Society bombards us with instructions to be happier, fitter and richer. Why have we become so dissatisfied with being ordinary? By Josh Cohen.
As a young university lecturer two decades ago, I taught a course on 19th-century American literature. Though I loved the period, my students were less enamoured. Most would give up on “Moby-Dick” or Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Essays” after only a few pages, then sit in seminars coiled in silence, hoping that I wouldn’t call on them.
Roy was different. He was prodigiously well-read and discussed our texts with passionate intensity, which his classmates observed with a mixture of perplexity and awe. At the end of term, most students handed in efficient and entirely unremarkable essays. But Roy came to my office two days before the deadline begging for an extension.
I explained to him that I couldn’t grant him extra time without a doctor’s note and that he’d lose marks for giving in the work late. I urged him to go home and just write his essay. He had already demonstrated that he had numerous interesting things to say.
Roy said he’d actually already written the piece. Why then, I asked, hadn’t he submitted it? “Because it’s terrible,” he replied, screwing up his face in agony. He implored me for a few more days’ grace; I insisted that it wasn’t in my power.
The essay came in a day late. Despite being docked five points, it still scored a high mark.
Roy continued to hand in work late for the remainder of his degree and nonetheless came top of his year by some distance. The following year he enrolled on a Masters programme I ran. His work became ever more dazzling and the delays in submission more protracted. When he came to see me a week before the deadline for his final dissertation, I spotted an angry rash across his forehead. In some alarm, I asked if he was well.
“It’s fine,” he snapped. “I just rub away at the skin when I’m stressed, that’s all.” I then noticed that his nails were bitten past the quick and his fingers had swollen red pads.
I directed Roy to the student-counselling service. At first he refused to engage with it, but he soon realised that it could support his requests for an extension. The official September deadline passed, but Roy’s counsellor helped him stretch it until the following January.
Changing the dimensions of a nose or bust has come to represent the desired yet unattainable hope of a perfect future
Just before Christmas Roy came to see me, unkempt and staring glassily into the middle distance. There was no chance of getting his dissertation completed in time, he told me. By now I had learned the art of gentle remonstration. This was a Masters dissertation not his life’s work, I pointed out. It didn’t need to be perfect.
“Trust me,” he replied with a mirthless laugh, “it’s a world away from perfection. It’s not even in the same galaxy.” I surmised that he had written it, a fact which he confirmed. “I’ve also read it”, he added, “which gave me no option but to delete it.” Slack-jawed, I asked him if he had kept a copy.
He hadn’t. He’d wiped out more than 20,000 words. “I have way too much respect for you to have subjected you to them,” he told me.
This turned out to be the last time I saw Roy. For the next year and a half, he was granted extension after extension as a result of his ongoing anxiety. When the final extension expired, he submitted neither a dissertation nor an excuse. I wrote to him and asked whether he had a draft to show me. “Not that I’m willing to inflict on you, I’m afraid,” came his reply. I didn’t hear from him again.
Among the texts on the undergrad syllabus I taught to Roy was “The Birth-Mark”, a short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne written in 1843. It’s the most chilling study I know of the psychology of perfectionism.
Aylmer, a young scholar of science, develops an increasingly febrile obsession with a small red birthmark on the cheek of his beautiful young wife Georgiana. He finds her tantalising proximity to perfect beauty intolerable.
To him the birthmark was a sign of the “fatal flaw of humanity…[a] symbol of his wife’s liability to sin, sorrow, decay and death”. Georgiana learns to see herself in the distorted mirror of her husband’s gaze and comes to share his horror of the birthmark. She begs him to use his ingenuity to correct “what Nature left imperfect”.
For this 12 page article in pdf with several more illustrations, please click here:
Josh Cohen is a psychoanalyst and professor of modern literary theory at Goldsmiths, University of London. His books include “The Private Life”, “Not Working” and “How to Live. What to Do”
ILLUSTRATIONS: ADAM SIMPSON
The Extraordinary Story
Long reads and life from 1843 magazine
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