pain and boredom
I’ve just finished reading an article by Joe Brooker on boredom in Malone Dies, one of Beckett’s novels. You can get to it through this link. Brooker analyzes the phrase “what tedium,” which punctuates that novel, alongside another narrative interruption, “this is awful.” He concludes that boredom undoes itself or disappears as it is “named in retrospect in an act of naming which itself dispels boredom, and it has a way of intensifying itself to the point where it is so unendurable that its claim to the name ‘tedium’ becomes dubious” (7).
In other words, he argues that commenting on boredom is actually an escape from boredom, and that persistent boredom stops being boring because it is transformed into pain. A similar argument could be made about Waiting for Godot, I think. However, I’m skeptical about both Brooker’s points. We’ll talk about the first one in class tomorrow, but I have some thoughts about the second now. Or soon, after a picture (I've always thought Beckett was rather good-looking in a haggard-older-man kind of way):
Boredom and pain are always linked in Beckett. To be bored requires thought, or self-consciousness, and in Beckett, thought is pain: "What is terrible is to have thought," says Vladimir. So boredom inevitably entails pain. The question is whether, as Brooker assumes, pain is different from boredom, and takes us away from monotony into the realm of intensity.
I don’t think so. It’s quite possible for pain to be boring. We tend to think of pain as a sharp jolt or the experience of intensity, but pain can be low-level, chronic, dull, and tedious—as well as being boring to talk about.
And if pain can be boring, can't boredom be painful, or at least intense? I’ve certainly been intensely bored, most recently on Saturday night when someone talked to me about evolutionary biology for half an hour. No! Go away! Brooker assumes not because he relies on Adorno’s definition of boredom as the eversame. And Adorno, of course, thinks that you can be bored without being aware of it, as you are unwittingly trapped in monotony, and that boredom is the enemy of thought. But there’s another understanding of boredom as discomfort or dissatisfaction with the eversame, which we've seen in Baudelaire and Kracauer.
So, are boredom and pain opposites or synonyms? Is boredom a feeling or an escape from feeling?
In other words, he argues that commenting on boredom is actually an escape from boredom, and that persistent boredom stops being boring because it is transformed into pain. A similar argument could be made about Waiting for Godot, I think. However, I’m skeptical about both Brooker’s points. We’ll talk about the first one in class tomorrow, but I have some thoughts about the second now. Or soon, after a picture (I've always thought Beckett was rather good-looking in a haggard-older-man kind of way):
Boredom and pain are always linked in Beckett. To be bored requires thought, or self-consciousness, and in Beckett, thought is pain: "What is terrible is to have thought," says Vladimir. So boredom inevitably entails pain. The question is whether, as Brooker assumes, pain is different from boredom, and takes us away from monotony into the realm of intensity.
I don’t think so. It’s quite possible for pain to be boring. We tend to think of pain as a sharp jolt or the experience of intensity, but pain can be low-level, chronic, dull, and tedious—as well as being boring to talk about.
And if pain can be boring, can't boredom be painful, or at least intense? I’ve certainly been intensely bored, most recently on Saturday night when someone talked to me about evolutionary biology for half an hour. No! Go away! Brooker assumes not because he relies on Adorno’s definition of boredom as the eversame. And Adorno, of course, thinks that you can be bored without being aware of it, as you are unwittingly trapped in monotony, and that boredom is the enemy of thought. But there’s another understanding of boredom as discomfort or dissatisfaction with the eversame, which we've seen in Baudelaire and Kracauer.
So, are boredom and pain opposites or synonyms? Is boredom a feeling or an escape from feeling?
posted by smbrook at 11:14 PM
4 Comments:
It seems to me like the connection between boredom and pain is complicated by whether we're referring to psychological pain or physical pain. Does Brooker conflate the two?
I agree that boredom can be painful, and that pain can be boring. However, in the first case aren't we only using pain as a metaphorical term for a mental state? And in the second, it seems like boredom is a psychological response to pain. I'm not so sure that pain itself is boring.
I have one tattoo. It took 15 minutes for the "artist" to mark me and the constant, just bearable pain he inflicted (accompanied by the annoying buzz of the needle) was achingly monotonous. Initially, pain means something - the simple fact that we've incurred injury - but once we locate our injury, self-inflicted or not, we are left to endure a meaningless physical discomfort that overpowers all thoughts and desires if it is intense enough. The inability to escape such tedium locks us in a state of boredom.
The upside is that we gain a new appreciation for all the little, forgettable things we did prior to the onset of pain such as freedom of movement or even a satisfying yawn.
Jessica, in her book The Body in Pain (1985), Elaine Scarry also makes a distinction between psychological and physical pain. She claims: "Physical pain is able to obliterate psychological pain because it obliterates all psychological content, painful, pleasurable, and neutral" (34).
This state sounds quite a lot like the pain that Jane is describing. It seems to me that boredom and pain can both be states of obliteration where no distinctions or content exist. Pain is boring because it blocks out everything else. Scarry also argues that physical pain, unike psychological pain, can't be described: in this way, perhaps, it's also an "experience without qualities," as Goodstein describes boredom.
But I'm skeptical about the psychological/physical distinction. First, physical pain is, in many respects, subjective, and an internal psychic state. In hospital, the only way they have of gauging pain in order to administer pain killers is by asking you how you rate your pain from 1-10. In other words, self-grading. I've recently been misdiagnosed twice because I didn't feel the pain I was meant to be feeling.
Second, psychological pain is often felt physically. When I'm anxious or unhappy I feel it in my stomach. When I'm angry I get tense shoulders. Theorists like Sylvan Tomkins argue that feelings like shame and anger are felt on a physiological level that bypasses cognition.
All this suggests to me that physical pain is on a continuum with psychological states, and that the physical/psychological distinction is kind of blunt. In that respect, I'm not sure we can say that (physical) pain is different to boredom because the former is material and the latter immaterial/psychological.
Another thought: the fact that we use the word "dull" to describe pain--both physical and psychological--seems worth noting. It indicates that we do and can find certain kinds of pain boring: mundane, tedious, monotonous.
I don't agree that to have boredom is to have thought. In fact it seems to me that I am generally bored when I do not have anything interesting to think about. When I am not working on a mathematical problem I am bored, and this inevitably leads me toward emotional pain. However, having a problem to work on occupies me.. i.e. makes me ignorant of my pain for the time being. So, there it is - thought is simply an escape from pain which is probably synonymous with complete boredom.
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