Angst Squared
Francis O'Gorman, Worrying: A Literary and Cultural History
Bloomsbury, 192pp, £14.00, ISBN 9781441151292
reviewed by Phil Jourdan
The quiet agony of worrying is a familiar topic for this reviewer. It feels necessary to state this outright, though I couldn't say why. This defensiveness, however, is quite in keeping with the spirit of Francis O’Gorman’s Worrying: A Literary and Cultural History. Its worried author spends the first dozen or so pages of his book on worrying mostly worrying about how tricky the act of writing about worrying has proven and will continue to prove to be. This book is itself an act of worrying.
From the outset, even a sympathetic reader will likely be alarmed by the sheer restlessness on display, with O'Gorman nervously qualifying his statements, drawing attention to himself as a worrier who even worries about the challenges of pinning down the very meaning of ‘worrying’ – and all this, he insists, not for purposes of self-help. Unintentionally, in trying to form my own thoughts on his ‘literary and cultural history,’ I appear to have rather been influenced by O'Gorman's self-consciously flighty aesthetic. Which, indeed, turns out to be one of the major problems with his book: it’s a book about worrying, but rather than illuminate a surprisingly challenging topic, it ends up doing no more than to demonstrate how surprisingly challenging the topic is, by showing us a worrier doing what he does. Worrying itself, disappointingly, remains as opaque as it was when we first picked up the book.
O’Gorman writes about the many faces of worrying eloquently (‘Worry enters edifices that don’t look too stable. Worry makes of unfixed foundations its best home’) but he seems to consider the challenge of answering the questions they naturally raise optional.
In the right mood, this is inspiring stuff; but the book remains shallow throughout. O’Gorman does not really explore the heart or the mind, or the shift from the ideal to the real; he describes various attitudes to worry, philosophical and practical, but remains cautiously unprovocative about it all. I fear that this will count as a low blow, but I couldn't shake off my impression, as I was reading the following sentences, of O'Gorman as uncharacteristically (for him) lacking in self-awareness in those moments that best sum up the way his own squirming on the page looks like a lot of avoidance tactics: ‘Worry refers us, often enough, to matters about which we can bring ourselves to act. Worry, the fretful evaluation of the options in our life, might seem to distract us from the business of living happily. But it also distracts us – in our consuming anxieties about the quotidian, the humdrum – from troubles that dwarf our ordinary concerns.’ In this book's case, considerably less worrying about whether he was going to do a good job might well have helped O'Gorman create something remarkable. To the book's detriment, I think, he chose instead to focus on making scrupulous observations that underwhelm precisely because they touch on things that every worrier already sort of knows. Such intellectual shyness from someone as learned and acquainted with his subject as O’Gorman seems out of place.
It’s sometimes hard to tell whether O’Gorman is simply worriedly pre-emptying the kind of criticism he knows might be levelled at him for even daring to write as he has.
This should have clued him in to the looming possibility that his own book was at risk of being tedious or irritating. At times, it can be both, but it wouldn’t be fair to say that this is a boring or annoying book. It has the curse of being one of those quirky titles that just feels overdue for those invested a priori in the subject matter and unnecessary for others. It’s hard to win in these situations.
In one of the book's most confident and rewarding chapters, O'Gorman links worrying to the ‘capacity to think, the very defining faculty of human consciousness in the deepest narratives of our culture.’ If there was ever a justification for a specifically literary history of worrying, it's this: that our capacity to think, and the discursive quality of our ongoing little self-constructions, have led us to tell stories about ourselves as thinkers. And our ability to think freely is, in O'Gorman's words, ‘part of the most significant intellectual definition of what “freedom” now means.’
I think he is right to go on to single out the notion of choice as a particularly fundamental aspect of the kind of worrying that we love to hate. We certainly can confuse ourselves into thinking that it is somehow philosophically important that we consider our choices to the point of fretfulness:
It seems that we are finally going to address some of the less easily romanticised factors we suspect might be at play in the process of worrying. But from these premises, O’Gorman doesn’t dare go much farther. In fact, after the interest of such remarks, what follows can even sound curiously glib: ‘Yet choice is hard to handle! […] Too much choice paralyses choosing.’ ‘The wealth of information intensifies the difficulty about decisions.’ Or, more strikingly because of its unintentional fussiness: ‘The cosmetic industry advises us that we can choose what we look like. The postmodern world of flexible identity even means we can choose different personae […] The internet chat room allows us space to define new roles and new identities […] the adverts tell us we can choose this lifestyle or that…’ This is disappointing, not least because it felt as though the book might finally prove surprising.
‘Perhaps,’ O’Gorman writes, ‘you can identify worriers by the way in which they answer a normal, casual inquiry about how they are. […] A worrier might be lurking behind the response: “Not too bad, thanks very much.” Not too bad? The measure is the relative absence of gloominess, difficulty, problems, pain. Daring to be happy is a risk.’ So is daring to take a serious stand on worrying when you know the topic as intimately as O'Gorman does – and it might have been worthwhile him to do so. My criticism here is not that he ought to have produced a series of brilliantly innovative statements on worry or that he should have adopted a totally different approach – as he tells us right at the start, ‘This book has had some trouble getting off the ground. […] Different readers have wanted it to be different things’ – but that, on the evidence of the final text, as someone starting the conversation about ‘worry’ as something literary or cultural or simply interesting, he did not display much courage.
It is an uncomfortable thing to focus so much on the author’s choices in this way. How far can you go before you are simply talking about the author, about whom you know nothing, instead of about his book? But one of the curious things about Worrying is that it invites its readers to keep the author in mind. ‘I wish I could catch myself worrying and then stand back and watch,’ O’Gorman says. ‘But the truth is I can’t definitely answer my own question about worry and words because – I can’t stand back and watch.’ Yet there are times when it is perfectly possible and even expected that one should catch oneself in the very act of worrying: the writing of a book, which takes several (increasingly self-correcting) drafts, is one of them. Worrying on the page, in O’Gorman’s hands, becomes an aesthetic principle, and it’s not especially effective.
By the time I had finished Worrying: A Literary and Cultural History I felt distinctly unenlightened, and let down by the efforts of an author who had so many chances to address in practice what he knew were obvious potential pitfalls in his approach to a topic too many of us are prepared to have an opinion on: ‘There’s something easy about worry and something egotistic.’ Yes, and surely going for what’s easy here was never going to amount to something truly worthwhile.
From the outset, even a sympathetic reader will likely be alarmed by the sheer restlessness on display, with O'Gorman nervously qualifying his statements, drawing attention to himself as a worrier who even worries about the challenges of pinning down the very meaning of ‘worrying’ – and all this, he insists, not for purposes of self-help. Unintentionally, in trying to form my own thoughts on his ‘literary and cultural history,’ I appear to have rather been influenced by O'Gorman's self-consciously flighty aesthetic. Which, indeed, turns out to be one of the major problems with his book: it’s a book about worrying, but rather than illuminate a surprisingly challenging topic, it ends up doing no more than to demonstrate how surprisingly challenging the topic is, by showing us a worrier doing what he does. Worrying itself, disappointingly, remains as opaque as it was when we first picked up the book.
O’Gorman writes about the many faces of worrying eloquently (‘Worry enters edifices that don’t look too stable. Worry makes of unfixed foundations its best home’) but he seems to consider the challenge of answering the questions they naturally raise optional.
Worry is the unhappy child of a turn from the Gods to man. It is, at one level, the result of the broadest shift in human culture from heart to mind; from a faith in an abstract fate to the world of human selection; from the Age of Faith to the Age of Enlightenment; from the ideal to the real; from the skies to the earth.
In the right mood, this is inspiring stuff; but the book remains shallow throughout. O’Gorman does not really explore the heart or the mind, or the shift from the ideal to the real; he describes various attitudes to worry, philosophical and practical, but remains cautiously unprovocative about it all. I fear that this will count as a low blow, but I couldn't shake off my impression, as I was reading the following sentences, of O'Gorman as uncharacteristically (for him) lacking in self-awareness in those moments that best sum up the way his own squirming on the page looks like a lot of avoidance tactics: ‘Worry refers us, often enough, to matters about which we can bring ourselves to act. Worry, the fretful evaluation of the options in our life, might seem to distract us from the business of living happily. But it also distracts us – in our consuming anxieties about the quotidian, the humdrum – from troubles that dwarf our ordinary concerns.’ In this book's case, considerably less worrying about whether he was going to do a good job might well have helped O'Gorman create something remarkable. To the book's detriment, I think, he chose instead to focus on making scrupulous observations that underwhelm precisely because they touch on things that every worrier already sort of knows. Such intellectual shyness from someone as learned and acquainted with his subject as O’Gorman seems out of place.
It’s sometimes hard to tell whether O’Gorman is simply worriedly pre-emptying the kind of criticism he knows might be levelled at him for even daring to write as he has.
At one level, I’d like to be able to live in a community where it’s possible to talk about the little or larger pains of the inner life. And, at another, I have a dreadful feeling that this is self-centered […] I also fear, wholly hypocritically, having to listen too much to others’ worries.
This should have clued him in to the looming possibility that his own book was at risk of being tedious or irritating. At times, it can be both, but it wouldn’t be fair to say that this is a boring or annoying book. It has the curse of being one of those quirky titles that just feels overdue for those invested a priori in the subject matter and unnecessary for others. It’s hard to win in these situations.
In one of the book's most confident and rewarding chapters, O'Gorman links worrying to the ‘capacity to think, the very defining faculty of human consciousness in the deepest narratives of our culture.’ If there was ever a justification for a specifically literary history of worrying, it's this: that our capacity to think, and the discursive quality of our ongoing little self-constructions, have led us to tell stories about ourselves as thinkers. And our ability to think freely is, in O'Gorman's words, ‘part of the most significant intellectual definition of what “freedom” now means.’
I think he is right to go on to single out the notion of choice as a particularly fundamental aspect of the kind of worrying that we love to hate. We certainly can confuse ourselves into thinking that it is somehow philosophically important that we consider our choices to the point of fretfulness:
The privileging of choice is a natural corollary of free market economics that champions open competition as the driver of prosperity […] The idea of the free market has become entangled with the conception that human life will flourish in every sense if each individual is ‘freed' not only to think for themselves but to compete against everyone else without hindrance except that of law. In turn, the free market has become the economic basis for a faith in the 'right' of the individual to act according to their own independent decisions, to choose freely.
It seems that we are finally going to address some of the less easily romanticised factors we suspect might be at play in the process of worrying. But from these premises, O’Gorman doesn’t dare go much farther. In fact, after the interest of such remarks, what follows can even sound curiously glib: ‘Yet choice is hard to handle! […] Too much choice paralyses choosing.’ ‘The wealth of information intensifies the difficulty about decisions.’ Or, more strikingly because of its unintentional fussiness: ‘The cosmetic industry advises us that we can choose what we look like. The postmodern world of flexible identity even means we can choose different personae […] The internet chat room allows us space to define new roles and new identities […] the adverts tell us we can choose this lifestyle or that…’ This is disappointing, not least because it felt as though the book might finally prove surprising.
‘Perhaps,’ O’Gorman writes, ‘you can identify worriers by the way in which they answer a normal, casual inquiry about how they are. […] A worrier might be lurking behind the response: “Not too bad, thanks very much.” Not too bad? The measure is the relative absence of gloominess, difficulty, problems, pain. Daring to be happy is a risk.’ So is daring to take a serious stand on worrying when you know the topic as intimately as O'Gorman does – and it might have been worthwhile him to do so. My criticism here is not that he ought to have produced a series of brilliantly innovative statements on worry or that he should have adopted a totally different approach – as he tells us right at the start, ‘This book has had some trouble getting off the ground. […] Different readers have wanted it to be different things’ – but that, on the evidence of the final text, as someone starting the conversation about ‘worry’ as something literary or cultural or simply interesting, he did not display much courage.
It is an uncomfortable thing to focus so much on the author’s choices in this way. How far can you go before you are simply talking about the author, about whom you know nothing, instead of about his book? But one of the curious things about Worrying is that it invites its readers to keep the author in mind. ‘I wish I could catch myself worrying and then stand back and watch,’ O’Gorman says. ‘But the truth is I can’t definitely answer my own question about worry and words because – I can’t stand back and watch.’ Yet there are times when it is perfectly possible and even expected that one should catch oneself in the very act of worrying: the writing of a book, which takes several (increasingly self-correcting) drafts, is one of them. Worrying on the page, in O’Gorman’s hands, becomes an aesthetic principle, and it’s not especially effective.
By the time I had finished Worrying: A Literary and Cultural History I felt distinctly unenlightened, and let down by the efforts of an author who had so many chances to address in practice what he knew were obvious potential pitfalls in his approach to a topic too many of us are prepared to have an opinion on: ‘There’s something easy about worry and something egotistic.’ Yes, and surely going for what’s easy here was never going to amount to something truly worthwhile.