"Boredom" by Alberto Moravia

"Boredom" by Alberto Moravia is one of those novels that remains undetected until a big series of republications bleeps it out into the literary radars.  I picked it up at Barnes & Noble for $4.95 in a reprint from the New York Review of Books "classics" series.  I wasn't planning on reading it but after finishing "The Anthologist" by Nicholson Baker I sort of fell into the "drone" of the hyper-introspective male narrator voice, and wanted more of the same highly intellectual, philosophical, hair-splitting story-telling.

The story revolves around a middle-aged artist who has decided not to paint.  He is filled with boredom, which he describes as his inability to have any connection to real things.  Most of the novel revolves around the definition of boredom with the action and descriptive pull of the story as the fuel to that drive for definition.  He becomes involved with a young model named Cecilia and uses her as a laboratory rat for his "travels" in and out of boredom.  What he doesn't count on is her extreme elusiveness.  The young woman is a master of the art of lying, and the long stretches of conversation among them (more like interrogations by the jealous artist) are an example of amazing artistry on the part of Moravia.  Here, as in the many long passages on the nature of "boredom," Moravia "splits hairs" about the seemingly most insignificant matters, but at the same time revealing the intellectual pleasure of delving deep into psychological and philosophical matters that otherwise would appear, well, boring (no pun intended) on the page.  The narrator eventually finds out that the young model is being "unfaithful" to him with another man, an actor named Luciani.  The narrator's drive to find out the truth appears to him as a deterrent to his boredom, but unfortunately it is entirely the contrary. The entire definition/redefinition/classification and reclassification of the story elements make the narrator appear as a very confused chess player trying in vain to make sense of a irrational match.

The narrator does not know where to find the truth, and even as his own eyes appear to deceive him, he resorts to his obsessive thought-process.  But the only thing of which I was not capable was resigning myself to Cecilia's elusiveness, accepting it, and, in short, calmly sharing her favors with Luciani.... so did I seek to console myself by telling myself that, while I knew that Cecilia went to bed with the actor, the latter did not know that she went to bed with me.  In other words, I now found myself, in relation to Luciani, more or less in the position of a lover in relation to an ignorant husband, and no lover was ever jealous of a husband, precisely because knowing, in certain cases, means possessing and not knowing means not possessing.  It was a wretched consolation, but it helped me to pass the time with calculations of the following kind: I knew about Luciani and Luciani did not know about me, consequently Cecilia had been unfaithful to him with me and not to me with him.  Finally there was the question of the money, as there had been with Balestrieri: I gave her money and Luciani not merely did not give her any but spent my money with her; therefore she was making me, not him, pay her, and consequently was in a way unfaithful to him with me.  However, it was not impossible that she was going with Luciani for love and with me for money, therefore she was being unfaithful to me with Luciani.  But Cecilia attributed no importance to money.  Money therefore had perhaps a sentimental significance between her and me, and since the actor did not give her any money, perhaps she was being unfaithful to Luciani with me.  And so on, ad infinitum."  

While the plot runs throughout with passages very much like this one, the novel is driven by a subtle amount of action that does not interrupt the inquisitive stream of consciousness-like thought process of the narrator.  This is where I believe the artistry of the novel resides... Moravia is able to (much like Nicholson Baker in "The Anthologist") straddle that line between the useless "hair-splitting" and the philosophical examination and get it down on paper in a very pure state.  To engage the reader at that level, and to get readers to continue passing the page while at the same time putting down these type of passages of deeply introspective ruminations that could potentially bore the average reader... well, to do that and to do it well is art exemplified.

There is no real revelation for the protagonist/narrator at the end.  Yet, having said that, this novel drives itself by the mere force of its art and its amazing depiction of the obsessive human mind at work.  Perhaps that is exactly where the core of existence resides... that we may struggle for meaning and definition while the continued examination never really ends.  "Boredom" is Alberto Moravia's "Ulysses" but with a far better and more traditional plot.