Books that explore the ordinary often have extraordinary appeal. For authors, there's the satisfaction of being the first to mine gold that was sitting under everyone's nose. And readers go for the genre's element of surprise: who wouldn't want to at least thumb through a volume entitled The Devil's Cup: Coffee, The Driving Force in History -- or Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World (no kidding)? A couple of years ago, A Brief History of Laughter was published. And now comes Crying: A Natural and Cultural History of Tears (W.W. Norton, 1999; $25.95) by Tom Lutz, '83, PhD '89.
An English professor at the University of Iowa, Lutz was more than a little ambitious in his approach, as the subtitle suggests. In 304 pages, he sweeps across some 2,500 years, surveying the hows and whys of crying in cultures from ancient Greek to 20th-century aboriginal Australian. He breezes through dozens of theories devised -- and, for the most part, dismissed -- by psychoanalysts, philosophers, anthropologists and other academics. His conclusion: crying is an enigma that scientists have yet to unravel, and the most enduring insights into this emotional "language" are found in fiction.
The author has an explanation for his subject's resistance to scientific methodology. Crying, he says, occurs when we are least able to verbalize our feelings. "If tears supplant articulation," he reasons, "it is small surprise that it is difficult to articulate their meaning." By contrast, emotions are the daily bread of fiction writers. In a literary roundup that corrals the likes of Sophocles and Dorothy Parker, Lutz uses their fictional characters to show that tears can be a function of pain, sorrow, pleasure or manipulation (crocodile tears). He recalls the family members in John Irving's The Cider House Rules who go to cruel lengths to make their adopted baby cry, so that they will feel needed.
Lutz still finds it surprising how little we know for certain about the physiology of weeping, given our vast experience with it. He reports that most of us go through 4,000 crying sessions in the first two years of life, for example, and that grown women weep from 30 to 64 times a year on average and men, 6 to 17 times. Yet medical researchers identified the lacrimal glands as the source of tears only within the last hundred years, and they still disagree about the process.
Psychologists, too, have preached wildly different messages on the subject, Lutz observes. The "father of behaviorism," James B. Watson, argued in the 1920s that all infant crying should be completely ignored. Self-empowerment therapists of the 1970s and '80s insisted on the cathartic value of crying, even screaming, for periods of 30 minutes or more. Yet Lutz reports that no studies offer a neuroscientific basis for the benefits of "a good cry."
Social attitudes toward crying change with the times, too -- especially judgments based on gender. Weeping as a noble male gesture has moved in and out of favor since the Trojan Wars. As Lutz relates: "When Roland, the most famous warrior of medieval France, died, 20,000 knights wept so profusely they fainted and fell from their horses." On the other hand, reports of Sen. Edmund Muskie's public display of tears -- occasioned by press speculation about his wife's mental health -- knocked him out of the 1972 presidential race, despite his protest that the moisture on his cheeks was from falling snow. Bob Dole was one of Muskie's loudest critics, claiming his tears showed "emotional instability."
Now, Americans have done a turnaround -- especially Dole. By 1996, Lutz writes, "weeping was so necessary on the campaign trail that Bob Dole, who had managed to avoid it during his first 40 years of public life, took to crying regularly." Bill Clinton "tears up at all of the appropriate moments." But, notes the author, Hillary Clinton would be ill-advised to cry publicly -- and so far, she hasn't. Why? "The men who cry prove that they are not too manly; the women who maintain stoic control of their emotions prove that they are not too 'feminine.' "
In sports, too, the weeping hero is in vogue again. Michael Jordan cried after the Bulls won the 1996 NBA championship; wrestler Kurt Angle bawled for 30 minutes after winning Olympic gold; and Derek Loville of the San Francisco 49ers has made a near-ritual of pregame tears.
The book's enormous scope is both a strength and a weakness. Lutz mostly keeps the reader engaged with thought-provoking information and offbeat illustration -- such as Charles Darwin's photo series chronicling the movement of facial muscles just before a sob. But, for example, Lutz's chapter on the psychology of tears is likely to leave the lay reader bewildered with its unwieldy cast of characters and their contradictory theories.
Another minus: Crying gives the impression that SpellCheck was its only editor. Homophones like principle and principal, affect and effect are mixed up. Shakespeare's Polonius becomes Polonious and Dylan Thomas's "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night" is identified as "Do Not Go Gently into That Dark Night."
But these are minor irritants. Speaking of which, did you know that tears provoked by irritants differ chemically from emotional tears?
