“It’s BOREDOM.”
In Charles Baudelaire’s poem from Les Fleurs du mal entitled “Au Lecture,” plenty of daring and controversial ideas are laid out for the reader. Baudelaire begins the poem by pointing out humanities sinful nature. He does this in the first two lines when he points out that “[i]nfatuation, sadism, lust, avarice,/ possess our souls and drain the body’s force;” (Baudelaire 1-2). He continues his pessimistic outlook on human nature when he states that “we pray for tears to wash our filthiness;” (7). Baudelaire plays very well with christian imagery and ideology. He pokes fun at the idea of praying for purging our sins with the image of tears cleaning off a literal filth on our skin. He furthers this imagery by describing the devil as “watching by our sickbeds” (9). This in itself is a very frightening image in how he illustrates this picture of the devil with us in our worst times. He also goes on to utilize a metaphor comparing our will to metal that the devil as a scientist boils into vapor. This is a perfect metaphor in that it makes clear the strength of our will and the near scientific craftiness of the devil. Baudelaire also utilizes the line that states that “each step is a step to hell” to help characterize how there is no turning back when it comes to our sinful nature. Baudelaire then continues by pointing out how “demons are boozing in our brain” (21) to help show the demons excitement in winning our souls. After describing our evil actions and lifestyle in much detail Baudelaire then moves on to the culmination of the poem. This culmination is what Baudelaire believes to be the worst thing of all. Baudelaire states that this worst thing of all is “BOREDOM” (37). He then points out that the reader knows it well. This was a very clever closing stanza that Baudelaire uses. He states that Boredom or the reason why any reader would be reading his work was the most evil act of all. He builds up the poem with a critical and pessimistic review of human sinfulness. He then states that the worst thing humans do is the source of Baudelaire’s bread and butter. He also describes the reader as a hypocrite because the reader is suffering from boredom and calls the reader his brother to make clear that Baudelaire himself is a victim of boredom.
This title!
I wonder if he wasn’t tongue in cheek about boredom. I remember taking poetry writing with Carol Ann Davis when she was here at the college. We read a piece about boredom, maybe an excerpt from this quirky book called Voyage Around My Room, written over 42 days under house arrest (Xavier de Maistre). So you can imagine he was bored. But I think all writers know boredom to be the secret power society has made taboo. Check out this poem, written by the brilliant alcoholic John Berryman in 1964:
Dream Song 14
Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn,
and moreover my mother told me as a boy
(repeatingly) “Ever to confess you’re bored
means you have no
Inner Resources.” I conclude now I have no
inner resources, because I am heavy bored.
Peoples bore me,
literature bores me, especially great literature,
Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes
as bad as Achilles,
who loves people and valiant art, which bores me.
And the tranquil hills, & gin, look like a drag
and somehow a dog
has taken itself & its tail considerably away
into the mountains or sea or sky, leaving
behind: me, wag.
Of course, the boredom was his secret power, but just as in the paradox of David Foster Wallace’s blog-famous commencement speech, “This is Water” maybe his genius led to his eventual suicide. What do you think?
I remember reading that book! And I remember reading Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, which emphasized daydream but could be connected to the element of boredom because he advocated simply sitting and waiting. I do think being “bored” is valuable, but I think–at least for a writer–boredom is more than what we generally think it is. Kind of like Berryman’s dream songs and Bachelard’s oneiric house of the mind, it’s not just empty nothingness. Boredom is about letting your mind and your imagination take over within your head while your body is at stasis to begin the process of creation.
But was Baudelaire being tongue in cheek? I don’t think so. I really do think he was saying inaction is vile–though he does bring up that part about being a hypocrite, how we’re all bound to be inactive at some point. I got the feeling that Baudelaire liked feeling activity (whether inner or outer) much more than he wanted to feel stagnant.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dexIA_OfLzg
I liked that you brought up the element of fear when you said, “This in itself is a very frightening image in how he illustrates this picture of the devil with us in our worst times,” because I did feel like Baudelaire consistently pushed the element of fear and being frightening to the reader in the beginning. The images are disgusting and twisted and vile, and I’m like, “Oh, god! Where is this going!” Then, like you say, he ends on a down note. After all these depraved and scary images, he states the worst of all is inaction or just being boring or bored. Which was very jarring to encounter, but I liked it. It makes you go, “What?! Really? Not doing anything at all is really WORSE than all of these terrible things?” And, yeah, it is. Especially, for a writer who craves experience.
Are their no “like” buttons on this blog? Where are the “like” buttons!?
There are articles and books on modernism and boredom–perhaps my fellow commenters here might take that up a bit. Boredom is not about critical scrutiny.
There’s a lot going on here: boredom seems to be cast as a particularly modern affective state here, and a dangerous one at that. I wonder how other Victorians viewed the scene of reading. One imagines that it was a scene of erudition and learning. That Baudelaire casts the very act of writing and reading poetry as one of the premier evils–and a hypocritical one at that–shows a very modern sense of what kinds of truths and moral value literature holds (very little for Baudelaire, it seems) and what role literature might play in any culture. This poem seems to turn on the way that extraordinary depiction of evil and sin is then transformed into the sins of banality and boredom, of inaction and malaise–a sensibility that the poem both condones and warns against.