I’m bored in the U.S.A
How did it happen?
– Father John Misty, 'Bored in the U.S.A.'
Recently I found myself teaching Donald Barthelme’s now classic postmodern story “The Balloon” to undergraduate students in an American literature survey. When I canvassed for reactions to the piece, I was surprised to hear a majority of the students describe the story as “boring.” Barthelme’s surrealistic tale, in which an enormous balloon inexplicably appears over a large swath of Manhattan one day and elicits a bevy of citizen reactions, isn’t exactly what one would call dull. That’s a little like calling Dali’s drooping clocks tiresome. Nevertheless, the story’s dizzying language, weirdness, and lack of plot failed to keep some students’ attention.
But my students were in good reading company. In The Pleasure of the Text (1973), even Roland Barthes admits he sometimes becomes bored while reading, though boredom’s threat also ensures his readerly bliss. Yet what is indicative of the reader’s aesthetic freedom for the sophisticated Barthes, can feel to the novice reader like confusing chaos. The initial moral of this story about a story might be somewhat obvious: one person’s boredom is another’s obsession.
True as that may be, the boring can often be a starting place for discovery. In fact, I managed to win over several skeptics by sifting through the seeming narrative nonsense and helping students to discover what mattered in the story and how we might engage with its strangeness. It’s basically what we literature professors do on a daily basis, point to how the patterns, forms, and structures in language and storytelling create meanings of which we’re not always aware. Teaching formally and stylistically complex works is especially challenging in this respect, but it’s pretty fun to turn the boring into the interesting.
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