boredom and metonymy

I've just been preparing for class: we'll start with “A Case of Identity,” doing a close reading of the first page, then moving on to think about the role of the typewriter. I'm excited by a whole series of questions in this story that could be lumped under the rather bulky category of the relationship between the specific and the universal, or the unique and the common. What’s the relationship between the hand-written and the type-written; the metonymic detail and the genre of realism; Holmes’s jewelled snuff-box and his simple life; the individual story of the Dundas separation case and the mass-produced newspaper? Similar questions thread themselves throughout Doyle's stories. Holmes himself relies on a connection between the individual detail (Mary Sutherland's odd boots) and the common course of events (you put on the wrong boots because you are in a hurry). Yet he also insists that each case he examines actually reveals the strangeness of the world, and the absence of any general, predictable pattern of events.

How does boredom fit into this? I think that depends on the way we perceive the relationship between boredom and everyday life. Critics of everyday life usually complain about its repetitive, predictable, monotonous, boring nature. Everyday life is seen as the triumph of the indistinguishable over specificity or uniqueness. One day is the same as any other day in a year or a life, and the relationship between the part and the whole is all too predictable.

Perhaps, then, the trope of boredom is some kind of hyper-metonymy: the part illustrates the whole perfectly—there’s no difference between the specific example and the general experience. One boring day at the office is indistinguishable from another—it illustrates nothing beyond the general boringness of office life. Including university office life. Similarly, the whole is nothing more than the part—there’s nothing more to office life than the boring day, repeated ad nauseam.

Everyday life is often contrasted with the realm of the unpredictable, the exciting, the individual, and the singular. That’s basically the line of the situationists and Lefebvre, whom we’ll be looking at more in a couple of weeks. There’s an irony here, or perhaps a dialectic: the critique of everyday life will dispel boredom, but it depends on boredom. That is, the experience of boredom is necessary as it contrasts with an unthinking, unaware experience of the everyday where the world is taken for granted. But feeling bored is only useful insofar as it impels you to resist the boring structures and practices that constitute everyday life—from mindless photocopying to endlessly waiting for a bus. Instead, take a map of Berlin and use it to find your way around Paris: the situationist dérive. (Does that seem exciting to you? Sounds pretty tedious to me. I would have been a bad situationist.)

A gratuitous photo of Guy Debord and other situationists being not bored:


But the Langbauer and Highmore pieces this week open up other ways of thinking about the relationship between boredom and everyday life. Highmore suggests that everyday life is also the site of mystery, perplexity and the phantasmagoria (4, 16), and Langbauer suggests that it can be the experience of violent shock and terror. This makes me think of the famous scene in Modern Times when Charlie Chaplin gets caught in the assembly line. The experience here is far from routine boredom: instead, it’s manic terror.

Langbauer argues that the act of imagining everyday life as the experience of boredom, rather than of shock and terror, might be a screen or defensive gesture that shields the subject from the violence and uncertainty of everyday life. In this reading, the ascription of boredom to the everyday is the attempt to shield oneself from singularity or unpredictability. The posture or position of boredom can also be a way of combating mortality and of shoring up a fantasy of the stable self. While querying this version of boredom, Langbauer identifies another kind of boredom that stems from and acknowledges ambiguity and uncertainty, allowing us to “inhabit [the world] differently through in-difference to constraints” (93).

Can I tie this back to tropes and typewriters? Let’s see. On the one hand, boredom can collapse the distinction between the individual and the general, between the part and the whole, between the original and the copy. This is often seen as a bad thing--but could it point to boredom's potentially productive connection to ambiguity?

On the other hand, boredom can challenge the taken-for-granted nature of the everyday world. Boredom, like a trope, makes us see the world differently—and also, potentially, to feel we understand or control it. With the aesthetic gaze comes the fantasy of mastery. Think of Holmes’s “infinite languor” (36). The bored subject probes where others take things for granted, and discovers individuality in the age of the mechanical reproduction—identifying the distinguishing marks of a typewritten copy, say. Boredom is therefore the mark of distinction as well as the fear that distinction has disappeared; it revitalizes and shields the individual at the same time as threatening individuality.

That’s a start. A rather long start. We'll see where the stories take us tomorrow.