Facing Boredom: Essential Indexicals and Narratives of the Self

Abstract

Boredom is tout court a matter of sense incorporated in meaning. Indeed, it is a matter of being able to give sense, of producing meaning. Self-referential narratives are crucial in referring to the pragmatic mechanisms in play within this special operation of “giving sense.” Identity and meaning are correlated terms. In fact, this kind of minimal auto-biographical oriented descriptions can be conceptually depicted as the general rule. Success in the process of narration seems to be dependant on the construction of an ongoing meaning that stitches together the otherwise scattered events. And, they need of course a designated protagonist above everything. One view in classical narratology lists all its strategies to cope with this requirement basically in a twofold manner, one objective and one subjective: “sense” appears as soon as a causal rationale or an analogous of it is utilized to order the relative configuration of events, so each one can be told to lead to the other (Gallie 1964; Danto 2007); a second complementary approach makes out of a performative strategy based in self-identification—katharsis, narrative commitment—and expectations the needed elements. Meaning, sense, depends on the ascription of past, present, and future events to oneself. Of being part of the story told while working it through as its inside author. This fundamental reference to every story account is explained in a theory of the authoring mind either as an essential indexical (Perry 1993), a permanent center of gravity for the narrative’s dramatic direction—possibility of reidentification and relocation, of contextual completeness…—or as some constitutive rule—a performative cognitive act—which entails sense in the shape of the involvement of the narrator in the naming/pointing out of the elements to be included. Both some use of indexical(s). Particularly, they comprehend actions related to the employment of proper names—and especially, ones proper name should be an index in a prominent sense. Pronouns, names, are analogous to that related identification present in the natural kinds—the essential nomination for non-artificial common terms such as “gold” or “water”—both sets of nouns being a necessary condition for any personal narrative meaning intended… safe for the fact that we can only be addressed back from weariness by the former ones. Total or gradual oblivion of this ability of self-implication—as in seniors—is apparently a first step in disentangling personal master narratives and the type of identities attached to them. The occasion for that goes hand in hand with the inviting of narrative weariness and boredom (De Medeiros 2013).

To bring this out, consider the following story from William James, who insisted (rightly, if I am right) that consciousness is quite distinct from self-consciousness, [James] reproduces an instructive letter from a friend: “We were driving… in a wagonette the door flew open and X, alias “Baldy”, fell out on the road. We pulled up at once, and then he said “Did anyone fall out?” or “Who fell out?”–I don’t exactly remember the words. When told that Baldy fell out he said “Did Baldy fall out? Poor Baldy!’’”

(Anscombe 1981)