from the post-war fictionalized representations of hoarding popularized by Davenport and Erskine. Hoarders do not as much reanimate the past through their objects as envisage the future impact certain possessions will have on their lives. Not the locus of dead history as much as founts of untapped potentialities, hoarded objects are saved because the hoarder believes, however erroneously, that the objects will eventually prove important or meaningful. Such hoarded objects might include unread newspapers that might be edifying; unopened mail the fine print of which needs to be scrutinized before jettisoned; old clothing that might become attractive again to its owner or that might be suitable for a planned child; and junk that might seem useless but, if refurbished correctly, might prove valuable. Consider hoarding in more purely economic terms: hoarders believe that they have investments the cashing out of which they postpone because the true value of such investments remains unknown to them (or, if it is known, it is cognitively suppressed or deferred). In the documentary film Packrat (2004), the wife of a hoarder unloads some junk that her husband has collected. According to his wife, the hoarder became Bpassionately livid, as though she had thrown away dollars and dollars.^ In their zeal to gather, protect and then creatively implement found objects that are deemed valuable for their use rather than exchange value, hoarders seem to project a neo-feudal future where every object plays a multitasking, subsistent role. The modernist dictum according to which one should value the Bideas in things^ should be modified in relation to hoarding behavior: It is not the idea in a thing, but the Bthings in a

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thing,^ the plural, even depthless materiality that can be coaxed out of any singular object that allures the hoarder (Brown 2001).2 BThe functional object is devoid of being,^ remarks Jean Baudrillard, for whom functional objects cannot outlive their contemporaneity: BRich in functionality but impoverished in meaning, their frame of reference is the present moment, and their possibilities do not extend beyond everyday life^ (1996, 80-81). But we have seen that the meaning of functional objects for hoarders widens considerably beyond the present moment. If antique, Bmythological objects^ show minimal function and maximal meaning, hoarded objects show minimal meaning and maximal function. Consider the medical explanation of hoarding in relation once again to Susan Stewart’s work, namely her distinction between professional collectors and packrats. As noted earlier, the collection is built upon principles of organization and categorization, the spatial whole superseding the individual Bnarrative that lies behind it^: BWilliam James reported that a California wood rat arranges nails in a symmetrical, fortress-like pattern around his nest, but the objects ‘collected’–silver, tobacco, watches, tools, knives, matches, pieces of glass–are without seriality, without relation to one another or to a context of acquisition. . . . James, who found the same propensity for collecting intrinsic objects among ‘misers’ in lunatic asylums . . . noted that hoarders have an uncontrollable impulse to take and keep^ (1193, 153-54). BHere we might add,^ Stewart concludes, Bthat this form of insanity is, like anal retentiveness, an urge toward incorporation for its own sake, an attempt to erase the limits of the body that is at the same time an attempt, marked by desperation, to ‘keep body and soul together’^ (154). Never mind the too-easy extrapolation from animal hoarding to human hoarding, as well as the conflation of a Freudian notion of anal-retentiveness to hoarding proper. Neither James nor Stewart asks why hoarders collect without a consideration of their objects’ seriality and a structural relationship to one another. Objects are not configured in a purely relational sense because the hoarder desires to reinvest objects with particular utility functions; to organize objects serially would be to create a closed economy in which situated objects are valued principally as objects of exchange. Compare the hoarder to a more specialized type of collector, the antiquarian. The antiquarian Bsearches for an internal relation between past and present which is made possible by their absolute disruption. Hence his or her search is primarily an aesthetic one, an attempt to erase the actual past in order to create an imagined past which is available for consumption. In order to awaken the dead, the antiquarian must first manage to kill them^ (Stewart 1993, 143). Like the antiquarian, the hoarder does imagine a disruption between past and present; yet unlike the antiquarian, the hoarder typically refuses to aestheticize objects. While hoarders do overvalue their objects, they do not as much fetishize their objects as show confidence in the possibility of a future fetishization akin to a meta-fetish. Put in terms of the difference between symbol and allegory: because hoarders sense the transformative power of objects (primarily the tendency of objects to bear an influence on one’s own personal history), objects are not valued as transcendent symbols. But again, the material, this-worldly history congealed in a hoarder’s objects is not a past but future history, the very evolution of which is continually deferred. It might be helpful to consider the phenomenology of hoarding in relation to an influential sociological study of domestic object-relating, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Eugene Rochberg-Halton’s The Meaning of Things: Domestic Symbols and the Self. In their desire to recover a sense of things that appreciates the object’s present and future meanings (and not just its sedimented past), the authors note that, like symbols as defined by Clifford Geertz, objects can be both Bmodels of^ and Bmodels for^ reality: BIn the first sense, they reflect what

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is; in the second, they foreshadow what could be^ (1981, 27). This distinction builds on John Dewey’s related distinction in Art as Experience between perception and recognition: if recognition occurs when something is experienced and interpreted as already known, Bperception. . . occurs when we experience a thing and realize its own inherent character^ (quoted in Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton 1981, 44). In order to appreciate the present and future-oriented aspect of objects as models for something, one also has to consider that, as Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton summarize Dewey, BPerception involves an active receptivity to the object so that its qualities may modify previously formed habits or schemes^ (177). Dewey’s notion that perception involves active receptivity to objects can provide a heuristic against which to assess hoarding disorder. On the continuum from passive recognition to active perception, compulsive hoarders worry over the extent to which their objects might, if agitated, scrutinized, and discarded unnecessarily or prematurely, exert too much of a modification of their ingrained habits and schemes. Since the hoarder habitually defers the use of his objects, to dispose of or cash out an object before its due date, as it were, would be overwhelming; it would force, in Dewey’s terms, so much receptivity as to radically realign and interrupt the hoarder’s settled dispositions.

Hoarding in contemporary fiction and theory Perhaps because of the historical distance separating us from particular post-war anxieties, more recent fictionalized accounts of hoarding not only approach the disorder philosophically, but such representations overlap more closely with the clinical picture of the disorder in underscoring the extent to which hoarded objects are valued for their future-oriented potential. In Richard Greenberg’s play The Dazzle (2000), directly inspired by the Collyer case, the younger brother Langley, the principal hoarder, reveals an appreciation for the changing, everfascinating details of objects rather than larger systems of classification or conceptualization. In one scene Langley, after spending the day observing leaves in the park, fixates on a leaf that he calls extraordinary. About to tell Homer the layered story of this incomparable gift of nature, his brother responds: BI don’t feel like attending to the story of a leaf, right now, Lang, I simply don’t. I don’t want to hear about its texture or its stripling or its shape or its rare visual appeal or what you thought to call it. I’d rather listen to a narration of some ancient Roman battle^ (46). If Langley is interested in the infinite stories that simple objects seem to embody, Homer is engaged by well-established, past linear histories. Chastizing Langley for disliking Bideas,^ Bgeneralities,^ and Babstractions,^ Homer eventually humors his brother: Homer: What kind of tree still has its leaves in December? Lang. An evergreen, of course. Homer: Douglas fir? Lang. My name for it is– Homer: So then what you were studying, so diligently, all the day long, wasn’t even really a leaf at all, but more a kind of spindle? Lang. My name for it is– Homer: Good Lord, you’ve been staring all day at a needle! Lang. My name for it is . . . Homer: Well, what?

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Lang. Oh. I’ve forgotten. . . . Homer: It means you can go back tomorrow and find exactly the same lea –oh dear, I hope you tagged it–you can go back tomorrow and find the same leaf and stare at it again, and name it, and forget it. (47) Langley shows a reluctance to categorize or classify objects or even to resort to the conventional names ascribed to mechanical and natural items. The same object can, for Langley, appear quite different from day to day to such an extent that, as an obedient nominalist, he renames particular objects as his fancy dictates. In a later exchange, when pressed by Homer to explain his fondness for collecting items such as Bcuspidors, crushed pince-nez, checkbooks from defunct accounts, pieces of a smashed demilunette, plumbing parts, rusted roasting pans, baseballs, spoons, pickling spices,^ and a lacrosse stick, Langley explains his affection for the latter item, in particular: Lang. How long and lovely it is–all cracked and burnished–and the basket all snarled– Homer. Why do you care? Lang. It’s lovely, Homer; it’s sacred. Homer. Sacred! You’re an atheist! Lang. God isn’t the source of what’s sacred. Homer. Then what is? Lang. Things in themselves. (50) Greenberg’s Langley might seem to be mouthing just a bit of pop philosophy when he notes an appreciation of the noumenal rather than phenomenal sense of things, and when he intones throughout the play that BEverything that is, is fine.^ But it is precisely a preoccupation with the object as object that most cultural and literary studies of hoarding seem unable to appreciate. What is ironic about Langley’s comment about appreciating things in themselves is his inability to actually sustain such a belief as the play unfolds. Although Langley expresses an interest in the objects themselves, not only are such objects always in a state of becoming rather than static being, but their multiple becomings tend to reach upward to some divine or mystical illumination. Langley’s love of objects is more a matter of sacred caritas than secular eros. Greenberg’s play shares an aesthetic view of hoarding with the pathological collecting of Utz, the protagonist in Bruce Chatwin’s widely-regarded novel Utz (1989). Utz and the narrator agree that a precious collection of porcelain is valuable not for the power to revive and memorialize the past as much as immortalize the present. As the narrator remarks, Bporcelain was not just another exotic, but a . . . talismanic substance–the substance of longevity, of potency of invulnerability"; and as Utz later suggests, BPorcelain was the antidote to decay^ (11-12). The porcelain represents an eternal now against which one’s past history and future livelihood are measured: BThings are the changeless mirror in which we watch ourselves disintegrate. Nothing is more age-ing than a collection of work of art^ (113). The compulsive collector is a bit like the cabbalistic creator of the Golem; just as the fabricator of the Golem takes unformed matter and invests it with life, so the collector takes dead objects from public collections like museums and revivifies them. Collectors do not simply acquire objects; they create them through means of selection, placement and valuation, analogous to the ways in which a Golem can Bcreate the World, by repeating, in an order prescribed by the Cabbala, the letter of the secret name of God^ (42). An idolater of sorts, the

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creator-collector, like the overreaching alchemist who attempts to turn dross into gold, attempts to re-create the philosopher’s stone in and through the collection: BThe search for gold and the search for porcelain had been facets of an identical quest: to find the substance of immortality^ (108). Greenberg and Chatwin’s views of hoarding depart from Erskine and Davenport’s in that the former understand the hoarder’s objects as symbols, whereas the latter understand the objects as allegories. While symbolic objects tend to leave off the earthbound realm and signify a transcendent beyond–Bto aspire,^ as one commentator notes, Bto an immediate unity with that which^ they intend (Wolin 1994, 66)–the value of allegorical objects tends, at least according to Walter Benjamin, to be closely bound to historical circumstance: Whereas in the symbol destruction is idealized and the transfigured face of nature is fleetingly revealed in the light of redemption, in allegory the observer is confronted with the facies hippocratica of history as a petrified, primordial landscape. Everything about history that, from the very beginning, has been untimely, sorrowful, unsuccessful, is expressed in a face, or rather a death’s head. And although such a thing lacks all the ‘symbolic’ freedom of expression, all classical proportion, all humanity, nevertheless. . . . This is the heart of the allegorical way of seeing, of the baroque, secular explanation of history as the Passion of the world. . . . (1977, 166) For Greenberg and Chatwin, compulsive collecting serves not merely to lift objects out of dead history but to accord those objects a talismanic power to summon quasi-Platonic certitudes and forms (whether love, for Greenberg’s Langley, or immortality, for Chatwin’s Utz). Both writers expand on Benjamin’s notion that, as the latter comments in BUnpacking My Library,^ BTo a true collector the acquisition of an old book is its rebirth^ (1968, 61). Greenberg and Chatwin would track a mutual rebirth of object and subject through acts of collecting and hoarding. Contrastingly, Erskine and Davenport suggest that the Collyers’ objects were just so many scraps that represent unfulfilled history. Compare compulsive hoarding in the view of Erskine and Davenport to Benjamin’s more pointed notion of baroque allegory. Benjamin describes a correspondence between baroque allegories and clutter, if not hoarding proper: BIt must not be assumed that there is anything accidental about the fact that the allegorical is related to . . . the fragmentary, untidy, and disordered character of magicians’ dens or alchemists’ laboratories familiar above all to the baroque^ (1977, 188). Through the canny hermeneutics of the allegorist, baroque images and objects undergo a dialectical reversal: through an acknowledgement of the very degradations of profane things, one is able to glimpse, through the sheer force of contrast, something salvific. Suffice it say that redemption through the mortification of allegorical objects is never quite achieved by the Collyers or their biographers. As far as the early fictionalized accounts of hoarding are concerned, the Collyers disappoint because they are failed allegorists.

Hoarding, cynical reason, and OCD I have not yet addressed why there has been so much recent media attention to compulsive hoarding. To answer this question involves determining why there has been so much interest in OCD generally during the past decades (hoarding is currently listed in the DSM IVas a subtype of OCD). In a purely medical and scientific sense, OCD has become more widely represented in the media of late due to the ascendancy of diagnostic or biological psychiatry and the

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serendipitous discovery in the 1980’s that SSRI’s, developed to treat depression, are also effective in alleviating symptoms of OCD. Prior to this discovery, OCD had been considered a rare, difficult to treat psychoneurotic disorder much resembling in etiology Freud’s notion of obsessive neurosis. In an important recent essay, Jennifer Fleissner links the historical rise of obsessiveness to the entire project of modernity. Building on Leon Salzman’s contention that the emergence of the obsessive character is a distinctly modern phenomenon, tied to such factors as Bcomplex technologies and the atomic age,^ Fleissner remarks that Bthe unknowables of modern life, perhaps now more than ever, generate a profound yearning for some small token of control^ (2007, 110). Doubt inevitably ensues from a technicist worldview and the enlightenment project of mastery over nature, only reaffirming the Bmodern quest for certainty and control^ (116). This veritable Binstitutionalization of doubt^ renders obsessiveness a quintessentially twentieth-century disorder. Much of Fleissner’s argument rests on questioning the DSM IV’s distinction between obsessive-compulsive disorder and obsessive-compulsive personality disorder. OCD proper is ego-dystonic, which means that obsessions and compulsions are alien to the desires of the healthy ego and hence unwanted. In OCPD, closer in etiology to Freud’s outworn notion of anal-retentive typology, obsessions and compulsions are of a piece with the ego (they are egosyntonic) and so provide a measure of gratification when realized successfully. Fleissner argues that, since in both cases the overriding symptom is unmitigated doubt and skepticism (doubt that might be seen as warranted, even sustaining, given lingering modernist uncertainties), we should not take too seriously the distinction between OCD and OCPD. However, I would suggest that because obsessionals with OCD proper characteristically do not doubt their beliefs and actions as much as doubt their very doubtfulness (they act against their better judgment, akin to Aristotle’s incontinent individuals), Bcynical reason^ better explains the current preoccupation with OCD proper. As I have argued elsewhere, what distinguishes OCD from OCPD is that obsessionals with the former disorder are fundamentally self-alienated and experience their symptoms with detached irony (Cefalu 2009). As Slavoj Žižek has suggested, post-Marxist ideology does not comport with the classic Marxist notion of misrecognition or false consciousness, whereby one encounters a distance between Bso-called social reality and our distorted representation,^ which is typically represented in the mantra, Bthey do not know it, but they are doing it^ (1989, 28). Contemporary ideology is more of a piece with cynical reason, according to which one is aware of the distance between ideological ruses and social reality, but persists in remaining under ideological illusions nonetheless, embracing a Bparadox of enlightened false consciousness^ (29). Hence the mantra of cynical reason is more aptly Bthey know very well what they are doing, but still they are doing it^ (29). Importantly, what prevents cynical reason from characterizing a truly post-ideological stance is that, despite its Bironic detachment,^ it leaves intact what Žižek characterizes as the "fundamental level of ideological fantasy^: ideological illusions are retained, but they are expressed at the level of doing, rather than thinking, or on the plane of material practices, rather than cognition: BBy following a custom, the subject believe without knowing it, so that the final conversion is merely a formal act by means of which we recognize what we have already believed. . . . External custom is always a material support for the subject’s consciousness^ (41). To what extent do the ideological underpinnings of cynical reason help to explain the contemporary plight of the obsessive-compulsive subject? Given the automaticity and habitual

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behavior one observes in OCD, one might assume that the obsessive-compulsive subject, like the generic subject of cynical reason, Bknows the right way to act, but chooses the wrong way anyway.^ It is as if the obsessive-compulsive marks the limit point of cynical reason, teetering on allegorizing a truly Bpost-ideological^ subject because he or she has traversed any illusions that meaningful belief will somehow be shaped by habitual action. If, as Žižek claims, following Althusser and Kafka, that contemporary ideologies rest on Binterpellations without identification^ (since ideological apparatuses act senselessly, causelessly, in order to maintain the illusion that they have some unifying center), the subject of OCD illustrates the irony, often tragicomic in manifestation, of putting the most effort into actions that he or she knows are ultimately meaningless, and that will not foster any integral, action-guiding beliefs in the future. The frequency with which a sufferer of OCD carries out a habitual act corresponds not with increasing belief but increasing frustration and disbelief in the importance of those actions. Although listed in the DSM IV as a subtype of OCD, compulsive hoarding bears an obverse relationship to cynical reason. If the generic obsessional embraces cynical reason in suspending belief in the name of action (he knows that compulsive washing is unnecessary but washes all the same), the hoarder suspends action in the name of belief (he refuses to discard Bworthless^ items because he believes them to be valuable). Yet, because the hoarder’s belief attaches to no univocal intentional object, his motive force is again more a belief in the object’s potential not to be what it is than any decisive consideration of what the object might or should become. The hoarding ideology does not transcend cynical reason or Btraverse the fundamental fantasy^ (which for Žižek, for example, would entail a transition, for both subject and object, from a predicated something to a non-predicated nothing or void space); rather, following Giorgio Agamben, we might say that hoarding, insofar as it reinstates via suspension a radically contingent past that is ultimately indistinguishable from the plenum of future possibilities, signals a bracketing of being and its negation entirely: BEmancipating itself from being and non-Being alike, potentiality thus creates its own ontology^ (1999, 259). A hoarder’s preoccupation with the potential stored in objects of seeming refuse is brought out suggestively in Marilynne Robinson’s novel Housekeeping (1980). Sylvie, the eccentric aunt who collects cans, magazines and newspapers that are Bstacked to the ceiling,^ is considered pathological by neighbors. Yet Sylvie’s niece Ruth glimpses the saving potential of Sylvie’s and her own hoarding. At one point, Ruth remarks that BIt seemed to me that what perished need not also be lost. At Sylvie’s house, my grandmother’s house, so much of what I remembered I could hold in my hand–like a china cup, or a windfall apple, sour and cold from its affinity with deep earth, with only a trace of the perfume of its blossoming. Sylvie, I knew, felt the life of perished things^ (1980, 124). An appreciation of Bthe life of perished things^ might be seen as the hoarder’s mantra par excellence. Objects that seem to have perished, that would be let go by others, are revivified by the hoarder, as if, paradoxically, to cast away a seemingly unusable item is to kill the very life of that item. In one of her many epiphanies, Ruth will come to value the hoarder’s enviable redemptive work: Imagine that Noah knocked his house apart and used the planks to build an ark, while his neighbors looked on, full of doubt. A house, he must have told them, should be daubed with pitch and built to float cloud high, if need be. A lettuce patch was of no use at all, and a good foundation was worse than useless. A house should have a compass and a keel. The neighbors would have put their hands in their pockets and chewed their lips and strolled home to houses they now found wanting in ways they could not understand. (184)

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It is not the case that the neighbors’ houses are ill-equipped to transform into arks; it is rather that the neighbors cannot make the gestalt shift necessary to decipher the form of a potential ark in the content of an actual house. Such passages help us to see that the hoarder’s philosopher might as well be Heidegger, although with an important modification to Heidegger’s distinction between practical and theoretical perception of objects. Heidegger remarks in Being and Time (1996) that Ba useful thing is essentially ‘something in order to’. . . . The different kinds of ‘in order to’ such as serviceability, helpfulness, usability, handiness, constitute a totality of useful things^ (64). Hoarders blur Heidegger’s distinction between pragmatic and theoretical knowledge to the extent that serviceability is enhanced precisely when the object is not at all being used for its designated purposes. Heidegger comments that Bthe less we just stare at the thing called hammer, the more actively we use it . . .^ (65). For a hoarder, however, a broken or unused hammer can seem more handy in its hidden uses than the functioning hammer. And the very act of simply stowing away this hammer signifies its latent handiness, as if, to modify Heidegger’s comment, the more a hoarder just stares at the thing once called a hammer, the more he uses it. This is why, against Fleissner’s argument that obsessiveness should still be characterized as a Bdoubting disease^ (in accordance with the late nineteenth- and twentieth-century description of the disorder that one finds in the work of Pierre Janet and others), I would submit that subtypes of obsessiveness like hoarding are characterized by skepticism’s opposite, say unmitigated faith and committed belief that objects can continually renew, even transcend themselves. Georg Simmel approximates this view in his notion that the possession of things is an action or movement, rather than a stationary or passive state that sets in once an object has been acquired: BThe static concept of property is nothing but the active enjoyment or treatment of the object transposed into a latent condition, and the guarantee for the fact that one can at any time enjoy or act upon it^ (1978, 304). Importantly, though, Simmel remarks that the very nature of what is owned tends to limit such freedom. His example is of a piece of wood, which can be made and remade into several objects, although it cannot be reconfigured as a tool that requires, say, the elasticity of rubber: Bno matter how deeply his emotions and artistry may penetrate his instrument, no matter whether the limits of his power are predetermined, somewhere such limits do exist. Beyond a certain point, the structure of the instrument does not permit any further yielding to the power of the soul^ (324). It could be that hoarders not only reject the very notion of a limit point or transformative nullity of objects but that this rejection is represented in their very deferral of acting on that object and actually testing its and their own felt alchemical abilities. Better simply to stake belief that such an object can indeed be radically transfigured as the occasion warrants. As one last example of hoarding’s potential, consider Myla Goldberg’s novel Bee Season (2000). Based on her skewed understanding of the mystical legend that God’s light, once enclosed in sacred vessels, has been shattered by creaturely sin, Miriam, the obsessive kleptomaniac, erroneously believes that Bshe is a broken vessel, pieces of her scattered everywhere^ (87). Each time she steals an object she believes that she has restored that object to its proper place. When Miriam’s husband Saul finally apprehends her kaleidoscopic reconstruction of stolen objects, he muses that each object indeed had been previously displaced, its bastardized use or aesthetic value somehow limiting its authentic ontological and aesthetic range: Beach object presents itself redefined, this its true function, this the reason for its creation^ (224). Miriam’s example of pathological collecting may seem to run counter to what I have been suggesting about more generic hoarding: that hoarders supremely desire to restore an item’s range of use values, both past and future, by suspending or withholding it. However, both

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Miriam and the generic hoarder act as restorers of objects’ lost lives, in one case to remand things to their proper ontological role, in the other case to open up individual things to both their homespun and far-reaching possibilities. Another way of saying this is that, for hoarders generally, each individual object contains a kaleidoscope of uses within itself–as if any single object could reflect Miriam’s entire collection of stolen objects, or at least the utilitarian capacities of such objects, were they to be de-aestheticized. Bill Brown has argued compellingly that in key modernist texts such as Virginia Woolf’s Solid Objects, fragments of lost or broken objects are valued for their discrete thinglike qualities. Shards or pieces of objects break the circuit of metonymy; parts do not stand for wholes as much as transmute into idiosyncratic and incommensurable things unto themselves. BIn the case of Woolf’s story, the point is not that the familiar object has been defamiliarized into unreconstituted fragments (which is to say discrete, fragmented sensations), but rather that literal fragments become objects without any of the coherence or familiarity we associate with objects^ (1999, 7). In the more recent representations of hoarding that I have been assessing, objects or parts thereof also transcend their own materiality, but they tend more often to signify other serviceable objects. If the governing trope of modernist materialism is, as Brown suggests, unconsummated metonymy, the master trope of contemporary hoarding is outsized metaphor: wholes are seamlessly displaced by other kindred wholes (22). Hoarders nullify whatever defamiliarity might creep in when one gazes too intently at something broken or discarded; their unshakeable confidence in the continuity of an object’s past and future lives suggests an antidote to or at least suspension of modernist skepticism and, as I noted above, postmodernist cynical reason. What a hoarder collects, ultimately, is not any companionable object but a bare concept, every object’s generic serviceableness (itself bracketed from an object’s designated uses or aesthetic appeal) that then rematerializes depending on that object’s new, even unfamiliar incarnations. When Sylvie Bfeels the life of perished things^ or when Miriam recollects her shattered parts, they intuit these alternative lives that are unfathomable to the Bsane^ among them. What conclusions can we finally make about the relationship between, on the one hand, these recent fictionalized accounts of hoarding and, on the other hand, the clinical picture of the disorder as defined in the DSM IV and as represented in the frankly terrifying and unsanitary living conditions of hoarders that have been recently depicted in the media, especially in the Bravo documentary series, Hoarders? Clearly the fictionalized characterizations tend to depathologize and even idealize acts of hoarding, and so should not be valued insofar as they might narratively displace the diagnostic criteria established by the DSM IV. But perhaps the fictionalized accounts help us to see beyond all of the obfuscating clutter and paraphernalia of the hoarders’ objects; such stories, however distorted, allow us to reconstruct the hoarders’ best view of themselves and the limitless potential of the material world around them.

Endnotes 1

For a good overview of scholarly research on compulsive hoarding, see Grisham and Barlow, 2005. For some

self-help books on hoarding, see Neziroglu, Bubrick, and Yaryura-Tobias, 2004; and Steketee and Frost, 2006). For documentary films on hoarding, see Montag, Packrat: 2004; and Alford 2004. For a mainstream fictionalized account of animal hoarding, see Jance, 2004. 2

On the complex relationship between ideas and things, see Brown 2003, especially chapter one, passim. See

also Brown 2001.

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