Wrestling with Boredom, or, On Inspiration in Academic Practice

Let me be honest. I don't want to be writing this essay; it feels like a monumental digression I can't afford. I wish I could get out of it but, on principle, I can't. In admitting this, I don't want to come off like I'm trying to be clever with a little meta-enactment of the anguish of boredom. I assure you this was not my plan. Yet I do wonder if I'm letting myself get psyched out by the topic, enervated in advance by the prospect of having to wring something interesting out of boredom. Like that friend in grad school working on writer's block who never did hand in their diss. Could it have turned out any other way?

The topic of boredom lured me as a surly reprieve from the cloying optimism of much of the therapeutic self-improvement literature with which I'm habitually concerned in my scholarship. Now, though, in desperation, I find myself racking my brain trying to remember what self-help has to say about boredom.

I'm too bored to open my books, but I'm sure that, if I did, the self-help would admonish that if I am bored it is my fault because it means I'm not trying hard enough. It would adapt an old homily and remind me that "there are no boring subjects, only boring people." The adage chastises the bored for not paying the right kind of attention. You have all the material you need to be interested; boredom is ingratitude at life's bounty. It's a sentiment that can be used to assuage disgruntled students or to light a fire under an indolent, screen-dazed child. 

But self-help literature also registers the history of this problem, this paucity of pep. Abraham Myerson's 1925 When Life Loses its Zest made the topic of anhedonia its focus and paved the way for the rise of amphetamines, for which Myerson was an early spokesman. Myerson may have been onto something; drugs would be the most expedient solution. Almost a century later, self-help is rethinking what it previously diagnosed as an affliction — we are overbooked and overstimulated, says Eva Hoffman's How to Be Bored (2016), which counterintuitively celebrates boredom as the antidote to our hyperactive digital lives.

Hoffman maintains that the best response to boredom is to pursue it rather than flee. This is also what I have my students do. When they read James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, they have to "unboring" a passage from it (inspired by Kenneth Goldsmith's account of his poetics of transcription as "a certain kind of unboring boredom"). They have to transcribe it five times, read it aloud, research the etymology, talk about it with a friend. Students like this because they are freed from the pressures of argumentation. It's a treatment, rather. The unboring treatment. 

I am not teaching Finnegans Wake this semester, thank god. I am teaching a graduate seminar on experimental criticism. What Elaine Scarry says about beauty, inspired by the Kantian philosopher Rudolf Makkreel, applies to experiment as well, it is a "pact of aliveness."1 Reading the experimental writings of literary critics — Charles Bernstein, Brent Hayes Edwards, Anahid Nersessian, Emily Ogden, and others — I am struck by the minor protests they are staging against the inertia of the inevitable.2 Experiment as an agreement to revisit the possibilities our collective professional boredom can obscure.

For the seminar, we read Walter Benjamin's theses on writing, which contain some advice about inspiration. He says, "Keep your pen aloof from inspiration, which it will then attract with magnetic power. The more circumspectly you delay writing down an idea, the more maturely developed it will be on surrendering itself."3 But academics don't always have the luxury of an aloof pen; we have to write through the pain. Clusters, futures, and administrative service depend on it. What role, then, does inspiration play in academic writing? Are the best academics those whose inspiration is infinite? Or perhaps the most successful scholars are those who don't need to imagine themselves the conduits of divine dictation to write something decent.

Last night I had one of those stress dreams that causes you to wake with clenched teeth and a tight chest. I dreamt I fell asleep during a graduate student's qualifying examination. The student was on a roll, and somehow, I dozed off. When I awoke, the exam was almost finished, and I had the last question. I asked it in my most alert and upbeat tone (the same I use at home to mask the fact that I have fallen asleep on the couch during a late-night film) at which point the other examiners disdainfully informed me that my question had already been covered. Once we started to disperse, I pulled aside a friendly colleague and asked him if it was obvious that I had been sleeping. "I'm afraid so," he said, regretfully. "At first it just seemed like you were just being very quiet, but then it became obvious you were actually asleep."

One familiar characterization of academia is as a black hole for inspiration — its close relative, the cliché of the killjoy academic who takes the beloved objects of a culture and drains them of all pleasure and vitality, is another. Take Dr. Howard Belsey in Zadie Smith's On Beauty — in his class, nobody can ever say "I like the tomato."4 But this caricature neglects how beneficial inspiration is to everyday academic practice. Writing reviews and reports, reading prospectuses, spinning paeans out of late-night letters, we are constantly laboring to inhabit the obsessions of others, to find a way in. In academia, one of those spheres where the boring possesses a degree of prestige, inspiration is at once mistrusted and mandatory.

Please evaluate the extent to which your instructor generates enthusiasm for the subject matter: a) Excellent b) Very Good c) Good d) Fair e) Unsatisfactory f) Not Applicable.

Neither the uninspired nor the uninspiring need apply.

I checked my word count just now, hoping I might be nearing the end. But I'm barely halfway there. I'm never going to make it. Maybe I can talk about some of the other ideas I had for this piece, the ones I was too bored to properly pursue.

My initial thought was to finally write the piece on boring hospital art that I have often toyed with composing in the past. This was to have concerned the print in the doctor's office where I waited for my pregnancy checkups (Fig. 1). I had a lot of time to analyze this image, which looked like a poor, mass-produced imitation of Georgia O'Keeffe. The flower was completely decontextualized, unsigned, surrounded by studio gray, a vermillion lollipop atop an unnaturally bare and disproportionate stem. It might have been made by a machine. It seemed intended to conjure ideas of femininity, possibly even to reference the female anatomy that was the specialty of this ward, but also as if crafted to blend in with trash cans and consent forms, the junk objects of the consulting room.

This print was somebody somewhere's solution to the problem of how to decorate a room. But what were they trying to accomplish? To make the patient angry about the art, instead of the waiting, to "cool the mark out" as Erving Goffman would have it?5 Or maybe their intentions were pure.  Maybe this is what the bureaucracy imagines to be universally pleasing art, just as someone must imagine Muzak to be universally pleasing song. 

I was about to finally start writing about this, was maybe even a little excited, and then I also happened to be reading Ben Lerner's 10:04 for something else. And he had a perfectly witty bit about the bad hospital art in the room where he was trying to produce a sample for the artificial insemination of his friend. Lerner had already done it, with his wry and perfectly calibrated, debate-club-honed prose. Then I thought, what if I could still write an essay on it for the non-fiction crowd? But a Google search turned up a New Yorker piece that preempted my take; it snappily summarized the whole cultural context of hospital art, uncovered its historical beginnings, talked about how pictures of flowers and nature were first introduced to offset the sterility of the hospital ward. Like countless scholars, I had been New Yorkered; my hoary idea reflected back at me in the urbane glow of the site's sleek typeface. 

Best not to dwell on that now. It seems that I still have 1000 words to go, so I'll tell you about the backup plan I turned to next, a counterintuitive little rumination on trauma and cliché. This would have repurposed, in mounting desperation, some material from an essay I wrote in graduate school on boredom and trauma testimony. I know what you're thinking. What a hideously callous topic. The point, though, was not to offer a normative judgment but to advocate for a more holistic engagement with the experience of trauma and its verbal manifestations.

The paper collected instances of cliché in trauma narratives, for instance from Katharine Butler Hathaway's memoir The Little Locksmith: "That person in the mirror couldn't be me. I felt inside like a healthy, ordinary, lucky person — oh, not like the one in the mirror!"6 Theorists such as Emanuela Tegla discuss trauma as a "limit case" which exposes the inadequacies of language and representation, but I wanted to suggest that an unexamined manifestation of the difficulty of narrativizing trauma is the recourse to cliché. The thesis was that the formulaic quality of much testimony is not purely extrinsic to trauma — a product of the individual's suggestibility to the media, for instance — but reproduces the experience of the loss of self, the "hypnotic identification" integral to the traumatic event.7

You can imagine why the professor hated it. It was the source of one of the worst grades I received in grad school. Still, Lauren Berlant had noticed something similar when she wrote of "trauma and ineloquence." And Susan Sontag described "the bromides of the American cancer establishment," lamenting the "military flavor" of its metaphors, the countless "crusades" against cancer.8 What I wanted to add was the suggestion that rather than avoiding the boring elements of trauma narratives, theorists should dig into these moments, learn to approach this banality of language as a wound. It is time, as Namwali Serpell suggests, to "apply to cliché a lens other than critique or recuperation," ⁹ for the cliché is where the depersonalization of trauma makes itself felt. We shouldn't compound the trauma by demanding its expression always be dazzling or extraordinary. To deny the element of uniformity in testimony, to ignore the recourse of survivors to cliché, is not really listening but is rather to project our own discomfort with the dehumanizing implications of trauma and death onto the narratives we hear (or do not hear).

Cliché is also protection, perhaps, from being interpellated, an impersonal safety bubble. From being overread or giving oneself away. For instance, I developed a habit in childhood of only drawing the most uniform shapes in my doodles out of a fear that any other sort of image would be misconstrued, attributed to some kind of psycho-libidinal preoccupation. A simple square or circle seemed a safeguard against this kind of proleptic archival intrusion into my doodling subconscious. Boringness can be a defense.

In an attempt to motivate myself to revive this topic, I looked into some more recent examples of trauma and cliché. I found an interview with Shannon Doherty — of Brenda Walsh fame — talking about her stage 4 breast cancer. She said, "I definitely have days where I say why me. And then I go, well, why not me? Who else? Who else besides me deserves this? None of us do." Her phrase — "why not me?" — stood out to me because of its poignant familiarity. It's a reversal of the "why me?" cliché, but one that itself is becoming convention. There are even cancer memoirs with this title, Why Not Me?: Cancer isn't Picky, it Just Picks.  This is the shock of trauma, the shock of de-individuation. The sentiment seems particularly noteworthy coming from a celebrity, someone whom the stars have conspired to push to the front of the pack of common humanity. Even the celebrities do not have special protection from contingency. 

Bad hospital art, trauma, and cliché. It occurred to me that what I have really been thinking about is boredom and death, about aesthetic inertia as a foretaste of our communal, physical fate. Death is supposed to be the supreme catalyst, and to inspire the resolve to appreciate, to savor the lulls. Randy Pausch's The Last Lecture, dying and doing pushups on the stage, to leave something for his family. But Nietzsche writes of the banality of death, not in the sense of "compassion fatigue," yawning in the mouth of horror, but that boredom anticipates a reality of death, its negation of the salvation of future eventfulness.10 Writes Emily Ogden, "What it means for death to claim us is that the sterile round of our routines claims us. We no longer see the point or the possibility of a pleasant surprise."11 

Boredom refuses to be diverted by the worldly. In this sense it is the obverse of inspiration, which is worldly diversion in its ideal form. "Why not me!" enthuse those who pursue the alchemy of their singular attention with gusto. This inspiration is not the exclusive reserve of the artists, for, as Max Weber reminds us, "inspiration plays no less a role in science than it does in the realm of art." Far from an academic casualty, inspiration is a prerequisite: "whoever lacks the capacity to put on blinders, so to speak, and to come up to the idea that the fate of his soul depends upon whether or not he makes the correct conjecture at this passage of this manuscript may as well stay away from science."12 This may be why inspiration is so slippery, because of the proximity between focus and denial.

I have described it primarily as a good, this urge to make the old things of the world sparkle with scholarly care. But there could also be a compulsive aspect to the need to always add a clever take, a different spin. There's a saying that the greatest enemy of truth is not falsity but boredom.13 What is closer to the truth, the inertia or the resistance, the boredom or the inspiration? According to the logic of death and cliché, sameness, repetition, and deindividuation are the constants in this cosmic morass. Can we then still separate boring things from boring people, as the self-help adage suggests? Or, is the value of inspiration that it allows us to forget the horizon of eventless indistinction toward which we tend?

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Beth Blum is an Associate Professor of English at Harvard University. Her book, The Self-Help Compulsion: Searching for Advice in Modern Literature was published with Columbia UP in 2020. Her writing has appeared in Modern Language Quarterly, PMLA, Modernism/modernity, The New Yorker, Aeon Ideas, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and more.

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