I’m taking the stairs
As I was scrolling through headlines about the Istanbul bombing, I came across one potentially less depressing Turkish news item, from Sabah: “Mental Patient Beats Doctor in Elevator for Six Floors.” Tor the first time in ages, I found myself thinking of Grey’s Anatomy, a show I used to watch while I was supposed to be writing my dissertation. Grey’s Anatomy is so famous for its use of elevators that, even in the homeland of Genette, young girls are making video montages about it: in the words of Youtube user piluka6: “all happens in that elevator!”
The elevator in Grey’s Anatomy functions much like the inn in Part I of Don Quijote: all plot problems are resolved by dumping the relevant characters in there and letting them sort it out. The characters themselves openly acknowledge this formal property of the elevator, in metatextual remarks such as: “I don’t want any drama today, I’m taking the stairs”; or (meaningfully): “Anything can happen in the elevator.” This is an example of what Viktor Shklovsky called “laying bare the device,” and it always struck me as rather daring because, when you take a cold hard look at the formal narrative possibilities afforded by the device of the hospital elevator, “inexhaustible” isn’t the first word that comes to mind.
Dear readers, I wish I could tell you that “Mental Patient Beats Doctor in Elevator for Six Floors” was a funny, upbeat story. I don’t mean uproariously funny, because violence against doctors is no laughing matter, but maybe funny like Dante’s Comedy (one year of therapy exacted from the doctor’s person, per floor?).
The thing is that for the story to have any comedic value at all, it’s essential that the mental patient be beating up his own doctor. This condition was simply not met at the Dokuz Eylül University Teaching Hospital, where the beaten doctor was, rather, a totally unrelated ER intern who happened to be taking the elevator. Less funny still, the mental patient was somehow armed with a stick, so that, standing behind the intern and beating him repeatedly on the head, he eventually “transformed the elevator into a lake of blood.”
When the doors finally opened at the psychiatry department on the sixth floor, the mental patient ran away and disappeared. The intern, of course, had to take the elevator right back down to the ER, to get six stitches in his head. (In the meantime, security guards found the mental patient by tracking his bloody footprints, and transferred him to a different hospital.) And what did fate hold in store for the medical resident? Another elevator ride back to the psych department, to address his emotional symptoms, chiefly: a feeling of uneasiness in elevators.
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Tags: comparative literature, dissertation, doctors, Don Quijote, politics, today's youth, Viktor Shklovsky
August 3rd, 2008 at 5:37 pm
How about:
An American psychiatrist sings a Tom Lehrer song upon meeting his Russian born patient for the first time.
I have a friend in Minsk,
Who has a friend in Pinsk,
Whose friend in Omsk
Has friend in Tomsk
With friend in Akmolinsk.
His friend in Alexandrovsk
Has friend in Petropavlovsk,
Whose friend somehow
Is solving now
The problem in Dnepropetrovsk.
Leaves you kinda lingering for sanity. Also, this happens to be true and the (utterly not mental) Russian happens to be my girlfriend.
August 3rd, 2008 at 6:38 pm
Dear LK, thank you for contributing this interesting case. Now that we already know the answer to why the psychiatrist falls asleep, we must surely turn to the question of why the psychiatrist bursts into song. In the meantime I hope this form of therapy proves as effective as it sounds strenuous.
The song brings me to mind of an experience I had 2 years ago, when my then-psychiatrist asked me if I wanted a “tip” for an article I could write for the New Yorker. I didn’t know what to say, so I was like, “Uh, OK.” The tip turned out to be that his daughter’s college friend was working at the Whitney Biennial and discovered that the Thai artist Rirkrit had to modify his “Peace Tower” for “political reasons,” where the political reasons turned out to be that he wanted to close down the traffic and stage a peace protest on Madison Avenue. “Isn’t that fucked up?” my therapist asked. I still don’t know what part of this was supposed to be a story idea.
The “friend in Minsk” further reminds me of an anecdote told to me by the literary historian Luba Golburt, about a guy she knew who said that he was “three degrees away from Tolstoy.” When Luba asked what he meant, he said that his father’s father’s father was sitting on a bench in Tula or Dnepropetrovsk or somewhere, and a man walked by, and that man was… Tolstoy. (My first thought was: “Now I am five degrees away from Tolstoy!”)
Yours in the name of science… e
August 4th, 2008 at 8:02 am
Ah, the measure of man makes for a Poetry of the Absurd.
1) The psychiatrist sleeps perchance to dream that he is not a psychiatrist.
2) Um, obviously your then-psychiatrist was birthing the élan of a somewhat circular concept: Protesting the Protest of Protest.
3) Forget Kevin Bacon, Six Degrees of Tolstoy is maximally erudite. I just slipped in at six — score!