I recently went on a holiday and found certain aspects of it interesting. What did I find interesting? Not that the scenery was breathtaking, or that some aspects of Africa are poignant. Rather, when I found myself doing unpredictable things, I could evaluate myself positively on the enjoyment threshold. Hence, Wordsworth: “Our meddling intellect/ Misshapes the beauteous forms of things”.
My aim here is not to blurt out clichéd romantic insights but really to interrogate what we find interesting. We use it all the time, dismissing things/people that we find uninteresting. In terms of readings, I often attribute the term ‘interesting’ when I come across complexities using tools employed by literary critics: for example, the present politics of South Africa is ironical given its history, or the credit crisis shows the paradoxical irrationality of neo-classical economics. But is there any reason why we should allow these fancy literary terms to dictate our imagination and sense of excitement? And this might have professional implications for those of us who do policy research. I often find myself writing, “It is interesting to note….”. Should I then be more informed about the method of thinking I employ in determining what is relevant and what is not?
I came across a book on Boredom by Patricia Meyer Spacks interrogating the term ‘interesting’ from the point of view of literary history. Meyer Spacks tells us that she had this habit of circling the word interesting whenever she came across it in student papers. The reason: she thought it was not ‘a critical adjective’ as it did not reflect the quality of the text, but more the reader’s cultural and personal position. Thus, it would appear that Meyer Spacks felt that one finds something interesting only when she relates to it. The word interesting is bereft of objectivity or any accepted notions. However, later in her career she stopped this practice. The reason can be best explained by her analysis of Sense and Sensibility. I believe (as I’ve indicated in an earlier post), that the writer inevitably thinks of her readers while writing (Primo Levi says about The Truce: “It contains the truth, but filtered truth”) and hence seeks to engage the potential readers’ interest (writers often have different target audiences). Thus, in Sense and Sensibility, says Meyer Spacks, Austen first creates an interest in Marianne and Willoughby and then in Elinor and Edward Ferrars. The way she does this is by attributing characteristics which makes the first set interesting and then changing affiliations to other characteristics, which in turn makes the second set interesting. Towards the beginning, the reader is naturally inclined towards youth, elegance, beauty, ardour, genius, taste, spirit, expression, the unpredictable and the romantic rescuer who departs ‘in the midst of a heavy rain’. Gradually, Austen finds Edward Ferrars’ ‘heart to be warm and temper affectionate’ and Elinor’s ‘feelings were strong, but she knew how to govern them’ and identifies them as ‘interesting’ people. This moral change says Meyer Spacks is also found in Wordsworth: “…the human mind is capable of being excited without the application of gross and violent stimulants, and he must have a very faint perception of its beauty and dignity…”. Thus, the term ‘interesting’ is not eccentric, idiosyncratic or individualistic but more communal, moralistic and easy to identify.
Mayer Spacks has a psychoanalytic explanation to this shift. She feels that the earlier ultra-romantic understanding of interesting is narcissistic: Marianne finds Willoughby interesting because she identifies in him characteristics she aspired to have and have their basis in similar emotions. The focus is attention to the self. And hence what should be interesting is a deviation from self-gratification. Structured ‘emotional responsiveness’ is given more importance to ‘immediate aesthetic preference’.
This understanding of ‘interesting’ flows well into modernist writings where boredom flowed from self-obsession due to the primacy attached to individual sovereignty. English fictions dealt more with aristocratic lethargy or lack of social cohesiveness rather than individual exuberance. Mayer Spacks points out how this led to violent spats and sadistic romances (“That is my notion about the plants: they are often bored and that is the reason some of them have got poisonous”). The solution: get out of self-indulgence. Thus, “work is the best defense against boredom” and “As a matter of fact, it is impossible, almost, to meet anyone who has not something of interest to tell you if you are clever enough yourself to find out what it is”. (This negation of self and reliance on the discerning abilities of the self is essentially what created ‘the other’ and features very strongly in the later chapters of Edward Said’s Orientalism. Hence, the popular nexus between modernity and neo-colonial practices.)
At some level, this analysis made sense. For instance, the reason why law, politics and economics strikes me as interesting is because they provide a sense of purpose, a shift away from immediate useless acts by being concerned with important things. I’ve noticed this in various parents while describing their children: ‘He is interested in molecular biology’ or ‘He is interested in professional tennis’ or sometimes (if the parents are nice) ‘He is interested in painting’ (gendered notions of the word ‘interesting’ merits a separate discussion). You probably would not find parents saying: ‘He is interested in eating lunch’ or ‘He is interested in looking at himself in the mirror’.
More importantly, a shift in my literary preferences may also be explained by the above. Earlier, Ian Mcewan would be my hero as he always found the appropriate language to discuss emotions I could relate to. For instance, he provides an escape route for my life-long inadequacy in sports by saying in The Innocent: “He would not participate because of the pitiless accuracy with which they caught the ball.” (Linguistic narcissism, perhaps?) Then, I found myself shifting my faith to J.M. Coetzee as he makes matters of importance such as youth, colonialism, hierarchy, language, gender sound very literary. Further, I also enjoyed sentences which I may not have related to. For instance in Waiting for the Barbarians, he talks about his affection towards a ‘barbarian’: “I behave in some ways like a lover- I undress her, I bathe her, I sleep beside her- but I might equally well tie her to a chair and beat her, it would be no less intimate.” I haven’t really been in a position where I could dominate a tribal woman, but I found interesting the various complex (often academic) shades of violence.
However, recently, as I have been indulging in detailed policy research, what interests me more is the methodology of research and how I can relate to the research that I am conducting. Earlier, I would be enamoured by topical issues and would find conceptually sound socio-economic write-ups very interesting, but now I find them interesting only if I can link them to the issues I am researching (which often compels me to violently create links). Further, I do find yet another shift in my literary habits. Coetzee is alive and well, but in a different form- earlier I had read Foe and hadn’t enjoyed it that much, it has now become my favourite. Reason: he makes matters of importance such as youth, colonialism, hierarchy, language, gender sound very personal. Most literary moments arise out of Daniel Defoe’s (and his female counterpart, Susan Barton) interrogation and improvement of Friday’s ‘savage’ faculties. Again, in Disgrace, while earlier I found ironical that the protagonist was a Communications teacher while realizing at the same time that the English language was inappropriate to make light of the South African experience. Subsequently, I found it more interesting that he is accused of living “in abstractions” which colours his method of analysis.
Thus, there hasn’t been a declining interest in newer subjects but only a shift in how they create interest-there is more excitement caused by method-awareness. As I was reading Philip Roth’s interview of Primo Levi, I found it interesting that Levi is described as an artist-chemist rather than a chemist-writer. I really liked the fact that he didn’t do chemistry to build a real-world-profile to legitimise his writings but that he felt that writing complemented (and this is borne out in The Periodic Table) his interest in chemistry and allowed him to conceptually record his observations by way of linguistic devices. I easily fall prey to rhetoric (Levi would certainly not have approved) and hence find myself enjoying George Soros’ latest commodity: The New Paradigm for Financial Markets. He explains how the theory of reflexivity explains the present financial crisis, i.e. those who analyse the market have an interest in it. Economics, therefore, is examined through a commercial lens which does not allow honest examination.
In her final chapter, like most writers tracing out literary trajectories, Meyer Spacks looks at boredom in postmodern times. What characterises postmodern fiction is that as everything is relegated to the subjective and because of deference to the influence of social forces, there is no need for the individual to be interesting or make things interesting. The World, removed of clichés, presents itself as uniformly gray, you sit and wait for interesting to happen to you. This has led critics of postmodernism to believe that postmodern times revels in the uninteresting and that the traditionally boring is the new interesting (in fact, this aristocracy of boredom arising out of leisure culture has led to opinions that postmodernism is the playground of the elite). Popular American cinema, I think, assumes boredom as a point of reference (Jim Carrey refusing to get out of bed in Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind, Zack Braff completely unaffected by a plane crash in Garden State). Like the modern atomized individual, Meyer Spacks thinks the boredom of the postmodern urban environment leads to violent acts: binge drinking, stealing cars, random shooting.
I personally don’t like the classificatory use of the term postmodernism primarily because I don’t like the deterministic connotation it has. And that is antithetical to any postmodern enterprise- knowledge is no longer deterministic, definitions are flexible and in my opinion, the postmodern movement is a tool for interrogating the assumptions imbedded in modernity. Thus, it should not be classified as a socio-political movement. Hence, though the glory and unquestioned supremacy of the individual has been questioned, it is not necessary that the notion of creation has to be eroded. For example, Deleuze and Guttari (also classified as postmodern writers) believe that though it is not possible to predict causation, people would do well to exploit the intermingling of events and knowledge-pockets and create new interesting amorphous things out of them. The storyteller is the new technician.
There is one quote in Meyer Spacks’ final chapter which I think is the point of deviation: “At least in the twentieth century, we typically attribute the causes of boredom to conditions outside ourselves: the tedious meetings we must attend, the dreary classrooms we inhabit.”
Thus, there is a shift from blaming the isolation of the self for boredom to the notion of the self as a plaything in the hands of unknown social forces. The question that must be addressed now is whether thriving in the new boredom would be interesting or whether interesting would be to playfully weave narratives and ways of living with this new awareness. I tend to think that since the boredom/interesting dialectic is blurred, it is not necessary to subscribe to the supremacy of either. Which means we neither give in to stereotypes of the interesting (riding out into the storm; reach out to others out of compulsion) nor be compelled to respect a heavy dullness. Thus, what emerges is not a simplistic clichéd middle ground but really a sense of awareness of narratives which used to jump out of the page and mixing them around without discarding ‘unimportant’ narratives.
I think this is why of late I’ve been somewhat ambivalent of erstwhile compelling rhetorical attractions. It is uninteresting to talk about individual achievement without addressing crime and commerce, uninteresting to address the problem of subjectivity of empirical research without appreciating how it may contribute to policy. On the methodology front, law is uninteresting without economic sociology, commerce is uninteresting without literary history. Just one word further on methodology: the pursuit of a subject is uninteresting if it is an end in itself (tedious meeting, dreary classroom) unless the skill comfortably melts into substantive pursuits (so that the word ‘pursuit’ goes out of the equation).
Further, as we have seen, what I find interesting is definitely relative. People subject to other space-time combinations will look towards the eradication of different concerns. But that, in my opinion, is a very un-interesting conclusion. I do well believe that permutations of basic psychological traits find their way into general judgment-making tendencies. And historically victorious distinctions- individual and community, brave and cowardly, aggressive and placid, frustration and relief find their way into perceptions. Thereby making things immensely boring again (even this cyclical thing gets boring after a while), but provides fodder for anyone looking to make things interesting.