Toward Bigger and Better Boredom

...Burroughs, I believe, ought to be boring to anyone with even minimal education, and seems by now well established on the path to oblivion...

...If at the very beginning of this century Logan Pearsall Smith could regret waking up the same person every morning, how much more true is this of today's average human being who, at best, retraces the steps he has taken countless times on the movie or television screen...

...All of which leaves us with the highly plausible notion that Warhol, and others like him, at least in part believe in, savor, and consider artistic the hebetude and boredom they experience, generate and have the impudence to market...

...What is more significant and revealing is that Warhol abandoned his "painting" and "film-making" to hurl himself, in exactly the same spirit, into activities of indisputable mindlessness: into taking Polaroid pictures indiscriminately and ceaselessly, then into making, ceaselessly and indiscriminately, tapes of vacuous conversations...

...Now there was a time—a good many years ago—when any heterosexual male might well have wanted to birddog the luscious Miss Goddard...

...If Warhol gives you endless silk screens of Marilyn Monroe or Campbell soup cans, you might say that nothing could be more vulgar, pointless and boring...

...In all these cases boredom is either a springboard toward something else, or an object of ridicule, or a tragic-heroic condition (Leopardi's noia) that confers existential dignity on its bearer...

...The attempt to make a plain, positive value out of quintessential boredom is beyond the near-immobile Oblomov even: He dreamed away his life on a couch, but his reveries were, to himself at any rate, far from boring...

...We are back with the solution of Pascal and Sir Thomas Browne...

...But, then, a perfect belief in anything may do as much...

...That could still, perhaps, be part of the put-on, much as it seems to be the natural equipment of a fellow who started out as a window dresser for Delman's shoes, and whose sensibility seems never to have risen above shoe level...

...if, for example, Burroughs bores you, that is not boredom at all, just your unfamiliarity with, or unopenness to, his new kind of sensibility...

...The desperate cult of the new in art is, in large measure though not exclusively, a matter of boredom, of the low boredom threshold most people have...

...With Warhol it is different...

...History, at any rate, shows that all societies and orders have had to contend, at least intermittently, with boredom: If the pagan, hedonistic Romans had their taedium vitae, the good Christian saints and medieval monks had their accidia (or, in Middle English, accidie), forms of the same boredom that bridges all gulfs...

...The old image of the child breaking its toy to see what makes it tick becomes too flattering here...

...A terrible enemy, this boredom that comes masked or invisible and often remains unrecognized—known only by the dead and maimed that litter its path...

...However, there is not always easy protection against boredom even for bores, nor are the teams as neatly drawn up as Byron jocularly suggested in Don Juan: "Society is now one polish'd horde,/ Formed of two mighty tribes, the Bores and Bored...

...And there were, to be sure, Warhol's earlier films, hours and hours of the same shot of whatever—a kiss, someone sleeping, the Empire State building-to prove his point...

...Yet there is today an even more desperate strategy afoot...

...he'd never be so dumb as to bore himself...

...more appropriate is the trope of the Vandals smashing works of art which, because they could not create them, they felt they could not possess...

...The French, as usual, reciprocated by adopting the English "spleen," so prominent in the works of Baudelaire and other Decadents...

...First of all, even a brief meeting with Warhol reveals the utter hollowness of that hollow-looking shell of a creature...

...Haste to be happy and hasty disenchantment are the two faces of boredom in our own society...

...the war, alas, is always lost...

...Spleen, the morose, melancholy manifestation of boredom, and the vapours, the hysterical, hypochondriac aspect, were the two dreaded psychic illnesses of 18th-century England—the twin curses one most wished to escape...

...There are many components that go into the making of action painting or pop art, musique concrete or concrete poetry, to name only some of the older and better established varieties of artistic absurdity...

...Following around an aging Hollywood ex-star, and taping her garrulous effusions and conversations with other vacuities is not only pure camp but also sheer stupidity...

...Boredom, then, would be another name for mortality, or, more appropriately, the awareness of mortality...

...Currently, in fact, he is engaged in a taped biography of Paulette Goddard, whom he adoringly follows around and tapes ad nauseam...

...Speeding up the tempo of life has wrought havoc not only with life...

...Till then we read of no such haste to be happy...

...Boredom is only another name for a certain species of frustrations...

...Pascal continues: "I found that there is a very effective one, consisting of the natural misfortune of our weak, mortal condition, so miserable that nothing can console us when we consider it closely...

...It is not that individual culture has reached any new heights—on the contrary, it may be lower than it has been in decades...

...Whence does it come...

...finally, like most bad things in Britain, it received a French name, ennui...

...In his little book, In Bluebeard's Castle, George Steiner declares: "For me the most haunting, prophetic outcry of the nineteenth century is Theophile Gautier's 'plutot la barbarie que l'ennui' " But what Gautier certainly and Steiner apparently did not reckon with is that the two things are not mutually exclusive: Much of what passes for art nowadays is an unholy marriage of the barbarous and the boring...

...So Lady Mary Wortley Montagu wrote in a playful letter of March 27, 1743, about why she did not fear death: "Perhaps we are to go the round of the planets, and then, do but imagine what lively creatures we shall be in Mercury and Venus...

...Warhol speaks in resounding banalities or remains silent...

...the thing, in short, that drives us out of our rooms, our minds, our skins...

...On a rather lower level, Andy Warhol is the perfect example of the domestication of boredom—or, at least, the attempt to domesticate it...

...One recalls the hero of the lovely 13th-century tale, Aucassin and Nicolette, saying that he would rather go to Hell with the fine scholars and fair knights, and the comely, gracious ladies who have two or three friends besides their lords, than to Paradise with all the impoverished, virtuous bores...

...Under such circumstances, the only possible destination is the place we have not yet been to, not yet seen...

...and in film, where the relative newness of the form still makes the discovering of good, virgin territories comparatively easy...

...Some Warhol partisans have seen in this a deliberate put-on, and have defended the right of a superior but cynical intelligence to sell its alleged artistic works to the rich and the supposed cognoscenti—rubbing their noses in their own stupidity, futility and dullness...

...Newspapers, magazines, radio, television, movies—what can your life come up with that they haven't already done for you...

...It is the argument that matters...

...it has affected at least as deleteriously the tempo and direction of movement in the arts...

...This is, broadly speaking, true in all the arts today, except perhaps in architecture, where the functional demands on the work of art make excessive deviation almost impossible...

...Here the vacuity, nothingness, or, at best, utter insignificance of the material is brazenly exalted, the more boring, the better...

...In England, the word "bore" did not appear till the 18th century, but the thing was there before, just as unsweetly, by other names: "spleen" and "the vapours...

...It is the attempt to defeat boredom by embracing and annexing it...

...It is not clear from this passage (or from other earlier writings of Miss Sontag) whether the "frustration" is deliberately provoked by this "interesting art," whether it is merely an accidental but expectable byproduct of its advanced and unusual nature, or whether—a possibility apparently not entertained by our critic—there might be something wrong with an art that so frustrates "most educated people...

...The easiest way for the lazy, stupid, or merely bored to come to ostensible grips with something hard to assimilate is to dismiss it as claptrap and go on to something more preposterous, seemingly revolutionary, and facile...

...The wise and righteous doctor, Sir Thomas Browne, wrote consolingly to his married daughter staying in Guernsey (a good place for bo-vines and boredom) in October 1681: "Thou didst use to pass away much of thy time alone and by thyself in sober ways and good actions and noe place should be teadious wherein we may serve God...

...But there is a general level of mass culture or midcult (as Dwight Macdonald dubbed middle-class culture) that has risen higher than ever, thanks largely to the mass media and fast, easy travel...

...If 17th-century religious acceptance of this boring world as a mere antechamber to the afterlife was a protection against boredom, the leisure, sophistication and overcivilizedness of the 18th century were the veriest breeders of it...

...So even travel becomes a redundancy and bore, and does not help us get away from the self and life we carry about in cars and airplanes...

...The number of small miseries and large calamities, suicides, slayings, mass murders, persecutions and wars, torturings of prisoners and animals (including cruel blood sports), conjugal and familial naggings and brutalities, and who knows what other abominations, produced by boredom is beyond calculation even by a concert of computers...

...I can't accept this view...

...bored by Albee's play, the New York Times Magazine asked some notables for their opinions of this "difficult work.'' Andy Warhol, as I remember, said that parts of it were rather boring, but that this was all right, he liked to be bored...

...So another brilliant 18th-century woman, Hester Lynch Piozzi, shrewdly noted in her travel diary, Observations and Reflections (September, 1784): "Refined countries always are panting for speedy enjoyment: the maxim of carpe diem came into Rome when luxury triumphed there...

...when one experiences them, they strike one as antiquated.' Think of it: We suffer from a vast oversupply of second-hand living that makes our own quotidian experiences seem trivial and anticlimactic...

...Ah, but that's just it, they'll tell you...

...The bored and restless surge of existence toward novelty forces the arts ruthlessly and prematurely to lunge ahead, and the only quickly and easily available direction, the only one guaranteed to provide a wholly unseen landscape, is that of nonart or antiart...

...In the last chapter of his stimulating book, Nil, Robert Martin Adams outlines the roles boredom has played in the thought of Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard, and in the writings of Leopardi, Goncharov (Oblomov), and Huysmans (A rebours...

...But I wonder whether the notion of immortality protects against boredom or in fact derives from it—whether the idea of heaven is not earthly boredom projected defensively onto a larger, grander canvas...

...Which brings me neatly to our present condition in the arts: chasing after new artistic visions before we have begun to savor fully the available ones...

...The actual examples are irrelevant: Beckett and Antonioni at their best are not, I think, boring to the careful peruser...

...Sutor, ne supra crepidam, though, must today be one of the least heeded of ancient maxims...

...The second most powerful enemy—sinister, underhanded, an expert at infiltration—is boredom...

...There have been earlier attempts by writers and philosophers to put boredom to use, but none like these...

...I dare swear the inhabitants are entirely unacquainted with spleen and vapours...

...A put-on artist might want to bore others...

...Thus the great Hungarian modernist, Endre Ady, ends a poem about roaming along the Cote d'Azur with the heartrending verses: "Oh, life, how great and glorious/ Is your every landscape that we do not reach...

...This can be done in a quasi-civilized manner, as it was by the young Susan Son-tag (who disavows some of her earlier opinions now) in the final essay of Against Interpretation: "The commonest complaint about the films of Antonioni or the narratives of Beckett or Burroughs is that they are hard to look at or to read, that they are 'boring.' But the charge of boredom is really hypocritical...

...but one of them, to repeat, must surely be boredom with the arts and letters as they are—either out of decadent overculturedness or out of arrogant undercultivation, which pretends to be above it all to disguise the fact that it is beneath it...

...and poets and philosophers lent their assistance to decorate and dignify her gaudy car...

...Pascal offers a famous diagnosis in the Pensees: "I discovered that all human unhappiness stems from one sole cause, which is not to be able to stay at rest in a room...

...either way, he says nothing...

...Our life is boring, our culture is boring, so our art, to live up to its duty to reflect our culture and life, must also be boring...

...or you remain frustrated, thus merely proving that despite all your education, your mind or sensibility is closed off, and too bad for you...

...And, indeed, isn't the orderly sameness of most traditional concepts of heaven the handiwork of bores...

...Clearly, restlessness equals boredom, but what is its explanation...

...even Huysmans' hero, Des Esseintes, tries, in the grips of intense ennui, to ward it off, however listlessly and unsuccessfully, until he reaches the position that would have led him, had the novel continued as Huysmans' life did, to embracing Christianity...

...And the new languages which the interesting art of our time speaks are frustrating the sensibilities of most educated people...

...There is no bore we dread being left alone with so much as our own minds," wrote not one of our contemporaries, but James Russell Lowell in the last century...

...None of this is boredom pure and simple...

...This leaves two possibilities: Either you read Burroughs over and over again until you are hypnotized or drugged into perceiving nonsense as sense...

...When Tiny Alice opened on Broadway, and many people were puzzled, frustrated, or (dare I say it...

...But the diva can no longer even pretend to good looks, and heterosexuality is a thing (perhaps the only one) Warhol never made any pretensions to...

...Pascal seems to be right at least to the extent that a perfect belief in the afterlife inures the soul to boredom...

...Already in 1920, the Austrian novelist and essayist Robert Musil wrote in his journal: "One cannot live without reading daily about adventures in the newspapers, but they excite only when one reads about them...

...From Baudelaire on, poets have been writing variations on this theme...

...There is, in a sense, no such thing as boredom...

...Why Burroughs should not bore one is never explained by this sort of criticism, but, of course, it is much easier to invent a fake reason for why someone else is bored by it than a true one for why one is not bored oneself...