If the dark satirist is so attentive to crippling or unhinging his literary form and most artistic conventions too often taken for granted, then it should come as no surprise that he is equally devoted to content. Here, once again, it is his business and his pleasure to introduce subjects most often coyly scanted, topics stunning, repulsive, unpleasant, taboo. Chapters 10-14 investigate a sampling of such topics, including tedium and the soporific, the toilet and the bowel, cannibalism, hypermechanization, and the end of the world. Needless to say, other repellent and noxious matters are, for the brilliantly wayward and inventive satirist, quite ready at hand.
10
Boredom, not one of the topics featured in romances or cherished in tales aspiring to be thrilling or action-packed, is a persistent theme of satire and the grotesque. For instance, one of the great moments in literature near the beginning of the modern period occurs in Jane Austen’s Emma (1816) at the famed Box-Hill picnic and “exploration.” Dances and outings, for the village and country gentry, occur seldom, and out of dullness, everyone is overly enthused about the upcoming “gipsy party” occasion. But for whatever reason, that occasion does not measure up to expectations; tensions mount, and the company is caught in a mean and sullen mood by what we would now term anomie and ennui. The result is an idle game and Emma’s famous guard-down, offhand piece of surly curtness, when she insults the tedious but lovable Miss Bates. In a fit of the doldrums and victimized by what the eighteenth century called the spleen, Emma drops her honorable role as gracious gentlewoman, and a saucy other personality, a Mrs. Hyde, if you will, breaks out.
A similar moment is nearly effected by Dickens’s professional tired man and snob in Hard Times, James Harthouse, Esq. The younger son of an aristocrat, he cannot inherit, but he has been educated and refined, for no good reason whatsoever. Flippant, haughty, faddishly lazy, indifferent, disinterested, he wanders aimlessly about the planet, enervatedly migrating from idea to idea, career to career. He “had tried life as a Cornet of Dragoons, and found it a bore; and had afterwards tried it in the train of an English minister abroad, and found it a bore; and had then strolled to Jerusalem, and got bored there; and had then gone yachting about the world, and got bored everywhere.” Now he randomly falls in with industrialists and statisticians. What is more, he is absolutely without reason, principle, or interest. As for opinions, Harthouse languidly tells his new acquaintances, “I have not so much as the slightest predilection left. I assure you I attach not the least importance to any opinions. The result of the varieties of boredom I have undergone, is a . . . sentiment . . . that any set of ideas will do just as much good as any other set.”1 Emotionless, goalless, unaccountable, he can be a very unsocial and dangerous companion. In fact, his jaded posturings, half pose and half stark reality, prove attractive to others, and he almost manages to seduce Louisa, his employer’s wife, in the course of the novel. And why not? There are no standards or values in his empty book. It is surely an irony that his name is Harthouse—for he is clearly a popular figure of the time, a man without a home, a man without a heart.
The conduct of both Emma Woodhouse and James Harthouse results from key moments of self-indulgence, born of frustration, absence of purpose or direction, and tedium; the two aptly demonstrate particularly romantic and modern moments. We get inklings of such outbursts lying just beneath the surface of the emergent individual self in Dryden’s figure of Achitophel’s “restless turbulence of wit”; in the Tale of a Tub’s modern who can write, seemingly interminably, upon nothing, but with his eye fixed upon the audience’s mounting proclivities for yawnings and repose; in the Dunciad’s finale of the second book, in which Henley’s sermons and Blackmore’s poetry paralyze everyone with sleep; or in Voltaire’s Senator Pococurante in Candide, who possesses everything but who (a deviant modern Faustus) is overcome by boredom, revulsion, and fatigue. We are but a step away from the Langeweile of Goethe’s Werther, who, with nothing to do and nothing that he wants to do, expires in a suicidal vacuum.
Of course, the advent and proliferation of boredom, although a recent and peculiarly modern infestation, are hardly altogether new. The urbane Romans were familiar with an infectious lassitude and restlessness of spirit, taedium vitae, and the Church fathers in the Middle Ages were well acquainted with the sinful attractions of acedia and sloth.2 But the Renaissance catapults us into the modern era—with its especial susceptibility to a bored and solipsistic exhaustion. The breakdown of a God-centered universe with its Great Chain of Being and the advent of the Baconian inductor and the Cartesian ego as raisonneur all shifted man’s point of view, placing a new burden upon the “private eye,” the singular individual. Both science and Protestantism stressed the self’s, the conscience’s, central role in the universe, a universe newly emptied of benign or deific companionship.
At the same time (say, in the Elizabethan era), accelerated urbanization increasingly confined “lonely crowds” together in little rooms and narrow thoroughfares. The emergence of the middling class contributed to the establishment of codes of mediocrity and more circumscribed standards of conduct, and the rapid growth of newspapers and transport simply transmitted those standards widely, letting everyone know more and more what they happened to be. The rise of democracies and republics merely “freed” men into the confines of uniformatarian fads, fashions, and popular opinions. The alteration and oscillation of public standards only served to remind the individual of life’s instability and ultimately of indeterminacy and relativity.
As a consequence, man opted for the ideal of self-reliance at the same time that the self was insecure, changing, and largely unknown. An urban industrial society bequeathed time a new significance, and man was induced to live, as if a metronome sounded throughout his affairs, in the volatile realm of the present moment—but in a present moment of regimentation. As Lewis Mumford notes, a machine and clock society encourages an intense and extreme “regularity that produces apathy and atrophy—that acedia which was the bane of monastic existence, as it is likewise of the army”3
All such transitions have been taking effect over the past three or four hundred years with mounting decisiveness. It is small wonder that man’s freedom seems constricted, his haste to no purpose, his solitude oppressive, his selfishness mean, his heroism blasted. Hence the modern is an organization man trapped in his own labyrinth, a narcissist stultified by the stunted invariable features he sees in the glass. Hurled inward upon himself and left to his own devices, he presents a case akin to that of the lonely traveler who complained to Socrates that however much he journeyed, he continued being disappointed. Socrates responded tartly: “Of course you’re bored when you travel everywhere alone!—Look at the company you keep!”4 Modern man, by insisting upon leaning on himself, has simply thrown himself off balance and fallen to the floor. Quite rightly, Baudelaire’s view of his own romantic, tumultuous, and confused self is of the “Héautontimoroumenos”—the self-tormenting man.5 The term might suitably apply to all the modern generations.
Reinhard Kuhn’s recent study, therefore, of ennui in Western literature, The Demon of Noontide (1976), is of the kind long overdue. Yet excellent as Kuhn’s book is, it does not particularly stress the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the truth is that we have witnessed a boredom explosion in the modern era.6 Since Descartes, modern man has been motivated to focus upon the self as the apex and assessor of value. With the advent of the era of mass production, time and self have come to be valued insofar as they are made, produced, marketed, developed, manipulated, and sold: “Caught within the formidable pressures of time and the social world, the self is reduced to the status of what it can produce, accomplish, and achieve, or whatever terms may be used to designate this purely instrumental relationship.”7 Hence, in modern mythologies, the individual attempts to read himself into daydream scenarios of task-performance and success stories. It is significant, for instance, that only in the last two centuries have we witnessed the rise of pornography, which posits the male self as infinitely capable of an endless cycle of sexual performance and orgasm. Yet, because he is not a constant, not a perpetual-motion machine, man cannot simply continue indefinitely to be progressive, productive, successful. Therein lies his ultimate frustration and disillusionment: he cannot live up to his private mythopoeic dream, nor will his life unfold with heroic regularity and grandeur.
Rather, his life is a recurrent cycle of hope, anticipation, experience, and disillusionment, as Samuel Johnson repeatedly observed: “We desire, we pursue, we obtain, we are satiated; we desire something else, and begin a new pursuit.”8 His world is constituted, in short, by the paradox of precoital frenzy and postcoital longueur, as Shakespeare affirmed of “lust in action”:
till action, lust
Is perjured, murderous, bloody, full of blame,
Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust;
Enjoy’d no sooner but despised straight;
Past reason hunted; and no sooner had,
Past reason hated.
Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream.9
Hence alienation, ennui, and despair proliferate. Man has elected to rely upon himself, and he fails to find his chosen topic continuously creative, reliable, or even interesting. As the crux of his modernity, contemporary narcissistic man elects to mate with and to marry himself.10 Then follows the falling out of love, the sordid marital squabbles, and ultimately the breakup—or the breakdown.
John O. Lyons, in an important study of the self, suggests that the modern creation of a self-conscious, gesturing, melodramatic, and “performing self” emerged fully with the generation maturing in the 1760s.11 But the modern self-aware individualist revolutionary, self-dependent, self-reflexive, has been taking shape since the Renaissance.12 With the commencement of the romantic era, he assumes distinctive contours, questing for “spontaneous overflow,” for “peaking,” and even for orgiastic moments of immediacy and self-realization that all too often collapse into “dejection.”13 William Wordsworth is a case in point; the epic that romantic man aspired to recite features only himself: “A Traveller I am / And all my Tale is of myself.”14 Yet such a devotion and such a quest are destined to come to grief as the lonesome persona flutters and fails and his drama too frequently peters out.
What brought on this disillusion and despair in the romantic era? Curiously, George Steiner has hypothesized that the nineteenth century’s “great ennui” was brought on throughout Europe by grand promises and “great expectations” of the French Revolution and by the apparent heroic stature of Napoleon and the excitement of war, troop movements, liberal political promises, change, and altercation that afterward came to nothing, leaving a resounding anticlimax as legacy to the remainder of the century.15
Steiner is only partly right: the Revolution did seem to make promises to European man. But the Renaissance also proposed reinvigoration, increased trade with the Orient assured luxuries, the voyagers’ new frontiers seemed boundless, the Enlightenment guaranteed light, science assured panaceas, the idea of progress ensured advancement, the Encyclopedia prescribed and betokened knowledge. But the manufacturers shipped C.O.D., and their machinery made them fall short in quotas and in delivery. Thereupon commenced a general disillusionment that has deepened and grown more profound during the last two centuries. Promises engendered energetic explosions of anticipation that only became stoppered and suppressed. Hence, as Jacques Barzun remarks, “Byronic melancholy, which is to say almost all nineteenth-century melancholy, had its roots in energy repressed. Ennui, as bored young men have always discovered, is the product of enforced inaction or curbed desire.”16
Yet, paradoxically, even the revolutionary self’s desires were contradictory, negative, and self-destructive. In the nineteenth century, so sure did man become that life could not live up to expectations that we might take Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s drama Axel as a kind of archetype. At a key moment the lordly Axel de Auersperg obtains everything—a castle in the Black Forest, youth, vigor, and good looks. To top it off, he finds a fantastic treasure in gold and jewels and a beloved, the Princess Sarah de Maupers. Yet at that instant of realization, he turns his back upon life with high disdain: “Vivre? les serviteurs feront cela pour nous.”17 Let the peons and the domestics do the living, make and clean up the messes; the high soul is above reality, above corporeal existence. At the opposite extreme, and equally as viable, reclines the soporific and exhausted sensibility, damaged by life, as portrayed in Verlaine’s “Langueur” (1883): “The lonely soul is sick at heart with impenetrable ennui.”18 In both cases, the self’s suffering the torments of life is simultaneously exhibited with perverse pride as the artist’s medallion and disease.
In fact, so conventional among the French poets became the reaction against life and hostility toward the bourgeoisie that it is the hallmark of art in nineteenth-century France.19 André Gide observed that “The major grievance against [the symbolist school] is its lack of curiosity concerning life . . . all of them were pessimists, self-abnegators, defeatists, ‘bored with the gloomy hospital’ [Mallarmé] that was for them our country (I mean: the world), ‘monotonous and unjust,’ as Laforgue said. For them, poetry became a refuge, their only haven from hideous reality”20
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that disappointment was largely individual and private. The great romantic heroes—Goethe’s Werther, Rousseau’s confessional self, Chateaubriand’s René, Sénancour’s Obermann, Byron’s Manfred, Sainte-Beuve’s Joseph Delorme, Flaubert’s Frédéric Moreau—all withdraw into the cradle of the self where they suffer acute mental torment, lassitude, and debilitation.21 Only once in his career did Baudelaire attempt to exorcise such haunting personal guides: “Vanish therefore, false shades of René, of Obermann, and of Werther; flee into the haze of the void, monstrous creations of indolence and isolation; like the swine in the Lake of Gennesaret, go, plunge back into the enchanted forests from whence the fairy-tale enemies dragged you, sheep assaulted by romantic giddiness. The genius of action no longer allows you to dwell amongst us.”22
But “the genius of action” does not prevail, and, like Hamlet, the poet retreats again into the world of hesitation, contemplation, self-contradiction, and bad dreams.23 That is the mal du siécle, as Ruskin once confirmed: “On the whole, these are much sadder ages than the early ones; not sadder in a noble and deep way, but in a dim wearied way,—the way of ennui, and jaded intellect, and uncomfortableness of soul and body. The Middle Ages had their wars and agonies, but also intense delights. Their gold was dashed with blood; but ours is sprinkled with dust.”24
Thus we are faced with the paradox that the intensely energetic nineteenth century, a period given over to the most daring explorations of self, discovered only decadence, decay, inertia, controversion, and loss of self. In any event, the remainder of the century witnessed the creation of great archetypal figures self-tormented by indolence and despairing fatigue. Here are the clear tones of Kierkegaard: “I do not care for anything. I do not care to ride, for the exercise is too violent. I do not care to walk, walking is too stenuous. I do not care to lie down, for I should either have to remain lying, and I do not care to do that, or I should have to get up again, and I do not care to do that either. Summa summarum: I do not care at all.”25
“I do not care at all”: these words ought to remind us of the triumphantly placid denial of Herman Melville’s Bartleby: “I would prefer not to.” They poignantly represent the individual’s total withdrawal from society into the self. Huysmans’s Des Esseintes, in A Rebaurs (1884), is a similar naysayer, the pale aesthete who turns night into day and contracts his sensibility until it quivers alone in his own apartments amid a detritus of odors, liquors, manuscripts, and flowers. Pater too addresses ideal sensualists, who are enjoined at the close of Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873) to “burn with a hard gemlike flame”; but they might well burn themselves up. That is precisely the case with the notorious Oblomov, the title figure in Goncharov’s 1859 novel; he simply withdraws vacuously and deliriously like an infant to a sofa and defies the realms of society and of time.26 Still more invidious is the fate of Dostoevsky’s renowned Underground Man, who burrows to the center of wretchedness to guarantee a specious, isolated, and imprisoned “freedom.” And, not among the least, there is in James’s “The Beast in the Jungle” (1903) John Marcher, a man who “marches” nowhere, who sacrifices his entire life egomaniacally to “waiting” and “watching” for the advent of his life, his destiny. But his destiny was to discover that he was moribund, defunct, a man without a destiny or a life. So much may be said for the avatars of the romantic self. The nineteenth century tracked the elusive self to its lair, and the beast that he proved to be was a poor, bare, forked, unaccommodated creature indeed.
When we turn to the great modernist writers of the present century, we encounter much of the same patterns of behavior—not only intensified but also expanded to include the authors themselves. Edmund Wilson remarked this expansion and this paradox in which (in Oscar Wilde’s terms from “The Critic as Artist”) life imitates art:
The heroes of the Symbolists would rather drop out of the common life than have to struggle to make themselves a place in it. . . . And the heroes of the contemporary writers . . . are in general as uncompromising . . . sometimes, indeed, the authors themselves seem almost to have patterned their lives on the mythology of the earlier generation: the Owen Aherne and the Michael Robartes of Yeats, with their lonely towers and mystic chambers, their addiction to the hermetic philosophy—and Yeats himself, with his astrology and spiritualism, his own reiterated admonitions . . . of the inferiority of the life of action to the life of solitary vision: Paul Valéry’s M. Teste, sunken also in solitary brooding . . . and Teste’s inventor, the great poet who can hardly bring himself to explain why he cannot bring himself to write poetry; the ineffectual fragmentary imagination, the impotence and resignation, of the poet of “Gerontion” and “The Waste Land”; the supine and helpless hero of “A la Recherche du Temps Perdu,” with his application of prodigious intellectual energy to differentiating the emotions and sensations which arise from his passive contacts with life and with his preference for lying in bed by himself and worrying about Albertine’s absences to getting up and taking her out—Proust himself, who put into practice the regime which Huysmans had invented for his hero, keeping his shutters closed by day and exercising his sensibility by night . . . Joyce’s Bloom, with his animated consciousness and his inveterate ineptitude; Joyce’s new hero [H.C. Earwicker] who surpasses even the feats of sleeping of Proust’s narrator and M. Teste by remaining asleep through an entire novel; and Gertrude Stein who has withdrawn into herself more completely, who has spun herself a more impenetrable cocoon.27
In all such literature, authors and characters now participate, and Wilson detects a “sullenness, a lethargy, a sense of energies ingrown and sometimes festering.” Moreover, he suggests that philosophers, mathematicians, and scientists reflect a similar “metaphysical hypertrophy,” which he attributes to the general social and political environment.28
If anything, the spectrum of boredom in the twentieth century has been deliberately broadened well beyond the individual, so that major works scrutinize an entire exhausted society. As might be expected, such works are devised by the satirists. Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks (1901), for example, surveys three generations of a family in decline and disintegration; increased aesthetic sensibility simply spells degeneration and extinction for the clan. Céline, in Voyage au bout del la nuit (1932), depicts an entire society of haunted, lost, indifferent individuals wandering aimlessly in the streets, seeking withdrawal, passivity, and isolation. Antonio Machado, in “Del passado efimero” (ca. 1912), depicts all of Spain as listless and impersonal, worn out, hypochondriacal, and unrepresentative:
boredom; . . .
This man is neither of yesterday nor of tomorrow,
but of never; of Spanish stock,
he is neither ripe not rotten,
he is barren fruit.29
In the brilliant novel Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (1930–42), Robert Musil portrays all of Austrian society idly and blindly “waiting for the end.” As the whole world swings interminably and irrevocably toward world war, the Austrians blissfully plan a “Collateral Campaign” to honor the Jubilee year of the emperor Franz-Joseph in 1918—the year that will rather witness the destruction of Austria. In addition, the campaign will celebrate the leader as “the Emperor of Peace”—only moments away from total war. Ulrich and his entire society are conceived as listless, blind, detached. Appropriately, the responsibility for the planned honors is situated in a committee, and we witness the most beautifully stultifying motions and bureaucratic pseudoactivity drummed up incessantly, leading the committee nowhere at all.
In a recent review, Frederick Karl proposes that perhaps Kafka can better serve as exemplar of the modern age than Joyce since in the broadest sense Kafka’s created universe projects a world enormous, allegorically vague, lost, unknown, confusing in its representation of time and space. Kafka certainly conveys the larger complexities that preoccupy twentieth-century man: randomness, indeterminacy, the sinister Freudian libido and unconscious, his animal addiction to aggression, relativity, sweeping paranoia, and preoccupation with decay.30 Somehow, Kafka’s “Hunger Artist” (1931) and “Metamorphosis” (1937) strikingly represent the dilemmas of the modern everyman. Gregor Samsa as insignificant clerk turns into insect and spends the remainder of his life in bed—(a drudge’s paradise). But his alienation, confinement, decay, and subsequent death are a dehumanized torment. And similarly, the hunger artist is the perfect absurdist representative of negative achievement: the crowning glory of his art is inactivity, nonperformance, and this total abstinence is practiced in a cage. Paradoxically, the triumph of his “art” is simultaneous and synonymous with his self-destruction. But the fickle public has turned to other fashions and knows nothing of the artist’s senseless nugatory passion for repression. So it is throughout Kafka’s oeuvre: all his protagonists are mysteriously on trial, convicted, and passively unresisting, carted away.
As we move further and further into our own century and as our topic widens its sphere, we observe how many literary works become preoccupied with almost a total existential and surrealistic absurdity, dealing with la nausée in a mad, tedious, Sisyphean world from which there is no exit: “We have at last arrived at ‘the age of assassins’ which the poet Rimbaud predicted.”31 The literary realm reflects disaster with a vaudevillean panache, as is certified in Heller’s Catch-22, Grass’s Tin Drum, and the novels of Hawkes, Barth, García Márquez, and Pynchon. A whole genre of antiutopian or dystopian novels has grown up in this century presenting the destruction of society and even of the planet.32 Science fiction too features an important strain of satiric novels, dramatizing absurdity and destruction at the planetary, galactic, and universal levels.33 All this cataclysmic fiction is offered in the ho-hum manner, exaggerating frivolous Laforguian humor and irony to a fanastic degree. Seizing upon ideas in science, writers also utilize all the pessimistic concepts available—survival of the fittest, probability theory, indeterminacy, relativity, entropy—so that much literature pictures an exhausted universe unwinding and running down.34 For “contrary to the confidence in our powers of technology and information, the prevailing image of man we find in modern art is one of impotence, uncertainty, and self-doubt.”35
In such an atmosphere a thinker like E.M. Cioran goes further than Sartre and Camus: “Toute expérience capitale est néfaste.” For him only two intellectual positions are tenable: if a man has any faith or hope, he is a fanatic, willing to turn violent and run mad. On the other hand, if he sees destroying time and the sinking world for what they are, he confronts the void and the spectacle of ennui: “Boredom reveals to us an eternity that is not the surpassing of time but its ruin; it is the infinity of putrid souls lacking in superstitions: an absolute plateau where nothing any longer hinders things from running smoothly to their own downfall.”36
Surely the most remarkable artist dramatizing universal ennui and entropy after midcentury is Samuel Beckett. His fictions are chock-full of static, crippled, and abandoned creatures confined in rooms, cells, barrels, cans. Murphy is forever secreted in his rocking chair; Malone perennially lies prone, stretched out flat, as if for sleep or death. His inactivity leads to his dissipation, disintegration into nothingness. We recollect the endless figurative postures of waiting of Beckett’s eternal denizens in Waiting for Godot (1952) that dramatize an almost fabulous torpitude. And we watch Molloy (1950), as the protagonist exhaustedly “listens” and hears that in the universe “all wilts and yields”; he hears “a world collapsing endlessly, a frozen world.”37 With Beckett we are almost at the outer extremity of universal catastrophe and immobility.
If we were to reduce our topic to farcical absurdity, we could incorporate it, as Donald Barthelme does, into a house of cards, a universe of games. The narrator of one of his stories is the perfect gamesman: he plays “Password, Twister, Breakthru, Bonanza, Stratego, Squander, and Gambit. And Quinto, Phlounder, Broker, Tactics, and Stocks & Bonds.” He plays with Amanda:
“These games are marvelous,” Amanda said. “I like them especially because they are so meaningless and boring, and trivial. These qualities, once regarded as less than desirable, are now everywhere enthroned as the key elements in our psychological lives, as reflected in the art of the period as well as—”
“Yes,” I said. Then we played: . . . Crise du Cinéma . . . Zen Zen . . . Break the Ball . . . After the Ball Is Over. . . .
“Games are the enemies of beauty, truth, and sleep,” Amanda said. The brandy was almost gone.
“There remains one more game.”
“What is it?”
“Ennui,” I said. “The easiest of all. No rules, no boards, no equipment.”
“What is Ennui?” Amanda asked, setting it up for me.
“Ennui is the absence of games,” I said, “the modern world at its most vulnerable.”38
So it is, in an entropic world of Last Mohicans, last laughs, last tangos in Paris: not the bang, but the “whimper” that T.S. Eliot believed would splinter the world. It is more deadly now than it was in the nineteenth century, when Baudelaire looked for a personal yawn to swallow up creation.39 For it has spread to the masses, has incorporated whole societies, and promises a much more infernal type of demolition. In 1978, in accordance with the trend among public relations experts and other high-minded U.S. officials of emphasizing holidays and spreading optimism, one could have observed that July 15-21 was officially designated “National Avoid Boredom Week.” It is moot, however, to observe that bureaucracy will never be able to eradicate ennui from the modern world. Whether we like it or not, boredom looks as if it is here to stay.