Possessed

A Cultural History of Hoarding

Rebecca R. Falkoff

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781501752827
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire historique

In Possessed, Rebecca R. Falkoff asks how hoarding—once a paradigm of economic rationality—came to be defined as a mental illness. Hoarding is unique among the disorders included in the American Psychiatric Association's DSM-5, because its diagnosis requires the existence of a material entity: the hoard. Possessed therefore considers the hoard as an aesthetic object produced by clashing perspectives about the meaning or value of objects.

The 2000s have seen a surge of cultural interest in hoarding and those whose possessions overwhelm their living spaces. Unlike traditional economic elaborations of hoarding, which focus on stockpiles of bullion or grain, contemporary hoarding results in accumulations of objects that have little or no value or utility. Analyzing themes and structures of hoarding across a range of literary and visual texts—including works by Nikolai Gogol, Arthur Conan Doyle, Carlo Emilio Gadda, Luigi Malerba, Song Dong and E. L. Doctorow—Falkoff traces the fraught materialities of the present to cluttered spaces of modernity: bibliomaniacs' libraries, flea markets, crime scenes, dust-heaps, and digital archives. Possessed shows how the figure of the hoarder has come to personify the economic, epistemological, and ecological conditions of modernity.

Thanks to generous funding from New York University and its participation in TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem), the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access (OA) volumes from Cornell Open (cornellpress.cornell.edu/cornell-open) and other Open Access repositories.

1

Psychologies

THE PERSONAL LIBRARY

In his short documentary, Possessed (2008), Martin Hampton captures the struggles of members of an Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder Action Hoarding support group in London—people who self-identify as compulsive hoarders.¹ The film is divided into four parts, each composed of a monologue by one group member who leads the camera operator through a cluttered dwelling, giving an account of his or her experience of hoarding. The hoarder in “Control,” the first of the four segments, describes the intricately cross-referenced catalogs he maintains to index the books and videocassettes neatly shelved four-deep, up to the ceiling, and across every surface in his apartment. He seems proud of his personal library, if also apprehensive about the lack of space: “I like having books to look at…I like having lots of stuff. Like if I had a three-bedroom house then it wouldn’t be a problem, cause I’d have enough room for all the stuff I’ve got, so I’d be quite happy.” Despite the meticulous record keeping, the expanding library takes on an almost supernatural power and begins to elude his control. He explains: “It’s not the way it should be. It’s starting to take over. And that’s sort of a bit spooky.” The contentment afforded by his collection is offset by an awareness of the slow approach of disaster: “At the moment it’s not too bad, but it’s very close to becoming a real real problem.” His control over the books and videocassettes is precarious—he situates disaster in the not too distant future—“ten, fifteen years”: “It’s like the walls of the flat are sort of closing in. It’s a bit like that thing in Star Wars, where they end up in the trash compactor. And the walls are coming in!” To inhabit a present structured by the dread of a domestic avalanche or some similar catastrophe is a recital of what it means to be human in the Anthropocene, living in anticipation of an apocalypse of our own making.

The second segment presents a different affective orientation: “Submission.” The hoarded space brims with consumer goods destined for prompt desuetude: cellular phones, computers, digital cameras, external hard drives—most still in their original packaging—as well as kitschy figurines, plush toys, and office supplies. The hoarder describes these purchases as the result of a dream-like state: “You see something and you want it so much. You’ve got no choice but to buy it. So, I suppose I don’t feel like I can, sometimes, not buy things.” As if hypnotized by flashes of opportunity, he is unable to resist a bargain. And when the embarrassment of riches arouses distressing indecision, he buys whole lots. He confesses haltingly to having racked up credit card debt of more than £40,000: “That’s more than my mortgage. And it’s just basically everything you see around you.” He describes the sense of panic he feels when visiting the post office, fearing the arrival of another order: “I recognize I can’t trust myself.” While the hoarder of “Control” relishes in the presence of his possessions, for the subject of “Submission,” the objects have lost their luster; they accumulate like an unwelcome residue of his helplessness. Like the dangerous environment the hoarder of “Control” has created, which seems to be exceptional and yet engenders an Anthropocenic sense of doom, the hoarder’s indebtedness in the “Submission” segment is the norm for sub jects of contemporary capitalism.²

If the juxtaposition of “Control” and “Submission” appears to mirror that between subject and object of the verb “to possess,” the documentary—and its title, Possessed—suggests that even in exercising control over things, we are possessed by them. Hoarding marks a dangerous threshold at which control over objects cedes to a sense of helplessness before the material world. That threshold—between control and submission, between the subject and object of the verb “possess”—may be used to draw a distinction between collecting and hoarding—a tantalizing exercise that finds provisional resolution in considerations of value.³ But such resolution is necessarily fleeting; value is unstable and hoarding, like fetishism, is rooted in conflicting perspectives about value. The ambivalence expressed by the subjects of Possessed shows how these conflicts take root not only between individuals but also within them, and over time.

The ambivalence is particularly evident in “Control” and “Submission” in the ascription of increasing agency to objects: “It’s starting to take over” becomes an uncanny refrain in the film. In a different idiom, new materialism takes up the ways in which matter eludes human agency and cognition.⁴ Broadly speaking, new materialist thought attempts to escape binaries that structure Western metaphysics and capitalism and to put critical pressure on the cultural turn that seemed—in caricature—to render the materiality of the world an effect of language. Jane Bennett’s vital materialism, for example, proposes a world composed not of inert matter transformed by human labor but of “actants” that can produce effects and change the course of events. In place of hoarder and hoard, Bennett sees a “hoard-assemblage” marked by porous boundaries between human and nonhuman matter. Bill Brown’s thing theory, and more broadly, his decades-long attention to the “material unconscious” of literary and visual texts, is better able to speak to the practices of acquiring and keeping that result in hoards because he maintains some distinction between human and nonhuman matter and between subject and object, even as he troubles the threshold between the two. In his introduction to the 2001 special issue of Critical Inquiry titled “Things,” Brown distinguishes between an object, which participates unobtrusively in the experience of being-in the-world, and a thing, which provokes a confrontation with materiality. The “thingness” latent in every object becomes evident on contingent occasions when its materiality intrudes. A pen that runs out of ink, a printer that jams, or a picture that tilts confronts us with a materiality that exceeds our intentionality and use.

Brown understands modernism—across literary and visual arts—as the aesthetic work of attending to or provoking the intrusions of material, of liberating thingness from the “fetters of modernity.”⁵ Modernity, he argues, subjugates matter to human ends; modernism is the aesthetic project of making manifest the indomitability of matter to reveal the limits of modernity. That formulation helps to explain the compatibility between the push and pull of modernity and its artistic movements and the scenes of control and submission that Hampton documents in Possessed and that characterize obsessive-compulsive and impulse-control disorders. The disruptions of use and order represented by what Brown calls “thinging”—bringing out the thingness of an object (i.e., its alterity)—are symptomatically vexing to those who suffer from obsessive-compulsive and related disorders.⁶ Given that the intrusions of “thingness” that define modernism for Brown overlap with the irregularities intolerable to those who suffer from obsessive-compulsive and related disorders, it is unsurprising that scholars have proposed strong correlations between obsession and modernity. Lennard Davis, for example, writes: “To be obsessive is…to be modern.”⁷ He underscores the exceptional concentration of energy that is associated with success in a range of areas: “We live in a culture that wants its love affairs obsessive, its artists obsessed, its genius fixated, its music driven, its athletes devoted.”⁸ Davis understands obsession as an extraordinary concentration of energy, a monomaniacal passion. But as Hampton’s film, and the other texts I discuss in this chapter show, that concentration of energy, that consuming passion, consumes the impassioned in cases of hoarding and its precursors, beginning with bibliomania.

Bibliomania to Monomania

The sense of being possessed by possessions becomes increasingly insistent beginning in the nineteenth century, as collections spilled forth from curiosity cabinets, grand galleries, and the personal libraries of bibliomaniacs into the annals of medicine, where all sorts of object-oriented manias and maniacs began to accumulate.⁹ Those “possessed” by the material world appeared to early nineteenth-century psychiatrists to be suffering from some form of the ailment Jean-Étienne Dominique Esquirol named “monomania.”¹⁰ The French psychiatrist began using the term in around 1810 to describe repetitive and intrusive thoughts or actions: obsessions and compulsions.¹¹ Monomania, like its precursor, “partial insanity,” left mental functioning unimpaired in all but one area.¹² It was a form of insanity that could affect a large segment of the population, even those who appeared to be in full possession of their mental faculties.¹³ This relegation of madness to some small corner of the mind held great appeal for contemporary writers, as did the linguistic affinity between “monomania” and “bibliomania,” which had been in use for more than 150 years to describe the passionate, disordered extremes of book collecting.

Monomania quickly swept through literary circles in France and beyond; writers began using the word to refer to a harmless quirk in the form of a fanatical enthusiasm for one subject.¹⁴ Despite the speedy diffusion of monomania in nonspecialist writings, the term was soon replaced in psychiatric writings by a spate of sub-types: manias and phobias “enriched by nearly all the roots of the Greek dictionary” in what Max Nordau dismissed as an exercise of “philologico-medical trifling.”¹⁵ Some of these ills relate specifically to objects and overlap considerably with hoarding: in addition to bibliomania, there was kleptomania (first called klope-mania), oniomania (compulsive shopping), and various collecting manias.¹⁶ Psychiatrists after Esquirol diagnosed kleptomania, oniomania, collectomania, and klepto-collecting in people who seemed unable to control themselves around objects; they, like the hoarder of “Submission,” could not help but to steal, buy, or gather. In these manias, the exercise of the aesthetic judgment of taste is transformed into something ego-dystonic—that is, discordant with ego aims and ideals—something “sort of a bit spooky,” as the subject of Hampton’s “Control” describes it.

The emergence of so many object-oriented manias in the course of the long nineteenth century attests to anxiety about agency that haunts the willful subject of modernity in his confrontation with stuff. This chapter traces that anxiety about agency from bibliomania to hoarding disorder. My attention to this history of object-oriented manias marks a departure from recent studies of hoarding in the humanities and social sciences, which have settled on a genealogy of the diagnostic criteria that begins with the 1993 publication of “The Hoarding of Possessions” by Randy Frost and Rachel Gross. While that article introduces questions of etiology and classification that chart a clear pathway to the inclusion of hoarding disorder in the DSM-5 in 2013, my attention to the longer, interdisciplinary history of the diagnostic category brings into focus heterogenous thematic threads entangled in hoarding today. I demonstrate the conflation, in hoarding discourse, of the poetic disposition that defines modernism for Brown with the faltering will of the subject of modernity. Before Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and Carlo Emilio Gadda made literary praxes of hoarding, fin-de-siècle psychiatrists Giovanni Mingazzini and Sante de Sanctis observed obsessive forms of collecting in patients who were seized by inexplicable urges to gather up and stash away twigs and other worthless items.¹⁷

At the intersection of bibliomania and monomania and of literary and scientific texts, the drama of a will that falters before the object world begins to unfold. Physiologists, alienists, philosophers, and criminologists came up with various explanations for such weakened wills—degeneration and hysteria (along with menstruation, pregnancy, and lactation) were the most common.¹⁸ After surveying these theories, I turn to Freud, who sets aside physiological explanations to develop psychodynamic—that is, narrative—accounts of obsessions and phobias. In an 1895 paper written in French, Freud makes obsessions and phobias a product of mental disordering, a mésalliance of mismatching of ideas, feelings, and actions.

In his 1752 article on bibliomania for the Encyclopédie, Jean-Baptiste le Rond d’Alembert makes disordered keeping a function of disuse.¹⁹ The modern history of bibliomania heralded by the encyclopedia entry is apposite to a study of hoarding today because of the distinct relationship between a book’s use, which resides primarily in the immaterial, reproducible text, and its material form, which is what captivates collectors, maniacal, and otherwise.²⁰ For Walter Benjamin, use is fundamentally at odds with collecting—no matter what the object. “What is decisive in collecting,” he writes, “is that the object is detached from all its original functions to enter into the closest conceivable relation with objects of the same kind. This relation is the diametric opposite of utility.”²¹ Printed books are notable as collectors’ objects because their use—reading the reproducible text—is already divorced from the material form of any single copy. The rift between the medium and message—that is, between the possession and use of books—is redoubled in literary texts about bibliomania that relate the travails of the bibliomaniac to the heroic feats narrated in the pages of his tomes.

Whereas the problem with bibliomania for enlightenment writers—for example, d’Alembert and Cesare Beccaria—rests primarily in its removal of books from use, in early nineteenth-century Britain, Romantics relished in the discerning taste of book collectors. By the 1830s, the popularization of the diagnostic category Esquirol invented is evident in literary treatments of bibliomania. Both Gustave Flaubert and Charles Nodier write of bibliomaniacs ruined—financially, socially, and morally—by their unrestrained passions. Already in fourteenth-century Florence, Petrarch recognized that reading too many books can be edifying or dangerous, leading some to knowledge and others to madness.²² The modern history of bibliomania reveals the extent to which too many books, as physical objects, are no less able to reap refinement and ruin.

In his Encyclopédie article, d’Alembert defines bibliomania as “the mad desire to own books and to [amass] them.” For the collector who la...