Boredom

~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 19^th 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 19^th 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 19^th 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 19^th 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 19^th 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”.