Please let me explain for those of you new to the site. Front List/Back List posts are regularly occurring on the DA. In these posts I review both a new release and an older title. The older (back list) title can relate to a current event, cultural trend or in the case of today's choice: the front list title itself.
On the surface the two books today are unrelated. Possibly even philosophically opposed. One is seemingly a Neo-Beat novel seasoned with punk rock sensibilities while the other is a collection of writings by a master that would come to define an entire form. One is of today and the other, at its finest, is of all time.
So let's have at this tenuous but supposedly interesting comparison. As always we start with the Front List.
From The Front List
The Canal by Lee Rourke. Fiction. Melville House Publishing. Trade paperback. 199 pps. ISBN: 9781935554011. $14.95
It seems that boredom is not really that removed from desire. It seems that they are, in fact, the same urge more or less: the urge to do something. It seems that the same common denominator underpins them: existence. And existence is essentially prolonged boredom. Desire is boredom. These urges remain with us even when the body begins to deteriorate. When the body is past its best these urges still seem to remain. They remain until the last breath. We are driven by urges we can't really explain. None of it can be explained. This, it seems to me at last, is the sheer beauty of boredom, and, more importantly, existence: It is all-powerful, more powerful than anything we can imagine.
-from The Canal
So then we are condemned to be free and suffer a hell populated with other people and our desires of/for them. No, I am not mashing Sartre quotes together in order to mock, but rather to set a stage. In any case, the book begins with an epigraph from Heidegger and there's no way I'd ever mix those two jars of oil and water.
Sorry. That was a bad analogy in these BP tainted times.
There is validity in the superficial comparisons made between Rourke's writing and that of the Beat generation. There is also some truth to the descriptions of his settings as having a sort of punk air about them. Please just don't ask me to explain what the latter means. It usually leads to arguments. If you need further evidence just look at this set list for the novel composed by the author.
Rourke's interest in the written image of dialog and even narrative technique as repetitive form can certainly call to mind aspects of concrete poetry and something of the Kipling-Hemingway-Kerouac strand of the literary genetic sequence. That's about where it ends though. In The Canal form serves function and that function is to communicate the profundity of boredom.
The Canal is the tale of a man who finds himself suddenly capable of taking life by the reigns and fully engaging his boredom. Yes. His boredom. Luckily the beneficiary of a decent inheritance, he quits his job and takes up station on a park bench overlooking a somewhat murky canal in need of a thorough dredging. From this vantage point he beholds and catalogs the many different planes passing overhead, reflects upon the gentle waterfowl and waxes voyeur with the daily affairs of office workers that play out in the building across the waterway. This is but the setting.
The novel steadily builds a multi-layered tension surrounding the other human inhabitants, all also bored, who frequent the canal. In time the plot even begins to resemble Alfred Hitchcock's "Rear Window", replete with undiscovered homicide and the threat of physical harm. Yet despite these violent and dreadful histories of the equally bored cohabitants of the canal, the man maintains his slightly more engaged brand of boredom.
This is, at long last, a real novel of ideas. Something that does not come around as often as it should.
The strength of the novel, and much should be said in praise of Rourke for this, is that it never devolves into foolishness, slapstick or petulance. Instead of playing with boredom as schtick it addresses it head on and without the typical prescribed curatives at the end. No, the profound boredom of Rourke's protagonist requires replication and not treatment. For Rourke and his loitering man, boredom is enlightenment, or at least a heightened awareness of the core of who and what he is, that is to say his being. Lucky for us it's already endemic.
Despite at times seeming to possess a level of tension that can be found only in the best of horror writing, the novel never succumbs to any of the potential pitfalls set forth in its plot. Instead of real devilry we are to encounter the protagonist's pseudo-philosophical musings on society and life in general. All of them delivered with a firm conviction that would have made Sartre proud. Instead of a veritable cast of Saint Anthony's demons we find topical assessment of subjects like love, death and responsibility, which are perhaps demons more grim yet.
The Canal is a rigorously thoughtful book, where exposition serves to inform the ideas and musings of the author. It is existentialist in the same way that the novels and short stories of Sartre and Camus were. Such philosophically engaged writing is rare in fiction today, let alone in a novel as accessible and intriguing as The Canal. This is achieved in part by the compartmentalization of the more philosophical musings, which often provide relief from the tense and often dark plot that is unfolding.
This brings me to the back list...
From The Back List
The Complete Works: Essays, Travel Journal, Letters by Michel De Montaigne. Translated by Donald Frame. Introduction by Stuart Hampshire. Essays. Everyman's Library. Hardcover. 1336 pps. ISBN: 1400040213. $30.
I am one of those freest from this passion. I neither like it nor respect it, although everyone has decided to honor it, as if at a fixed price, with particular favor. They clothe wisdom, virtue, conscience with it: a stupid and monstrous ornament! The Italians, more appropriately, have baptized malignancy with its name. For it always a harmful quality, always insane; and, as being always cowardly and base, the Stoics forbid the sages to feel it.
Montaigne,"Of Sadness"
There are perhaps several books where the comparisons could have been easier to make. Let alone less combative.
The foggy, guilt-ridden waterways of Amsterdam in Camus' The Fall might be better at more immediate comparison. Jean-Paul Sartre's study of shiftless characters who fail to address their own boredom in The Age Of Reason would have been easily done as well. I thought briefly about the hobbyhorses and eternally inward digression of Laurence Sterne's masterwork The Life And Opinions of Tristram Shandy but found the style and effect too different. Herman Melville's Bartelby, The Scrivener would perhaps have the closest ties and yet...
Nope.
Instead I want to call attention to Michel De Montaigne, father of the essay and a man who despised idleness on principal and yet was an admitted benefactor of this dreadful disease.
It seemed to me I could do my mind no greater favor than to let it entertain itself in full idleness and stay and settle in itself, which I hoped it might do more easily now, having become weightier and riper with time. But I find that, on the contrary, like a runaway horse, it gives itself a hundred times more trouble than it took for others, and gives birth to so many chimeras and fantastic monsters, one after another, without order or purpose, that in order to contemplate their ineptitude and strangeness at my pleasure, I have begun to put them in writing, hoping in time to make my mind ashamed of itself.
-"Of Idleness"
Zing and counter zing.
In Rourke's novel the boredom of the protagonist serves as a catalyst for profound inquiries made within and without, each of them born of a topical realization made from observed phenomena. These inquiries are housed within brief asides that could nearly stand alone as essays. The man in Rourke's book is a thinker and he has found himself best equipped to do so when thoroughly and incurably bored.
No one had written like Montaigne before he crafted his essays. There is a great sense of ease and reflection that exists in his diverse writings that can't help but be felt by the reader. It is something that is not readily found in writings before the Essays and to a large degree is lacking in modern writing.
In essence I am saying that Montaigne and his Essays were born of the very same boredom that Rourke seeks to expound upon in his novel. There is a feeling to them that is very similar.
Please understand that I am not comparing Rourke's protagonist's musings with those of Montaigne. Nor am I claiming some insight into either author's mind. For one the format of fiction has its limits when it comes to didacticism. Still, there is something to the man sitting there on a park bench thinking in an organized, orderly manner that reminded me instantly of the impression one gets of the French master at his own table or amidst some ambulatory pontificating.
And that's basically it. A sort of incidental moment, born of boredom, creates similar musings in two very different cases, places and times (I am referring to Rourke and not his protagonist of course). Basically I wanted to go metaphysical with the association between the two books today, as that seemed apropos.
I am not going to waste your time with a review of the Essays either. They are essential reading and a review of them is more fittingly housed in an academic title. I am however going to say that in them you will find something less than stuffy, something born of a writer who had the leisure, perhaps the boredom, to set down the subjective chimeras born of his idle mind.
They are nice companion readings for a novel about boredom.
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