Of Baudelaire and Holmes
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of boredom and alienation without a life in God. The impulse to suppress
boredom, to seek some instant or immediate pleasure, is from this point of view
a consequence of our fallen condition . . . ”(256). Indeed, to some in the early
Christian church, this demonic ennui, a “terrible scourge of the soul” (Kuhn 71),
was regarded as the harbinger of the far greater evil of tristitia, the total evil that
consumed the believer’s soul (Kuhn 48).
It’s in 19th century and early 20th centuries, however, that ennui gains the
most attention. One can make the case that Emma Bovary is afflicted by an
ennui that ultimately leads to psychosis and suicide. As another example, having
come into a substantial inheritance, Dostoevsky’s Underground Man is afflicted
by a form of ennui—he refers to it as “inertia”—that has become for him a sort
of paralysis (1310). To Dostoevsky this paralysis is a response to a series of
ideologies, only one of which is materialism, that had their origin in Western
Europe and that, in later works, he considered demonic. The point is made in
Dostoevsky’s The Possessed, recently retranslated as Demons. In the
introduction to this translation, Richard Pevear comments, “The demons...are
ideas, that legion of isms that came to Russia from the West: idealism,
rationalism, empiricism, materialism, utilitarianism, positivism, socialism,
anarchism, nihilism, and underlying them all, atheism” (xvii). Dostoevsky’s
perspective is made clear by the novel’s epigraph, which is taken from the story
in which Jesus casts a legion of demons out of a crazed man and into a herd of
swine. At one point in The Possessed, the main characters, all aristocrats and
most affected by the influx of the “isms,” relieve their own constant boredom by
r esorting to spectacle: while they are traveling in the countryside, one of the
women expresses a desire to see the body of a young man who has recently
committed suicide (325-328). Again, in Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Ilyich,”
for the first time in his life, Ivan experiences boredom, or ennui, here a terrible
form of depression after he is denied a desired promotion in a materialist society
resembles our own (433).
However, it is the German philosophers Martin Heidegger and Georg
Simmel that offer us the most insight into the boredom that may lie at the basis
of the appeal of everything from The Real Housewives of New Jersey to Guy
Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes. Heidegger saw boredom/ennui as an undeniable part
of the human experience and of the modem age. He observed:
Genuine boredom has not yet arrived if we are merely bored with this book
or that movie, with this job or that idle moment. Genuine boredom occurs when
one’s whole world is boring. Then abysmal boredom, like a muffling fog, drifts
where it will in the depths of our openness, sucking everything and everyone,
and ourselves along with them, into a numbing sameness. This kind of boredom
reveals what-is in terms of a whole. (Sheehan)
The boredom of which he speaks is at the heart of the human condition.
According to Heidegger, it is often out of profound boredom that one
experiences the dread of the annihilation of one’s own being that death must
bring. This dread, bom of the realization that death is finality, is joined in