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Why does it all end in tears?
Crying: The Natural and Cultural History of Tears by Tom Lutz
W. W. Norton, £18.95, 352 pp £15.95 (free p&p) 0870 155 7222
Ours is such a supremely self-conscious era, that it might seem that there could hardly be any aspect of human life which has not been anatomised almost out of existence. But, it seems, there is still one: crying.
"Perhaps no other fundamental human activity has received so little direct and sustained attention", says the American writer Tom Lutz, who has produced a natural and cultural history of tears. In fact, on the evidence of this book itself, it seems that a great deal of attention has been paid to tears, time out of mind, but perhaps this fascination has not been very sustained, or coherent, and certainly it has not been packaged in such a popular form.
Tom Lutz's range is enormous; he can do psychological, anthropological, historical, neurological, theological, sociological, physio logical, philosophical, literary, cinematic, arty and pop. He writes well, too, and has a light touch with complex theory, and a good eye for quirkiness, and the connectedness of things in general.
As Lutz points out weeping is universal among humans, and peculiar to us - claims that elephants, beavers and dolphins weep are quickly dismissed - but quite self-evidently, weeping has no universal meaning or function. It does, however, have universal fascination; we know and feel that it means something important, but we also know that it is almost impossible to know what.
Crying may appear to have the glamour of spontaneity, of artless emotional truth; it may appear to be something beyond conscious control and so one of the few windows into the soul. But you don't need to read poetry or philosophy to know that it is just as often ambiguous or even dishonest, like the mythical tears of the crocodile. What appears to be an overflowing of emotion is actually controlled, at least partly, at least sometimes, by convention.
The crying of a new-born baby is clearly not the same as the ululations of a paid professional mourner in the Third World; contrariwise the stoical dry eyes of a bereaved First World War father do not truly suggest less sensibility than the sensual, manly weeping of an 18th-century intellectual contemplating an elevating landscape. A woman may weep in public from frustration, or for emotional effect, but she may also weep entirely alone; these different tears have different meanings, and may feel very different to her.
Tom Lutz covers the strange variety of weeping very well; he writes of the 20,000 French knights of Childe Roland, in the 11th-century Song of Roland, all fainting and weeping together in grief, of recent American presidents, orchestrating their tears (and of Jacqueline Kennedy restraining hers), of the "Nabob of Sob" (the pop star Johnny Ray, later outsobbed by Elvis Presley) and of teenagers going time after time to see Titanic, expressly for the pleasure of crying. All this raises fascinating questions.
Where this book is unsatisfactory is in its answers. The philosophical section, as is the way with the philosophy of emotion generally, is frustrating and comes to no conclusion. The same goes for the body science of crying: as the author says, "the current state of physiological research into such matters leaves us with more questions than answers". Nobody knows, for instance, why women weep more than men, or why their tears are chemically different from men's, or whether tears are part of arousal, or part of relief. And so on.
An editor I worked for long ago said that all journalism falls into one of two categories - Why oh Why? or Fancy That! This book, which is very high-quality journalism, attempts both, but only really succeeds at Fancy That!
The Sunday Telegraph | Sunday, December 17, 2000
