~by
David Aiken~
Boredom is not a phenomenon from the world.
It is an echo from an inert mind.
In his novel Le Rouge et le Noir,
which was published in 1830, Stendhal writes of his protagonist, Julien Sorel,
that he frightens his youthful peers because of his excessive ‘energy’.
Just to
introduce the character briefly, Julien Sorel is a bourgeois clerk librarian
who is employed by a wealthy peer of the French aristocracy. Sorel is poor, a
country bumpkin from ‘lesser’ France (i.e., the provinces), and has the
(mis-)fortune to be transplanted from the hinterlands of France into the
brilliant and complex aristocratic ecosystem which is at the core of 19th
century Parisian society (i.e., the enriched, the endowed, the entitled,
and the ennobled). Although he is not yet a member of the clergy, Julien Sorel
is educated in the tradition of poor humanist priests; regrettably, however, he
is also socially ambitious in a world where the social classes can never
successfully mix. The plot in The Red and the Black hinges precisely on
this “caste” tension, where the irresistible force of a socially humble man’s
individual merit and ambition is pitted against the immovable rock of society’s
lethargically enshrined rules of inherited rank.
Because
of Julien Sorel’s education and personal intellectual merit and efforts, as
well as a little pushing from his priestly teachers, once our budding Tartuffe
becomes established in his clerical employ in Paris, he discovers that his
learning and his reflective habits of mind intimidate the indolent but
aristocratic young people in his entourage—those who have inherited their
merits and their high-society positions from their wealthy families and
connections. From this strain between Julien and his social milieu shall unfold
more complexity in the plot intrigue, of course; and so, writes Stendhal about
this bourgeois arriviste Julien, “Dans ce siècle, où toute énergie est morte,
son énergie leur fair peur.”
So, the first characteristic in this story
for our consideration is énergie, which it seems should be understood as
being something like intellectual daring, emotional drive, or just simply
commitment to an idea that inspires and moves our hero to action. In the
context of this description Stendhal creates an additional tension between ridicule,
which serves to oppress and enthrall Parisian society in general, and an
intriguing notion of personal vitality, which renders certain
individuals social mis-fits who seem always to be crusading for some
greater fairness in or amelioration of the social context.
To be exact,
Stendhal’s narrative reasoning suggests that the fear of ridicule had
long since died in his 19th century, leaving behind a particular
hardened ‘moral’ shell for the coming generations of society; and this moral
shell of codified and inflexible opinion both dominates individuals and
transforms them into a homogeneous flock. This staid mass, in turn, demands
from its younger constituent elements that each should conform to inherited
ideas and usages, and it uses ridicule and mockery to subdue and beat the
wayward down into submission. The idea, by way of metaphor, is that as we grow
up we are enculturated through a cookie-cutter mold, which in turn comforts the
previous generations of our society because the elders can then rest assured
that one young pressed cookie will look just like another and that all cookies
will look just alike for the foreseeable future. The promise of success in such
a world lies in conformity—like peas in a pod, everyone is and acts like everyone
else. [By way of a comparable albeit more explicitly philosophical excursus: in
his 1689 “A Letter about Toleration” §4 The limits on toleration, John Locke writes about precisely the same type of cookie-making
zealotry that accompanies the imposed and imposing conformity in the Christian
religious communities of his day.]
The second characteristic to which Stendhal
draws our attention in his novel is to the adhesive
that unites the herd, this society, into one homogeneous group. The binding glue
for this particular 19th century Parisian society, which is so
tightly girdled and entrapped inside the mold of its received ideas, opinions,
manners, etc., is ridicule. The vital piece of information here is that
the younger generations are not even bothered by the fear of ridicule,
because they have simply slipped into the dead, but actively constraining
cookie mold as inheritors of a previous generation’s battle of words and ideas.
The young themselves have no intellectual or emotional investment in the mold
that is imposed on them, and which they unwittingly adopt. They are taught the
“proper” way of doing things, and their world asks of them not that they should
have their own ideas and battles, but only that they should conform to what
they have received from those who have gone before. The intellectual battles for
ideological terrain are long past; theirs is now simply to continue to change
the dressings on the metaphorical and never-healing wounds.
In
his chronicling of 19th century France, Stendhal minutely observes
and dissects the phenomenon of cultural transmission. There is an inherently
dialectical and dialogical tension among and between generations. One
generation fights for its manners, usages, and beliefs, and then passes that
acquired ‘body’ of beliefs and actions onto the children and the children’s
children, who receive and believe because they respect or fear their parents
and their elders. In the best of cases, from the point of view of a Nietzschean
philosopher anyway, as the child becomes the adult of the new generation he will
challenge the teachings he has received, fighting his own battles and winning
through to his own understanding of the world. In most cases, though, this
struggle will not occur (so also says Nietzsche!); and the succeeding
generation, aimless, will meekly ramble around until individuals of a same
class come together into a free-ranging herd, conforming to and obeying the cookie-press
precepts and “truths” they received through the mother-milk.
This brings us to the third characteristic
that interests Stendhal in Le Rouge et le Noir – ennui, or
boredom. Cookies, per our metaphorical usage, are uniformly jaded. They are not
encouraged to challenge their shape, nor the color of their sprinkles, nor
their position on the serving plate; they are simply pressed out and expected
to sit patiently, in all the glory of their cookie-ness, waiting until whatever
in the world is going to happen inevitably happens. And so, goes proverbial
wisdom, it should be with every generation’s children. In such a metaphor, coming-into-adulthood,
except on the rare occasion, is not marked by the cookie-individual personally
doing battle with the dragons that live in the hidden places of our minds,
dragons that have snuck in through the education we have received and that have
tucked themselves away in the corners of our imagination, dragons that have
carefully secreted themselves in our most shadowy places and there patiently
await the Dawning-of-Their-Day. (—The image of dragons is from the first
discourse in Nietzsche’s Zarathustra; Immanuel Kant would have very
properly called such ‘mind-critters’, Verstandeswesen).
In the social construct that Stendhal is opening up to us, the typical
coming-into-adulthood tends to be marked by acceptance of and conformity to the
teachings and traditions received from the hands of the Elders. This means that
the excitement of discovery for self, the heuristic call of the wild and of
engaging in one’s own personal and private ‘heroic’ tussles against the demons
that attend us and stalk us, is not only not an outcome desired
by the Elders of our societies (including our educational institutions), but it
is aggressively discouraged, indeed excluded from those
individual right-of-passage experiences that are considered, at least by
Nietzschean philosophers, to be healthy and good. So it would seem that we may tentatively
conclude that it is therefore ‘the way of things’ in human society that we
should be profoundly bored.
Like
Nietzsche after him with his ideas about the world’s Great Men and of social
evolution through their Will to Power, Stendhal seemed to understand that each
generation is automatically the hero of its own stories. However, while this
may be true of generations, most individuals probably will not
ever become authentically heroic, precisely because they are being pressed and
molded into the societal cookie patterns (teachings and traditions) that
require no individual thought or action, but only obedience to the principles
of conformity and a passive mind. This irrepressible ennui at the heart
of Stendhal’s vision of 19th century France, whose controlling
mechanism is ridicule, is directly translatable today by our alpha-state
inducing relationship to education, to work, and to technology, which first
lures our eyes to the screen, then dulls our brains and senses.
Ennui – the emotional flat-line of the Nietzschean masses. This is the
defining characteristic of the Merseaults (…remember Camus’ L’Etranger)
of our world, of the “outsider” who does not remember whether his mother died
today, yesterday, or whether she is still sitting at home right now having her
afternoon tea and crumpets.
However, we must not become complacent,
believing that all is completely undone for the thinking imagination. The world
become existential and therefore ultimately unpredictable, still invites the
individual to dare. To dare to rebel; to dare to listen to the sound of
the different drummer; and to dare to follow the path toward the sound of that
new drumbeat by taking the high road of our own thoughts and dreams and
visions, that most solitary and desert way which so titillated and so seduced
Stendhal’s Julien Sorel and Mlle de la Mole, and which so profoundly enthused
Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. To be sure, the terminus of this journey is seldom, if
ever, specific happiness. But then how could it be? Are we not, after all,
daring to break the pressed cookie mold, and thereby necessarily drawing down
upon ourselves the disapprobation, indeed the wrath, of the Elder generations
of cookie-makers? But while this journey’s end may not be happiness in the most
traditional sense of social contentment, Nietzsche has argued that we will
finally find at the end of that road freedom in the truest philosophical
sense.
And what will these new cookies-sans-molds
look like? Some will make great contributions to the world of men; some will
wreak great havoc. Some will become admired; some reviled. All will be Rebels
in courage. Thinkers of thoughts independent. Ayn-Randian-type Architects of
their own realities. New-world Iconoclasts. The Ridiculed. The Isolated and Insular.
The Street Fighters of the world. The Alive. And finally –the Dead.
(Modified from an original essay published
August 29, 2012)
Further reading: Roland Barthe’s essay, “Toys”.
