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Popular Culture Review
in materialism (See Appendix A for entire poem). He begins by addressing the
reading audience:
Infatuation, sadism, lust, avarice
possess our souls and drain the body's force;
we spoonfeed our adorable remorse,
like whores or beggars nourishing their lice....
In this opening, Baudelaire establishes the analogy that holds together his
poem: boredom, or ennui, is like being possessed by demons, and it manifests
itself in “[i]infatuation,” “sadism,” “lust,” and “avarice.” Every stanza following
the first, in fact, simply expands upon the analogy: “The devil... hissed/ old
smut and folksongs” (9-10); “Each day his flattery makes us eat a toad,/ and
each step forward is a step to Hell”(13-14); and “Gangs of demons are boozing
in our brain”(17). At the poem’s end the poet confesses that he shares with the
reader a boredom that has a demonic character: “This obscene/ beast chain
smokes yawning from the guillotine—/you—hypocrite Reader—my double—my
brother!”(34-36).
It’s difficult to say what Baudelaire specifically had in mind: possibly the
public’s preference for sensational events, such as rape, poisoning, murder, fires,
and cases of demonic possession over the works intended as pure art. One thing
is clear, however, from a reading of Baudelaire’s works, and that is that this
demonic phenomenon, the almost unbearable boredom that Baudelaire himself
shared with the reading public, has much to do with the rise of a money society
and the failure of his own audience to ever grasp the existence of the
Symbolist’s “transcendent absolute” (6). Indeed, if Baudelaire is right, it is
surely this spiritually and intellectually numbing ennui, culturally-induced, that
accounts for our own addiction to reality TV shows that glorify the very worst
elements of human nature, to incredibly violent video games in which we, as
participants, assume the role of an action hero, and to movies that move from
spectacle to spectacle to such an extent that the storyline is lost.
Interestingly, boredom has long been associated with materialism and the
demonic. The writer of Ecclesiastes, for instance, proclaims that life is without
meaning as he suffers from a boredom that has resulted from an incredibly
prosperous life in which his every desire has been fulfilled. Is Solomon’s
boredom demonic? Within the framework of the Bible, it would not be entirely
incorrect to say so. Again, theologians from the Middle Ages considered
boredom not only a sin but something demonic. According to sociologist JanErik Mansikka, Professor of Education at the University of Helsinki, “The
modem conception of boredom has an antecedent in the medieval concept of
acedia, as one of the ‘seven deadly sins’ in the Christian tradition” (256).
Mansikka adds that “Thomas Aquinas perceived acedia as consisting of a certain
kind of joylessness... and a lack of interest in spiritual goods” (256). In short,
Aquinas and other Medieval theologians were right in line with Charles
Baudelaire in considering acedia—or ennui—a condition representing a severe
spiritual disorder. “In this tradition human beings are doomed to a certain form