In Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, boredom is not incidental. It settles slowly over the novel like a climate. Characters wait, speak in languorous cycles, repeat themselves. The hours pass (ritualised, inert). What emerges is a boredom not of vacancy but of pressure: boredom as intensification, not lack.
Philosophical accounts often approach boredom as a threshold experience. Heidegger’s description of “profound boredom” in Being and Time suggests a condition in which the world withdraws in its entirety, revealing not the content of existence but its structure. Boredom becomes an experience of time itself: dilated, abstracted, pure. Lars Svendsen, writing in A Philosophy of Boredom, follows this line, asking whether such states differ meaningfully from depression. The distinction remains unresolved, porous.
Literature takes up the question differently. In Marguerite Duras’s Moderato Cantabile, boredom is embedded in the cadence of the prose. Sentences pause, restart, fail to accumulate. What occurs between characters barely rises to the level of event, yet the repetition and silence hold more charge than action might. Similarly, in Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out, boredom becomes a condition of perception, not a failure of narrative. The text lingers on the threshold of monotony, testing how long attention can be held without resolution.
Patricia Meyer Spacks, in Boredom: The Literary History of a State of Mind, identifies boredom as a relatively modern affect. Earlier centuries lacked a word for it, or folded it into adjacent states (acedia, melancholy, spleen). It is in modernity, with its emphasis on interiority and expectation, that boredom emerges as a distinct condition. Spacks traces how it becomes thematic, formal, even stylistic: novels that induce boredom not in spite of themselves but as part of their project.
There are dogged attempts to redeem boredom: Joseph Brodsky’s, for instance, in On Grief and Reason, where he insists on boredom’s ethical potential. Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, by contrast, seeks to banish it, naming it a failure of psychic order. Bertrand Russell, somewhere between the two, allows for boredom’s necessity, but only as something to be minimised, managed.
But boredom in literature resists being solved. Its presence marks not a gap but a confrontation: with duration, interiority, and the limits of narrative. It slows the sentence, empties the plot, and leaves characters suspended in states not designed for resolution. In this way boredom becomes less a theme than a mode: of reading, of writing, of being read.
Siegfried Kracauer’s 1924 article “Boredom” espousing a ‘radical boredom’ and Paul Corrigan’s 1975 chapter in Resistance Through Rituals “Doing Nothing” is a fantastic organic theory of the potentiality of boredom.
Here is the Kracauer: http://www.mediafire.com/download/ak3x9h8kg17zcre/Sigfried+Kracauer+-+Boredom+%281924%29.pdf
Thank you, Glen, I like Kracauer, and that piece is so typical. I’ll look up the Corrigan.
A few more texts to consider: Heidegger’s “The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude,” Convolute D (“Boredom, Eternal Return”) in Walter Benjamin’s “Arcades Project,” and the chapter “Stuplimity” in Sianne Ngai’s “Ugly Feelings.”
I forgot Benjamin, good suggestion. I don’t know Sianne Ngai so thank you for that introduction and the Heidegger mention.
Lee Rourke’s own novel The Canal.
So much of Kafka.
So much of Sebald.
“Genius and Virtue” by Arthur Schopenhauer.
Poe is probably overlooked as an author who documents boredom in his stories and poems.
David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King is all about boredom.
Nanni Balestrini’s novella Sandokan (boredom / crime).
Georg Büchner’s novella-fragment Lenz.
Thanks, Ed, all superb suggestions, particularly Poe who I wouldn’t have thought of as writing on the theme of boredom. Also a reminder to read Sandokan, which I’m pretty sure I have on my shelves.
I was glad to see the Pessoa in the linked list. For me, The Book of Disquiet is one of the best books ever written. However, the Pessoa is more about depression and the state of BEING BORING as opposed to boredom. In fact, when you read the Pessoa, there is a realization that it may be impossible to be bored if you are paying attention.
Here’s two that are mentioned in Peter Englund’s short essay about the history of boredom. I’m not familiar with either.
Zeltdin’s _Anxiety and Hypocrisy_, the fifth volume of his _A History of French Passions_.
Argyle’s _The Social Psychology of Leisure_
Theodore Zeldin is normally reliable, very well-read and passionate. The whole series looks worthwhile/
Thanks for your comment.
How about On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored: Psychoanalytic Essays on the Unexamined Life, by Adam Phillips? I’m pretty sure you can find it online (from the Russians).
Another of those titles I keep picking up in bookshops, scanning and then putting down again. I tend to think, quite wrongly I am sure, that Adam Phillips is to psychology what de Botton is to philosophy.
That could be, but I don’t know anything about de Botton (aside from the titles of his books). As for Phillips, portions of the, um, Russian edition of On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored that I’ve skimmed seem reasonable. But mainly I remember that when this book appeared in the early ’90s, many old-school, straight-ahead psychologists were delighted to encounter even one public pushback against the ultimately victorious hard-marketing campaign to declare psychoanalysis a science and help make zillionaires out of the pharmaceutical and insurance companies.
Nevertheless, practically no one who lives in an electrified society is able to experience actual boredom any more, so even writings as recent as 15 years ago are obsolete. Boredom has been eradicated by the social psychosis of 24/7 input: people even sleep with their TVs on and their smartphones next to them! A mere 15 minutes without at least two forms of external noise (magazine, TV, music, video, book, Internet, conversation) triggers cascading anxiety attacks and severe withdrawal symptoms. Very few people can go long enough without distraction to become bored now. Alienation, indeed.