The Meme of Aesthetic Boredom

Boredom in Art

 

Josh Corey’s remarks about his own boredom with the novel remind me of David Foster Wallace’s boredom, discussed at length in the recent New Yorker piece about his suicide. David Foster Wallace tried, unsuccessfully, to overcome his boredom. He even went so far as to try a homoeopathic remedy, by writing most of (but of course, not completing) a novel concerned with the most boring job in the world (or most boring white collar job in the world), that of IRS accountant. Wallace, in his effort to understand boredom, appears to have equated it with mindfulness. These dedicated number mumblers were actually our arhats, masters of mindfulness. His great theme of boredom derived from his thesis that America is over-mediated and bored. Sigh. This is a truism, if true. (It’s true of course! ask Henry Miller, ask Carl Jung, ask William Blake). But this led him to a dilemma. The reflexive reaction to America’s mind numbing infatuation with TV and drugs was to take a lot of drugs and write really, really long novels that are so complex and suffused with irony, none of those bored, over-mediated people will ever read them. Moreover, he appears to have felt that irony, constant destabilizing irony, is inhuman. How can there be an inhuman solution to the problem of our ongoing dehumanization? And yet, how can we be seen by others as smart and sophisticated if we embrace feeling, humanism, connection? Aren’t those things boring and sentimental? Must art be opposed to wisdom?

 

I started writing novels around the same time he did, and we are the same age. In the 80’s, the reading public had exhausted the metanovel (that drug-fueled monster referred to above) and was in the throes of minimalism. Minimalists like Carver weren’t so much ironic as tight-lipped. The Barthelmes were both. Everything is inferred. The irony is in the silence, the refusal to say anything. So Wallace tacked towards the just exhausted alternative. Like Lethem, he fell under the spell of DeLillo, who combines the meta-novelist’s intellectual ambition with the minimalist’s tight-lipped irony and bad dialog. All three are contemptuous of their readers in a way that say, Vonnegut or Attwood are not. 

 

Wallace’s boredom was with the conventions of the novel, as with the conventions of life. Yet he was suspicious of this. He wanted an audience, he wanted relationships, he wanted friends. Post Modern irony and skepticism just didn’t gas him anymore, but he could find no alternative and so sank into writer’s block and existential crisis. That’s one way of looking at it. But the aesthetic problem isn’t all that serious, once you recognize it. You simply have to be brave enough to try something different, to suspend your judgments, mostly learned in college, and write the kind of book you want to read, for the kinds of people you want as readers. But in the end, this wasn’t his problem. Like all depressed people, he could not connect to the world. It was existence that finally bored him, and like George Sanders, he killed himself.

 

If he were truly the great literary genius he is supposed to have been, he would have found a way out of the fictional dilemma. The way it is, his aesthetic struggle, as described by friends and colleagues, seems obvious and, well, boring to me. Every novelist in the country with a brain has struggled at some point with these things, but not all of us have had such a hard time jettisoning our Post Modern mannerisms and cliché’s and embracing the art of the novel as it always has been, vulgar, sensationalistic, shameless. I love the fucking novel. I love plots and dialogue and character. I love stream of consciousness and I love omniscient third person narrative. I love hating Jay McInerney and Brett Easton Ellis and Gertrude Stein and I love loving Donna Tartt and Philip Roth and Djuna Barnes. It’s all very subjective. There are no laws, only opinions, and what works from time to time, for this reader and that writer.

 

A novelist has to be interested in life to be interested in the novel. Wallace could not live, so he could not write. It is sad, true. If people want to make him the tragic voice of a generation that’s fine, but the art of fiction is a messy one, not one for the cloister, and no one ever wrote a great novel by theorizing it first, or even a good one. The novelist is like the experimental versus the theoretical physicist. You know a novelist is at work when you hear a muffled explosion and a crazy woman with singed grey hair emerges from an office, her face covered in soot and a big smile.

 

As for the aesthetic meme of boredom in art, well there’s no accounting for it. If you think boring, repetitive art where nothing changes and nothing happens is more compelling, more honest, more interesting, then go for it. Others have gone there before you, so you won’t be original, but you will be in a club. The Meme of Aesthetic Boredom lives on, periodically revived by bored intellectuals, like herpes. I believe they are sincere. Warhol wasn’t trying to bore anyone with Empire State Building, he just wanted us to see what he saw. He liked looking at things for a long time. He was an artist. It was a form of mindfulness.